Analysis of the dreams of a Guayaki Indian woman This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © John Leavitt. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.2.043 TRANSLATION Analysis of the dreams of a Guayaki Indian woman Translated by JOHN LEAVITT, Université de Montréal The following is a translation of Lucien Sebag’s “Analyse des rêves d’une Indienne Guayaki,” originally printed in Les Temps modernes, CCXVII, June 1964. The pages that follow are distinct from a classic piece of ethnology; they present the analysis of a series of dreams of a young Guayaki Indian woman, dreams that were collected in their original language during an ethnographic mission among these Indians, who live in Paraguay in the region of San Juan Nepomuceno.1 My stay there lasted from February to September 1963, and the material presented here was collected in a little over two months: every morning the young woman Baipurangi would come to tell me her dreams; at first I asked for them, but as time went on it became a matter of habit. Our discussions lasted from half an hour to an hour and a half, the difference depending primarily on: –   linguistic difficulties, which were noticeably reduced after a time by my growing familiarity with the language; –   the length and importance of the material brought to me: it sometimes happened that Baipurangi remembered three or four dreams a night; –   the opacity of the story to which I was listening. This opacity resulted both from the way a dream was related and from my ignorance of the context, which made things still more obscure.[522] As to the first point, the systematic recounting of her dreams was a completely new activity for Baipurangi: she often skipped essential information to focus on a theme that seemed more important to her,2 in which case it was extremely difficult to reconstruct the chain of events. There is, to be sure, nothing exceptional in this—every patient who shares oneiric productions or fantasies acts in the same way. But in this case the task was more delicate because of my inadequate knowledge of the social and religious underpinnings. In this connection it is important to underline that while these dreams take on meaning only on the basis of continually increasing ethnographic material, inversely, they themselves provided a privileged means of access to this material—many mythological themes, many beliefs became accessible after their appearance in one or another of the dreams. In collecting these texts I was governed by two concerns: –   one, ethnographic: to attempt to grasp certain properties of Guayaki culture by analyzing the way in which its constituent elements are taken up, lived, transformed by a particular individual; –   the other, psychoanalytic: to mark how the subject, using a certain number of privileged signifiers to which her culture gives access, develops her own problematic, the partial analysis of which could serve to confirm or deny certain theses of Freudian psychoanalysis. On the first point, we have no doubt as to the results: dream analysis, pursued steadily in certain privileged circumstances, reveals whole sections of the cultural edifice which remain hidden to normal observation and interrogation. The second concern presents more problems: while we can draw certain conclusions from what is found in the dreams, none can be drawn from what is not found in them; after two months of “analysis,” the material from a single subject is still not nearly sufficient for any kind of generalization. It is thus with the greatest caution that I will venture into this domain. The corpus collected includes about one hundred dreams; twenty-nine of them are presented here, the others having been eliminated either for their “neutrality” (simple images of classic scenes of Guayaki life) or for their “unintelligibility” (two or three of the dreams remained completely meaningless to me), or because they added no supplementary information to the dreams already in hand. This redundancy, however, while undeniable—very often Baipurangi simply dreamed of a separation from her husband and return to her father and mother—is not without meaning: the repetition of themes or characters reveals the articulations of the family constellation within which Baipurangi is struggling. The fact that certain elements appear in all the dreams obtained for several days, and thereafter only episodically, reveals certain psychological turning points, the existence of a process in the most general sense of the term.[523] The dreams that follow have been translated3 and then analyzed; this analysis is governed by a set of criteria which should be kept in mind: The dreams comment on each other: elements which are extremely obscure at first become clear as they are developed in later dreams. Thus the research did not bear on any particular dream production but on the group as a whole; and in this I followed the criteria of any structural study. The ethnographic context naturally provided the indispensable background to which I referred what I was hearing. Baipurangi’s dreams were generally constructed out of classic situations and attitudes of Guayaki culture: because of this any discrepancy between normal behavior and that which appeared in the dream was always of value as an indicator—it allowed a direct grasp of what the dream was seeking to signify. Although Baipurangi did not really free associate—the formulation of the analytic rule was difficult—every dream did provide her the occasion for numerous commentaries. In this way, memories of her childhood sometimes emerged, and these allowed a better understanding of episodes that at first were incomprehensible. Parallel with this work with Baipurangi, I was able to devote time to direct observation; immersed in the life of the tribe, I had the possibility of watching the development of the real conflicts to which the dreams referred and to question the various protagonists as to how Baipurangi had acted in each case. Finally, based on what Baipurangi had told me, I was able to ask her parents about her childhood and her husband about their sexual life together. In this way the distance between the real processes and their symbolization took on meaning. The conditions of this work call for two additional remarks: At no time did I share either my interpretations or my thoughts about her dreams with Baipurangi; nothing was said that might have influenced her or turned her reflections in a direction determined by the observer. My interventions, always as short as possible, were meant only to allow me to reconstruct the dream in its entirety or to obtain ethnographic elements that were indispensable for understanding what was happening. The fact that Baipurangi sometimes dreamed these interpretations, which I had never shared with her, indicates the singularity of the conditions of this sort of dialogue. On the other hand it is undeniable that work of this kind could not have led to anything without the “affective transference” that Baipurangi directed onto myself, a transference which acquired real force when she began telling me her dreams. In this connection it does not seem false to say that during the whole of this period Baipurangi “dreamed for me.” The number of her dreams, three or four a night from the time she knew that she would be telling them to me every day, as well as the interest she took in our sessions, show that the dreams were a real gift that she came to give me every morning. I find a confirmation of this [524]in the fact that, when our relationship became less close because of the affective neutrality from which I never deviated, she practically stopped dreaming or remembering her dreams. This overdetermination in no way lessens the value of the material collected, but indicates that the dream functioned on two levels:4 in its form a realization of the very desire to dream, it set into play in its content desires still more secret, which we are now going to try to decipher. But this is possible only once the ethnographic context is in place. * * * At Arroyo Morroti5 lived two groups of Guayaki Indians who had been put under the protection of Don Manuel Peyreira, a Paraguayan rancher. They had partly abandoned their former way of life, which until then had been totally nomadic. The first group, the “Aché Gatu” (their own name for themselves: “Aché” is the term used by all Guayaki groups to designate themselves; “Gatu” means “good”) had been in this situation for four years.6 This is the group to which Baipurangi belonged. In many respects life continued as it had before this relative sedentarization; agriculture had not been introduced, and the Guayaki still lived by hunting and gathering; they left the area regularly on long journeys, but always came back to the place where they were settled, especially since the Paraguayan in charge of them provided them fairly regularly with beef or horsemeat. In its general outlines the culture had not yet changed very much; the various taboos were still being observed with the same rigor; and while the machete had replaced the stone axe, this transformation dated back to an even earlier period, when the Guayaki had gotten into the habit of stealing tools from the woodsmen who worked in the forest—a habit that provoked bloody reprisals. Without going into detail,7 the Guayaki can be characterized as follows: they are certainly among the most primitive societies of South America; pure hunter-gatherers (no trace of agriculture has been found and nothing permits us to attribute this to a regression), they lived in autonomous bands not exceeding around a hundred members;8 the various bands moved over a vast territory and in general did not interrelate.9 Each group dispersed into subgroups consisting of a few families who hunted together; these groups were often temporary, although motivated by intense affective bonds. The group thus moved around [525]between several camps; sometimes groups visited each other and all would reunite; but this never lasted very long, since the scarcity of game made frequent dispersions necessary. The habitat was of the most rudimentary kind: it consisted of simple shelters, made of branches of the pindo palm, which could be built in a very short time and abandoned without complications. Sometimes this shelter served a single family; sometimes it was larger and could shelter fifteen or more people. Even with this sociological framework in place, Baipurangi’s dreams become intelligible only if one keeps in mind certain characteristic traits of Guayaki culture. Two great ceremonies mark the life of the adolescent: the piercing of a boy’s lip and the purification that follows a girl’s first menstruation. Lip piercing takes place around the age of thirteen or fourteen. It marks the transformation of a boy into a man who can hunt and take a wife. The lip is pierced by two adults using a monkey bone. A little hole is made in which the Guayaki will wear the beta, an ornament usually made from a small bone of an animal (a peccary); it is a sign of virility and a promise of successful hunting. The menstruation ceremony involves the construction of a special hut within the encampment itself, the isolation there and partial fast of the girl (who may not eat meat for several days), the purification of the recluse and of all who have had sexual relations with her since her first period; this purification consists of a massage with liana shavings soaked in water. A man who is not purified in this way risks death and may be killed by a jaguar or a poisonous snake. This purification also takes place at the birth of a child, but in this case the danger threatens the child’s father or fathers,10 who can escape death only if they are washed with liana shavings. Men who father a male or female child thus find themselves in the same position as those who receive and have sexual relations with a woman who has become an adult.11 The birth of a child involves several other individuals as well: the child who has just emerged from its mother’s womb is taken up in the arms of a woman who holds it while other members of the group massage its body and mold its head (the word “mold” translates the indigenous term; it involves only a massage, which causes no deformation). The child will use special terms to designate the people who thus took part in his or her birth: jware will refer to the man who molded my head,12 upiare to the woman who took me in her arms, and I will be their chave. After giving birth a woman should submit to certain taboos (prohibition of all sexual relations and eating the principal meats) until her child is able to take his [526]first steps. During this period the mother is kuja ichyve,13 a special status that involves profound changes in her life. While children are often desired, abortions are very common; they are generally motivated by the hardships of forest life. When they reach adulthood men and women have themselves tattooed; the tattoo consists of several long parallel incisions, dorsal for the men and ventral for the women. When a woman submits to this operation it is for the purpose of bearing strong, resistant children. Boys and girls are not, however, equally valued. Boys are received with joy, and the Guayaki have many methods of assuring the birth of a male; girls, on the other hand, were sometimes killed at birth and very often killed at the death of their father or mother; girls were the main victims of the vengeance called for by every death—even though the victims were sometimes over ten years old. The dreams that follow allow us to grasp the often unconscious effect of this status on a particular feminine subjectivity. The Guayaki bear the names of animals, the animals one’s mother ate while she was pregnant. Because of this a Guayaki often has twenty or so names but only uses a few of them depending on personal choice. The man who brought the meat my mother ate is my chikwagi, to whom I am particularly attached; in principal I have many chikwagi, but in fact only two or three are selected out of all those who have played this role and are actually considered as such. Polygyny and polyandry both exist among the Guayaki; at any moment of the group’s history the sex ratio determines its preference for one or the other, while the two forms can coexist. The presence of relatively stable, established families, made up of a man and two women or inversely one woman and two men, does not stand in the way of extreme freedom in sexual relations; thus every child often has two fathers, and sometimes three; in certain cases he lives with two fathers, in others with only one of them, if the second has left the child’s mother. Parallel to the true husband or wife is distinguished the japetyva,14 a term that designates the individual with whom I have a legalized liaison involving regular sexual relations. One man might live with two women more than thirty years apart in age, such as a grandmother and a granddaughter; in fact, girls cease to be virgins at an extremely early age, around eleven or twelve, which sometimes results in an ambivalent relationship to sexuality. The Guayaki are cannibals;15 they eat all of their dead (endocannibalism) and sometimes organized war-parties for the purpose of killing and eating their enemies (exocannibalism). The alimentary meaning of cannibalism was the only one suggested to me; a religious meaning seems out of the question.[527] Cannibalism does, however, involve practices aimed at regularizing relations with the world of the dead: when a person has been eaten, the bones are broken and then thrown into the fire—the first act is for the purpose of keeping away the bad soul ianvé,16 which dwells in the forest and constitutes a permanent danger for the living; the second permits the ascension of the good soul, ové, to its celestial home. This duality of the soul plays a major role in Guayaki belief: Ianve is related to all the evil beings that live in the forest and sometimes kill people; people are fleeing from Ianve when they change camp after a death, for Ianve comes to take the husband or wife who is still alive. Ove, on the other hand, is positively valued; the celestial world is opposed to the danger and mystery of the forests: above, the souls of the dead are connected by bonds of friendship which contrast with Ianve’s isolation, and they watch over the world they have left. We will not, then, be surprised to see the dreams repeatedly bringing up the theme of death—death which allows passage to another universe, similar in many respects to human society, but without the problems that make life in the present so difficult. Indeed, the link between the two worlds is constantly evoked, since what happens on earth has repercussions in the heavens. These take different forms, but amount essentially to the revenge that is called forth by most human acts. No theme, in fact, is more pregnant with meaning for the Guayaki than that of revenge. The death of an adult, man or woman, brings in its wake the murder of his or her children (usually the daughters), whose souls rise up to the sky to rejoin their father’s or mother’s soul. The most diverse meteorological phenomena, cold, rain, wind—designated by the global term pichua—are the consequences of this death and are provoked by the Ové of a close relative, which takes it upon itself to avenge the dead. A death involves both a real compensation (the killing of a child) and the use of an interpretative schema that allows the linkage of certain natural phenomena to the event afflicting human society. But death is not the only object of such a privilege: the perforation of the lip, the first menstrual period, the killing of an animal each creates a disequilibrium which will not be absorbed until the injured party has been avenged. Relations between man and woman are based on the same categories: the widow who remarries risks being the next to die; Ianve will come back to collect his former mate. No day passes without such ideas coming up in the Guayaki’s conversations; the smallest incident, a tree falling, a storm, a bad dream, is attributed to the recent or distant death of a member of the group. One cannot help being struck by the amazing homogeneity with which the notion of vengeance is used to account for everything that can happen to a Guayaki. Such are the elements, here presented very schematically, which we will meet again in Baipurangi’s dream-life; through them we will be able to grasp the way the dream puts this material through a series of transformations which in turn reveal what the dream is seeking to signify. BAIPURANGI is a young woman, around eighteen years old, married to a thirty-year-old man, JAKUGI, the man who took her virginity before she had had her first period. For a time after this she had two husbands simultaneously, Jakugi and [528]KRAJAGI, who has been dead for two years. Baipurangi’s parents, on the other hand, are alive—her mother BAIPUGI and her two fathers KANDEGI, still married to her mother, and PIKUGI, who now lives with another woman. The dreams also involve the following persons: PAMPIGI, the mother of Baipugi and so grandmother of Baipurangi, who was first married to Pikugi and then, at a very advanced age, to Jakugi. She died around the same time as Krajagi. JAPEGI, Baipurangi’s jware, who purified her when she had her first period; he died very recently. DORO PAREGI: He died very young, a little while after participating in Baipurangi’s birth; thus he too is her jware. JAPEKUJAGI: A young woman, older than Baipurangi, who was kidnapped by the Paraguayans; she had watched protectively over Baipurangi for some years and had intervened several times when Baipurangi found herself in difficulties. KYBWYRAGI and JYVUKUGI: Two very important members of the group, for whom Baipurangi feels the greatest affection; she thinks of them, especially the former, as potential lovers. The Jakugi-Baipurangi couple had existed for several years, and it had known a good many difficulties in that time. The coexistence of the two husbands had not been easy, the jealous Jakugi finding it hard to accept Krajagi’s claiming his conjugal rights. After the death of the latter, Baipurangi had had sexual relations with a young Guayaki—but this affair ended badly: Jakugi found out, thrashed his rival, and beat his wife. Since this incident the latter, fearing reprisals, no longer deceived her husband.17 But the situation weighed on her, whence the ambivalence of her behavior—she was, in fact, always giving and refusing herself, always attracting men she liked and then not carrying the adventure out to its normal consequences—an attitude, she explained, caused by the fear that she felt. Another fact worthy of note: her absolute sterility during this entire period. Baipurangi had no children and had never been pregnant, a situation that was beginning to disturb her profoundly.[529] I was able to obtain this information before beginning to collect dreams; these will present new information and will allow us to penetrate more deeply into this fabric of relations; but above all they will take us past the level of simple biography to gain access to the problematic that constitutes Baipurangi’s life. Dream No. 1. I18 am in the forest with Jakugi. He turns towards me and says, “A brara19 will bite you.” This dream, the first one collected, is very short—her husband’s simple statement announcing her impending death: she will be bitten by a poisonous snake. On this occasion Baipurangi tells me about her relationship with Jakugi and indicates that she is not happy; this sentiment is directly related to her feeling of sexual saturation. Jakugi wants to make love all the time, he never gives her a moment of rest, he is not gentle. Jakugi is a violent man and she resents his sexual insistence, experiencing it as an aggression. At first glance the dream simply embodies this aggressivity, carrying it out to its normal outcome—death. For the Guayaki this kind of announcement, or prediction, is neither prophecy nor curse; it simply expresses the consequences that will follow from an act previously committed; it is not based on a fault involving any feeling of guilt, but rather on an “objective” failing. In this sense, Jakugi’s aggressivity is not pure violence; although the dream has not yet revealed any of this, it is based on something else—something that makes it necessary for Baipurangi to die.20 Dream No. 2. I am in the forest with Jakugi and we meet a female peccary (chachu in Guayaki); she is kuja ichyve and is accompanied by her daughter. Jakugi hits the daughter with the shaft of his bow and kills her. I am horrified and I cry. The peccary wants to avenge her child and she bites Jakugi. He kills her with an arrow; I climb a tree to escape. Baipugi, Baipurangi’s mother, is presently kuja ichyve; she has a child several months old and is bound by all the taboos that this state involves (sexual and food prohibitions). “Chachu” is both Baipurangi’s name and her mother’s; thus, while evidently other things as well, they are both peccaries. It is highly unusual to cry over the death of an animal; I would do so only if one of my deceased kin bore that animal’s name. The fact that Baipurangi starts to cry when Jakugi kills the little peccary indicates that more than a mere animal is involved here. The theme of the mother avenging her daughter is, on the other hand, common in the oneiric productions of the Guayaki as well as in the belief system through which they encode events; and it is sons-in-law who are the most common victims; [530]several deaths were attributed to the vengeance of a mother-in-law who came back to earth after death precisely for this purpose. Notwithstanding the absence of any explicit recognition on Baipurangi’s part, these various elements suggest the identification of the two peccaries with Baipugi and Baipurangi; this would make the latter the victim of an aggression, thus explaining the tears, which can refer only to the death of human being. The identity of the two situations (kuja ichyvé), the similarity of the names (chachu), and the evocation, in connection with what seems to be a normal hunt, of the death of near kin, all seem to fit this interpretation. The comparison with later dreams that develop these themes abundantly will confirm it further; but as far as this dream is concerned, all that Baipurangi will tell me is that she is still unhappy with Jakugi and is afraid of him beating her, a fear that perhaps takes concrete form in the murder of the baby peccary. Dream No. 3. Jakugi is not there. Around me many children—they are all boys—are playing, laughing very loud and climbing trees; I am angry and start to cut down the tree with an axe; the children fall down while my mother Baipugi and my father Kandegi watch. Kandegi is very hungry, and he cuts down a pindo palm to extract the pith; we all eat it and I feed the children with the pith. Jakugi is absent; throughout the series of dreams he will be either present and aggressive, disturbing Baipurangi’s life, or absent, leaving a blank space that others will come to occupy. This dream is the first of a long series in which the father takes the place of the husband. The occasion for the dream was an event that I had been able to observe the day before: Baipurangi cleared an area of ground using an axe; all the children helped her and the work turned into a game in which Baipurangi and her little companions enjoyed themselves tremendously. The dream re-presents this situation but transforms its meaning: the children behave exactly as they did during the day, but Baipurangi, on the contrary, becomes morose; the laughter of the others makes her angry, and it is to make them stop that she starts to cut down the trees. The boys fall down, but in Guayaki waa means both to fall and to be born. Here one cannot help thinking of the “acting-out” analyzed by Freud and based entirely on the fact that the same German word (niederkommen) can indicate both falling and giving birth (Freud 1920). From this perspective, what the dream seems to be saying is this: “In the absence of any man (on this occasion Baipurangi explicitly tells me that she does not want to have a child by Jakugi), and while my mother and father watch, I give birth to several boys; and it is my father who then finds food for them.” The refusal to laugh, which is doubly marked (Baipurangi does not laugh, and she does not want the children to laugh), would then be explained, since pregnant women are forbidden to laugh for fear of giving birth to girls rather than boys—something that nobody wants to happen. Here again the passage from manifest to latent content operates only indirectly, without the subject’s explicit acceptance of the probable meaning which our analysis—based on the cultural elements put into play—seems to reveal. The interest of the experiment comes from the fact that the dreams to follow will bring forward and deal explicitly with themes that remain latent here.[531] Dream No. 4. I am sleeping near my mother Baipugi; suddenly Krei appears; he is a young man with a pierced lip; he tells me, “Jakugi is very angry; he will scratch you because you had sex with Kybwyragi.” Then we go hunting, Krei, my former husband Krajagi, who is now dead, and I. Krajagi kills an armadillo; I bring it back and roast it; then I give a piece to my father Kandegi. The term krei has a double meaning: in its more general sense it can be translated “shadow”, “image”; in this case it would apply both to my shadow on the road and my image in a mirror; but in a more restricted and certainly a derivative sense, it designates a being that lives in the forest, appears especially at night, and attacks the Guayaki on various occasions, particularly when they disobey taboos; in this last case his forms are many, while the aggressions he commits are often sexual in nature; here he appears as a young man who has already had his lip pierced, i.e., as a possible sexual partner, and despite certain transformations the function he fills will be the same through the whole series of dreams: that of a messenger who announces the news, who objectively describes what is going on; in many respects he personifies the law: in certain cases he forbids things, in others he shows the unavoidable results of the situation. This absolute position is, certainly, often a decoy; the rule that he enunciates is precisely the one to which Baipurangi is willing to submit, and his appearances are situated within a field determined by Baipurangi’s desire, responding to those aspects of her desire which she cannot admit in the first person. This is no simple artifice: the store of meanings made manifest in the dreams defines a space in which the range of operations granting the subject access to the set of possible formulations of her problematic transforms its very content. In addition, I learn from this dream that Baipurangi and Kybwyragi have been attracted to one another for several days; nevertheless they have not had sex, since Baipurangi is afraid of Jakugi’s reaction; on another occasion, not so long ago, he had fought with his rival and struck Baipurangi. The dream, for its part, considers the thing done; it is the explicit realization of Baipurangi’s desire.21 Because of this, the unhappy consequences of the act come to the fore; but the dream will be able to neutralize them; for the conjugal couple that the dream constitutes is not the one that currently exists: Baipurangi finds herself with her late husband Krajagi. Krajagi is the antithesis of Jakugi. As I begin to learn on this occasion, Krajagi was an elderly man incapable of violence, having only rare sexual relations with Baipurangi and remarkable for his lack of jealousy. The dream both achieves what Baipurangi is seeking and neutralizes the dangerous effects of this event by substituting Krajagi for Jakugi; it finishes with a hunt, the various moments of which—the man killing, the woman cooking and distributing the food—are always presented to signify equilibrium regained, the return to daily activities. Dream No. 5. I am in the forest with my two fathers Kandegi and Pikugi, my mother Baipugi and Pikugi’s wife; I am carrying the arrows and give them to them whenever they catch sight of an animal. Pikugi kills a coati and divides it among us.[532] This is the first dream in which the desire to return to the situation of childhood is clearly marked; there are no more husbands, no lovers, and Baipurangi is once again with her two fathers and two mothers, one real and the other artificial,22 hunting with them and sharing their family life. In later dreams this theme will show considerable development. Dream No. 6. While I am asleep Krei comes to visit me and says, “Your little brother is dead, you are going to drink armadillo blood and die.” Then Jakugi goes hunting and brings back the armadillo; he is very angry because I want to make love with Kybwyragi; he adds, “Your brother is dead, I will hit you.” Then Jakugi gives me the armadillo blood and I drink it. I know that I am dead and it is my jware Japegi, who has been dead for several years, who comes to avenge me; he will take away my upiare Jakwachugi and, he tells me, he will unleash a tempest. Then Japegi turns into my late husband Krajagi; I am in mourning because my little brother has died, and he has come to carry me off to the sky. I am very happy, for his soul (ove) is good; and so we go off together. Baipurangi’s little brother is sick, and for several days she has been afraid that he will die; every death demands vengeance, both a real revenge which is to be carried out by the members of the group (who kill their children at the death of a man or woman) and an ideal revenge, the work of the souls of dead kin whose intervention generally unleashes rain, wind, thunder. This dream is characterized by the overlaying of two acts of revenge, one, that of the brother’s death, being ritual in character, while the other is psychological in content. Jakugi is responsible for both; and Baipurangi, on her part, tends to confuse her fear over her brother’s possible death and the anxiety provoked by her developing relationship with Kybwyragi into a single feeling of apprehension. Krei condemns her to drink the blood of an armadillo; it is in fact thought that drinking the raw blood of an animal will cause death. Jakugi goes hunting armadillo and offers the blood to Baipurangi. But we are dealing here with a classical Guayaki attitude: in certain cases women declare that they want to drink armadillo blood and die; a mother whose son, a sister whose brother has just died will put a cup of armadillo or coati blood to her lips; this is, however, only a ritual gesture; the husband is present at the scene and at the moment the cup is about to touch his wife’s lips he seizes her arms and tries to calm her down. After a while she lets herself be convinced and agrees not to commit suicide. This ritual sequence undergoes a transformation in the dream: not only does Jakugi not try to keep Baipurangi from drinking the armadillo blood, he seems to urge her on; beyond the social situation which involves only a mock suicide, he is impelled by a deep personal resentment powerful enough to make him wish for Baipurangi’s death. The dream makes use of elements furnished by the culture, modifying them in function of the message it bears, this message taking its full value from the disparity between the code of the society in question and the transformations it undergoes on the level of the individual (cf. Sebag 1964). This dislocation is of revelatory value: it allows a decoding, unveiling the elements of the signifying chain that support the signified of the dream.[533] Jakugi’s aggressivity is an extension of that which he has shown in the other dreams: he acts the way Baipurangi expects him to. We should, nevertheless, look at this more closely. This dream has a point in common with dream no. 4: it considers already accomplished what is still only a possibility. In 4, Baipurangi dreamed that she had had sexual relations with Kybwyragi, which was not the case; in 6, Krei announces the death of her brother while he is still alive. And in both cases these happenings provoke Jakugi to extreme acts, the result of which will be the separation of the two spouses and the constitution of another couple: –   in 4, Baipurangi is back with an earthly Krajagi; –   in 6, she dies and her soul goes to join Krajagi’s. This is in fact where the meaning of the dream is to be found. It could be formulated as follows: “If my brother dies and, doing what we usually do, I act as if I’m going to drink armadillo blood, then Jakugi will let me go ahead and drink it to get revenge for my relationship with Kybwyragi. When I am dead I will return to my former husband Krajagi, the only one I desire to be with.” Thus what is an object of anxiety in the daytime—the possible death of her brother—becomes an object of desire in the dream, because it grants access to realms that are not of this world; hence the passage from the optative to the present. Japegi is Baipurangi’s jware and it is he who will avenge her by coming to take away his former wife Jakwachugi.23 In this connection Baipurangi tells me that when she was young Japegi always came to her defense; and what she is telling me about her past will be of considerable interest later on: when she was about ten years old she suffered from the indifference of her father Kandegi, who fed her badly and “kept all the meat for himself”;24 one day when she was hungry she started to cry, and he threatened her with his bowshaft. At this point Japegi intervened to protect her, an action justified by the fictive bond of kinship between them. The same bond is invoked in the dream, Japegi avenging Baipurangi’s death in conformity with the attitude he showed during his lifetime. The final conjunction with Krajagi is made possible in a double way: on the one hand Baipurangi kills herself and, once dead, rejoins Krajagi; on the other, Krajagi comes back to reclaim his wife; in this case it is the bad soul, ianve, who comes seeking his former spouse. This seizure of the living by the dead is a subject that causes Guayaki widows a great deal of fear; they take a thousand precautions to avoid dying in this way. But the dream erases all distinctions between ove and ianve in favor of the single affirmation of the joyful reconciliation with Krajagi. Up to this point I have based myself either on the organization of the syntagmatic chain or on the comparison between the normal value of certain cultural traits and the distortion that the dream makes them undergo. The analysis thus seems to possess a high degree of probability. But there are also lateral [534]associations that remain hypothetical, yet are no less interesting for that. The passage from a possible death to a real death (I dream that my brother is dead while he is still alive) was a means of getting out of this world to become part of Krajagi’s.25 But a more deeply hidden intention can be grasped in this: as the material that follows will show, Baipurangi suffered a great deal because she was not a boy, and during her childhood her father made her feel this keenly; the sick little brother is a son of Kandegi, born in his father’s old age and fulfilling his long-held desire. So one may wonder whether, by anticipating his death, Baipurangi is not punishing her father, taking from him the little boy he holds so dear. While nothing allows us to answer this in the affirmative, it remains a problem to be kept in mind. Dream No. 7. Pampigi (the late wife of Jakugi and my father Pikugi, now dead for several years) comes to visit us; she goes into the forest to hunt with her former husbands while I stay in camp. Jakugi and Pikugi separate and each follows the tracks of an anteater. Pampigi comes back by herself carrying a coati, part of which I give to my father. During the night Krei comes to visit me and announces that Jakugi has been killed by the anteater he was hunting and that the same thing has happened to Pikugi. Jakugi will not come back. Pampigi cries, but as for me, I feel happy. On the other hand, my father is dead, and that makes me grieve. It is my jware Japegi who avenges my father; the wind roars, the trees fall down. Then Pampigi commands the wind to stop and it obeys. After this the ianve of Jakugi appears; it is in a rage and coils around me to take me away with it; but Pampigi intervenes and orders it to go away. Ianve runs away. Everything ends: we sleep in camp, Pampigi and I. Pampigi was married first to Pikugi and then to Jakugi [Translator’s Note: This order of marriages is clear in the text, but seems to have been inadvertently reversed in the French publication. I have corrected it here.]; she returns and takes them both back, leading then off together on a hunt. But the trip she is inviting them on is really a journey toward death; the hunt will be a tragic one. This is the logical consequence of the return of a dead person’s soul to the living: those whom she loved are directly endangered. Two days before this a tree fell on Jakugi and wounded him slightly; everyone in the group blamed this accident on the ianve of Pampigi, who would be expected to persecute her most recent husband. Baipurangi herself gave me this interpretation the day before; without the least doubt, this incident provided the pretext for the dream. And what does the dream say? That Pampigi’s return is the ideal way to get rid of Jakugi, but that a certain price must be paid for liberty obtained in this way; the death of her father Pikugi, who was Pampigi’s other husband. Whence her contradictory behavior; Baipurangi laughs over Jakugi’s death, weeps over her father’s; but the second was the condition for the first.[535] From this point of view this dream is similar to the preceding one: for in both cases it is the death of a loved one, father or brother, that permits me to break off my relationship with Jakugi. The break, however, takes place completely differently in the two cases: in 6, Baipurangi passes into the other world, while in 7 it is Jakugi who leaves ours; and the two of them do not end up in the same world—Baipurangi’s is the sky, which all of Guayaki culture connotes positively; Jakugi, on the other hand, disappears into the forest, a dangerous and hostile world. This opposition is found again in the dream itself; Pikugi is located celestially, his death is avenged in direct reference to meteorological phenomena associated with Ove, whose abode is in the sky. Jakugi’s revenge, on the contrary, is a personal one, he wants his wife back, and in this case Baipurangi is threatened with death by strangling. One can therefore characterize the contrasted positions of Baipurangi and Jakugi in Dreams 6 and 7, of Pikugi and Jakugi in Dream 7 with an identical formula. Dream thought uses the code furnished by the culture to characterize the psychological and affective relations among human beings—and in so doing gives them their full force. It is Pampigi, back from the beyond, who can serve as intermediary between the living and the dead who obey her; thanks to her, peace re-descends in an asexualized world in which Baipurangi sleeps with Pampigi. The shadow of the father still looms, however, since Baipurangi offers Kandegi a piece of the meat which she has been brought. Dream No. 8. I meet you26 and you say to me, “You, you want to have boys”; I agree and we have sex; then we go into the forest together and meet my mother there; I say to her, “I made love with Wachugi.” This is the first dream to show a real element of transference; I had interpreted her second dream as a manifestation of the desire to have male children, but of course I had not talked to her about it. Now this interpretation, which has remained a secret, is attributed to me by the dream, in the very form I had given it. To this several remarks must be added: I am situated precisely in the position that Krei has filled up to now, that of categorically enunciating the truth of the situation. This substitution arises from the very nature of our relationship: for almost three weeks Baipurangi has been telling me her dreams and the memories connected with them; the amount that I now know about her, like my neutrality, which continues to astonish her when she compares it with the enterprising behavior of the few Paraguayans she has known, makes me appear as the depository of the [536]ensemble of her history, as the one most likely to formulate her desire. But paradoxically the dream evokes our sexual relations, giving me the burden of naming this desire and of accomplishing it. Nothing that has happened up to now, however, allows us to clarify the import and the value of such a yearning, which has been formulated by someone other than herself; it is an immediate given which will be made explicit in later dreams. Dream No. 9. I am in the forest with Kandegi, Baipugi, Pikugi, and his late wife Pampigi; Jakugi is not there; I am pregnant and give birth to a boy; it is my mother who picks his up in her arms; it is Kandegi who massages his skull, and Pikugi who purifies me with liana. After that I have a lot of children; they are all boys. The father does not come; I do not see him, I do not know who he is. While Baipurangi was telling me this dream, I interrupted her, mistakenly as it turns out, to ask her who was the father of the boy; after hesitating for a long time, and certainly following external associations, she answered that it was Krajagi; in the rest of the story she specifies that all the other children have no father. The place of the father is thus left blank, it is unknown; if she has named Krajagi, it is in reply to one of my questions and echoing her conscious preoccupations. On the other hand, her father and mother are there with her, performing the functions involved in a birth, although such a specialization does not exist in reality, any member of the group normally being allowed to take care of the baby. In fact, the dream seems to combine two possibilities which are mutually exclusive in normal situations: to have a child one needs a man to be its father, for whom one has left one’s own father and mother; but in her dream Baipurangi has a number of boys—without any progenitor appearing on the horizon—and while continuing to live like a little girl in the family she was born into. At the same time, the refusal to give birth to a daughter is clearly marked by the proliferation of boys. Dream No. 10. I am married to Krajagi and I sleep with him, my head resting on his chest; we do not make love and the night is very peaceful; in the morning we go to the camp of the Paraguayans, who give cloth to Krajagi; I do not get any because I already have a skirt. The Paraguayan looks at me and says to Krajagi, “Your wife is very pretty, I desire her.” I start to cry, “The Paraguayan wants to make love with me; if that happens I will die.” We run into the forest and there we meet my father and mother; everything is fine and the next day we go hunting together. A new substitution of Krajagi for Jakugi; it is a normal one (not involving the return of the dead) but explicitly purged of any erotic signification: Baipurangi sleeps calmly on Krajagi’s shoulder. On this occasion, she specifies that she had sexual relations only rarely with her first husband, the latter having been content to be tender and loving. It seems that this abstinence was due to an absence of desire on account of his advanced age, as well as to the jealousy of Jakugi, who was already firmly refusing to share Baipurangi at the time the two husbands lived together. Nevertheless the dream has a more heavily marked sociological element here; I am referring to the relationship with the Paraguayans, the dream formulating the situation as follows: they give us cloth, which we do not have in the forest, but in exchange they sleep with us. Baipurangi feels that is an intolerable situation, and once again it is death—or rather the threat of death—which allows [537]her to escape from this danger. This death which, in the course of the various dreams, will be announced, evoked, called forth, experienced, always appears as the means of passage from one universe to another, the abolition of what exists being followed by a restructuration in another form. This passage takes place either, as in the preceding dreams, from the society of living Guayaki to the world of the dead where all relations between individuals are reformulated differently, or, as in this dream, from a Guayaki society which has been changed by contact with whites to the old community, which lived freely in the forest. The dream thus ends with a reconciliation that is at once sociological and affective: the return to the forest and resumption of daily activities, and the conjunction of family of orientation with the conjugal family, the former husband Krajagi behaving exactly like a father. This dream calls for several other remarks: it is Baipurangi who makes the passage between worlds possible by crying to Krajagi that she is in danger of death. Because of this Krajagi flees with her, but, in so doing, his behavior is the total opposite of that of Jakugi, who did not act as he should normally have and let Baipurangi die. Thus, the substitution of one for the other is explained by reasons having to do with the organization of the syntagmatic chain. On the other hand, the theme of clothing is not a negligible one: the day before, in fact, I had offered Baipurangi a skirt to thank her for the work she had done for me; a number of similar gifts had already been made to other Indians who served as informants; thus there was nothing personal in it. In the dream Baipurangi specifies that she, for her part, is dressed, wearing the skirt that I gave her as a present; thus, only Krajagi is looking for clothing; but in exchange for what he gets, the Paraguayans ask him to give them his wife. So it is possible that the dream—which, by definition, is always destined for me—is reminding me that since I, too, have given her a skirt, I would have just as much, if not more, right to have sexual relations with her. One thing that suggests this interpretation is that along with this dream Baipurangi had a series of short dreams during the same week, all concerning her refusal to be Peyreira’s mistress. She escapes from him and finds me in the forest, with the result that we become a couple. Thus the dream functions on two levels: –   It marks the refusal of the present situation and the return to an archaic world which is both the world of childhood and the world the Guayaki knew before they had undergone any acculturation, a return which is one of the kernels of Baipurangi’s dream thematic. –   But at the same time the way of posing the problem is aimed, more directly, at me—since it offers me reasons to ask what Baipurangi is trying to give me. Dream No. 11. Jakugi is sleeping with Achikujagi, a girl who is younger than I am; I don’t know whether they make love; as for me, I am sleeping with my father Kandegi; I am very happy. This dream draws its interest from the fact that it so clearly marks the substitution of the father for the husband. Achikujagi is the japetyva of Jakugi, who, in this sense, has two wives. Baipurangi dreams of a separation: Achikujagi would stay with Jakugi while she would go sleep with her father. In both cases all reference to sexuality is absent.[538] Dream No. 12. Jakugi appears unexpectedly and my mother cries to me, “There’s Jakugi, run!” We escape into the forest, but Jakugi follows our tracks and catches us; I shout at him that I don’t desire him anymore. He moves as if to strike me with the branch of a tree, but my mother gets between us: “Don’t hit my daughter; you are very angry; I will not give you your wife.” Then my father Kandegi talks to me: “Don’t have any man, you will sleep with me; to men I will not give you,” then, speaking to Jakugi, “I do not give you my daughter, I do not share her.” Hearing these words, Jakugi calms down. He doesn’t hit me and he goes away. Up to this point the passage from the conjugal family to the family of orientation was made possible by certain events (Jakugi goes off with another woman, etc.), but was not directly affirmed as such. In this dream, however, the implicit becomes explicit: the marriage with Jakugi is annulled; and it is not simply that the two spouses separate, as can happen with any couple; nor that Baipurangi dies and rejoins her former husband in the sky; such accidents are an integral part of a normal life, and they leave unchanged what happened before them. But here it is the past itself that has been abolished; Baipurangi’s father and mother undo the gift they made of their daughter at a certain point in her life and decide to keep her definitively. The very form of this annulment clearly marks the central aspect of the return to the original situation: Kandegi forbids Baipurangi—as if she were still a little girl—to have relations with men; in the dream he pronounces the words his daughter would have wished to hear in reality. In fact, the dream effaces the distinction between past and present; it takes us back to a time when the essential choices had not yet been made. This scene of the father taking his daughter back is, in addition, without any evident sexual content; in her commentaries Baipurangi never turned in this direction; but the father’s intervention has an aggressive character which makes it resemble an attack of jealousy and relates it to a veritable conquest. Kandegi’s “I do not share my daughter” situates father and husband in a relationship of confrontation which tends to make them interchangeable. Dream No. 13. My jware Japegi comes to visit me and reminds me of our bonds of kinship. “You are my chave; I molded your head.” “You are my jware.” “When you are dead, you will come to my camp.” “I am not dead yet.” “You will die, for the ianve of Krajagi will come to take you away; after that, I will avenge you.” Hearing this, I am very happy because I will see Krajagi and live with him in the sky. This dream simply re-presents certain themes that have already been illustrated in the preceding dreams: the same intervention by Japegi, who occupies a position at once neutral and protective (he will avenge Baipurangi’s death); the same celestial reconciliation with Krajagi, which presupposes Baipurangi’s death, brought about this time by Krajagi himself, who will come to take back his former wife; the same confusion between the bad soul (ianve) and the good soul (ove), a confusion that is without anxiety, since the reconciliation will take place in the sky.[539] Dream No. 14. Jakugi is not there; I am sleeping with my parents: my chave, the son of Pichugi, is dead. Krei comes to visit me and says, “Your brother will die and be buried”; my jware Doro Paregi does not come; he is dead and he does not visit me; finally, my father and mother go away into the forest; I remain alone. The night before, a woman of the group had had a baby, a boy, and Baipurangi took him in her arms and massaged him. This is the child whom Baipurangi sees dead, identifying him with a little girl who has been dead for a certain time, and who was Baipurangi’s chave. Her brother’s illness is related to this; it is an illness for which Krei predicts a disastrous outcome, uniting the three children in a common destiny. This is evidently a dream of abandonment; Baipurangi’s real or potential spouses are first presented, explicitly or implicitly, as absent; and what we witness is the progressive crumbling of the links connecting her to those with whom the sexual dimension is neutralized: in the superior generation her father, her mother, and her jware, and in the inferior generation her brother and her chave. Now the day before, Kandegi and Baipugi had left the camp, leaving Baipurangi with her husband, which caused her a great deal of anxiety (as she told me several times on the day of their departure); this little separation, without importance since father and mother would be coming back shortly, nevertheless revives a number of extremely painful memories; she tells me that when she was little it often happened that her parents would go off on long expeditions in the forest, “abandoning” her to another family. Thus, a real departure without any significance takes on a weight which the dream adds to by extrapolating Baipurangi’s separation from all who are dear to her. But her anxiety is also real; on the afternoon of the day she tells me this dream she is supposed to be washed with the liana because she took part in Pichugi’s delivery; she tells me this morning that she doesn’t want to be purified and would rather die; she reaffirms this when I tell her she is joking, but ends up letting herself be purified. Dream No. 15. Peyreira arrives at our camp on a horse; he wants to make love with me, but I tell him that his wife will be very angry; then he goes away and I let him go; I am happy. But you are not there and I am sad. Briku Kivirugi consoles me: “It doesn’t matter, you are going to dream that you are making love with him.” The interest here is twofold; the interpretation proposed in 10 is confirmed in that Baipurangi refuses Peyreira and at the same time turns toward me; but its importance lies in the fact that this is a dream which explicitly concerns the act of dreaming itself: it is a meta-dream which takes itself as object and, through Briku Kiviregi’s mouth, expresses its own meaning, i.e., that it is a satisfactory substitute for what cannot really be effected, in this case the sexual act with me. Certainly it had appeared early on that the very act of telling me her dreams carried an erotic value because of the attention and intimacy which it implied; but here it is the dream itself that is thematized: the substitutive function of dream life, which takes the place of something else and allows the restructuration of a real situation that is lived as unchangeable, is clearly perceived here. Dream No. 16. Kybwyragi has gone into the forest; we follow his tracks; but only his bones are found, for he has been eaten by the jaguar; we are afraid and we return to camp to tell what happened. Then I leave with Pikugi; we do not meet the jaguar.[540] The Guayaki are very frightened of the jaguar; when one of them stays in the forest for a long time without sending news, they say that he has been eaten. Kybwyragi has been gone for several days; everyone agrees therefore that the jaguar who once ate his mother has done the same thing to him. The forest is dangerous, which explains the reaction of flight. But paradoxically Baipurangi and Pikugi are able to wander there without any problems immediately after this; as it happens, Pikugi is the only one who is legally in danger of such a death: for he is the father of a child who has just been born, and he has not yet been purified; in the forest he runs the risk of being attacked by a wild animal or bitten by a snake. Thus the dream carries out a veritable exchange, the jaguar killing Kybwyragi instead of Pikugi, which allows Baipurangi to find herself alone in the forest with the latter. The same theme will reappear in dream no. 21. The two dreams which follow simply re-present in slightly different form motifs which have already come up in the last few days; but even on this score they confirm what was suggested above. Dream No. 17. My jware Doro Paregi comes to see me and says, “You do a lot of cooking, you are very tired, you are going to die.” “My soul will go away with you; when I am dead I will not do any more cooking.” “Your jware Japegi will avenge you; he will capture Jakwachugi.” Suddenly Japekujagi appears and states, “I will not give my chave to men; you will not have any husband.” This dream combines two distinct themes; on the one hand, the present situation is recalled: Baipurangi often does the cooking for many people and this specialization, which is due to local conditions and much more extreme than is normal among the Guayaki, does not fail to weigh on her; she gets bored and sees this as another indication of her inability to accept her own status; thus death appears again as the normal way out of this unsatisfactory world. On the other hand the dream brings in the character of Japekujagi, a young woman some years older than Baipurangi, who was kidnapped by the Paraguayans.27 On this occasion Baipurangi explains to me that Japekujagi used to protect her from her father’s aggressiveness on various occasions when he had wanted to hit her, and that Japekujagi had opposed the first advances of the men of the group when they started to desire Baipurangi. For this reason Baipurangi was not married until after Japekujagi had disappeared; where her friend had succeeded —in watching over Baipurangi and in not giving her away—her parents had proved incapable. The dreams erase this difference in behavior: in 12, Kandegi and Baipugi pronounce the same words as Japekujagi in 17: “you will have no husband; we will keep you with us,” but while in the second case the dream merely re-evokes a past situation, in the first it attributes to its characters precisely the actions that they had failed to perform. Because of this, once Baipurangi’s desire—that her father take her back and keep her within her natal family forever—is realized in the dream, it [541]masks the essential distinction, which she raises when she talks about her childhood, between her father who neither desired nor accepted her and other kin who loved and protected her. The aggressivity towards her father, which will underlie the rest of the series of dreams, is here in some sense masked by the will to compensate him that animates some of them. Dream No. 18. I am in Jakwachugi’s camp; suddenly the jaguar appears. I am terrified but he reassures me: “Don’t cry, I will not scratch you.” So I stop crying, and he goes on, “You must not have any husband; leave Jakugi.” After that he goes away; Jakugi does not come and I am happy. The jaguar is not just any animal; curiously enough, it is one of Baipurangi’s chikwagi; for during her mother’s pregnancy the men of the group came upon a jaguar, drove it off, and brought back the deer the jaguar had just killed and had not had time to eat. Baipugi ate some of this deer, transmitting the animal’s name to her daughter. In the dream, too, the jaguar is a protective being, absolutely without ferocity, who states the same interdiction that Baipurangi has already put into the mouths of her father and Japekujagi. This is all the more striking since some days earlier Baipurangi dreamed that the jaguar had killed Kybwyragi, thus allowing her to go into the forest with her father Pikugi; it is as if the animal were being used both to forbid her from having sexual relations (in which case it is the chikwagi speaking) and to suppress possible marriage partners (which is the business of a jaguar). Dream No. 19. I die of a sickness; they bury me and my parents and Jakugi cry. Barendy appears and takes me through the sky; he carries me on his chest and tells me, “I will avenge you, I will fall upon the Aché camp and make the trees burst into flame.” He does this, to the great fear of the Aché; then my jware Japegi appears and takes me with him. Barendy is a mythological being who lives in the sky and is associated with fire; he is identified with shooting stars that fall upon the earth; it is said that he burns the forest trees when he gets angry, and that he is attracted by campfires, which cause him to attack the moment he notices them. Commenting on this dream, Baipurangi explains that everyone believes that Barendy is her father: while her mother was pregnant, she dreamed of having sex with Barendy; the result of this kind of dream is the birth of a daughter. Barendy, a distant being to whom very distinctive characteristics are attached, is thus the only father who has accepted Baipurangi as a daughter; for is he not the one directly responsible for her sex? The dream itself makes this mythical father into an avenging father who punishes the Aché for Baipurangi’s death, a behavior that has been shown by no real father in the whole series of dreams; on the contrary, it was shown malevolently by Jakugi, benevolently by Baipurangi’s mother Baipugi, by her jware Japegi and Doro Paregi, by Japekujagi who played something of the role of a mother for her, and finally by her first husband, Krajagi; thus by all the people who matter to her—except for her two fathers. This inability of the real father to avenge her can only be explained if what Baipurangi needs to have avenged is above all the way she was treated in her childhood; this vengeance will become the theme of the dreams to follow. Dream No. 20. I am living with you in the forest; we have a daughter; when she grows up, the Paraguayans desire her; but our daughter tells us, “I don’t want to [542]have any husbands.” Then she has her first period; I cover my daughter with cloth, but the ceremony is incomplete: the other Aché are not there and there is no purification with the liana. Here is the first dream—it will also be the only one—in which Baipurangi gives birth to a daughter; the two previous dreams in which she really or metaphorically gave birth to children left no ambiguity about the fact that these were boys, the boys that her father wanted so badly that he had not accepted his daughter. But this time the sex of the newborn is female, and the fact that I am the father deserves notice.28 This daughter is nothing but a double of Baipurangi; like her mother, she insists that she does not want any husbands; unlike her mother, certainly, the daughter has remained a virgin; this is indicated not by what she says but by the way in which the menstruation ceremony takes place; in fact, one sequence is missing, namely the purification of the men who have had sexual relations with the person who has had her first period. The loss of virginity generally takes place well before the first menstruation, and when the latter arrives there are always several men in danger of being eaten by the jaguar and who should therefore be washed with liana; it is this deflowering, often undergone at too early an age, that haunts Baipurangi; it is what her dream daughter has never known. Here again, the discrepancy between the norm and the way it is presented in the dream marks what is significant for Baipurangi. Dream No. 21. Jyvukugi has gone into the forest and been killed by the jaguar; my father Pikugi follows his tracks and gets there as the jaguar is about to eat the corpse; he chases the animal away and brings the body back; I cry and my mother says, “Your father is not dead yet; don’t cry.” Then I set about cooking the body; the meat is divided among all the members of the camp; as for me, I eat the penis. The meaning of this dream evidently depends on the meaning of cannibalism in Guayaki culture. In spite of very intense questioning of all members of the group, only the alimentary sense of the act was put forward: “human meat is good” was the most frequent response, and even today, when cannibalism has almost entirely disappeared,29 it is very common to hear adults expressing regrets for its passing. So, until some contradictory information comes in, the consumption of Jyvukugi must appear as a purely alimentary act; but this act has multiple consequences. First of all, this dream reworks a sequence from dream no. 16 by changing its characters around. It is no longer Kybwyragi, but Jyvukugi who is eaten by the jaguar; but in both cases Baipurangi can then go into the forest with her father Pikugi without running the least risk. We have noted that Pikugi has not yet been purified and so really risks suffering the fate that is Jyvukugi’s in the dream; and here again the substitute image imposes itself; Baipurangi has the greatest affection for Kybwyragi and Jyvukugi, whom she has often considered as potential lovers. In slightly different forms, dreams 16 and 21 can thus appear as sacrificing a possible mate in the place of the father, the young woman preferring the death of the former to that of the latter.[543] We must go farther than this: for the dream reproduces what happened while Baipugi was pregnant with Baipurangi. A jaguar had just killed a deer when men appeared, drove it away, and brought the deer back to camp, where it was divided among the members of the group. Baipugi was close to giving birth to her daughter when she took part in the meal, which explains why the child, who was born a few weeks later, is named after the deer and has the jaguar as her chikwagi. The dream simply repeats this real event; with one difference: it is no longer a deer, but Jyvukugi, who will be eaten. How can this transformation be explained? Another detail offers the solution: for when a man was eaten, it was normal practice to offer his penis to the pregnant women so that they might give birth to boys, the oral introjection of the penis excluding the possibility of a female birth. This is exactly what is happening with Baipurangi; while it is not explicitly stated that she is expecting a child, the chasing away of the jaguar, repeating as it does the events surrounding her mother’s pregnancy, clearly indicates that this is the case, as does the meal she eats. Indirectly, and without prejudging the ultimate value of cannibalism, Baipurangi dreams that she saves her father by letting her lover die, and that she takes all precautions to ensure that her child will be a boy. Dream No. 22. Krei comes to strike down my father Kandegi because he has gone off into the forest without me; Krei explains that he is doing it to avenge me. Krei is also angry because I have mistreated his pets, his coatis; and he is avenging himself by striking my father; I cry and rub Krei’s face to calm him down. Then he declares: “You took part in the delivery of a child; I will make you die.” Krei turns into my jware Japegi and we both go into the forest. Several levels of meaning meet at this point: those who have taken part in the birth of a child are in danger, for a certain time, of being attacked by Krei. Baipurangi is in the situation of having recently massaged the head of Pichugi’s son. Once again on this occasion she fantasizes her own death, the final departure with her jware Japegi abolishing the distinction between the world of the living and the world of the dead. But the heart of the dream is located elsewhere: in the punishment that Krei inflicts on Kandegi; he attacks him twice, and each time for different reasons. In the first case, it is Baipurangi who is avenged and what is at issue is still Kandegi’s departure into the forest, which made his daughter suffer because it made her remember the many abandonments of her childhood; Baipurangi’s aggressivity against her father is thus apparent, even though—in function of the norms of Guayaki culture—revenge cannot be the doing of the injured party, but of a responsible neutral agency. The second case, on the other hand, seems more obscure: it is Krei who is avenging himself; but, paradoxically, the guilty party, namely Kandegi, is not the one who is punished, but Baipurangi herself, whose dream says that she killed Krei’s pet coatis. This displacement of persons, and the very nature of the crime, formed so many enigmas, which were only solved thanks to Baipurangi’s commentaries on this dream. This fact is deserving of note, for it was certainly with this dream that we came closest to the classical analytical situation, Baipurangi giving herself up to real “free associations.” Out of what she tells me, one event emerges which illuminates the present dream: when she was about eight years old, Baipurangi had [544]a pet coati30 that had been given to her and to which she became very attached. One day when the family had no meat, her father Kandegi killed the coati for the meal. Baipurangi watched and wept; she held this against her father and even today vehemently maintains that it was a terrible thing for him to have done. This is apparently the event that was taken up by the dream, but it has been treated in such a way as to mask its aggressivity, while at the same time giving this aggressivity free rein: it is no longer Baipurangi who must be avenged, but Krei; and, a final point of unconscious rhetoric, the crime for which Kandegi will be punished is not his own but that of his daughter. In this way the same message is articulated twice, but it is made explicit the first time and veiled the second. This difference appears to be explained by the very archaism of the memory involved. The aggressivity against the father which has taken a certain time to take shape in the dreams seems to be touching on more and more ancient elements: at first Baipurangi was concerned with her marriage, which her father had wrongly condoned; following this the theme of abandonment came to the fore; finally it has become a question of direct aggression perpetrated against her by her father: the discrepancy between manifest and latent content which is most clearly marked here could thus be attributed to the primitive character of the problems evoked. Dream No. 23. Krei comes to visit me; he tells me, “Your father Kandegi is going to die and you will be an orphan; to avenge your father, Jakugi will beat you; you will die and be buried with your father.” The desire for the death of the father is here confirmed for the first time; up until now it has been Pikugi rather than Kandegi who has occupied the place of the dead; now Kandegi’s death is an accomplished fact, one that will bring about Baipurangi’s death (caused by the intervention of Jakugi, true to his usual character), and therefore, in another world, the reconciliation and final reunion of father and daughter. Dream No. 24. Jakugi kills a male deer; the female comes running to avenge her husband’s death, and Jakugi kills her too; he brings the dead animals back to camp and this makes us cry, my mother and me. This dream refers back to Dream No. 2, for here again Jakugi kills two animals and Baipurangi is very deeply hurt by this act; but this time the animals are deer rather than peccaries and the pair is no longer made up of a mother and a daughter, but a male and a female. The fact that both times the animals’ death is cause for weeping and lamentation is a clear indication that they are there in place of human beings. But which human beings? In 2 it seemed that the people in question were Baipugi and her daughter; in a formal way, the present dream confirms this interpretation: the death of the animal mother brings about the appearance of the human mother at the same time as the constitution of the deer couple weakens the relationship between Jakugi and his wife, who are presented quite separately from each other.[545] Still, the identification of the deer couple presents other difficulties; in the absence of all commentary outside the dream itself, it can only be hit-or-miss; nevertheless, two hypotheses can be put forward: Wachu (deer) is my native name; besides this, I know—for Baipurangi has told me several times—that Jakugi is growing concerned about our long morning conversations; thus it is possible that I am the one whom Jakugi kills, the deer’s wife being none other than Baipurangi herself; the dream would then be describing our common death, and, crying over the animals’ bodies, it is for her death and my own that Baipurangi was weeping. But here there is no way to reach any kind of certainty. On the other hand, Wachu is also the name of Baipurangi’s little brother, who had died of his sickness several days earlier; it is possible that the dream is blaming Jakugi for this death, although it is hard to understand why the husband-wife relationship should have replaced that of brother and sister (this last relationship does not mean very much when one is talking about animals; this might explain the change.) Dream No. 25. Krei comes to kill my father Pikugi; in this way he is going to avenge me, for I am very sick; I put myself between them and cry “Don’t kill him,” but Krei pays no attention to me, and Pikugi dies; I cry very hard, I will also die, and they will bury us both. This dream simply re-presents themes that have already been raised several times, and finishes quite normally with a post mortem reconciliation of father and daughter. Dream No. 26. A Guayaki from another group comes to visit us; I have never seen him before, and I start to laugh. This makes my father upset, and he says, “Don’t laugh, this is a fine young man; if you laugh you will not give birth to a boy.” In this dream motifs that have until now been randomly scattered through the dreams appear and are connected. Three essential themes that had been developed independently of each other: –   My father was very unhappy about my birth; he did not want a daughter; –   My father let me get married; in this way he definitively abandoned me; –   I want to give birth to boys and only boys; are now connected. But in what form?[546] The arrival of a Guayaki from another group, who is a possible mate, provokes laughter on Baipurangi’s part, laughter both of derision (she is making fun of this suitor) and of provocation (she is attracting his attention); while this ambivalence is characteristic of Baipurangi in everyday life, still the dream makes it quite clear, despite the ambiguity, that it is expressing a refusal. Now—and here we can see real progress in the clarification of Baipurangi’s problematic—her father, who in previous dreams had agreed to take her back and keep her with him once and for all, here forbids her to laugh, putting forward the young man’s good qualities, and so wishing that she should marry him. But this will for marriage remains secondary; it is rooted in a deeper desire: that of seeing his daughter give birth to a son, the son that Baipurangi was not herself. The way in which Baipurangi seems to deny sexuality while asking for it in her behavior is revealed to be based on a deeper anxiety, that provoked by her sterility, by her inability to repay the debt she contracted to her father in being born a girl; an anxiety which the next dream will push to its extreme consequences. Dream No. 27. Krei comes to visit me and says: “If you have your period, you will die; an animal will capture you and you will be carried off by the armadillo disease; if you are not pregnant, then death is lying in wait for you, but if you are expecting a child, then you will not be sick.” Baipurangi finishes by specifying that Krei wants her to have a child. Thus it is indeed sterility that is now taken as object, a sterility identified with death;31 in the preceding dreams, death appeared only as a way of getting rid of Jakugi and rejoining her former husband Krajagi with whom she only had “chaste” relations: but this was nothing but the conscious and tranquilizing use of an obvious fact too brutal to be accepted as such: for what the dream strikingly reveals is that this desire for death is simply the other side of her inability to live, to give life to a child of the male sex; only this, a new term in the game of signifying relations, would allow her to stop fantasizing her return to her original family, to master her feeling of abandonment through having responsibility for a small creature who must in turn not be abandoned, and finally to give meaning to her sexual relations by transforming them into something other than the sign of the lost paradise of childhood. The same content is formulated in the following dream, but this time disguised in a way that is highly illustrative of the dream-work. Dream No. 28. Krei tells me, “Don’t take a husband; if you get married, you will be very sick. Jakugi makes love a lot, and because of this you will get sick.” Then he turns to Jakugi to say, “Leave Baipurangi alone and sleep with other women; she has not been tattooed and so you can’t have her, for when a young woman has not been tattooed I do not give her away; you will have other wives.” Then I meet my father, Kandegi, who tells me that Krei has ordered him that we should sleep side by side; so we spend the night next to each other. At first glance, this dream is completely different from the preceding one and more like others which Baipurangi had had considerably earlier: Krei takes the young woman away from Jakugi to give her back to her father, and the world of [547]childhood is reconstituted once more; and the interdiction he lays down makes no allusion to a possible birth. But this is nothing but appearance; in fact, what does Krei say? “I do not allow a woman who has not been tattooed to get married.” In Guayaki culture tattooing is in no way a prerequisite for sexual relations or marriage; it generally takes place much later. On the other hand, it is directly associated with the reproductive functions: a tattooed woman will have strong and handsome children who will not get sick; and it is for this that a woman submits to this long and painful operation. For this reason alone the dream’s evocation of tattooing implies a direct reference to the desire to have children; but this desire is repressed: the semantic value of tattooing is different in the culture and in the dream, and the distortion which the syntagmatic chain operates upon the paradigmatic organization is given as the place both of repression and of the return of the repressed. What Krei is actually saying is thus quite different from what he seems to say, and his interdiction could be expressed as follows: “I do not allow a woman to marry if she cannot bear a man children; therefore, such a woman can do nothing but return to her father”; in reality, this return is itself impossible, since Baipurangi is not the son her father wished so much to have. Dream No. 29. Jakugi is married to Chachu Kujagi, and they are tickling each other. Chachugi asks me if I am angry; I answer no, for I know that Jakugi will die. This is the last dream that we collected; it allows Baipurangi to rid herself of Jakugi in the simplest possible way—by marrying him to a dead wife: for Chachu Kujagi died several days earlier, of pneumonia; in tickling her—an act which the Guayaki always interpret as a prelude to sexual relations—Jakugi is signing his own death warrant. And his death is definitely what Baipurangi wants; several Guayaki have died during the last few weeks following an epidemic; what is appearing is the possibility that Jakugi be the next victim. It is here that the series of dreams ends; we have analyzed them in order and have tried to interpret them basing ourselves both on the series as a whole—the dreams commenting upon each other—and on the way in which the cultural data are transformed on the oneiric level, with the associations provoked in Baipurangi by the telling of her dreams furnishing an important added base. It is now time to return to the problem in a synthesizing way. * * * The twenty-nine dreams given here make up only a little over a quarter of the material collected; as far as their content is concerned, the dreams that have been left out contain no new information; they are generally very short and condense into a phrase or an image what other dream dreams develop more abundantly. Nevertheless, from a certain point of view, it is crucial to consider the material as an integral whole, for only in this way can we grasp the displacement that has taken place in the thematic in the course of these two months: any dream that we have kept as an important one was in most cases announced and confirmed by a number of secondary dreams which in one way or another carried the same message. We have thus based ourselves on the corpus as a whole; but the rifts revealed in the study of this corpus are also present in the more limited series that has been commented upon here: to see this it will suffice to summarize the essential points of each dream [548]into one or two phrases; simply juxtaposing these allows us to grasp in a condensed form the slips and transformations of meaning that have taken place. No. 1. Jakugi announces my32 death. No. 2. Jakugi kills me and kills my mother who is trying to avenge me.33 No. 3. I give birth to children while my father watches; then he feeds them. No. 4. Jakugi’s aggressivity towards me; in the end he is replaced by Krei. No. 5. I live with my parents as I did when I was a child. No. 6. Jakugi has let me drink armadillo blood, so I die and rejoin my former husband Krajagi in the sky. No. 7. The return of Pampigi causes the death of my father Pikugi and my husband Jakugi. No. 8. Wachugi tells me, “You want to have children.” No. 9. I give birth to many boys, whose father is unknown. No. 10. I live with my family far from the Paraguayans. No. 11. Jakugi leaves me for Achikujagi; this makes me happy. No. 12. My father and mother take me back from Jakugi. No. 13. I know that I am going to die and go live in the sky. No. 14. Everyone leaves me, including my father and mother. No. 15. I dream that I will dream that I am making love with Wachugi. No. 16. Kybwyragi is eaten by the jaguar; then I go into the forest with my father Pikugi without running any risk. No. 17. Japekujagi forbids me to take a husband. No. 18. The jaguar forbids me to take a husband. No. 19. When I die, my father Barendy takes me away and burns up the forest to avenge me. No. 20. I have a daughter by Wachugi; she is a virgin and does not want a husband. No. 21. I eat the body of Jyvukugi, who has been killed by the jaguar; I will have boys. No. 22. Krei avenges me and himself by striking down my father. No. 23. Krei announces the death of my father, which will bring about my own death. No. 24. Jakugi kills a deer couple. No. 25. Krei kills my father to avenge me. No. 26. My father prevents me from laughing so that I will give birth to a boy. No. 27. Krei tells me that if I have my period again I will die. No. 28. A woman who cannot have children should not get married. No. 29. The death of Jakugi. Simply looking through this résumé reveals the existence of a process which, as it develops, grants us access to the more secret problematics that structure Baipurangi’s [549]life.34 Certainly, several of the dreams can be detached from the group either because they concern only minor points or because they refer to unchanging aspects of the situation: this is the case with dream 10, in which Baipurangi reaffirms her refusal of close contact with the Paraguayans, with dream 15, which thematizes the function of dreaming, and with dream 18, in which Barendy, in his classic role, takes away the young woman who has just died; but these are exceptions; the other dreams fall into groups, and these can be classed as follows. The first six dreams, with the exception of 3 (which presents the desire to have children in a disguised way) and 5 (in which Baipurangi nostalgically evokes her life as a child) center around Jakugi, who in one way or another causes Baipurangi’s death. This unity is all the more striking since this theme of the murder committed by the husband—for sometimes it is explicitly a murder—will not reappear in the dreams that follow. Dream 6 marks a turning point: Baipurangi’s death, which has been experienced until now as a trauma, begins to appear to her as a way to be rid of Jakugi and to rejoin her late husband Krajagi; thus, in most of the dreams that follow Baipurangi will be fantasizing her own death, calling for it, glorifying it—the death that will open her road to another, positively valorized, universe.35 Baipurangi certainly feels the danger of this; she is afraid of Jakugi, and her desire for death comes out in other ways than just in the dreams; she speaks of it often, even outside our meetings, a sign of real anxiety. But the way this raw material is picked up and elaborated by the dream will change its meaning: it is as if the traumatizing elements that are evoked over and over again through the whole series of dreams takes on a different value through their integration into a syntagmatic chain, as if relating them to other signifiers drawn from the code provided by the culture allows their explosive charge to be reduced. In another way, the dream-work consists of selecting certain elements that have been lived in their full opacity and hostility in order to integrate them into the very dialectic of desire and its object; thus, their inertia dissolves; they lose their aura of destiny to become the indispensable mediations that a living intentionality can use to arrive at its goals. That this integration takes place on an imaginary level does not diminish its real effectiveness. Thus Dream 6 marks a turning-point the effects of which will be felt as far as Dream 20. Jakugi is no longer a threat; he is simply the person it has become impossible to live with; hence the many variations on the theme “how to get rid of him?” To this question the dream brings two answers, one of which is situated typically within the imaginary order, while the other will facilitate access to the symbolic problematic that rules Baipurangi’s life by seeking to return to the time when this problematic was formed. For Baipurangi the first way consists of fantasizing her own death and rejoining someone she loved very much—her late husband Krajagi or her jware Japegi and [550]Doro Paregi—in the world beyond; this is the case with dreams 6, 13, 19, which all end in a heavenly reunion. The second way36 consists of dreaming of a primordial interdiction which would forever prevent Baipurangi from taking a husband: in 12 this interdiction is imposed by her father Kandegi, in 17 by Japekujagi, in 18 by the jaguar. This shift in characters is not secondary; it seems to us to be correlated with the greater depth of the dreams that will follow; for the characters invoked do not occupy the same semantic position. Kandegi is alive, but when faced with a real choice he did not behave as he does in the dream; on the contrary, he gave his daughter away, and, as far as Baipurangi can tell, he did so gladly. On the other side, Japekujagi protected Baipurangi from an even earlier loss of virginity than the one she actually experienced; but today, taken by the Paraguayans, she might as well be dead and can no longer help. The jaguar, finally, neutralizes the double opposition: he is a mythical being situated beyond life and death, who played no role in Baipurangi’s childhood and marriage. We have had the impression that after each dream, the impossibility—for reasons which are themselves contrary—of making the character in question play the role given to him in the previous dream brings about his replacement by another term. Dream 18, by choosing the most theoretical and abstract solution, will break suddenly with the previous dreams and bring back to the fore an aggressivity directed explicitly against the father who, precisely, did not act in real life as he did in the dream. But parallel to this series of dreams which all abolish the marriage to Jakugi has appeared another series, centered around the birth of children. Baipurangi’s desire to have boys was already revealed in Dream 3; Dream 8, responding to an interpretation that had not been revealed, puts the confirmation of the existence of this desire into my mouth, and 9 makes us witness to the birth of many children, all of which, without exception, are boys. The place of the husband, on the other hand, remains empty, while the father of Baipurangi is present at all the deliveries, feeds the children in 3, massages them in 9. We can give two explanations, which are not mutually contradictory, for this presence: either Baipurangi’s father is also the father of her children, or else these children are explicitly destined for him because they respond to his desire. What makes the first hypothesis likely is that several times the dreams have ended with the substitution of Kandegi for Jakugi; the chastity of his relationship with Baipurangi does not negate the fact the father is here put in the husband’s place and that Baipurangi keeps insisting that she spent the night with him. What is thus symbolized, certainly, is a return to the world of childhood, to a stage in her life when Baipurangi had not yet been taken from her parents; but it is the father and not the mother to whom she returns; and the evocation of nights spent with her father makes one think irresistibly of a veritable love [551]of the daughter for the father, which springs out of her very origins. The second hypothesis—that the birth of boys is a gift made to the father—will be confirmed by the third group of dreams, which will clarify the problems that have been left hanging so far. It must not be forgotten that as she explains and comments on these dreams, Baipurangi is recalling numerous episodes from her childhood. What serves as a backdrop to her dream life is the feeling of abandonment that possessed her at a very early age, when her father sometimes left her in the care of friends or relatives for periods that could last up to several months; because of this, her marriage simply appears to her as the supreme and ultimate abandonment; whence her tendency to relive the mythical scene of separation37 while inverting its meaning, the adult refusing this time to give the girl away. This abandonment by her family, for which she holds her father principally responsible, can probably be explained by the objective conditions of life in the forest; Baipurangi, however, does not connect her father’s attitude to this situation, but to the disappointment he felt when Baipugi gave birth to a girl and not to a boy. On this subject, memories abound. She remembers that very often she went without meat simply because she was a girl,38 and she evokes one dramatic scene that particularly struck her: when she was about ten years old her mother gave birth to another girl, and Kandegi became so angry because of this that he picked up his bow as if to hit the baby, even sketching the potentially murderous movement; at this point the women of the group intervened39 and things calmed down;40 it remains nonetheless true that Baipurangi sees herself as the victim of such an aggression.41 Once she has recognized her father’s desire to kill, she feels that whenever he leaves her, for however short a time, it is the veritable equivalent of his murdering her. So, when she fantasizes her own death, she is not content just to separate herself in this way from Jakugi and go to the sky to rejoin her loved ones; she is also unconsciously responding to her father’s desire to see her dead because she is not a boy. c. This is what highlights the turn taken from Dream 21 on: up to this point the dreams have revealed no aggressivity against the father. Baipurangi has been content to dream that Kandegi behaved differently than he did in reality, thus [552]answering his daughter’s wishes, while she herself, giving birth to a heap of boys, fulfilled the secret desire (secret because it has not yet been formulated in the dreams) of her father. It is this aggressivity that now emerges: Dreams 22, 23, and 24 feature Kandegi’s death, and they make it the result of cruelties inflicted upon Baipurangi. Parallel to this there occurs a modification in the way in which the question of children is posed. Up until now Baipurangi has been content to give birth to boys (Dreams 2 and 9) and to understand these scenes as the simple result of her desire to have children (Dream 8). Now the structure changes: she no longer gives birth, but clearly sees that it is her father who wants her to have male children and that for her this is a question of life or death. Let us look, then, at these two transformations. For the first, Dream 22 is decisive, since Krei kills Kandegi for reasons related for the first time to the “bad treatment” that Baipurangi suffered in her childhood. The episode of the pet coatis, by its very archaism, reveals the depth to which the desire for the death of the father descends in Baipurangi’s subjectivity. This desire for death is only the other side of the desire for the father who has refused to accept his daughter; from this point of view, Dream 26 provides the key to the whole edifice: up until now, the dream father has behaved in the way his daughter wishes he really had—he has kept his daughter and has not given her in marriage; but now real behavior and dream behavior unite: the father lectures his daughter who is making fun of a suitor and who, by her untimely laughter, could drive him away and cause the birth of a girl rather than of a boy; Dreams 2, 8, and 9 appear in retrospect to give the father what he has always been waiting for. It is Dreams 27 and 28 that will show exactly why it is crucial for Baipurangi to answer this desire: if she does not, then sexuality is forever forbidden to her. As Krei says indirectly, only women who can have children have the right to a husband; those who cannot will remain alone, with death as their only end; and the dreams taken as a whole point to a direct formulation of Baipurangi’s problematic: the only condition that would allow me to continue living with Jakugi is to have a child; and this is so because it is only by giving birth to a boy that I will have the right to be a girl. Baipurangi’s dream production can be interpreted in full only by taking into consideration the plurality of levels on which it develops: 1. She lost her virginity while very young—this is common for young Guayaki women—and she suffered because of this; her sexual relations with Jakugi weigh heavily on her; she continually opposes his aggressivity to the gentleness of Krajagi and repeatedly describes herself as literally gorged on the erotic plane, her valorization of Krajagi being proportional to her disgust. But both the dreams and the commentaries that follow them reveal that this husband was in fact a substitute for the father, surrounding the then very young girl with tenderness and protection, recalling her to a time before she had sexual relations. These remarks should not, however, lead us to think of Baipurangi as sexually frigid; the refusal of sexuality that is explicitly affirmed and lived in reality in her relationship with Jakugi was accompanied by a sexualization of most of her behavior; she could be attractive, provocative, and what seemed to us to characterize her from this angle was a permanent ambivalence not unlike that of hysterics.[553] 2. What is in play from one end of these dreams to the other is the question How can one be a woman? which J. Lacan has pointed out as that of the hysteric, and which takes on a particular weight here, developing as it is in a culture whose daughters are rejected at birth and often put to death on various pretexts during childhood. In being born a girl, Baipurangi has contracted a debt to her father; she has deprived him of what he desires, and her present abandonment, like those that preceded it, appears to her as the result of this debt: sexuality is the sign of this abandonment, the permanent reminder of her debt; but it is also the way for her to liberate herself: for she can abolish the debt only by giving her father what she took from him, namely a boy. Only the birth of a male child can justify her as a woman; and this is equally so of her justification as a living being since, as Krei says, if she has her period again she will die. 3. Thus the avatars of the relationship with Jakugi are located only on the surface; they refer back to an archaic complex which began to manifest itself in a series of dreams produced as a result of the relationship that has been established between Baipurangi and myself, a relationship based on entirely different criteria than the ones she is accustomed to. Thus aggressivity against the father is coupled with a profound dependence upon him, a dependence which is evidently symbolic rather than real. It is because this drama has been knit from the very beginning that all the successive abandonments, even the most harmless ones, have been lived as traumas; nothing in the present-day behavior of her parents, which was completely friendly, could cause anxiety; it remained nonetheless true that a simple trip into the forest carried disproportionate importance. This allows us to understand the metaphorical equivalence between father and husband; it doesn’t matter who will be the procreator of my children as long as I can give these children to Kandegi; at the limit, the procreator could be my father himself; Dreams 2 and 9, in which Baipurangi gives birth while her father watches, could then be explained as follows: by dreaming that Kandegi feeds the children that she has just delivered or massages them at birth, Baipurangi is granting him satisfactions he would have wished for and has not had; but in exchange for this gift she receives the right to be a woman. As Freud writes, “Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another” (Freud 1907: 145). * * * At the same time I was conducting this experiment with Baipurangi, I collected dreams from several other individuals. Each time I was able to capture the workings of mechanisms identical to the ones here analyzed. Certain remarks should be made in this regard: by their very generality, they delimit the framework within which these questions can be discussed. These dreams refer to the difficulties that individuals encounter in the society in which they live: the scenes they evoke, the feelings and reactions they attribute to the various characters, are characteristic of a certain culture. Interpretation becomes possible only on the basis of an extensive knowledge of that culture, the dream productions meanwhile providing a means of access to the psychological problems engendered by a particular social organization. But the discussion of a [554]particular case allows us to grasp how little such a sociological determinism can exhaust the material in question. An initial observation can give us an idea of this: for these dreams speak to us without mediation; what they put into play, beyond cannibalism, the murder of girls, and ritual vengeance, still concerns us directly. The story of this Guayaki girl, a member of the most primitive tribe of South America, whose entire life has been spent in conditions more precarious than we can imagine, still for the most part follows a logic that is familiar to us. The interrogation that runs through her discourse concerns her right to exist, a right that is not really but symbolically challenged. Her search for a place from which her past and future can take on meaning and reconnect normally with each other lays before us the fact that no such place is naturally given to man, that he does not occupy such a place as the result of some simple process of organic maturation, but only through a dialectic allowing him access to mastery of the symbolic space within which he has come into being. If the culturalist shapings of psychoanalysis are so disappointing, it is because they locate themselves on another level: for culturalism seeks to show how different societies create specific individual problematics, the subject being particularized according to the institutions through which he both realizes and completes himself. But, beyond certain of his formulas, what Freud is posing are the very conditions of this particularization: in what way does an organism bearing multiple possibilities become a subject centered around certain essential signifiers? The subject does not simply grow out of the organism; what happens, rather, is the subject’s encounter with an order that makes him accede to another dimension, constitutive of all culture. This universality exists on several levels: it is that of the symbolic function, of the passage from a phenomenal universe to the organization of signifying chains through which alone the real can be refracted, of the structuring of human relations that flows from the effectiveness of this logic, finally of the nature/culture conjunction that operates in every individual when, at the moment of birth, he is torn out of pure biological immediacy. It is above all on this last level that Freudian psychoanalysis is located. That Freud passed from the analysis of this encounter between determined individuals and a constitutive symbolic order to an actual history of the engendering of this order itself (the project of Totem and taboo) marks a confusion between two origins, that of structure and that of event. It does not, however, follow that this primordial order should be identified with that of any given society. When Freud defines the child as polymorphously perverse, he cannot be referring to a simply bodily incompleteness which develops over the long run toward some rigorously defined state of normality. Any familiarity with history or ethnology puts the idea of any such normality permanently into question. On the other hand, he is not so far from the linguist who observes that the human voice is capable of articulating an infinity of sounds.42 In both cases it is within a determinate [555]environment that this plurality of possibilities will lose its original indifferentiation, some of them becoming the privileged form of adult behavior. These forms vary from society to society; but in order to institute them all societies depend on what nature has provided them with, and this nature can never be definitively replaced: for what is rejected does not simply disappear; the individual, marked as what he is by a particular code, continues to bear within himself what this code misrecognizes or refuses. In inscribing individual energies into a network that preexists them, societies give this energy the power to become history; but each individual, while coming into being as an individual only through his encounter with such networks, remain something more than this. Which is simply to say that childhood is never over, and that it is at the point where child and adult, nature and a particular social universe, meet that we find certain activities, from playing to dreaming, that carry us ceaselessly back and forth between the real and the possible. A dream is the discourse of a subject who is at once both addresser and addressee. This means that code and message are also identical: the dreaming individual does not follow a predetermined code that has been fixed once and for all, but chooses or invents, in function of what he is seeking to signify, a certain type of syntax out of all those that are available. Thus, two successive dreams might easily follow two different codes. Freud demonstrated this polyvalence of dream logic in The interpretation of dreams: it means that the dreaming subject is situated at the meeting point of multiple symbolic systems and draws from their elements and syntaxes to signify his own condition. In doing this he may follow the preexisting codes of his culture, subject these codes to deformations such that the true meaning can be found only by pursuing associations, or—and this is the most frequent case—freely invent lexicon and syntax. For the most part, Baipurangi’s dreams occupy an intermediate position, using ritual sequences whose identity is retained while introducing certain displacements which can be made intelligible only through comparison with the cultural model. In line with this, they invite us to take a brief look at the problem that is raised throughout the work of Jung—that of the existence of archetypes and their appearance in both dreams and myths. One precision should be made immediately: in Jung’s eyes the appearance of archetypes is characteristic of only one class of dreams; in the other class, each dream has its own meaning, obeying rules specific to a particular subject. The latter group—and this includes most dreams—can be decoded only through free association. Thus, in his own words, Jung opposes any isomorphism of signifier and signified, which he sees as one of Freud’s errors: “It is far wiser in practice not to regard the dream-symbols semiotically, i.e., as signs or symptoms of a fixed character. . . I say that this procedure is advisable in practice because in theory relatively fixed symbols do exist whose meaning must on no account be referred to anything known and formulatable as a concept. . . It may seem strange that I should attribute an as it were indefinite content to these relatively [556]fixed symbols. Yet if their content were not indefinite, they would not be symbols at all, but signs or symptoms” (Jung 1931: 156). In this case, the key to the dream can be provided only by the subject himself. It is he who has “decided” the nature of the relationship between symbols on the one hand, things and concepts on the other, and it is to him that we should address ourselves. There are, however, other cases in which the materials at work in the dream obey a code which for Jung is universal and equally valid for individual and for collective productions. The analyst shares this code with the analysand, and so does not need to proceed via the patient’s commentaries—his own associations are just as valuable. “Each individual has his own life, his images and ideas. . . But what is of central importance on the level of the personal unconscious is not necessarily so for material arising from the collective unconscious. Faced with an archetype, the analyst can and should begin to think, for it arises from a structure common to the human condition, about which my associations will be as valuable as the dreamer’s” (Jung [1934] 1962: 313).43 Whether or not such dreams exist, Jung’s interpretation of them misrecognizes certain properties of symbolic thought. He himself wavers between a synchronic and a diachronic idea of archetypes: in the first case, they would consist of “constants of the imagination” valid for any individual whatever (and thus without relation to time) and organized in the unconscious, which is therefore a real entity which expresses itself equally in myths or dreams. In the diachronic view of the archetypes, on the other hand, we are referred to a history in which the archetypes came into being, a history whose essential property is that nothing in it is ever lost. “The unconscious, as the totality of all archetypes, is the deposit of human experience right back to its remotest beginnings” (Jung 1929: 157, cited in Jacobi 1957: 36). But this linear schema of history is unacceptable both for humanity and for animals. For the universals of the imagination cannot be reached on the level of images: the recurrence of certain signifiers which seem to bear the same signified all through human history can most often be explained as the simple projection of our own semantic classes onto material that is actually far more complex; and when this recurrence takes place over shorter periods it is the result of a shared development valid for certain, but not all, societies. Anthropology and the history of religions, on the contrary, reveal how little symbols possess “a fixed meaning or character” in this domain. Even the most natural conjunctions—such as a paternal sun, a maternal earth—cease to be natural in a different context. It seems that what governs the formation of symbolic universes is a series of mutually exclusive choices rather than any progressive and undifferentiating integration of different levels of meaning. The dreams to which Jung is referring utilize a recognized and objectivized code. It is thus true that the analyst is able to advance a coherent interpretation without passing via the subject’s associations; but it is vain to speak as Jung does of the analyst’s associations. For in this case it is not a question of associating, but of knowing as thoroughly as possible the collective meanings carried by the various elements [557]of the dream. In listening even to Baipurangi’s dreams, with their extremely limited individual lexicon,44 recourse to a collective unconscious that is the same for everyone is inconceivable. Analysis only became possible once we had plunged ourselves into a particular cultural universe, completely unknown beforehand. For a Guayaki dream-interpreter, on the other hand, the best procedure would not have been to follow his own associations, but to master the values of his own culture—and to verify whether or not they were the same for Baipurangi. In both cases the use of the term “association” is inadequate. When the dreams of a patient make use of mythical and religious material, the key to this material is to be found outside the dreams themselves; but this does not mean that it is universal. Cultures, like individuals, organize and interpret what is available to them in function of principles that differ from one case to the next; in no case can the relationship of subjectivity to the symbol be considered a natural one, with symbols consubstantial with the “soul” itself. And this implies: that when such material is legitimately used in an individual’s dreams, it is always in cases where it was previously known to him, one way or another. that—if this material is not distorted—only an objective study of its content, incorporating all the necessary safeguards, can give us access to it. that while the analyst can, to the extent that he immerses himself in such a system, sometimes interpret it without difficulty, this does not mean that his own associations share in the privilege: for they themselves can form so many distortions, which will only occasionally intersect with the distortions the patient has performed on the same material. And what is at stake here is understanding the patient’s own distortions. From this point of view, Jung’s conception is both too broad and too narrow. The dreams that he says belong to the collective unconscious are those that contain mythological themes; but there is no reason to confine ourselves to these: political, social, economic elements would be equally amenable to the same techniques. A dream centered around historical figures, Lenin or Hitler, shows the same use of certain signifiers from my own culture for individual ends. Thus, the fact that some dreams are constructed like myths is not satisfactorily explained by an isomorphism of the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious; it arises, rather, out of the encounter of an individual with a symbolic order that is distinct for each society. Collective unconscious and individual unconscious do not overlap:45 the former is entirely externalized; it is coextensive with the myths, rituals, institutions, representations of a particular culture, and is nothing outside of these; all interiority is excluded from it, since there is no subject to be the bearer of this totality. Unconsciousness bears—although this is not always the case—on the rules of construction of these systems and their respective modes of articulation. Thus, it is not lexicon but syntax that can be unconscious. Still, the human individual is [558]sometimes characterized by unconsciousness of both:46 through his encounter with the world he is inscribed with primordial images which are immediately masked, transformed, but without losing their—originally semi-biological—effectiveness; his everyday mental life reveals the existence of operations which structure immediately given material in an original way. The reader may refer to the forgetting of the name Signorelli at the beginning of the Psychopathology of everyday life; the final interpretation does not really reveal any new content; several times, already, Freud had thought over the relationship to death, impotence, and mastery that is formulated by the slip, and the quality of being unconscious characterizes the themes, not the operations; the operations produce a conjunction of the materials being worked with in such a way that all evident meaning is excluded. This opacity is, however, the sign of a new reorganization of the psychological field, bringing out equivalences among previously unconnected domains. By its very formalism, the unconscious reveals the multiplicity of implications of the contents of subjectivity; it seeks to establish unity and continuity where fragmentation and discontinuity seem to reign. This is what vitiates Sartre’s critique in Being and nothingness, which he bases on Stekel’s statement (Sartre [1934] 1966: 95) that “Every time that I have been able to carry my investigations far enough, I have established that the crux of the psychosis was conscious.” Even if this is true, it does not change the fact that the pathogenic kernel, even though available to me explicitly in such a case, structures my psychic universe in a way that in most cases is not directly accessible to me. A slip of the tongue or a dream remains unintelligible even in cases in which its decipherment would tell me nothing I did not already know. The distinction between unconsciousness of the lexicon and unconsciousness of the logic that rules it seems a decisive one: it rules out any confusion between the individual and the collective and connects psychoanalysis to two other domains: to biology on the one hand, and on the other to the universal semiology announced by Ferdinand de Saussure. The cultural lexicon used by the subject is an explicit one, which explains both the subject’s ability to use it and the analyst’s ease in understanding it. It is important to note that this lexicon has been learned, and is not attached by any natural link to particular conscious subjects. This observation, while decisive, is still not enough to explain the fact that dreams and myths from different societies echo each other. Robert Gessain (1957) has noted the homology between certain North American myths of the vagina dentata and dreams obtained on the analyst’s couch. How can such similarities be explained? The answer can only be found in the structural non-congruence of the individual and his culture. The latter represents only one of many possible symbolic systems—while every individual bears within himself the virtual totality of these systems. What a culture admits, recognizes, validates in its members is only a part of what these members are; and this misrecognized, repressed, forecluded being remains, in many ways, present. The notion of marginality, put forward by anthropologists, apparently refers to individuals whose entire personalities are organized around different elements than those central to their culture; but there is a part of each one of [559]us that remains marginal, and it is this part that other societies have developed and legitimized. The dream, by its very nature, leads into this relatively undifferentiated place where being infinitely exceeds what is said about it. The confusion of addresser and addressee allows a greater freedom of syntax, which is directly related to the openness of childhood. For while the adult has become an adult through being marked by a particular culture, the child still carries the possibility of being equally open to all conceivable norms. The dream—partly because of its normal abolition of the conditions of communication (there are also other reasons)—initiates a return to the freedom of childhood; it introduces other thoughts than those from which the culture of the dreamer draws inspiration; it uses whatever is immediately available to construct figures other than those that dominate waking life. Thus, the dreams of a hysteric or an obsessional neurotic might well rediscover—recreate—an organization of the world once developed by some vanished culture. From a certain point of view, Baipurangi’s dreams give us an example of this power: centered around a debt, they see marriage as a veritable gift; they tend to crystallize around a primal scene in which the father actually gives his daughter away. But nothing in Guayaki culture could really correspond to such a fantasy: Guayaki girls have total freedom in the choice of a mate, with the one stipulation that they are not free not to choose. The norms of the group, the life led by its members, were such that in practice marriage was imposed whenever possible. But in this process, which was only weakly institutionalized, the father’s role was minimal: it was not he who brought about the formation of the conjugal family. Baipurangi’s mythical reorganization of her own history is not based on the real conditions of her marriage with Jakugi, but on the way her relationship with her father has been structured since she was born. It is in function of a specific problematic—itself referring to the totality of Guayaki culture—that Baipurangi has reconstructed the system of social relations, giving the father a role that is not normally his. When Lévi-Strauss points to the incest prohibition as the foundation of all society, he makes it clear that every gift given is the consequence of a gift received: the father gives his daughter to a man of another group because he himself once before received a woman from that group. To different degrees every kinship system is an actualization of this primordial exchange, although this will be explicitly thematized only in some societies. While marriage always implies a giver, in the latter case his position changes from a peripheral to a central one. Instead of being the implicit correlate of the circulation of women, his intervention becomes real, with all the psychological or social effects that this implies. It is this passage that is effected in Baipurangi’s dreams. This is not to say that Baipurangi’s drama coincides in any simple way with this last possibility. In Baipurangi’s eyes, her father did indeed give her away, but not because he had previously received something. For in this case the woman has been replaced by the child as object of desire: her father did not get what he had a right to, namely a son; instead of a son, Baipurangi was born; and, because she had never been accepted, she could then be given away. Here giving comes before receiving: Kandegi abandons his daughter to Jakugi because he is hoping for a son from their union; at the birth of this boy the bargain will be definitively sealed. A gift that has received its countergift can no longer be put into question: thus we might expect that if Baipurangi gives birth to a boy it would forever establish her [560]as Jakugi’s property. But this is not the situation at all: for it is not a question of real possession but of the places of terms within a symbolic space that does not coincide with the actual relations among people. What is in question ultimately is not knowing whether or not Baipurangi will remain Jakugi’s wife—a factual problem that will be resolved once Baipurangi has mastered her own symbolic constellation—but ascertaining the extent to which she can realize a symbolic conjunction with her father which could abolish the disjunction that has existed since she was born. Thus her mythical history takes form at the meeting point of two propositions: –   My father gave me away because I took something away from him. –   Once I have given him what he is hoping for, I will be accepted retroactively. Such a logic, evidently, is completely ordered by an individual dialectic; but even so, it brings to light certain universal processes around which other cultures are organized. This is so of the exchange of women: in considering her own marriage as the exchange of a daughter for a son, Baipurangi is formulating the position of woman as object of exchange with a rigor that is without equivalent in her own society. The problems raised by the interpretation of these dreams are located at the intersection of many disciplines. This is not by chance: sooner or later the elaboration of any ethnology leads into biology on the one hand, psychology on the other. And we are not dealing with a reduction of any sort here, but rather a reciprocal fertilization possible only if the specificity of each discipline is fully respected. Psychoanalysis has never been so true to its goals as when it has maintained—against certain sociologistic tendencies—the irreducibility of its experience;47 to this extent it has been able to integrate results obtained on other levels, most notably that of linguistics. Inversely, ethnology has been able to define its object through a radical critique of psychoanalytic extrapolations about “primitive societies”; still, the problem of the relationship of the two fields remains open. It is hoped that the present essay might contribute to its solution. Translator’s note. I would like to thank Mark Mancall for instigating this translation and Isabel Heck for her help in preparing the manuscript. My goal here has been to be as literal as possible while not letting the English get completely bizarre. I have maintained most of the author’s idiosyncratic punctuation, especially his rather breathless use of semicolons and en-dashes. Where Sebag cites the French versions of works that also exist in English (e.g., Freud and Jung), I have given the equivalent passages in the published English translations. Two points where translation tactics should be made explicit: First, French possessives do not distinguish the gender of the possessor, but that of the possessed: son, sa, or ses can all mean “his,” “her” or “its”. Standard usage now (at least mine) is, when this is not otherwise specified, to use something like “his or her.” But in the early 1960s, virtually all scholarly writing referred to “the individual” or “man” as him and his. Not to impose more anachronism than necessary on the text, I have followed this usage here. Second, Sebag follows the scholarly French mode of referring to himself as “we” when it is the author’s voice, rather than the acting individual’s, that is speaking: “We undertook a study of dreams on our own. . .,” means that Sebag did it by himself. This use of [561]“we” corresponds to nothing in English. It distances the author’s voice and is apparently supposed to be modest. Sebag switches to “I” when he talks about himself as an actor in the events narrated, as, for instance, in Notes 28 and 30 below. There is no non-obtrusive way to signal the switching back and forth in the text between “we” and “I.” Given that, in spite of its expressive and poetic qualities, this is a text in which the referential function is predominant, I have decided to change the authorial “we” to “I” throughout, keeping the plural only when Sebag seems to be including the reader in the exploration: “I was (literally ‘We were’) able to obtain this information. . . [It] will allow us to penetrate more deeply. . . [It] will permit us to transcend the level of simple biography. . .” The French text is there if the reader would like to explore this stylistic dimension further. There is a discussion of the use of authorial “we” in Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’homme nu (Paris, 1971), p. 559. References Freud, Sigmund. 1905. “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, VIII. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1907. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, IX. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1920. “On the Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII. London: Hogarth Press. Gessain, Robert. 1957. “Vagina dentata” dans la clinique et la mythologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Jacobi, Jolande. (1957) 1959. Complex /Archetype/ Symbol. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jung, Carl. 1927. “The Structure of the Psyche,” in Collected Works, VIII. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1931. “The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis,” in Collected Works, XVI. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. (1934) 1962. “Du rêve au mythe” in L’Homme à la découverte de son âme, 6th edition, Paris: Albin Michel. Lacan, Jacques. (1953) 1979. “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth,” trans. Martha Noel Evans in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly 48: 405-425. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1963. “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” in Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Sarte, Jean Paul. (1934) 1966. Being and nothingness. New York: Pocket Books. Sebag, Lucien. 1964. Marxisme et structuralisme. Paris: Payot. ___________________ 1. Pierre Clastres and I studied Guayaki culture jointly; but I conducted this rather marginal work on dreams on my own. 2. I did not neglect these formal characteristics (the way a dream is related is as valuable as the dream itself); but in most cases they did not seem relevant, since they were identical throughout the corpus. 3. In the present essay it did not seem helpful to give the original texts with interlinear translations. 4. Which is, of course, always the case in an analysis. 5. Arroyo Morroti was just a clearing in the middle of the forest, where the Guayaki had settled because their protector’s “rancho” was located there. 6. The second group, the “Aché Kwera,” had been there for only a year, and some of its members did not appear at Arroyo Morroti until just before our arrival. 7. The ethnographic information given here has been limited to that strictly necessary for understanding the dreams that follow; we have avoided all developments not relevant to the dreams. 8. Neither of the two groups at Arroyo Morroti included more than forty members or so; but this was due to persecutions by the Paraguayans. 9. The Aché Gatu and the Aché Kwera did not know each other before meeting at Arroyo Morroti. 10. Cases of polyandry are very frequent in Guayaki society. 11. This point would require long explanations which we are unable to give here; we can, however, say that this marks an essential difference between men and women, indicating that it is the former who exchange the latter, and that in every case the counterpart of the gift received is the possibility of death itself. We should also note that sexual relations that took place earlier are only authenticated when the girl has her first period. 12. The term jware is also applied to the person who purified the girl with liana shreds at the time of her first period; this clearly indicates the reciprocal structural articulation of the two ceremonies. 13. Following the way Guarani is written, the phoneme y—common to Guayaki and Guarani—designates a guttural French “u”. The symbol u here designates the French sound “ou” [Translator’s note: As in English boot]. 14. I cite only those Guayaki terms that have specific functions not directly translatable into French; the dreams to be analyzed will involve figures designated by these terms. 15. This is true of at least one of the groups, the Aché Gatu, to which Baipurangi belonged; the second group, the Aché Kwera, buried their dead. 16. The term “soul” is of course used here with reservations. Ianvé and Ové can be defined only by their characteristics. 17. We should mention that the Paraguayan in charge of the Guayaki, Manuel Peyreira, had gotten into the habit of sleeping with Baipurangi from time to time. This situation was intolerable both for her and for Jakugi; but neither of them could do anything about it. 18. Baipurangi is speaking; we have kept as closely as possible to the text of the dream, in order to preserve the personal nature of the narration. 19. An extremely poisonous snake, greatly feared by the Guayaki. 20. I have analyzed the dreams in order, indicating at every point the degree of certainty the interpretation can claim. Each problem will be reconsidered in a more general way later in the essay, as we assess the route we have travelled. 21. “The dream-work. . . subjects the thought-material, which is brought forward in the optative mood, to a most strange revision. First, it takes the step from the optative to the present indicative; it replaces ‘oh! if only. . .’ by ‘It is’” (Freud 1905: 162). 22. In Guayaki a woman in this position is designated by a term meaning “false mother.” 23. As in this case, acts of revenge always draw on preexisting affective and social relations. The soul of a dead person, intervening on behalf of a wronged third party, will seize someone he was close to in life, most often his wife. 24. Meat has extraordinary affective and social value for the Guayaki. A Guayaki who spends a week without eating meat becomes morose and seems to have lost all interest in life. 25. This is a very common way of formulating problems for the Guayaki, in conversation as well as in dreams. We collected dreams from adults of both sexes, and this theme appeared in every case. 26. This is a reference to me, myself, to whom Baipurangi is telling the dream; this is the first in which I appear. Pierre Clastres and I had received Indian names after about three months with the Guayaki. He was Brikukiviregi (red-headed vulture), and I was called Wachugi (deer); these names had nothing to do with our physical or psychological qualities. [Translator’s note: Sebag uses the word chevreuil for the animal that gives him his name. In dictionaries, this is given as ‘roebuck’, and Auster, for instance, consistently uses this term in his translation of Clastres. Since these creatures are not all male, of course, the term should be roe deer. A roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) is a smallish European deer, a favorite with hunters. There are none in South America. I don’t know what kind of cervid the Aché hunt, but I would guess it’s the Brocket Deer (genus Mazama), a smallish deer about the size of a roe. I just translate it ‘deer’.] 27. Up until a few years ago the Paraguayans organized expeditions to kidnap Guayaki children, who were afterwards resold. It is only fairly recently that a law was passed forbidding such traffic and that the Department of Indian Affairs has extended its—faraway—protection over the various native groups of Paraguay. 28. Haven’t I, for my part, accepted Baipurangi completely? Haven’t I recognized her as a woman and still not had sexual relations with her? 29. In June, 1963, the Guayaki did, however, eat a little boy who had died of an illness, and performed the appropriate ceremonies (stripping and cremation of the bones). 30. Coatis are the only pets the Guayaki have; people catch them young and keep them until lack of food forces them to be killed. 31. The Guayaki explain most deaths as caused by diseases brought on by three essential foods: honey, armadillo meat, and coati meat. 32. Baipurangi is of course speaking of herself. 33. These summaries are situated not on the level of what the dreams say explicitly, the manifest content, but on that of the interpretation, the latent content. 34. An additional confirmation of this was provided by the appearance of childhood memories from the end of the first month. 35. The Guayaki, both men and women, speak very frequently of their own death; and they do so with a lyricism that is not without grandeur. 36. Dreams 7 and 11 occupy a somewhat special place; they deal with the same subject, the departure of Jakugi; the first is important because in it Baipurangi accepts the sacrifice of Pikugi—the father she is less attached to—in order to be rid of Jakugi; the second, which takes real conditions into account, evidently represents the most satisfactory solution. 37. Guayaki marriage involves no ceremony; and, strictly speaking, there is no need for the father’s consent; the father- and mother-in-law do, however, receive pieces of game from their son-in-law. 38. Indeed, what is in question in this case is more a mythical reconstruction of her history, revealing its symbolic value (on this subject, cf. Lacan [(1953) 1979]), than any kind of photographically exact narration. Direct questioning of the various protagonists revealed that while Kandegi was not happy about the birth of a daughter, he still treated her well on the whole. 39. The opposite could easily have taken place, and Kandegi could have killed his daughter at birth; this is what happened in several other cases. 40. This girl was later, at a very young age, kidnapped by Paraguayans. 41. Baipurangi must remember how her father would threaten her with his bow in the same way when she cried for lack of meat. 42. This represents, of course, only a very general analysis seeking to point out that nature remains the basis for cultural specifications, which are themselves mutually exclusive. Diachrony is essential to the Freudian theory of stages, in which each stage depends on the preceding one. This dependence is not real but symbolic: for it is the way in which the encounter between a particular drive and the law has been lived that determines the later form of that drive. In addition, the reappearance of earlier phases in adult sexuality is not simply a resurgence of certain moments of infantile sexuality that have remained identical throughout their development; a pervert is not a child, but a man who can signify his adult sexuality only by means of the debris of his childhood sexuality; thus the latter is restructured in function of norms posterior to it. 43. A somewhat different version will be found in Jung’s Collected Works, XVIII (1977: 90-91). 44. It is nevertheless true in Dream 2, built around the birth (fall) of children, that the Guayaki word for “fall” (waa) also means childbirth. 45. On this point, cf. Lévi-Strauss ([1949] 1963). 46. The unconscious may be threefold, involving lexicon, syntax, and function. 47. In my opinion, this is part of the significance of the work of Jacques Lacan.  

Severi: The arts of memory This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Carlo Severi. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) The arts of memory: Comparative perspectives on a mental artifact Carlo Severi, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Revised and updated by the author Translated from the French by Matthew Carey For linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists, the emblematic image always and everywhere preceded the appearance of the sign. This myth of a figurative language composed by icons—that form the opposite figure of writing—has deeply influenced Western tradition. In this article, I show that the logic of Native American Indian mnemonics (pictographs, khipus) cannot be understood from the ethnocentric question of the comparison with writing, but requires a truly comparative anthropology. Rather than trying to know if Native American techniques of memory are true scripts or mere mnemonics, we can explore the formal aspect both have in common, compare the mental processes they call for. We can ask if both systems belong to the same conceptual universe, to a mental language—to use Giambattista Vico’s phrase—that would characterize the Native American arts of memory. In this perspective, techniques of memory stop being hybrids or imprecise, and we will better understand their nature and functions as mental artifacts. Keywords: art, memory, pictographs, khipu, tradition, iconography There must in the nature of human things be a mental language common to all nations…. This axiom is the principle of the hieroglyphs by which all nations spoke in the time of their first barbarism. Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova, [1744] 1990 Social memory necessarily involves the remembrance of origins.1 Within the European tradition, ideas of the emergence of human society, and of its “first barbarism,” were long associated with the myth of a universal language common to all humanity. This original language posited by so many authors raised an endless series of questions: What did its morphology, grammar and logical structure look like? How did these first pioneers transmit it intact to future generations without a writing system? How did they communicate, both with one another and with God? In La scienza nuova [1744] 1990, Vico appeals to what we might call an anthropological myth to answer these questions. He suggests that social memory must, initially, have taken the form of emblems and symbolic figures, because images are the “mental language” which underpins the “principle of all hieroglyphs.” For Vico, this myth of a figurative language composed of icons is a logical necessity, and it was to have a significant impact on anthropological thought. Its effects are still visible, albeit in implicit or fragmentary form, in contemporary social anthropology. Just like so many of his contemporaries, Vico doubtless took Egyptian hieroglyphs as an historical model. When Horapollon’s treatise on the Ancient Egyptian scripts was rediscovered during the Renaissance, provoking intense debate, hieroglyphs were still widely seen as imagines symbolicae, as a coded form of secret knowledge frequently attributed to Hermes Trismegistus or to Moses. Some authors, such as Pico della Mirandola (following Plotinus), interpreted them as the last remaining traces of a divine language, which, by dint of careful riddling, could be made to give up the hidden order of the universe. Others, such as Alberti and Erasmus, more prosaically saw them as a possible model for a universal language. Paolo Rossi’s work on seventeenth century science ably seconded by a number of more recent studies (Rossi 1979; Mauelshagen 2003) has thrown up a number of interesting, and still partially unexplored, developments of this idea. During the Baroque period, the term hieroglyph was deployed in such unlikely fields as natural history, geology and zoology. Rock crystals, fossils, geological strata, freaks (two-headed babies, hermaphrodites or human-animal hybrids) were seen by doctors and earth scientists as hieroglyphs of nature—prodigious signs by means of which the natural world revealed its secrets. Francis Bacon definitively formulates these monsters as “spontaneous” scientific experiments where the laws of nature, untroubled by human intervention, give themselves to see. Later, in the work of Goethe, the hieroglyph becomes a prototype of the originary form of living creatures: an immediate and abstract manifestation of the underlying unity connecting natural phenomena and the human spirit. Over the course of the eighteenth century, this naturalist interpretation of the hieroglyph is joined by the more abstract visions of Leibniz, d’Alembert and Condorcet. Here we witness the full emergence of an idea already implicitly present in Vico: that of the mental hieroglyph or “universal character,” which could be expressed either linguistically or mathematically. One hundred years later, this same idea would drive Frege (1965) to elaborate his mathematical ideography—a symbolic system independent of natural languages and capable of rigorously representing the laws of propositional Logic. The idea of a mental hieroglyph embodying a direct, and linguistically unmediated, relationship between concept and image has been a widespread, persistent and productive theme throughout modern thought (Assmann and Assmann 2003). For several centuries, however, its principal field of application was speculation on the origins of mankind. For linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists, up until the end of the nineteenth century, it was a given that the emblem always preceded the sign in primitive society. This was assumed to be a universal principle derived from the very nature of the human body. In La Scienza Nuova, Vico had noted that hieroglyphs were an application of the same principles that regimented “mute” or sign languages, which made use of “gestures that have a natural relationship to the things they are intended to signify.” This, he suggested, explained why hieroglyphs the world over (from the West Indies of Mexico to the East Indies of China) seemed to derive from the same principles. For Vico, the hieroglyph was the model of the unitary principle of the human genus (“senso comune del genere umano”), which he placed at the heart of his theory. According to this principle, “uniform ideas [are] born among peoples unknown to each other,” which in turn gives rise to the “mental dictionary” characteristic of all human cultures (Vico [1774] 1990, vol. I: 499).2 According, then, to the myth of the universal language, human memory was initially preserved by means of images. This myth was particularly influential among historians of writing, who long distinguished between an iconic, uncertain and primitive “writing of things” and a later, more evolved “writing of words,” but it also affected the wider study of the art of memory. The two figureheads of this now burgeoning field of study, Paolo Rossi (1960) and Frances Yates (1966) both emphasize the hieroglyphic character of the artes memorandi or arts of memory. The latter, influenced by the work of Aby Warburg, set out to demonstrate the existence of a number of classical, astrological, magical, and more generally neo-platonic ideas within the field of mnemonic techniques—and this as late as the central Renaissance period. In contrast, Rossi (and later Jean-Philippe Antoine, 1993) adopted a philosophical approach highlighting the relationship between memorization and inferential techniques, which played a central role in arts of memory from Raymond Lull to Linnaeus. It would, however, be an error to over-stress the opposition between these two approaches. In practice, the arts of memory have the same double-headedness as the myth of an original language. Qua mental languages, they are either seen as bearers of a kind of magic associated with this first language (by, for instance, Camillo, Bruno or Agrippa von Nettesheim) or (as with Erasmus, Leibniz or d’Alembert) as precursors of a future universal tongue, which must be forged out of advances in scientific, and more particularly taxonomic and mathematical, knowledge. These ideas are still alive and well today, and not just in anthropology. In his intervention to a debate on the “universal language” promoted by the journal Critique in 1979, the mathematician René Thom could happily exclaim “why speak of the myth of a universal language? Nowadays, there is at least one universal language—that of science.” This is extremely close to the position of Paolo Rossi, for whom the historical outcome of the arts of memory can be seen in the work of Linnaeus. Frances Yates, for her part, identified “symptoms of the search for scientific method” in the classical Arts. In other words, references to a fundamental language and to the development of rational thought are present in the works of both of these pioneers of the study of the arts of memory. The arts of memory, then, are not a survival (or possible development) of a particular magical or scientific paradigm. Instead, they allow us to study historically and culturally situated practices of thought. This more anthropological approach to the subject is explored in the recent works of Mary Carruthers (1990, 1993, 1998) and Lina Bolzoni (1995, 2002). The two historians propose to address the artes memorandi as “crafts of thought,” which bring together a whole range of memorization and mental imaging techniques. According to them, memorization techniques (along with the taxonomical organization of knowledge to which they give rise and the historical longue durée in which it is inscribed) cannot be seen as the conceptual socle for one singular vision of the world, but instead as a sort of historical artifact that can be used in a variety of contexts—ranging from the systematization of knowledge to pedagogics, from prayer to meditation and even to the composition and reading of particular texts. The only thing distinguishing this set of techniques from an actual material tool is that it is a mental artifact, a tool of thought. In this article, I take the conclusions drawn by these two historians as the starting point for my analysis of the arts of memory within a number of Amerindian traditions. The wider goal of founding anthropology of memory, to which this article is but a contribution, may seem surprising. The existence of several different arts of memory, each characterized by a precise constellation of what Paolo Rossi sees as key to the artes memorandi—the relationship between recollection, classification, and inference, on the one hand, and evocation, ideation, and imagination on the other—is something that has passed most anthropologists by. Diligent fieldwork may have uncovered different memorization techniques in Oceania (Wassman 1988, 1991; Harrison 1990; Silverman 1993), Africa (Nooter and Roberts 1997; Kubick 1987) and the Americas (Hoffman 1891, 1898; Mallery 1898; Ewers 1979), but the idea that the underlying logic of memorization might influence so-called “oral” societies, and thus that we might be able to develop an anthropology of the arts of memory to complement the work of historians, is not one that has gained much traction within the discipline. This project necessitates several shifts in perspective. First, and most radically, we must tilt at the opposition between oral and written traditions—one of the fundamental artifacts of social anthropology. Elsewhere (Severi 2007), I have argued that this opposition underlies a number of anthropological misunderstandings: traditions that anthropologists have tended to describe as “oral” are very often better thought of as iconographic. In many cultures, social memory appears to rely only on the spoken word when, in fact, images play a central role in the transmission of knowledge. In cultural facts that depend on such transmission, there is then no symmetrical opposition between orality and writing. The counterpart of writing is not merely the spoken word, but the hybridization of word and image in the form of a mnemonic device, most commonly in ritual contexts. If the socialization of memory is to become a fully-fledged anthropological object, then we will need a new definition of tradition—one that is no longer defined in terms of semiotic means of expressing knowledge (oral, written, etc.), but according to the precise nature of the prevailing relationship between words and images. Historians of the arts of memory, for their part, will need to make space within their findings for new perspectives drawn from outside the Western world. This new approach implies a combined comparative and reflexive research strategy. If the idea of the art of memory is to be applied to non-Western traditions, then it is not enough merely to show that some of its concepts can be fruitfully applied to their memorization techniques. We must also bring what Lévi-Strauss called “the view from afar” to bear on the Western case. Seen from this perspective, both classical and medieval arts of memory can be classified as belonging to one ideal type from a whole series of thought techniques that can give rise to a tradition. The false opposition between orality and writing, the reluctance to compare the West with the Rest, and the complexity of the relationship between the arts of memory and writing techniques have together contrived to hamper our understanding of the memory techniques that we find in non-Western oral traditions. This difficulty is, however, not merely theoretical. The study of these techniques frequently throws up little-studied objects that are also extremely hard to conceptualize. Our customary categories (drawing, symbols, ideograms, picto-grams, semasiography,3 writing, etc.) are ill adapted to these objects, which are normally vaguely described as “mnemonics.” It is also frequently hard to grasp their underlying logic. One example of this is the Americanist debate surrounding khipus, the Incan cords containing different types of knots used to convey messages or memorize data. Recent research (Ascher and Ascher 1981; Urton and Llanos 1997; Urton 1998, 2003; Quilter and Urton 2002; Salomon 2001, 2002, 2006; Pärsinnen and Kiviharju 2004; Déléage 2007) has thrown new light on the technical uses and the social import of these mnemonic devices. This research builds on the fact that khipus’ primary purpose was to carry numerical information and their use was tied up with the control of different elements (made up of people, goods, ritual offerings, tribute, and even units of space and time) managed by Incan bureaucracy. The use of khipus is, then, as Gary Urton pithily puts it, a particularly developed example of the “social life of numbers.” This is confirmed by a number of historical sources, which confirm that the Quechua word khipu means both “knot” and “numerical calculation” and that the verb khipuni similarly means both “to tie a knot” and to “do a sum” (Gonzalez Holguìn [1608] 1989: 309; Garcilaso de la Vega [1609] 1991, I, book 6, chap.7–9; Cummins 2002). We know, however, that this interpretation only holds for certain khipus: those where the relationship between sections of cords or sets of cords is regular and assimilable to a numerical order. In these cases, the use of series (or even of series of series) of cords helps rigorously to record and memorize large sets of numbers (on a decimal base) and a small number of qualitative categories signaled by, say, color, the way the knot is folded or the direction of the cords. Urton notes that a significant number of khipus kept in museums (roughly one third out of six hundred) lack this regularity and so cannot be seen as arithmetical aids. A number of historical sources (notably Guàaman Poma’s New Chronicle edited by Murra and Adorno 1980, but also cf. the collection of texts assembled in Parsinen et Kiviharju 2004) suggest that these khipus were used to memorize texts containing names of people and places (Murra 1991), but we are still unclear as to how exactly the system might have worked. How are we to understand a mnemonic device that relies on the same mental operation (the creation of ordered series) to fulfill such diverse functions as numerical calculation and the memorization of a text? Contemporary debate on the issue is as lively as it is undecided, with partisans of the different camps frequently limiting themselves to fighting over whether khipus are “true” writing or “just” a mnemonic device. Most of these authors use the term “mnemonic device” to describe an “arbitrary and individual means of memorizing,” which “follows no standard rules” (Cummins 2002: 55). It is without doubt Gary Urton who most clearly exemplifies this opposition (universally accepted within the field) between “writing” and “mnemonic device.” To show that khipus could not be reduced to mere mnemonic devices, he initially proposed to distinguish between different types of khipus: mnemonic ones for general use and more codified ones for bureaucratic use. Later, he argued (against authors such as Marica and Robert Ascher and Martti Pärssinen) that all khipus are derived from a pre-Hispanic form of actual writing. Urton notes the capacity of certain khipus to record verbs or sentences and speaks of the khipus’ “high degree of syntactic and semantic information” (Urton 1998: 427). He specifically notes, “the khipu recording system more closely approximated a form of writing than is usually considered to have been the case” (ibid.). More recently he has proposed a third hypothesis: that khipus were reduced to mere mnemonic devices by the violent transformations undergone by Inca society during the early colonial period. The damage had been done as early as the late-1590s, leading to the elimination of fully grammatical constructions (of the type subject-object-verb), which were replaced by attenuated, non-narrative representations principally comprised of names and numbers. Beyond, however, the hypothetical transcriptive powers (the forms and tenses of verbs, as well as certain epistemic classifiers)4 attributed to it by Urton (1998: 428), it is hard to imagine just how this precolonial knotted language might have worked. It is worth remembering that “true writing,” according to De Francis’s (1990) definition, uses a finite number of signs to give a complete representation of the spoken language. But how could a khipu notational system cover the entire range of words in the language? In any case, as Cummins points out, khipus order the varied information they contain, be it words or numbers, by “producing an image of the memory, rather than by representing that which they are meant to preserve” (Cummins 2002). In other words, the arrangement of khipu cords into a series of logical arborescences indicates a train or process of thought and tells almost nothing of their actual content. In these conditions, how can we conceptualize the transition from the memorization of numerical series to historical narratives? This leaves one central question almost wholly unanswered by adversaries from both sides: what kind of conceptual unity underpins these different mnemonic usages and, by extension, what is the logical structure of these khipus? Further empirical research will doubtless shed light on this question. In the meantime, however, it is as well to consider the following broad theoretical point: the opposition, inspired by the classic work of Gelb (1973), between mnemonic devices and writing is, in fact, extremely fragile from a conceptual point of view. For Gelb, just as for the other authors mentioned above, all of these diverse techniques must necessarily fall into one of two camps. Either a society relies on oral memory, giving rise to loose, fragile traditions, or it develops techniques for transcribing language, leading ultimately to writing. Many Amerindian cultures, however, fall outside this crude opposition: the practice of social memory and the use of organized iconographies go together in these traditions, which developed arts of memory that cannot be reduced to either writing or to individual mnemonic devices. We will return to these matters later. For the time being, let me just note that khipus are not the only Amerindian graphic representations to call our categories into question by virtue of their hybridity. Throughout the length of the Americas, we find pictographic traditions that, from the point of view of Western semiotics, seem to realize an “impossible combination” of picture and sign. Historians of writing have long hummed and hawed over how to define these images. With the notable exception of Diego Valades who, as early as the fifteenth century, spoke of them in no uncertain terms as memory images, most specialists have reduced their analysis to the opposition with alphabetic writing systems. This long list of authors might begin with Michele Mercati who, in 1598, referred to them as “Indian hieroglyphs,” and end with Hoffman and Mallery’s (Hoffman 1891, 1897, 1898; Mallery 1893) definition of Amerindian pictograms as “rudimentary means of transcribing basic ideas.” And in between, we find all kinds of mysterious paleographic interpretations dreamt up, but rarely described, by countless European and American chroniclers and geographers. In some ways, the current debate surrounding khipus echoes these older controversies. I suggest that we can only understand the logical structure of these mnemonic devices by abandoning older and invariably ethnocentric approaches based on the opposition between khipus and writing in favor of a comparative anthropological perspective. The question, then of whether pictographic systems or khipus are “true” writing or “just” mnemonic devices is of no interest to us here. Instead, I propose to explore whether khipus and pictograms, qua organized mnemonic and graphic systems (however apparently distant they may be), share any common formal traits, thereby implying comparable mental operations. Can they, in other words, be fruitfully compared independently of any reference to writing systems? By focusing on the subtendant mental operations, I enquire as to whether they belong to the same mental universe, and so whether Amerindian arts of memory share a common mental language, to borrow Vico’s term. In this way, we will see that khipus and pictograms are not, in fact, unruly hybrids defying classification, but mental artifacts whose nature and function can be understood in their own terms. These analyses, based on the exposition of several necessarily coarse-grained case studies, then give rise to a description of the logical elements which underpin the universe of Amerindian arts of memory. The word universe as I use it here (as a horizon for research and not as an attempt to reduce the immense diversity of Amerindian cultures to one common form) has both a geographical and a logical sense. It is defined by the set of mental operations implied by the use of these memorization techniques as well as by a specific group of cultures. Amerindian arts of memory: A case study We have already noted that our traditional semiotic categories (drawing, pictogram, ideogram, etc.) fail to do justice to non-Western techniques of memorization. They do not give us the tools to produce coherent descriptions of how these graphic forms function. Instead of trying to classify these little known graphic systems a priori, we need to begin with empirical analysis of mnemonic icono-graphic systems and then delve into the mental operations on which they rely. Let us begin with what superficially looks like a fairly straightforward case: Yekuana weaving. The Yekuana, who speak a Carib language, now live in the Upper Orinoco region between Venezuela and Brazil, though they probably originally came from Southern Amazonia. The work of a number of ethnographers, most notably Marc de Civrieux (1970), has given us a detailed knowledge of the myths of these Amazonian hunters and agriculturalists. They consist of a long cycle of stories detailing the different episodes of a bloody conflict that they believe orders the universe. On one side, there is Wanadi, a positive being associated with the sun and who presides over human culture (agricultural, fishing, hunting, and tool-making techniques), and on the other his twin brother, Odosha, who is the incarnation of evil, misfortune, illness, and death. For the Yekuana, this cosmic conflict is not simply a schematic representation of the origins of the universe. Though it dates back to the dawn of time, the brothers’ struggle is unending: it continues to affect people’s everyday lives, often with tragic consequences. This lack of harmony can be traced back to an original dissymmetry between good and evil and between humans and their potential enemies, be they animal or vegetable in nature. For the Yekuana, evil always wins out over good. This is why their ally, Wanadi, lives in a far-off region of the heavens and has little contact with the human world. His twin brother, Odosha, is an ever-present danger; he lives in close proximity surrounded by his demons, often represented as the invisible “masters” of animals and plants. This also explains why Odosha is represented by a whole series of malefic creatures: howler monkeys, serpents, jaguars, or cannibal strangers, whereas Wanadi, alone in his sky-realm, singlehandedly protects his people. The Yekuana claim that the “invisible masters,” who are seen as owners of animals and plants, perform each act of hunting, fishing, or agriculture in the teeth of opposition. This universe inhabited by potential threatening enemies is that of Odosha and his demons. Each time humans perform some act necessary to their survival, they must face retaliation, which they try to ward off with apotropaic chants, but which sometimes strikes nonetheless. As well as being thought of as dissymmetric, good and evil are also constantly transforming into one another: the Yekuana believe that each cultural good or technique they possess (weaponry, weaving, body ornamentation, or painting) is the result of a transformation of evil or of the beings who depend on evil. It follows that all living creatures are inherently ambiguous: everything that might be seen as useful or beneficent (including the woven baskets that people decorate as part of marriage preparations) contains a “transformed share” of evil. There is no space here to explore this mythical tradition at length, but it is worth raising one point, related to the accompanying iconographic tradition. When Marc de Civrieux published his first collection of Yekuana myths, he asked several of his informants to illustrate the stories of Wanadi and Odosha (see figure 1). Drawn in an uncertain hand, these crude representations of humans, huts and trees are perfect illustrations of prevailing ideas of Indian pictograms as, in Hoffman’s discussion of the Inuit, “rudimentary means to represent basic ideas” (Hoffmann 1897). Figure 1: Yekuana “pictograms” illustrating the myths collated by Marc de Civrieux (from de Civrieux 1970). We have Donald Guss (who carried out two major field studies among the Yekuana in 1976 and 1984) to thank for a double discovery concerning these myths. First, he was astonished to find that the Yekuana never actually “told” their myths. Contrary to what one might have expected from Civrieux’s collections of myths, “there were no neatly framed ‘story-telling’ events into which the foreign observer could easily slip, no circles of attentive youths breathing in the words of an elder as he regaled them with the deeds of their ancestors” (Guss 1989: 1). Though mythology was omnipresent in everyday conversation, its enunciation was always fragmentary, allusive, and episodic. His initial goal of recording and transcribing their creation epic, Watunna, in the Yekuana language, would have taken years. Yekuana society, he noted, had only two contexts in which these myths received a fuller expression: in the images woven into baskets and in songs, which are often exclusively composed of lists of names of spirits (ibid.: 36). The handing down or transmission of myths, which only really took place during weaving sessions, did not take the narrative form that Civrieux unwittingly gave the reader to expect, but involved iconography and the enunciation, in a specific context, of a list of proper nouns. In other words, the fact that Civrieux’s collection of myths took a narrative form is the result not of Yekuana practice, but of two processes quite alien to Yekuana tradition: the transformation of myths that had nothing of the organized corpus about them into a suite of chronological episodes stretching from the dawn of time until the present, and the disingenuous incorporation of supposedly “indigenous” pictograms for purposes of illustration. Guss realized that these twin processes had completely distorted the practical form taken by this mythical knowledge. Though Civrieux faithfully reproduced some of the myths’ content, he fundamentally traduced them by misrepresenting the way they were performed and transmitted. This realization has implications for our understanding of Yekuana iconography. Having spent much time learning local weaving techniques, Guss was in a position to confirm that the Yekuana did indeed have a form of graphic representation associated with their mythology. But this was not the pictographic representation of Civrieux’s collection. Individual imagination played no part in this graphic tradition. Instead, the designs, based on weaving techniques, were regular, abstract, and geometric—and there was only a limited number of recognized themes. Guss managed to identify roughly thirty of them. The crude human and animal figures, the tottering huts and crooked horizons found in Civrieux’s book had no place in Yekuana tradition. And these differences were not restricted to mere form. The iconography identified by Guss was strictly limited in scope: it did not represent mythical actions or particular episodes, but only the names of certain key characters. These woven patterns incorporated abstract, geometric, and vaguely iconic representations of a few central figures as the Toad, the Serpent, or the Bat (see figure 2a and figure 2b). Figure 2a and 2b: “Toad” and “Bat” in traditional Yekuana iconography (from Guss 1989). One of the most startling aspects of Guss’s observations was that Yekuana pictograms (just like the ritual chants sung to crops and the “masters/owners of prey”) only record proper names. Guss convincingly argues that the true mnemonical centre of the Yekuana mythic tradition lies in these lists of names (both toponyms and anthroponyms). The different successive mythical eras are indicated by the use of particular toponyms and stories are remembered “around” their central characters. It stands to reason, then, that the visual memory of myth amounts to a finite and well-identified “catalogue” of proper nouns. But how does this visual memory function? Analysis of the graphic schemata typical of the iconography indicate that rather than presenting particular mythical sequences in more-or-less “realistic” fashion (as Civrieux’s illustration seem to have done), Yekuana pictograms reveal a deeper level at which mythical knowledge is organized. As we have seen, the two central ideas of these myths are of a constitutive opposition between two sets of characters and the constant process of transformation that affects them. These metamorphoses in turn take two distinct forms. On the one hand, there is the idea of the manifold creature (such as Odosha), who “adopts the form” of a whole series of different beings. And on the other, this ceaseless process of metamorphosis (where good is necessarily the result of a transformation of evil) can lead to creatures being endowed with a constitutive ambiguity, which is both positive and negative. Yekuana iconography allows for the precise, economical rendering of these two organizing principles in visual terms. In fact, the visual terms that translate the names of spirits are all derivations of a single graphic pattern: a sort of inverted “T” representing Odosha (see figure 3a) Figure 3a and 3b: Odosha and Awidi, the serpent (from Guss 1989). Here it is clear that a few simple geometrical transformations allow all the other mythical characters to be derived from a single graphic pattern. In fact, these graphic representations underline the simultaneous multiplicity of these creatures (monkey, toad, or serpent—as in figure 3b—and so forth) and their deeper originary unity. The different characters are, then, constructed from one fundamental form and form part of a wider system that not only identifies particular characters, but also their possible relationships. These relationships between figures (of analogy, inclusion, or transformation) bespeak an organizational structure, proper to this system of representation, which is based on the principle of unity. Furthermore, the visual technique in question also contains a possibility of slippage between form and ground that allows for the representation of a specific being and one of its possible metamorphoses. This possibility of double-representation (or better, of representation in the form of a potentially dual being) applies to several mythical characters: monkeys, bats, and toads. The most striking example is, without doubt, the Woroto sakedi, which depending on whether one focuses on form or ground, shows either Odosha or one of his serpent avatars, Awidi. In fact, as Guss himself noted, the real subject of Yekuana iconography is not such or such a character, but the ongoing transformation of one into the other (Guss 1989: 106, 121–24). Working up from one elementary form of the pictogram (which is always retained, but always transformed), this apparently simple iconographic series manages to organize the visual space of representation in increasingly complex ways. Within this visual space, all beings (even Wanadi!) are the result of a transformation of Odosha. These forms are created by dint of additions, variations and relationships of inclusion, repetition, and inversion, which all testify to their fundamental unity. This technique translates the mythological universe into visual terms by compiling an iconic memory of key characters. Yekuana weaving shows how crucial iconography can be in so-called “oral” traditions. Between the two opposing poles of exclusively oral and written traditions, there is in fact a wide range of hybrid situations where neither extreme dominates. When one makes the effort to identify the means by which such knowledge is transmitted, we find (as in the Yekuana case) a specific set of mnemonic interactions between a certain type of image (structured according to one dominant visual schema and belonging to a finite and often quite limited set) and certain categories of words, especially organized series of proper nouns. In Western societies, we are inclined to assume that as words and images are everywhere present in society, any form of visual representation or proposition can serve as an aide-mémoire. Field studies, however, suggest that the emergence of an iconographic tradition necessarily implies the formation of a specific discursive field concerned with visual representation. In “oral” cultures, such as that of the Yekuana, not everything can be visually represented; instead, iconography tends to be applicable to one particular sphere (e.g., mythology). Within this context, several levels of relations are created between the linguistic domain (in particular, special toponymical and anthroponymical lexicons) and iconic representation. The analysis of several ethnographic cases has shown (Severi 1997, 2007) that three distinct operations underlie the emergence of such mnemonic “domains of representability” in the Amerindian context: the choice of which words to represent; the creation of a cognitively salient visual medium of representation; and the ordering of a particular space (which for the Yekuana takes the form of a series of transformations of a basic geometric shape giving rise to a range of visual terms). These operations are further linked to the linguistic forms taken by traditional knowledge—here, specific chants. Unlike pictures in “our” cultures, Yekuana pictograms, then, do not simply illustrate stories. They describe relations (of inversion, extension, inclusion, analogy, and so forth) between mythical beings in iconographic terms. Pictograms, qua graphic images, imply the existence of a coherent iconography and a particular form of traditional knowledge. They cannot be thought of as graphic elements “invented” by individuals (as many scholars have seen them), but must be understood as relationship markers, signaling the nature of the connection between a knowledge set (and the mental operations implied by the set) and a graphic form determined by a particular iconographic tradition. Pictography and memory: A model These initial reflections on an apparently simple case study suggest that the evolution of Amerindian pictography depends on the development of two parallel axes. On the one hand, the emergence of an increasingly precise and refined iconography (with its particular themes and graphic style) and, on the other, the precise taxonomical organization of knowledge that can be pictographically represented. I have discussed this in detail elsewhere (Severi 1997, 2007), but here it will suffice to consider the pictographic representation of proper nouns. The knowledge set that, among the Yekuana, takes the elementary form of a simple list of mythical characters (Jaguar, Toad, Serpent, or Monkey) can, in other cases, be more precisely organized along increasingly complex relational axes. This can be seen in Kuna pictography (one of the most highly developed Amerindian systems), which makes use of lists of proper nouns represented by pictograms and associated with fixed narrative phrases that are only ever pronounced orally. In the Demon Chant (Severi 2007), for instance, the spirit-villages that the shaman must visit are depicted in fixed graphic form and linked to a specific oral parallelistic formula. Let us consider an example. Here is how the text describes the underground villages (located at the fourth chthonian level in Kuna cosmology, which has eight), which the shaman’s auxiliary spirits are to visit in search of a sick man’s lost soul: Far away, there where the sun’s canoe rises, another village appeared The village of the monkeys appeared The village shows its monkeys Far away, there where the sun’s canoe rises, further still, another village appeared, the village of the threads (snakes) appeared The village that coils up like a thread appears The village that coils up like a thread reveals itself The village that coils up like a thread and the village of the monkeys unite like two canoes in the sea they crash into one another Seen from afar, from far far away, the two villages unite, they seem to touch Far away, there where the sun’s canoe rises, another village appeared The village of the skirt appeared The village shows its skirt Far away, there where the sun’s canoe rises, further still, another village appeared, the village of the creepers appeared The village of the creepers appeared The village shows its creepers. Let us compare text and picture board (see figure 4). Figure 4: A picture-writing from the Kuna Demon Chant (from Severi 2007). Pictography does not transcribe all the words that are recited, but the choice of the words transcribed is by no means left to chance. Following the alternation between repeated formulae and “lists of variations” which structures the parallelistic text, the pictograms refer only to certain words in the chants, and indeed to those very words which, at particular moments in the course of the chant play the role of variants in relation to a set formula. Transcription translates into images only the list of variations (the names of the villages: monkeys, threads, creepers, and so on). Throughout the Demon Chant, the verbal formula that provides the narrative structure of the text (“Far away, there where the sun’s canoe rises, further still, another village appeared”) is never translated into pictograms. The picture writing transcription of a Kuna chant consequently involves three separate elements: a graphic formula and a verbal formula, both constant and independent of one another, and a variation of the text translated into pictograms. Far from being completely superimposable on one another, the two graphic and oral codes, each provide specific information. In other passages of the same text, we find even more complicated lists of names, created by incorporating the names of spirits into village names. Thus, the third part of the Demon Chant, entitled “the path that leads to the spirit villages,” contains names of villages (e.g., Village of Dances, Village of Transformations, or Village of the Homecoming) inhabited by several different sorts of animal spirits: deer, wild boars, monkeys, birds, butterflies, and so on. As such, the text consists of a series of logically “nested” groups of names, each associated with a particular pictogram and fixed oral expression (see figure 5). Figure 5: Logical “nesting” of lists of proper nouns in the Kuna Demon Chant. In other cases, these nested series are replaced by alternating series or small clusters of proper nouns. So what looks like a straightforward series of pictograms when drawn on mnemonic boards, is in fact subject to relatively complex decoding processes (Severi 2007: 166–76). Elsewhere in the Americas (among the Plains Indians, for example, or in Nahuatl and Maya pictographic traditions), pictograms designating proper nouns and, just as with the Kuna, their accompanying formulae, are inserted into other forms of stable graphic schemata. One good example is the “pictorial autobiographies” of Plains Indians where pictograms detailing proper nouns are linked to images of the horseman heading off to hunt or do battle. In such cases, the proper noun pictogram (here, “Bow decorated with feathers”) is slotted into a predetermined verbal formula. Figure 6 (see below), then, could be transcribed as “The bare-faced horseman, whose name is ‘Bow decorated with feathers,’ launches an attack.”5 Figure 6: A page from the Dakota Bible (from Severi 2007). In short, underpinning the wide range of local variation between different Amerindian cultures, we find a series of logical principles determining the use of pictograms. Different narrative themes (the journey, a spirit dialogue, or a war or hunting party) are played out in an oral genre (song, chant, or story) by means of parallelistic formulae with a fixed word order. This order transforms the narrative sequence into an alternation between fixed repetitive formulae and suites of variations, often in the form of lists of proper nouns. In the context of this mnemonically organized ensemble of words, the pictogram’s role is to give mnemonic salience to the variations. In this way, via the iconographic transcription of variation, the pictogram makes it possible efficiently to memorize long, elaborate texts. In other words, social memory in many Amerindian societies is based neither on a process analogous to alphabetic writing nor on some vaguely defined “oral” tradition. Instead, it depends on graphic mnemonic devices whose primary role is to describe the relationship between a relatively stable iconographic set and a rigorously structured use of ritual language. Amerindian pictography is not then some abortive forerunner of alphabetic writing, but a supple and sophisticated mnemonic device in its own right, with a shared, coherent graphic style and a regular relationship to memorized texts. It is worth stressing that from a graphic point of view, all pictographic iconography in Native America is: Conventional. Each “author” draws on a conventional and recognizable repertoire of graphic themes. Closed. Within the discursive space described by the pictograms, it is only possible to refer to certain predefined situations and symbols. Selective. The drawers of pictograms use conventional shorthands to evoke complex images. The use of these graphic schemata means that the drawings “select” a limited number of the real images’ manifold traits. Redundant. The pictograms always contain more information than linguistic descriptions of the particular scene or episode described. Sequential. These pictographic systems range in complexity from straightforward examples where the images follow only one form of geometric transformation to cases where they obey to a specific, rigorous linear order—boustrophedon among the Kuna or spirals among the Ojibwa. Drawing on the examples discussed above, we can outline a preliminary set of mental operations involved in the use of pictograms. First, it is clear that none of these memorization techniques can be described as “arbitrary” (Urton) or “based only on individual memory” (Cummins). In America, as elsewhere,6 the art of memory is based on the ordering of shared knowledge (referred to here as a tradition) and on a salience-effect that allows one to distinguish between individual terms within a sequence. Together, these two operations produce mnemonic relations. Unlike semiotic relations used in writing, mnemonic relations do not establish a connection between a sign and its real world referent. Instead, they rely on a set of visual inferences, based on the decoding of complex images, which establish a relationship between an imagistic memory and a word memory. The effectiveness of memorization techniques in iconographic traditions is not the result of an attempt to imitate the referential path taken by writing (i.e., the representation of the sounds of the language by which written signs designate words and thereby objects), but of the relationship they establish between different levels of mnemonic elaboration. From this, we can conclude that all graphic memorization techniques depend on the modular organization of the types of knowledge they represent. One clear example of this is the insertion of graphic representations of proper nouns into increasingly complex linguistic structures (proper noun + narrative sequence, based on inclusion or alternation, etcetera). But let us push the analysis a little further. These first two mental operations (of ordering and salience) played out in the iconographic process imply two more abstract principles, examination of which will allow us to rethink the relationship between pictograms and written signs. It is useful to draw a logical contrast between those traits that define a writing system and those that define a mnemotechnic, whatever its degree of complexity. Let us take two logical properties characteristic of all symbolic sets: power and expressivity. The logical power of a system can be defined as its capacity to attribute predicates, however simple they may be, to a wide range of objects, whereas expressivity allows a system to describe a limited range of objects using a wide range of predicates. Thus, the highly detailed description of a person given by a single image (e.g., a portrait) is extremely expressive, but lacking in power. In contrast, the utterance “all men are mortal” is extremely powerful, but not very expressive. Working our way up from these premises, we can see that in any writing system, such as an alphabet, that transcribes the sounds of a language, the power and expressivity of the language are equal to those of writing. Arts of memory, on the other hand, are systems of symbols whose power and expressivity is never equal to those of language, even though they leave scarcely any room for individual choice and variation. The structure of a mnemotechnic, qua mental artifact, is made up of a relationship between operations that attribute salience (which give the system its expressivity) and forms of ordering (which give the system its logical power). The primary function of these two principles is a mental one: the sequential ordering of images (and their relations) has an obvious mnemonic function. Salience, meanwhile, plays a crucial role in evoking and bringing things to mind. In sum, the arts of memory can be defined in terms of three distinct relationships: mnemonic (encoding/evocation), iconographic (ordering/salience), and logical (power/expressivity). It follows that if we wish to analyze an iconographic tradition linked to the use of memory, we must begin by looking at the relationship it establishes between encoding and evocation, ordering and salience, and power and expressivity. Seen from this angle, the Yekuana basket weaving discussed above can be described as a mnemonic iconography with a relatively limited graphic range, weakly organized around the derivation of all its themes (Monkey, Toad, Anaconda, and so forth) from one basic theme (Odosha). This makes the system relatively unexpressive and gives it a limited capacity for ordering (see figure 7). Figure 7: Ordering and salience in Yekuana pictography The model we are proposing is squarely focused on mental operations and the relationship between iconography and language. There is then no point in trying to compare different arts of memory in terms of their appearance or the tools, materials and techniques used to create and bear them. We are only interested in the relationship between salience and ordering, on the one hand, and power and expressivity, on the other. One final point worth noting concerns the evolution of the arts of memory. The negative vision of pictographic traditions shared by many historians of writing is based on the idea that pictograms are fundamentally sterile—unable to develop because they are little more than abortive, individual attempts to transmit information. For them, writing did not develop out of pictography, but bypassed it completely, following a quite different track: the representation of the sounds of a language. Much research suggests, however, that American pictograms developed in coherent and autonomous ways for several centuries. If we look at the development and evolution of the arts of memory in the longue durée, it is clear that they were always modular and multilinear—i.e., the development or extension of one aspect of the arts of memory did not imply the parallel development of another. One local tradition might reach a high degree of complexity in the organization and ordering of memorizable knowledge without developing a refined iconography.7 Elsewhere, we might find an extremely codified and visually sophisticated iconography with a relatively limited logical power. All Amerindian pictographic traditions are actually characterized by an emphasis on salience rather than power. If we briefly turn our attention to the art of the Northwest Coast of North America, we will find an example of this alternative relationship between salience and ordering. Eponymous animals: Northwest Coast visual culture The combined efforts of Boas and Lévi-Strauss turned the Northwest Coast into one of the loci classici of anthropological research. This Amerindian “oecumene” (Lévi-Strauss 1975), which brought several distinct cultures together in one homogenous ensemble, has been studied for its mythology, social structure, spectacular rituals of exchange, and its cyclical vision of time, with a radical separation between summer and winter, each characterized by a distinct conception of social existence and the relationship to nature. There is, I think, no need to wax lyrical about the artistic traditions of these cultures. Eulogized by the Surrealists, today it features in all major museums. Art historians and anthropologists have studied it at length, focusing on its different styles, mythical references, artists and aesthetics foundations. Studies of its mnemonic role have been less forthcoming. And yet a coastal totem pole is not merely an instantiation of a particular aesthetic idea. It was also intended to preserve the memory of a name or series of names. Barbeau’s (1950) formidable study of totem poles, as well as numerous other works (Inverarity 1950; Smyly and Smyly 1973; Garfield and Wingert 1950), leaves no room for doubt: whether a pole is linked to the memory of a person, a house, a clan, or a moiety, its function is the same—it embodies a series of names of mythical characters (Crow, Whale, Eagle, Bear…), the list of which describes the name of a social group. Take the example of a Haida totem-pole from the village of Skedans (see figure 8, from Smyly and Smyly 1973). Figure 8: The Haida Black Whale House totem-pole The totem pole is a sort of “pictographic column,” a vertical series of images of “crests” (heraldic emblems), most commonly in the form of animals. This series of crests not only represents the name of a social group (here, Black-Whale House, whose complex name is read from bottom to top as “Black Whale—Crow—Rainbow—Eagle”), but also proclaims ownership (or other forms of control) of particular lands, hunting and fishing territories, or associated privileges. Furthermore, in this tradition, the images always correspond to extremely detailed narrative cycles describing the group’s history: from its origin myths to contemporary legends, if such exist. So a totem pole may contain the crest of particularly lucky or respected clan chief or even, in one case described by Barbau (1950), the bizarre portrait of a group of eighteenth century Russian orthodox missionaries. On the Northwest Coast, the totem pole is a multi-mnemonic object. It may simply depict the image or symbol of a person buried at the funerary site at which it stands. Or it may proclaim rights, delimit lands, describe collective origins or evoke key events past and present. In each case, this range of functions is realized via representations (in the form of crests) of lists of names. As we saw in our Amazonian example, the representation of names-as-forms was extremely common in Amerindian pictography. Here again, the representation makes use of a sequential ordering and visual salience, but the ways in which this salience is produced are vastly more complex. By virtue of its specific shape, the totem pole offers an original visual solution to this problem. It has often been noted that Northwest Coast iconography is based on the creation of what we might call an alphabet of forms, where each visual theme is meaningful and corresponds to a particular lexeme. This can give rise to a series of forms whereby the animal or human is broken down into its constituent parts: wing, fin, eye, paw, and tail (see figure 9). Figure 9: Some examples of the Northwest coast “form alphabet” (from Holm 1965). An eponymous animal can be metonymically represented by one or more of its parts. A good example of this graphic convention is the Haïda representation of the sea-monster Sisiutl, whose reptilian body gives way to images of his three heads (see figure 10). Figure 10: Representation of the sea monster Sisiutl (Royal British Columbia Museum, 129-09). As Bill Holm has shown, this process by which entities and their traits (wholes and parts) are abstractly recomposed could lead to “representative” or “distributed” forms of the iconic traits used to depict mythical creatures (Hold 1965) (see figure 11). In fact, the “realist” or relatively abstract nature of these representations is less important, within this tradition, than the organization of space into a plane with a right-left opposition across a central axis. Iconic traits (or the forms of the visual alphabet) are then arranged in accordance with this predetermined spatial structure. The careful reader will have recognized in this description the concepts of the form-line (developed and illustrated by Bill Holm in his work) and split-representation (Holm 1983; Holm and Reid 1975. Cf. also Vastokas 1978: 243–259). It is worth stressing that this is a dynamic aesthetic. Far from reducing the themes it represents to fragmentary or static representations, Northwest Coast iconography uses them to represent metamorphoses. The different iconic traits that signal the simultaneously fragmentary and emblematic presence of an animal can easily be combined, giving rise to a transformative process that constantly alters their outward appearance. This can be observed in the numerous depictions of mythical figures transforming themselves into a single being, be it some fantastic sea monster, a ritual dancer, or even a shaman possessed by animal spirits. I have explored the visual and mnemonic characteristics of these chimaeric representations of metamorphosis elsewhere (Severi 1991) and this is not the place to dig over old ground. Suffice it to say that the anthropomorphism typical of Northwest Coast art probably owes its remarkable evocative power to a formal characteristic of the sequences of transformations it depicts. Figure 11: Representative Space and Distributive Space (from Holm 1965). In coastal masks, paintings and sculptures, mythical creatures (Woodpecker, Eagle, Crow, etcetera) are always represented as a specific combination of human and animal. It follows that the series of metamorphoses described by this iconographic tradition are never composed of binary terms (animal 1 / animal 2) but always contain three elements (animal [in human form 1] / animal [in human form 2]). Accordingly, the transformation of one animal into another always runs parallel to a latent anthropomorphism, which simultaneously orients its representational space and endows it with a graphic means of indicating salience. The human element, like a kind of musical ostinato repeating the same notes to accompany the changing melody, is always present in the background—a hidden presence in the movement from one animal to another. This is a purely visual and strikingly singular way of signaling the logical unity of the transformative process. Its singularity will become clear if we compare it to the Hopi solution to the same conundrum of how to represent complexity. Hopi ceramics, for instance, make use of simple, emblematic forms that also refer to name-lexemes (Cloud, Lightning, Serpent, etcetera), which are combined to represent, say, a mythical bird (see figure 12). Figure 12: A Hopi chimaera (Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology 43-39-10/25808). Here too, the image’s salience is reinforced, allowing it to bring together different meanings whilst simultaneously abetting the mental reconstruction of beings which are only present in fragmentary from. This visual process could perhaps be compared to a puzzle or a mosaic composed of different elements, which only produce an image once they have been assembled. But in the Hopi case, there is no latent anthropomorphism: the process is not driven by stressing the human element within the linear sequence of visual themes that transform into one another. Instead, it relies on the appeal to one naturally salient form (here, the Bird), which then functions as an ordering principle to which different visual themes can be attached. This use of a salient to establish a particular kind of order produces what we might call a complex salience, quite different from the case of the Northwest Coast art. To summarize, we have identified three graphic means of creating chimaeras and thus of reinforcing the salience of an image-name: these complex images can either be depicted in an oriented, representative, or distributive space, or alternatively they can occupy a condensed space, which can be linear (as with the latent anthropomorphism of coastal Totem-poles) or inclusive (as with Hopi ceramics, which incorporate heterogeneous elementary forms into one paradigmatic form, producing complex salience). In Northwest Coast art one can also identify yet another form of salience. Specific substances (shells, pelts, or human and animal hairs) are incorporated into representations to reinforce the visual impact of masks and totem poles. In this way, the purely visual salience produced by the appeal to a set repertory of forms is buttressed by an indexical form of salience. It is worth stressing, however, that these complex trajectories of iconographic salience are everywhere paralleled by a form of logical power, which is strictly limited to the transmission of names. This necessarily implies a sequential ordering of these different forms of knowledge; and indeed, Totem poles are also comprised of organized series. But this order does not constitute a principle likely to engender other forms of knowledge. It simply records the different circumstances that marked a particular social group (individual, clan, or moiety) over a given stretch of historical or mythical time. In short, within this tradition (where the invention of images has given rise to a form of visual salience of a rare complexity) the remembering of names is either circumstantial or passive. The memory it produces is never transformed into an organizational principle that can be applied to other domains of social life. Though it has given rise to an elaborate from of salience, the system is limited and passive when it comes to organizing the knowledge it is supposed to commit to memory. If we adopt the analytical vocabulary outlined above, we might describe the Northwest Coast iconography as a system that has achieved a remarkable degree of visual salience paralleled by a minimal relationship with the process of ordering (see above, figure 13). Figure 13: Development of salience in Northwest Coast iconography. Taken as a whole, these apparently unrelated examples suggest that the development of Amerindian arts of memory is indeed modular and multilinear and has proceeded along the two lines discussed above: the use of taxonomic thought and the creation of a visual form of salience. Each of these levels has its own mnemonic function and endows the mnemonic tradition with a particular form of expressivity and logical power. Pictograms and khipus What though of Andean khipus? Is there, in fact, a place within this comparative schema for a technique so often compared to writing and so often described as something more than “mere arts of memory” (Urton 1998)? Can we apply the three types of relationships discussed above (mnemonic, iconographic, and logical) to a technique apparently limited to numerical calculation? I suggest that we can, but not unless we provide a convincing account of the complex process of ordering which characterizes this system. It is clear that the development of this technique has generated a small number of organizational principles applicable to a wide range of different domains. This coherent development of the taxonomic principle has led to the creation of a system endowed with a high degree of logical power. By contrast, visual salience is limited to marking, albeit with a certain scope for variation, a point (the knot) within a linear sequence (the cord). In this context, the ordering of representable knowledge has probably evolved towards a system that distinguished between an idea of pure quantity (based on a decimal system and applicable to a wide range of categories: people, objects, units of time or space, etcetera) and the equally numerical concept of the ordinal series. This latter category is now divided into numerical series and linguistic series, and the linguistic series are further divided into toponyms and anthroponyms. The numerical series, in contrast, allows for the development of series of series and their organization along decimal lines (see figure 14). Figure 14: Development of order in Andean khipus. Seen from this perspective, Andean khipus can be described as an art of memory possessed of a rudimentary form of visual salience and an extremely complex ordering of representable knowledge. In other words, the Andean system (seen from the point of view of mnemonic, iconographic and logical relations) appears to have followed the opposite path to that taken on the Northwest Coast—and indeed in Native American pictographic systems more generally. Our analysis focuses exclusively on those groups of relations that rely on a certain number of logical elements and mental operations. What matters are the system’s logical implications and not its visual manifestations. As we saw in the Kuna case, picto-graphic traditions may contain implicit numerical operations, notably ordinal ones (series or series of series). Andean memorization techniques started with a standard task, for instance the transcription of series of proper nouns, and then began to distinguish between numbers and names, on the one hand, and between cardinals and ordinals on the other. This then allows for a further distinction between qualitative categories (meant to be named) and series of numbers produced using a decimal base. Gary Urton and Primitivo Nina Llanos (1997: 173–208) have convincingly demonstrated that the Andean decimal system is the result of the interaction between two organizing principles related to Andean mathematical thought: on the one hand, an organizational system based on the principle of groups of five (modeled on the five fingers of the hand) and, on the other, the systematic union of series of opposing terms (or moieties) that underpin Andean dualism and give rise to what they call an “arithmetic of rectification.” This does not imply that khipus are “radically different” from pictograms: many of these memorization techniques rely on the central role played by the act of enumeration. Without the creation of relatively rigorous linear series, where each element has a set place within an ordinal series, Amerindian pictography would be quite impossible (whether it concerned shamanic chants, calendars, or pictorial autobiographies). The narrative form taken by these pictographic traditions should not blind us to the fact that all pictograms rely on certain arithmetic or geometrical relationships. Examples of this range from the relations of inclusion, inversion, or scale-shift (geometric commutation) present in Yekuana weaving to the precisely calibrated, symmetrical, and geometrically oriented spaces of Northwest Coast art. What marks out khipus is not then the mere existence of enumeration or the mathematical expression of an equilibrium, but the emphasis placed on the “power” conferred upon mathematical calculation and its application to an increasing number of possible objects. This is testimony to the complex and elegant elaboration of mathematical thought within the mnemotechnic system embodied by khipus. In this sense, Andean khipus (which are extremely powerful, but devoid of expressive power) and Amerindian pictograms (which are very expressive, but can only represent a limited range of knowledge) constitute opposite logical poles of the vast spectrum of Amerindian arts of memory. We should not, however, be tempted into constructing overly rigid sets of oppositions. A tradition largely based on the ordering of knowledge will always retain some latent salience and, contrariwise, a tradition that stresses salience can still develop implicit numerical or geometrical operations, even quite complex ones. Armed with these new hypotheses, we can now return to the intellectual battle regarding the logical nature of Andean khipus. Seen from a purely numerical perspective, the khipus record two quite distinct types of knowledge: lists of numbers and narratives. Roughly a third of extant khipus (some six hundred) display no mathematical regularity. Precisely how this numerically based system was used to memorize narratives remains unclear and has provoked much debate. The work of the Polish historian Jan Szeminski, once placed in the wider context of the unitary system outlined above, may offer a solution to the problem. Szeminski has recently published an analysis of a long neglected text (“Tome II” of Fernando de Montesinos’ Ophir de España, which reveals certain aspects of the Andean oral tradition (Szeminski 2006). Szeminski quite brilliantly identifies a series of key elements that allow us to rethink the wider chronology of the region in the Inca and, indeed, pre-Inca period. These are crucial discoveries. His textual archaeology (one might even say codicology) evaluates and decrypts, layer by layer, the rich ensemble of indigenous exegeses contained within Montesinos’ text, which allow him to reconstruct a series of “narrative facts.” These shed new light on whole swathes of Andean history. But Szeminski’s work is also of vital interest to anthropologists, because the author almost unwittingly illuminates certain formal aspects of the oral tradition whose last vestiges are contained in Montesinos’ text. The author progressively identifies the indigenous parses and commentary that accompany these “narrative facts,” discovering in the process an evidently mnemonically oriented means of organizing traditional knowledge. This process of organization, evident in the “list of One Hundred Kings” that features in Montesinos’ book, consists in the creation of a list of names of Kings, each of which is progressively assigned a corresponding eponym. For instance, we come across Amawte (“the scholar or wiseman”) or his successor, “the Great Ploughman” (Szeminski op. cit.: 312), etcetera. To this list of names and eponyms is then attached a further list of parses or commentaries. The brief indigenous texts that feature in Montesinos’ book (and which Szeminski dubs “scholarly amplifications”) are good examples of these. In short, behind Szeminski’s “formalist” reading of the text, we discover a tradition comprised of elements organized in typically Amerindian parallelistic fashion whereby series of lists of names are arranged in a specific order and serve as the backbone of an oral narrative. If we break with the futile distinction between iconography and orality in the Andean tradition and incorporate the use of knotted cords into Szeminski’s definition, then we can use it to elucidate the way in which these khipus might have encoded (and so helped reproduce, in a specific calendrical sequence) certain texts. We must begin, however, by abandoning the term “narrative,” used to describe these mnemonically oriented lists of names. Narrative was, without doubt, just one of several different means of organizing knowledge in the Andean tradition. When the narrative mode was present, it was directed by a relatively systematic means of organizing knowledge, more reliant on the association and clustering of lists of names (used as aides-mémoire than on a story-like structure. Indeed, if, as elsewhere in the Americas, Andean mnemonic codification was based on the association of three distinct classes of elements (proper nouns [some of which were independently meaningful]; a title or eponym [“the scholar,” “the great ploughman,” etcetera]; and a parse or commentary), then we could imagine a corresponding form of graphic representation (perhaps capable of developing further degrees of complexity) composed of three differently colored cords, recording proper nouns, eponyms, and parses (or even a particular phenomenon that called them to mind: famine, revolt, invasion, etcetera). Approached from this angle, Szeminski’s work allows us to recreate the form or (as Jolles [1991] has said, the “state of organization of matter”) of memorizable knowledge in the Andean system. This in turn might help us to understand the manner in which sequences of knots and cords might annotate “texts.” We can then formulate the hypothesis that the Andean art of memory (which also made use of pictographic representations) was characterized not by the existence of two radically different systems (pictographic and numeric), but by the flexible use of one unified system, which could stress either expressivity or power. Within this variable system, where cords were normally used to record large, sets of numbers (power), expressivity could be generated by linking parses to lists of proper nouns. Certain latent aspects of the khipu system could be used to simulate the logical properties of pictographic mnemonics. Seen from this perspective, khipu knotted strings are the very illustration of a logical possibility ruled out by most specialists: that of a complex art of memory, wherein ordered sequences are both linked to oral parses or commentaries mentally organized along strictly defined lines, and necessarily associated with an iconic marker. This iconic marker might (as in the “giant khipu” analyzed by Frank Salomon)8 take the form of an object fixed inside a fold or a knot, or might can be a basic geometrical form (as with the tocapu studied by Cummins 1994), or it might simply be a “distinctively colored” cord. This reconstruction (which fits with Urton’s and Pàrssinen’s theories regarding other documents) allows us to identify a characteristic element of pictography within the khipu system—to wit, the fact that memorization (or better, the creation of a mnemonic relation) necessarily implies the modular organization of the knowledge it represents. The parallelism typical of both systems is a clear example of such modular organization. In this way, the underlying unity of khipus and Amerindian pictography becomes visible: khipus offer an original and precise means of associating their constitutive logical elements: the list of names; an imagistic variation linked to an oral commentary; and also the constitutive dualisms that underpin many forms of Amerindian arts of memory (order and salience; expressivity and power; encoding and evocation). Andean khipus then possess all the key elements of Amerindian arts of memory. It is, of course, a task for the specialists to decide how to interpret those khipus whose meaning still escapes us, the texts that accompany them some of which we now have access to, thanks to the work of Parssinen and Kiviharju (2004), and the sundry graphic designs, pictograms, keros, and tocapu that must, in all likelihood, have been associated with them. This article has simply endeavored to chart a possible course between the twin rocks of “social” writing and “individual and arbitrary” mnemonic devices that bedeviled the debate on Andean khipus, to open up a third way, which is founded on the hypothesis that they share the same logical structure as Amerindian pictography and rely on the same mental operations. Seen from this angle, khipus are neither a form of writing, nor mere mnemonic devices, but (by virtue of both their common traits and significant differences) legitimate members of the wider conceptual universe of Amerindian arts of memory. This universe is structured by a particular set of mental operations, which orient and direct a form of thought that finds its expression both in images and in the mental space it occupies. In the Americas as elsewhere, the study of processes of memorization is, by its very nature, a study of thought in action. * In conclusion, we can say that pictograms (and perhaps also khipus) are both iconographic and oral, and the function of images in the memorization process is clearly identifiable: the images are not mere illustrations of words. To the contrary, the image plays a central role in the construction of mnemonic relations between certain visual themes and particular words, which in turn help organize narratives. We might say that pictograms (and perhaps khipus) belong to a realm of traditional, socialized and clearly identified practices and which are, in fact, used as mental artifacts. They are, then, part and parcel of a mental universe that also encompasses a range of practices developed and deployed in culturally distinct ways within the Western world. These analyses also open up two new perspectives concerning the relationship between iconography, orality and mathematical calculations. We have already discussed the mathematical organization of ordered series present in both pictographic and khipu systems. A certain number of mental operations, linked to the creation of numerical, cardinal and ordinal series, seem to play a key role in all pictographic traditions making use of the idea of sequential order. But we have not, as yet, sought to identify the different mnemonic functions at work within these systems that are conventionally described, perhaps a little too hastily, as “ethno-mathematical.” What is the place of mnemonic processes within mathematical calculations? To what extent are these calculations tied up with graphic notations and what is the role played by mental representations? This article has proposed a critique of the formal aspects of the concept of oral traditions, as well as its neglecting of the role played by images. But the concept’s content is also problematic. Oral traditions have, without doubt, been too hastily confined to the narrative mode. Could we instead imagine a form of orality and iconography linked to mathematical calculation, classification, or categorization? These analyses also provoke a further question, which in turn opens up new avenues of inquiry. This concerns the relationship between mnemotechnic practices (which we have, thus far, firmly linked to the practice of an oral tradition and the role of mnemonic images) and those practices linked to alphabetic writing. By way of conclusion, then, I would like to offer up few ideas regarding the notion of writing and its multiple links to pictography. A long intellectual tradition has accustomed us to thinking of these two systems as mutually exclusive. In this perspective, pictography only exists where true writing has not, or not yet, been invented. One last Amerindian example will suffice to show that we are, once again, in the presence of a false opposition. We have already discussed one of the major themes of the Plains Indian pictographic tradition: pictorial autobiography. In this tradition, skilful warriors or hunters used to paint a record of their exploits, often on a buffalo-skin coat (Ewers 1979). From a technical point of view, this pictographic tradition comprised two main elements: a repetitive schema, representing the figure of a horseman in an oriented space, and an iconic variation signifying the horseman’s name and which was always placed next to the warrior’s face. From the 1870s onwards, when Euro-Americans established their dominion over the Great Plains, this pictographic tradition gradually began to move towards a situation where alphabetic writing was not only taught, but also imposed on the Indians, for obvious economic, commercial, and administrative reasons. The Indians rapidly learnt to transcribe in writing all kinds of information, notably for the cashbooks and ledgers of the American army. This period always witnessed the emergence of a specifically Indian usage of these cashbooks. They began to draw their pictorial autobiographies in them. Many of these ledgers have found a place in the collections of American museums. Careful analysis of them shows the pictographic record dividing in two: pictograms as such disappear, while the repetitive graphic schemata gradually move towards a graphic style that art historians identify as the starting point for contemporary Native American art, with its typical themes and authors. What matters for us, though, is that for a significant period of time (at least fifty years), pictograms and writing coexisted. In many ledgers, drawings and alphabetic transcriptions of words alternate or sit side by side. And when the authors of these hybrid documents wrote out their names in letters, they always placed them alongside the warrior’s face, in the space traditionally occupied by a pictogram. In other words, the linguistic sign was deployed in a mental space still oriented by the operations (ordering and salience) implied by the use of pictography. In this case, it is precisely not (as has so often been claimed) Amerindian pictography that tries, and fails, to imitate Euro-American writing. Rather, it is writing that has learned to speak the mental language (“common to all nations,” as Vico put it) of Amerindian arts of memory, whose logical universe this article has endeavored to outline. It is obvious that there remains a great deal of work to be done teasing out and resolving these exchanges between mnemonic iconography and linguistic signs, as well as exploring oral and iconographic traditions and their links to mathematical calculations and numerical series. Let me just say that the theoretical and methodological perspective proper to the anthropology of memory (understood as the study of certain techniques of thought) in no way excludes the parallel study of the trajectories taken by alphabetic writing when it is introduced into predominantly “oral” cultures. Such a study would clear a path for the analysis of the uses of writing within “oral” traditions and, therefore, within a mental space characterized by the use of “mental artifacts” proper to the non-Western arts of memory. This might, at long last, be a means of freeing ourselves (through empirical research) from the anthropological myth of an original Ur-language, composed of emblems and symbolic images, which Vico, as late as 1744, still saw as the conceptual underpinning “of all hieroglyphics.” References Antoine, Jean-Philippe. 1993. “Memoire, lieux et invention spatiale dans la peinture italienne des xiiie etxive siècles.” Annales E.S.C. 6: 1447–69. Ascher, Marcia, and Robert Ascher. 1981. Code of the quipu: A study in media, mathematics and culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Assmann, Jan, and Aleida Assmann, eds. 2003. Hieroglyphen-AArchäologie der Litterarische Kommunikation VIII, Paderborn: Fink Verlag. Barbau, Marius. 1950. Totem poles. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada. Berlin, Isaiah. 1976. Vico and Herder: Two studies in the history of ideas. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1990. “Giambattista Vico and cultural history.” In The crooked timber of humanity, 49–69. 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A Graphic Tradition practised by a people of Central Africa.” Acta Ethnologica et Linguistica, Series Africana 18: 1–327. Inverarity, Robert B. 1950. Art of the Northwest Coast Indians. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1975. La voie des masques. Paris: Plon. Mallery, Garrick. (1898) 1972. Picture writings of the American Indians. New York: Dover Publications. Mauelshagen, Franz. 2003. “Entzauberung vor der Entzifferung: Conrad Gessner und die zoologische Rezeption des “Hieroglyphica” Horapollons im 16 Jarrhundert.” In Hieroglyphen-Archäologie der Litterarische Kommunikation VIII, edited by Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, 221–43. Paderborn: Fink Verlag. Murra, John V. 1991. “‘Nos hazen mucha ventaja’: The early European perception of Andean achievement.” In Transatlantic encounters: European and Andean in the sixteenth century, edited by Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno, 73–89. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nooter Roberts, M., and Allen F. Roberts. 1997. Memory: Luba art and the making of history. New York: Prestel-The Museum of African Art. Pärssinen, Martti and Jukka Kiviharju. 2004. Textos Andinos. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Quilter, Jeffrey, and Gary Urton, eds. 2002. Narrative threads: Accounting and recounting in Andean khipu. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rossi, Paolo. 1960. Clavis Universalis: Arti mnemoniche e logica combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———. 1979. Segni del tempo: Storia della terra e storia delle nazioni da Hooke a Vico. Milano: Feltrinelli. [Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, The dark abyss of time, The University of Chicago Press, 1987]. Salomon, Frank. 2001. “How an Andean ‘writing without words’ works.” Current Anthropology 42 (1): 1–27. ———. 2002. “Patrimonial khipus in a modern Peruvian village: An introduction to the Quipocamayos of Tupicocha, Huarochiri.” In Narrative threads: Accounting and recounting in Andean khipu, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2006. Los Quipocamayos: El antiguo arte del khipu en una comunidad campesina moderna. Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos / Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Severi, Carlo. 1991. “Una stanza vuota: Antropologia della forma onirica.” In Il sogno rivela la natura delle cose, 226–34. Milano: Mazzotta. ———. 1997. “The kuna picture-writing: A study in Iconography and Memory.” In The art of being Kuna, Layers of meaning among the Kuna of Panama: Catalogue de l’Exposition, edited by Marilyn Salvador, 245–73. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of the University of California at Los Angeles. ———. 2007. Le principe de la chimère: Une anthropologie de la mémoire. Paris: Rue d’Ulm Editons / Musée du quai Branly.. Silverman, Eric. 1993. Tambunum: New perspectives on Eastern Iatmul (Sepik River, Papua New Guinea) kinship, marriage, and society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smyly, John, and Carolyn Smyly. (1973) 1975. The totem poles of Skedans. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Szeminski, Jan. 2006. “La tradition orale comme source historique: Le Livre II du Ophir de España de Fernando de Montesinos.” Annales HSS 61 (2): 299–338. Urton, Gary, and Primitivo, Nina Llanos. 1997. The social life of numbers: A Quechua ontology of numbers and philosophy of arithmetic. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1998. “From knots to narratives: Reconstructing the art of historical record keeping in the Andes from Spanish transcriptions of Inka khipus.” Ethnohistory 45 (3): 409–38. Urton, Gary. 2003. Signs of the Inka khipu: Binary coding in the Andean knotted-string records. Austin: University of Texas Press. Vastokas, Joan M. 1978. “Cognitive aspects of Northwest Coast art.” In Art in society: Studies in style, culture, and aesthetics, edited by Michael Greenhalgh and Vincent Megaw, 243–59. London: Duckworth. Vico, Giambattista. (1744) 1990. Opere. Milano: Mondadori. Wassmann, Jürg. 1988. Der Gesang an das Krokodil: die rituellen Gesänge des Dorfes Kandingei an Land und Meer, Pflanzen und Tiere (Mittelsepik, Papua New Guinea). Bâle: Ethnologisches Seminar der Universität-Museum für Völkerkunde-Wepf. ———. 1991. The song to the flying fox: The public and esoteric knowledge of the important men of Kandingei about totemic songs, names, and knotted cords (Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea). Cultural Studies Division, National Research Institute. Yates, Frances. 1966. The art of memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Les arts de la mémoire : anthropologie comparative d’un artefact mental Résumé : Pour linguistes, anthropologues et archéologues, l’image emblématique précède, depuis toujours et partout, l’apparition du signe. Ce mythe d’une langue figurée, composée d’icônes, qui constitue la figure adverse de l’écriture, a profondément influencé la tradition occidentale. Dans cet article, on essaiera de montrer que nous ne pourrons comprendre la nature logique des mnémotechnies amérindiennes (pictographies, khipus qu’en passant de l’interrogation, inévitablement ethnocentrique, que soulève leur comparaison avec l’écriture, à un tout autre ordre de questions, qui relèvent de l’anthropologie comparative. Par conséquent, nous ne chercherons pas à savoir si les techniques amérindiennes de mémorisation sont de « véritables » écritures, ou seulement des mnémotechnies. Nous nous demanderons plutôt si ces symbolismes, en tant qu’ensembles graphiques organisés à usage mnémonique, possèdent des traits formels en commun et s’ils impliquent des opérations mentales comparables. Nous chercherons ainsi à établir si ces systèmes appartiennent à un même univers conceptuel, à une langue mentale—-pour reprendre une idée de Giambattista Vico—qui caractériserait les arts amérindiens de la mémoire. Si l’on suit cette perspective, les techniques de la mémoire cessent de nous sembler hybrides ou imprécises, et que nous pourrons mieux en comprendre la nature et les fonctions, en tant qu’artefacts mentaux. Carlo Severi is Professor (Directeur d’études) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Director of Research (Directeur de recherche) at CNRS. A member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale of the Collège de France since 1985, he has been a Getty Scholar at the Getty Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles (1994–95) and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2002–2003). In 2012, he has been elected to a Visiting Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of La memoria rituale (La Nuova Italia, 1993), Naven or the other self (with Michael Houseman, CNRS Éditions 1994; English transl. Brill, 1998), and Le principe de la chimère (Rue d’Ulm-Musée du Quai Branly, 2007). Publisher’s note: We are very grateful to Éditions de l’EHESS for giving us the permission to publish this translation, revised and updated by the author, of Carlo Severi, 2009, “L’univers des arts de la mémoire: Anthropologie d’un artefact mental.” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 64 (2): 463–497. ___________________ 2. On Vico and the origins of anthropological thought, see also Berlin (1976) and especially (1990). 3. Gelb (1973: 282) defines semasiography as a “fore-runner of writing…which allows for communication by virtue of meaningful signs that are, however, not necessarily linguistic in nature.” 4. An epistemic classifier (or “evidential”) is a suffix indicating the nature of the information conveyed in a proposition. For instance, an evidential might indicate whether the information was generated by direct experience or is unverifiable rumour. 5. Regarding this question, cf. Severi (2007: 128–31). 6. See my earlier analyses of memorization techniques in the Sepik (Severi 2007). 7. This is also true of the oceanian mnemonic devices I have analyzed elsewhere (Severi 2007). 8. I refer to the field studies and remarkable analysis of Frank Salomon (2001, 2002, 2006).

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The three Graces, or the allegory of the gift This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Denis Vidal. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.2.024 TRANSLATION The three Graces, or the allegory of the gift A contribution to the history of an idea in anthropology Denis VIDAL, Université Paris Diderot Translated by Eléonore Rimbault Marcel Mauss’ The gift is one of the most revered texts of social anthropology. It is also one of the most debated. But, paradoxically enough, these debates have not focused on the main cultural tradition to which the famous essay may be attached. In this article, I attempt to show that Mauss’ anthropological theorization of the gift perpetuates and slightly modifies a very ancient tradition of reflection, fundamentally based on a few concepts—charis, gratia, and grace— all of which played a crucial role in European cultural history. This article also reveals the specific function played in this context by the allegory and iconography of the three Graces. Keywords: Three Graces, allegory of the gift, Mauss, gratia, charis, Seneca, Chrysippus, Lévi-Strauss Why are there three Graces and why are they sisters? Why do they hold hands?Why are they smiling, youthful, virginal, wearing a loose and transparent dress? —Seneca, On benefits1 As we learn from eminent scholars, art historians, students of antiquity, archaeologists, and philologists, the signification of the allegory of the three Graces has been known since Seneca. Seneca had found its meaning in Chrysippus, who certainly knew it from Hecaton. And it is not impossible that Chrysippus had himself taken this allegory from Epicurus. It is, in any case, a plausible hypothesis according to Edgar Wind, knowing, as Diogenes Laertius reports, that Carneades did not hesitate to call Chrysippus a “literary parasite of Epicure,” because he wrote on every topic that the latter had dealt with before him (Wind 1958: 34–35). Anyone who has, even absent-mindedly, read Marcel Mauss’ The gift will, by reading the persisting interpretation of the allegory of the three Graces, feel a strange sense of familiarity—a sense of déjà lu not necessarily stemming from a flawless knowledge of classical authors. Allow me to quote in full the answers Seneca gives to the series of questions I have just reported: Some people advance the view that one of them stands for giving a benefit, one for receiving it, and one for returning it. Others hold that they represent three kinds of benefactors: those who confer benefits, those who return them, and those who accept “benefits” and return them at the same time. But no matter which of these interpretations you decide is true, what good does this specialized knowledge do for us? And what about the fact that the group dances in a circle with intertwined hands? It is because a gift (or “benefit”) goes through an orderly sequence, passing from hand to hand and yet returning to the giver, and loses its integral character if the sequence is at any point broken, being most beautiful if the continuity is maintained? In the dance, though, the older sister has a greater value, like those who confer “benefits.” The Graces have joyful expressions, just as those who give and receive benefits generally do. They are youthful because the remembrance of “benefits” should not grow old. They are virginal because benefits are unspoiled, pure, and revered by all. Benefits should not be constrained or obligated—that is why the Graces wear loose robes. And the robes are translucent because benefits want to be in full view. (Seneca 2011: lines 20–21) It is difficult to find a better illustration and a clearer explanation of Mauss’ theories of the gift. But that is also why it is surprising to note the absence of any reference to Seneca in general (and to this text in particular)—not only in The gift, but also, it seems, in all his published work.2 It is especially startling if one considers the imposing collection of references, particularly those in Greek and Latin, that Mauss used to support his work, as well as the deep familiarity many of his closest collaborators had with classical literature (e.g., Huvelin,3 Davy,4 and many others). This is all the more curious considering that in the numerous commentaries that followed The gift, scholars agreed almost unanimously on one point: the discrepancy between the quality of the intuitions expressed in the text and the less convincing character of some the demonstrations (based on ethnographic facts) included in it. Students of Oceania, such as Raymond Firth and Marshall Sahlins, raised this criticism concerning Mauss’ interpretation of the hau, a Polynesian category quite central to his argument on the gift (Firth [1901] 1965; Sahlins [1972] 2004; Boyer 1986). The perception of this discrepancy has led some of Mauss’ commentators to criticize him, others to see in it further evidence of his perspicacity, but it seems that very few of them questioned the origins of his intuitions. One may reconsider, from this perspective, the meaning of Lévi-Strauss’ famous observation about The gift in his Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss ([1950] 1987: 47): “Are we not dealing with a mystification, an effect quite often produced in the minds of ethnographers by indigenous people? Not, of course, by ‘indigenous people’ in general, since no such beings exist, but by a given indigenous group, about whom specialists gave already pondered problems, asked questions and attempted answers.” Lévi-Strauss continues, explaining that we may infer that Mauss is seized by hesitation and scruples at the most crucial moment. He is no longer quite sure whether he must draw a picture of indigenous theory, or construct a theory of indigenous reality. He is very largely right to be unsure, for indigenous theory is much more directly related to indigenous reality than a theory developed from our own categories or problems would be. So it was a very great progress, at the time when Mauss was writing, to approach an ethnographic problem from the starting point of his New Zealand or Melanesian theory, rather than to call upon Western notions such as animism, myth or participation. But indigenous or Western, theory is only ever a theory. At best, it offers us a path of access, for, whether they be Fuegians or Australian Aboriginals, the interested parties’ beliefs are always far removed from what they actually think or do. Once the indigenous conception has been isolated, it must be reduced by an objective critique so as to reach the underlying reality. We have very little chance of finding that reality in conscious formulations, a better chance, in unconscious mental structures to which institutions give us access, but a better chance yet, in language. (Lévi-Strauss [1950] 1987: 48–49) One may suspect, however, that Lévi-Strauss, too, was seized by hesitation and scruples at the most crucial moment while analyzing the work of his predecessor. Is he not affirming, for example, in a most magisterial manner that “indigenous or Western, theory is only ever a theory”? But, in the particular case of Marcel Mauss, as I will attempt to demonstrate here, this sentence should be reformulated more accurately in the following way: “Western or Western, theory is only ever a theory.” The progress of logic could have given rise to the suspicion that the issue deserved further consideration. Unfortunately, this is where Lévi-Strauss, in his exegesis of Mauss’ work, seems to abandon the application of his own analytical principles and neglect their implications. Once Mauss’ conception had been defined, like that of any “indigenous people,” “it [had to] be reduced by an objective critique so as to reach the underlying reality. We have very little chance of finding that reality in conscious formulations, a better chance, in unconscious mental structures to which institutions give us access, but a better chance yet, in language.” (ibid.) Lévi-Strauss was probably right when thinking that Mauss had been “mystified” by indigenous people. But by identifying the “indigenous” people as Māori, he ran the risk of being mystified at once by a native and as a native. In line with Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, let us see now if we can catch sight of the “many moons that are dead, or pale, or obscure” (ibid.: 66). Connections The short passage in Seneca, which we previously cited, combines several elements that can be briefly enumerated. It primarily discusses two notions: one is originally Greek, charis, and the other one is Latin, gratia, and was to be considered as the translation of the former. It also involves a group of deities, also originally Greek: the Charites, who became the three Graces, and whose iconography can be traced over more than twenty-five centuries. Finally, it speaks of the interpretation of this allegory, which involves a reflection on exchange as a concept. Taking these various associations as a point of departure, we shall wonder what kind of continuity can be detected between these notions, deities, this iconography, and some of the contemporary anthropological developments regarding forms of exchange. In particular, we will try to elucidate whether the consistency between these different elements is due to anecdotal similarities or if it is possible to detect the existence of a genuine common ground, firmly rooted in our traditions of thought, which is still reflected in our way of thinking, analytically or not, about exchange practices. This is indeed the hypothesis that will be developed here, and which summarizes the perspective adopted in the comments that follow. Charis The use of the term charis is longstanding. We find it in Homer. The two meanings of the word “grace” (as beauty and as favor) reflect the two chief meanings of charis, which seemingly coexisted from the outset. Charis also refers to the two ideas of pleasure and granted favor (Chantraine 1980). More importantly, the set of notions associated with this term in ancient Greece are consonant with a stream of thought on gift and exchange, as the works of Jean-Pierre Vernant ([1965] 2006) and Marcel Detienne ([1972] 1994) show. Vernant defines the Greek charis as “the divine power manifest in all aspects of gift giving and reciprocity (the round of generous liberality, the cordial exchange of gifts), which, in spite of all divisions, spins a web of reciprocal obligations” (Vernant [1965] 2006: 163). The author adds that “one of the oldest of all functions of charis is a woman’s giving herself to a man.” Detienne’s studies on mythology, in particular those related to the myth of Ixion, corroborate this general analysis of the charis, showing what happens a contrario in its absence: In archaic Greece, as in other societies of the same type, the circulation of women cannot be dissociated from the exchange and the circulation of goods. At every level of social life the binding rule of gift and counter-gift applies, not only between men and gods, and between men and nature, but also between different groups of men. To thwart charis at any of these levels is to upset the entire system of exchange and presentation and to carry corruption to the very heart of the social order. (Detienne [1972] 1994: 88) In order to draw these reflections closer to the analyses of Mauss, especially those on the Polynesian concept of hau in The gift, several other aspects of the concept of charis must be noted, although it is not possible to develop them fully here. First, there is a double lack of differentiation associated with it. It appears, on the one hand, in the absence of a distinction between charis seen as a quality that would have been deified and the Charites (i.e., the three Graces) as a group of deities. Moreover, at this stage it seems that nothing radically distinguishes each of the deities’ functions, even if, in some cases, they appear as a collective group of goddesses in which none are individualized, while in other cases they are singularized, and each one has a different name (Vernant [1965] 2006: 360). There is also the association, ancient but never lost, of the Charites with the notions of growth and fertility (ibid.: 277). Finally and above all, there is this specific quality which the charis grants to everything from which it emanates. Let us cite Vernant once more: To the Greek, the charis does not only emanate from a woman’s body, or from any human being who “shines” with the beauty of youth, with a sparkle (often found in the eyes) that inspires love; it also emanates from finely chiseled jewelry, carefully carved jewels, and from certain precious fabrics; from the scintillation of metal, the bright reflection of a precious stone’s water, the polychrome quality of a weaving, and the vivid colors of the depiction of an animal or a vegetal setting with an intense liveliness. The silversmith’s and the weaver’s works also shine splendidly and render the gleam and light of flesh. (Vernant 1965: 261 n. 31)5 There is no doubt that this specific quality of the beings and objects that circulate in an exchange (which Vernant identified) very much resembles the mysterious quality that Mauss tirelessly tracks in every monograph, and over the continents, which he designates metaphorically as the mysterious form of power manifesting itself in the practice of exchange. Hence we may affirm that everything called for the Greek concept of charis to figure as a prominent example in Mauss’ work. Its almost complete absence should only be the first among the reasons for our astonishment. Gratia In spite of their lack of etymological kinship, the term gratia came to be considered as a legitimate translation of charis given that it was precisely and constantly used Figure 1: The Three Graces, fresco from Pompeii, Naples Museum of Archaeology. by Latin authors as its equivalent. Émile Benveniste ([1969] 1973: 160) describes as follows the social process in which the word gratia and its linguistic family are involved: The connection with Latin words shows that the process at the beginning consisted of giving service for nothing, without reward; and this service, which was literally “gratuitous,” provokes in return the manifestation of what we call “gratefulness.” The notion of service that does not demand a counter-service is at the root of the notion, which for us moderns is twofold, “favor” and “gratefulness,” a sentiment which is felt by the one who gives and by the one who receives. They are reciprocal notions: the act conditions the sentiment; the sentiment inspires a certain form of behavior. Once again, we are definitely in the realm of the gift. But with this Latin equivalent to the notion of charis, the “sentiments” inspiring the actors, as well as the way in which these feelings are called upon in all aspects of social life, are paramount. This is consistent with what Claude Moussy has shown in a work entirely dedicated to the analysis of gratia and its linguistic family: All the values of gratia common in the Classical period can easily be explained from its fundamental meanings, both abstract: gratia as “recognition”; and concrete: gratia as “payment in return” or “benefit.” They all bear a link to the practice of benefaction, and this extension of gratia, stretching out from the vocabulary of recognition toward various domains, in particular to that of politics, is a good illustration of Seneca’s thesis, which envisions the entire edifice of social life resting on the pair “benefit–recognition.” (Moussy 1966: 410) However, the common definition of gratia as “charm, grace, pleasure,” is incommensurable with the previous meanings, and the intervention of charis in this new development of the Latin word seems quite plausible. As to the Christian sense of gratia, it derives from charis, usually translated as gratia in the Latin versions of the first works of Christian literature. Hence, from a comparison of the Latin notion and the Greek one, we can draw several observations. With gratia, the relational structure fostering cohesion between actors emerges, along with the definition and the analysis of sentiments that inspire or should inspire the practice of gifting. Thus is it not surprising that Seneca’s On benefits, from which I excerpted the interpretation of the allegory of the three Graces, is conceived as a practical and pedagogical treatise destined for those involved in gift giving. But it is precisely this pedagogy that presents a difficulty. When speaking of practices associated with beneficence, obligations to give, to receive, and to return, Seneca affirms that the challenge is to “organize the topic which more than any other binds together human society” (Seneca 2011: 22). But this affirmation comes here to support a plea in favor of practices that he judges insufficiently present in collective life. This is how one sees, in Seneca, the awareness of a dissociation between two exchange circuits—which the terminological usages account for more generally, as Benveniste ([1969] 1973: 161–62) points out: It would be a serious error to believe that economic notions originate in needs of a material order which have to be satisfied, and that the terms which express these notions have merely a material sense. Everything relating to economic notions is bound up with a far wider range of ideas that concern the whole field of relationships between men and the relations of men with the gods. These are complex and difficult relations in which both parties are always implicated. Yet the reciprocal process of supply and payment can be interrupted voluntarily: thus we have services without return, offerings “by grace and favor,” pure acts of “grace,” which are the starting points of a new kind of reciprocity. Above the normal circuit of exchange—where one gives in order to obtain—there is a second circuit, that of benefice and gratefulness, of what is given without thought of return, of what is offered in “thankfulness.” Thus, contrary to charis, which according to Hellenic scholars was used in ancient Greece to signify a quality inherent in any authentic social exchange, gratia seems to have been dedicated to a much more specific exchange form, with specific connotations. These connotations, more and more present in the use of gratia, also mark the modern notion of “gratuitousness.” Moreover, in the passage from charis to gratia we see the survival of other connotations associated with this term in ancient Greece. The concepts of “charm” and “pleasure” are still present, but there is more. When describing an old usage of charis, Vernant, as we have seen, spoke about “a woman’s giving herself to a man.” Let us refer now to the Christian signification, especially in St. Paul, “who seemingly introduced the word charis into the vocabulary of Christianity; who, in any case, was first to systematize the theology of Grace. Grace is above all a gift from God: it is God giving Himself gratuitously to mankind in the person of Jesus Christ” (Moussy 1966: 451). It is, in fact, that same charis that Christian baptism bestows on human beings. It is as if the comparison of charis and gratia reflected the gradual dissociation of a “total phenomenon.” In ancient Greece, the notion of charis—perhaps a genuine equivalent of the Polynesian hau—is commonly interpreted by scholars as the cement of any social exchange, and a mysterious quality present in both things and people; the notion of gratia, however, disseminated and preserved the Greek connotations of charis, but also altered them quite significantly. It came to denote an increasingly particular type of exchange (“gracious,” “gratuitous”) and specific qualities, be they sensible—the beauty of a woman—or, on the contrary, immaterial—Divine Grace. What has been lost apparently is the sense of an immanent and general connection between all the different connotations once associated with the term charis and which referred to all exchanges that bind society. But is it really from such a perspective that we must interpret the allegory of the three Graces? The Charites In order to progress further in our analysis, we must now turn to the Charites, minor deities of ancient Greece, whose memory was preserved thanks mainly to their iconography. We know little about these deities and their worship in ancient Greece. The references found in ancient authors, although quite frequent, are extremely laconic.6 The cult of the Charites seems to have been primarily associated with the “fertility” of nature, the “pleasure” and “joy” in love and human relations, and, finally, with gratitude and “benefits.” Each of these associations, of course, must be understood and resituated in the cultural and psychological context of ancient Greece. Suffice it to say here that the three Graces each bore names and more importantly had a filiation and alliances that varied greatly according to the poets who mentioned them (Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Pausanias, etc.). Sometimes considered as three sisters, the daughters of Zeus, they were not always called by the names which Hesiod reports: Aglaea, Thalia, and Euphrosyne. As minor deities, the Charites were also relatively undifferentiated from nymphs, Muses, and Hours. Furthermore, the worship of these various entities was frequently conflated. Their function can also be contrasted with other groups of minor deities like the Erynies (Vernant [1965] 2006: 412 n. 43). Their cult was sometimes brought to the forefront, as it was at Orchomenos in Boeotia; and it could occasion specific celebrations (the charitesia). But in general, their cult was associated with and subordinated to that of other deities such as Aphrodite or Apollo. Figure 2: The Three Graces, Acropolis Museum, Athens. In the fragments of scattered information available about the Charites in ancient Greece, one can thus discern the different connotations that the Greeks associate with the notion of charis. But it was not until the Hellenistic period, with the first Stoics and their Roman successors, especially Seneca—and to a lesser extent, Servius—that the Charites came to be linked closely with the logic of the gift and of “benefits,” to the extent of becoming their privileged allegory. As we have seen above, Seneca describes the gift in such a way that, regardless of the temporal logic, one feels like one is reading a pastiche of Mauss! One can also appreciate the rhetorical artifice with which Seneca equips himself to report the allegory of the three Graces: a very specific blend of false humility and genuine self-importance, authentic admiration and easy denigration—in short, an overall tone and commentary style where one easily identifies a stranger’s viewpoint, almost, even, an ethnographer’s. How can we understand, Seneca wonders, why “Chrysippus, who is famous for his sophisticated intellectual analysis that gets to the heart of the truth, and who only says what is needed to get the job done and never uses more words than he needs in order to be understood—Chrysippus, too, filled his entire book with this nonsense, leaving himself only a little bit of room to discuss the actual process of giving, receiving, and returning benefits” (Seneca 2011: 21)? That is a question familiar to anthropologists, and not only concerning the Greeks. And the following remark also has not always been without an equivalent, in the ethnographic literature on other cultures or different scholarly traditions: “Just you look out for me, if anyone takes me to task for knocking Chrysippus off his pedestal—he is a great man, of course, but still he is a Greek and his overly subtle sharpness gets blunted and even turned against him” (ibid.: 22). One problem with which anthropologists are also familiar is the impossibility of knowing—given how the allegory of the three Graces is reported to us—what the respective contributions were of Seneca, Hecaton, or Chrysippus, and what the sources of the latter author were. Hence, by a coincidence that is perhaps not meaningless, this astonishing description of the gift has an epistemological status reminiscent of our modern ethnographic descriptions (Sperber 1985). First, this wavering is due to the difficulty of associating the interpretation of the three Graces with an author or even with a precise culture—Greek or Latin. This comment on the gift was ultimately preserved thanks to the confrontation between two cultures. Moreover, it is because Seneca’s text shows us clearly that during the Hellenistic period, the logic of gift giving, this illusion of a “total phenomenon,” is, in fact, already merely a dreamed universe of sociability. Only the artifice of an allegory can introduce us to it, and this arouses Seneca’s suspicions as it is not good to believe “that frivolous fictions and arguments fit for old women might be able to prevent the most destructive possible turn of events: a universal cancellation of benefits” (Seneca 2011: 23). It would therefore be an error of interpretation to mistake what is presented unambiguously as an allegory for what could be taken, outside the context of its utterance, as a representative description of a state of society; a society that would, moreover, remain in need of precise identification. By describing this allegory, Seneca does not pretend to do more than to submit to the rules of art and to the intellectual trends of his time, although not without a certain disdain, as some of his reflections, like this supposition, indicate: “But suppose that someone is so dedicated to the Greeks that he thinks these questions are vital.” (Seneca 2011: 21). However, Seneca underestimates the possibility that Chrysippus had used this allegory in the same way as he does, that is, precisely as an allegory and for purely allegorical purposes. So what is transmitted from one thinker to another, and Seneca is an integral part of this chain, is probably neither a belief nor a superstition. It is a particular way of thinking about exchange in society through select images that illustrate this conception, in order to have it understood and to make it more desirable. To think that scholars like Mauss may have thought, many centuries later, that one could find in ancient or exotic societies the same ideal of sociability because the desire for it was maintained while the allegorical character of this ideal had been lost, is not only an attractive hypothesis but also one that may have the advantage of being accurate, as I will try to show. But let us still continue our investigation by focusing this time, more precisely, on the iconography of the three Graces as such. The iconography of the three Graces Figure 3: The Three Graces, marble statue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Roman copy of a Greek original from the second century BC. It is convenient to distinguish two periods in the iconography of the three Graces, one “ancient” and the other “modern.” The ancient period ARCHAIC REPRESENTATIONS One may find a few pieces of information on the first visual representations of the three Graces in the same way as one can find rare and scattered references to their cult and mythology.7 At the time of their debut, the three Graces had not yet started the round dance that would immortalize them. In some temples, in Orchomenos, for example, they were represented by rocks and at Elis by wooden statues in golden clothing, whose faces were made out of marble. But most importantly, in the basreliefs of the time, it seems the Charites were conventionally shown in profile or in a three-quarter view in three-quarters, holding hands and in a single file. Moreover, they were always represented draped in cloth. REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD It is during the Hellenistic period, first in Greece and then in Rome, that the three Graces acquired the iconography that would serve as their canonical representation in the modern era (Deonna 1930). From that moment on, the representations of the three Graces showed them dancing in a circle: the one in the center is represented from the back while the others are more or less facing the viewer, while also in a three-quarters orientation. As in the previous period, the three Graces hold each other by the arms or shoulders, and they often have symbolic attributes (fruits, vegetables) in hand that they circulate among themselves. Finally, following an aesthetic trend that certainly began in Aphrodite’s representations, the three Graces were increasingly shown naked. If one believes Pausanias, this new representation of the three Graces spread from one particular artistic work. There was, indeed, in the new configuration of these deities, an element of novelty that did not seem to be only related to their symbolism; it may have also been related to the masterly way their dance was depicted from an aesthetic point of view, thanks to an ingenious spatial arrangement. Moreover, considering that the representation of the three Graces required the artist to depict the female body from all angles in one single composition, we may sense there a reason that, regardless of any symbolic association, can explain the particular appeal of this divine group. The modern period MEDIEVAL REPRESENTATIONS The memory of the three Graces was never completely lost in the Middle Ages (Wind 1958: 44 n. 35). By contrast, it is interesting to notice how, concerning its iconography more specifically, contact was lost for several centuries with the depictions that were prominent during the Hellenistic period, and which only resurfaced during the Renaissance. Medieval artists, who did not draw inspiration from the models of the past, used their own traditions of representation to invent an image of the deities matching the textual descriptions they built upon in a rather literal manner. Jean Seznec, who studied in detail how images of ancient gods were preserved, modified, or transformed up until the Renaissance, provides an example regarding Remi’s commentary on Martianus, dating from the year 1100, which illustrates well such a process: Yet as we examine them more carefully, we see that the artist has not indulged in pure fancy; on the contrary, he has taken pains to follow as carefully as possible the directions of a certain text. . . . The text tells him, for instance, that Apollo carries the three Graces in his hand. Remi has taken this detail from Macrobius, who had it from Pausanias: “Apollinis simulacra manu dextera Gratias gestant” (Saturnalia I, 17). What is called for here is thus a small replica of the group of the three Graces. Our draftsman, however, who has never seen anything of the sort, naïvely pictures a kind of bouquet out of which emerge three female busts. (Seznec [1940] 1961: 168) There are other “deviant” illustrations of the three Graces, related to the same period in their iconography, for instance in the moralized manuscripts of Ovid, or in the Tarocchi (Tarot card games) (ibid.: 199). REPRESENTATIONS SINCE THE RENAISSANCE Figure 4: A detail of Primavera, Sandro Boticelli, 1478/1482, Uffizi, Firenze. The renewal of the Hellenistic representation occurred in the second half of the fifteenth century, and from then on it quickly became dominant. The discovery of an ancient sculpture depicting the three Graces in Siena played a crucial role, as it allowed artists to become acquainted with the old way of portraying them. Figure 5: The Three Graces, Raphael, 1534/1535, Musée de Chantilly. This discovery is known to us thanks to Raphael, who drew numerous sketches of the sculpture. Subsequently, a host of great artists offered an interpretation of the allegory: among them were painters, printmakers, and sculptors of the Renaissance. Raphael, Raimondi, Correggio, Francesco del Cossa, Vasari, Dürer, Botticelli, Clodion, Germain Pilon, portrayed the Graces strictly following the ancient models, more or less, while Titian or Tintoretto gave freer interpretations. From then on, artists, like Rubens in the seventeenth century or Boucher in the eighteenth century, continually drew inspiration from the iconography of the three Graces, even as the meaning of the allegory was progressively lost. Figure 6: The Three Graces, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1531, Musée de Louvre, Paris. Figure 7: The Three Graces, Rubens, 1639, Prado Museum, Madrid. Perspectives on the gift Representations of the Charites existed in ancient Greece. Similarly, the notion of charis had always been associated with the system of presentations typical of the gift. But it was really during the Hellenistic period, in Athens and in Rome, that an effort of conceptualization regarding the social implications of the gift took as its starting point the theme of the three Graces. As we have already seen briefly, it was based on a constant renewal of the iconography of these deities. Seneca’s perspective In Seneca’s commentary, which draws inspiration from Chrysippus, several points are noteworthy. Seneca refuses, for instance, to individualize each of the Charites. With a biting irony, he ridicules the way Greek poets and thinkers individually assigned them a name and a genealogy: “Each authority twists the interpretation of these names as it suits him, trying to reduce them to some orderly plan; in fact, though, Hesiod just assigned to the girls the names that he felt like giving them” (Seneca 2011: 21). By ignoring completely the specific identity of each of the Charites, Seneca does not purport to innovate, but he intends to give a more universal scope to this allegory. It is also why he does not seek to define what each of the Charites precisely stands for. Let us cite again this passage: Some people advance the view that one of them stands for giving a benefit, one for receiving it, and one for returning it. Others hold that they represent three kinds of benefactors: those who confer benefits, those who return them, and those who accept benefits and return them at the same time. But no matter which of these interpretations you decide is true, what good does this specialized knowledge do for us? (Seneca 2011: 21). Each of the Charites stands for a significant gesture of the gift relationship. But just like Lévi-Strauss when he analyzes the structure of exchange, Seneca grants less importance to the precise definition of each of these gestures than to the “orderly sequence” that constitutes itself through them. He insists that it is not enough to find a willingness to give. There must be simultaneously a willingness to receive and a willingness to return. Closer in this regard to Mauss than to Lévi-Strauss, for Seneca, taking this simultaneity into account does not imply any form of automatic complementarity among these three archetypical gestures. What really is needed, he suggests, is to find out the necessary conditions so that such synthesis may effectively take place: “Our job is to discuss benefits and to organize the topic which more than any other binds together human society” (ibid.: 22). For he has assigned to himself the duty to help “prevent the most destructive possible turn of events: a universal cancellation of benefits” (ibid.: 23). From the same perspective, the remarkable advantage of the allegory of the three Graces is to allow the representation and thereby the comprehension, though a series of symbols, of the necessary complementarity of the gestures involved in gift giving and the no less indispensable role succession implied by these gestures. There was indeed a difficulty, both logical and iconographic, in attempting to represent, in a unified iconographic space, gestures that are otherwise defined by a temporal succession. It is the dynamic intuitively associated with dancing, and to round dances in particular in this case, that allowed the paradox to be resolved. For Chrysippus or Seneca, it was necessary that there be three Graces because it is the minimal number needed to represent the three fundamental gestures characteristic of the gift in one single moment, and thereby in a single representation. Hence, if one of the Graces is presented to us from the back and the two others in profile or facing us, this is only due to the constraint of solid geometry. However, space is not oriented here from the viewer’s position. The fact that the deities are facing him or her does not have a particular signification.8 This is a fundamental difference between the analysis offered by Seneca and the one proposed by Servius, which was also abundantly cited and analyzed by commentators after him. Servius’ perspective Servius wrote a famous gloss on the three Graces in the fourth century, that is, three centuries after Seneca. Contrarily to the latter, who still described the Graces wearing transparent dresses, Servius accounted for their nudity. But above all, it is the interpretation of the positions assigned to each of the Graces that changed with this author: “That one of them is pictured from the back while the two others face us is because for one benefit issuing from us two others are supposed to return” (Servius 2004: 1.720; English translation found in Wind 1958: 28). Servius’ interpretation involves a new element. As we have seen, in ancient Greece the notion of charis was associated with growth and fertility. A symbol of this association was in fact preserved through the vegetal attributes often placed in the hands of the deities. But this reference disappears completely with Chrysippus and Seneca. In their conception of the “orderly sequence” of benefits, it is the gesture that matters, as well as the human relations that are established and affirmed with gift giving. But as Seneca repeatedly and precisely indicates, its signification is independent from the material reality of the objects that circulate from hand to hand by way of the gift. By contrast, for Servius and other authors after him like Boccaccio, the benefactor can legitimately expect the “benefit” associated with his gesture. The apparent gratuitousness of the gift does not show the disinterest of the giver since, on the contrary, a benefit in return is promised to him—a benefit delayed, but that will amount to twice what was given. It is also interesting to note that such a perspective, relying on the hope of future gains, is conveyed by a new interpretation of the representation of the three Graces. As we have seen before, in ancient Greece, the three deities were shown in profile and were advancing in line, parallel to the viewer. Then, during the Hellenistic period, they started dancing in a circle, and the viewer found him- or herself in a decentered position vis-à-vis them. But at the end of the Hellenistic period, the perspective changed again. The depiction of the three Graces became still. This time, the axis that extends from the viewer to the deities was explicitly taken into account. The giver’s function was identified with the central deity, who turns her back to the viewer. The two other Graces, situated on her two sides and facing, represent the recipients of the gift. In Chrysippus’ interpretation, the one relayed by Seneca, the logic of the gift was defined by three fundamental gestures—to give, to receive, to return—each embodied by one of the three deities. With Servius, however, the perspective changed. There are only two fundamental gestures left—to give and to return—and if one of them is symbolized by one deity and the second by two of them, it is only, we are told, to express the quantitative difference between what passes from hand to hand on the occasion of the gift and what compensates it in a second movement. Servius’ interpretation, however, although it is frequently cited, more recent and detailed, did not supplant Seneca’s, and these two perspectives were in fact maintained up until the Renaissance. The perspective of the Renaissance The theme of the three Graces was at its peak during the Renaissance, in particular among humanist authors like Marsilio Ficino or Picco dela Mirandola. The three deities were assigned a central position among allegorical figures in their new versions of Neoplatonism. Ficino, for instance, gave the title Charitum Ager (the Graces’ place) to his villa in Carregi, where he hosted a Neoplatonic academy. Picco dela Mirandola also took them as his emblem and engraved them on the obverse side of his personal medal. Three words accompany their representation on the medal—pulchirtudo, amor, voluptas—each word supposing to correspond to one of the Graces. This citation, taken from Wind (1958: 36), gives a general idea of the symbolism of the three Graces in the Renaissance: While the triad of the Graces signified liberality to the Stoics, for the Neoplatonists it was a symbol of love, inviting celestial meditations. Since the Graces were described and pictured as attendants of Venus, it seemed reasonable to infer that they unfold her attributes: for it was the axiom of Platonic Theology that every god exerts his power in a triadic rhythm. This new signification of the symbolism of the three Graces was associated, subsequently, with a renewed interpretation of their iconography. For Servius, the most important element was the confrontation between the central deity, identified with the act of gift giving, and the two others, symbolizing the return of the gift. During the Renaissance, however, the scene came to be interpreted differently. The central deity’s volte-face in relation to the viewer was now enhanced. It was understood as a way of turning away from earthly considerations to contemplate the spiritual realm. This signification was reinforced by the way the two other deities were consequently reinterpreted. The accent was no longer placed on their symmetry in relation to the central deity, but, on the contrary, on the asymmetry that appears as soon as one neglects the overall position of the bodies to pay attention to the orientation of their faces and gaze. The reading of the scene was no longer static: the new interpretation had to be based on the dynamic that animates the scene. It was no longer about dance, as in the Stoic tradition, but about the reinvention of a particular genre: All that we have to remember is that the bounty bestowed by the gods upon lower beings was conceived by the Neoplatonists as a kind of overflowing (emanatio), which produced a vivifying rapture or conversion (called by Ficino conversio, raptio or vivificatio) whereby the lower beings were drawn back to heaven and rejoined the gods (remeatio). The munificence of the gods having thus been unfolded in the triple rhythm of emanatio, raptio, and remeatio, it was possible to recognize in this sequence the divine model of what Seneca had defined as the circle of Grace: giving, accepting and returning. (Wind 1958: 38) While Servius’ commentaries on the gift had privileged a rather materialistic interpretation of gratia and had essentially dealt with the nature of human transactions (their social and material quality), the Humanist reading of Plato instead placed the emphasis on a very specific and largely metaphysical notion of love—amor— which took preeminence in their interpretations over the previous connotations associated with charis and gratia: If we further consider that all communion between mortals and gods was established, according to Plato, through the mediation of Love, it becomes clear why in Ficino’s and Pico’s system the entire Greek pantheon began to revolve around Venus and Amor. All the parts of the splendid machine (machinae membra), Ficino wrote, “are fastened to each other by a kind of mutual charity, so that it may justly be said that love is the perpetual knot and link of the universe: amor nodus perpetuus et copula mundi.” Although Venus remained one deity among others, and as such the bestower only of particular gifts, she defined, as it were, the universal system of exchange by which divine gifts are graciously circulated. The image of the Graces, linked by the knot of mutual charity (segnesque nodum solvere Gratiae), supplied a perfect figure to illustrate the dialectical rhythm of Ficino’s universe. (Wind 1958: 38–39) The search for spirituality in this new interpretation of the three Graces found a superior aesthetic translation in the painting of Botticelli, Primavera, currently on display in Florence’s Uffizi gallery (see above, Figure 4). In this picture, the representation of the three Graces, wearing transparent dresses and holding hands, seems to be directly inspired by Seneca’s description. Indeed Botticelli was a keen illustrator of these kinds of allegories, inspired by the Neoplatonists, and which had become popular in the Medici circle. However, this new proximity between the image and its ancient gloss must not delude us. There is some paradox in closely associating a spiritual quest with the rather carnal theme of the three Graces; and such a paradox was ever apparent, as Wind suggests, in the ancient use of this theme by the Stoic masters of antiquity. This also led Wind to postulate the possibility of an Epicurean origin for the allegoric use of the three Graces. But whether it is the case or not, there is no doubt that, during the Renaissance, not all artists felt obliged or inclined to follow the scholastic interpretation of the most fashionable allegories of the time, and to attenuate the carnal quality of the representation of the three Graces in the manner of Raphael (see above, Figure 5) or Botticelli. Correggio, as well as many painters of the Fontainebleau school, for example, did not hesitate to emphasize the theme’s intense sensuality. This also explains what happened by the end of the Renaissance, when there was a progressive breaking of the link between the scholarly interpretation of philosophical origin and an iconography, largely inspired by it, but also loaded with sensuality. Then, the theme of the three Graces survived thanks to its iconographic appeal, but it also became more and more remote from any association—scholarly or not—with the idea of gift giving. The three Graces were still frequently represented dancing, but not necessarily in a circle, and regardless of the viewer’s position. However, they remained associated with Love, most of the time depicted conventionally as the flying baby (putto) escorting the Graces. One may then follow from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries—with Tintoretto, Rubens, Boucher, or Watteau—how this visual allegory progressively lost its conventional sense and also became more closely associated—Watteau is a good example of this transformation—with the courteous pleasures of Love. An evolutionist temptation From what has been seen above, it is possible to trace the guiding lines of an evolution of the theme of the three Graces. And one could argue that the history of such a theme reflects, beyond this specific example, an evolution of behaviors and attitudes that bears witness to a progressive change in civilization. This is what I would like to show briefly. But on this occasion, it is better to summarize first the various elements of our investigation. In the beginning, we have the Greek notion of charis. This notion, as is often the case in ancient Greece, was represented by a group of minor deities—in this particular case, the Charites. Poets like Homer, Hesiod, or Pindar progressively assigned names to these deities, as well as genealogies and sometimes mythologies. There was also some worship of them, often in the context of the cult of more important divinities of the Pantheon: Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, Aphrodite. The Charites were often represented with the latter deities or placed in the entrance hall of their sanctuaries. It is possible to learn all this thanks to the compilations of archeologists, philologists, and historians of ancient Greece; and our sources are altogether numerous, diverse, and reliable. Then, during the Hellenistic period, two singular events occurred. A new way of visualizing the three Graces replaced the ancient iconography. There is no absolute proof that this developed from an original model that would have served as a reference, but it is the most likely hypothesis. Moreover, at the same period, philosophers—in particular, Chrysippus, a master of ancient Stoicism—used the image of the three Graces as a central allegory in their conception of the gift, most certainly inspired by the wealth of connotations that had long been associated with the notion of charis and with the Charites. It is, then, plausible that the new iconography of the three Graces was born that way, under the influence of the gloss of these thinkers. But unfortunately there are no contemporary accounts of what happened at that time in Greece. What we know we owe to later sources of Roman origin. This is true both regarding representations of the three Graces—paintings and sculptures—and concerning the interpretation of this allegory proposed by ancient Stoics, which we are familiar with almost exclusively thanks to Seneca. Although we know that numerous intermediaries spread the teachings of ancient Stoicism in Rome, we have invariably lost track of them, as it is the case, for instance, for Hecate’s works, even though it is certain that they influenced Seneca. Seneca did not conceal that his perspective on ancient Greek authors was both critical and selective. If he transmitted the allegory of the three Graces in On benefits, he said, priding himself on his offhandedness, it was without granting it much importance. But although he did not trust the immediacy and the validity of the teaching that could be drawn from an image or a myth, he paradoxically reinforced the significance of this allegory, somewhat in spite of himself. He did so, first, by endorsing the role of agent in this transmission: it seems that Seneca is the sole source accounting for its importance among the first Stoics. Second, and most importantly, he did so because he systematized its interpretation in accordance with his own conceptions regarding the practice of gifting in society. However, the unexpected consequence of his intervention in this domain was less to abolish the need to resort to an allegory than to guarantee the allegory’s subsequent success. Thus, the Charites became known in Rome not so much as other Greek gods and goddesses whose cult was absorbed by the Romans during the Hellenistic period, but, rather, from the beginning, as purely allegorical figures, allowing their use as such by artists, poets, and thinkers. However, aside from this fragile thread by which the allegory of the three Graces was passed on and systematized from Athens to Rome, another form of acculturation, more diffuse but more significant, also occurred: it was the slow assimilation of the connotations associated with charis and the acclimation of the notion—rather than a mere translation—in Latin, through the term of gratia. The effect was all the more interesting as three streams of signification soon coexisted in the notion of gratia. The first involved the old connotations attached to charis, which can be found in the close association of gifting gestures, charm, and the interior beauty that the gesture confers. The second stream embraced connotations that were more specifically Roman, referring precisely to the procedures of gift giving; they characterized this practice by associating it with notions such as beneficence and gratuity. Finally, a third stream assembled the new Christian connotations associated at first with charis, then with gratia, and which eventually came to characterize the notion of Divine Grace. This probably explains the success of the allegory of the three Graces in the Renaissance. Indeed, it was a period during which intellectual milieux took pleasure in rediscovering and deftly handling the different—and often paradoxical—connotations and associations associated with gratia or embodied by the three Graces. Offering an opportunity to reinterpret Seneca in a Neoplatonic sense, but also in a rather Epicurean manner in the way it illustrated a notion then at the heart of Christianity, the allegory of the three Graces offered Renaissance artists and humanists a perfect occasion to celebrate creatively the marriage of spirituality and sensuality. They all leaped at the opportunity. After the Renaissance, it became more and more dubious to present the image of the naked and dancing Graces as a representation, even if only allegorical, of Divine Grace. However, in the seventeenth century, their representation was still judged sufficiently edifying for the Graces to preside, in Rubens’ painting, over the education of Marie de Medici (see above, Figure 7). But as the paintings of Boucher and Watteau can testify, from the eighteenth century onward, they mainly symbolized the charms of love. From this we can summarize how the fate of the three Graces can be interpreted over time: A first period, associated with ancient Greece. The use of the notion of charis at that time is well reflected by the analyses of Gernet or Vernant, who interpret it as a key notion of the exchange, similar to the way Mauss used the Māori hau for his analysis of the sociocultural systems of Polynesia. A second period, the Hellenistic era. Both in the evolution of the notion of gratia and in Seneca’s analysis, it becomes clear that the logic of the gift can no longer be interpreted as if it were involving the society as a whole. As Benveniste shows, the practice of gift giving is now identified to a “second circuit,” interrupting the normal circuit of exchange. A third and last period, corresponding to modern times from the Renaissance to the present. The notion of gratia has been divided between a purely spiritual dimension, to which the Neoplatonic Humanists of the Renaissance gave a new philosophical dimension, and a more sensual dimension still present today, in particular in the iconographic representation of the three Graces. Here we have come full circle and the three Graces, after a centuries-long peripetias, have become a fully secularized iconographic theme, with no obvious connection henceforth with the gift. As I will now show, there is little doubt that someone like Mauss would have interpreted such an evolution in the interpretation of the three Graces as a simple illustration of a more significant evolution, that is, the progressive marginalization of gift practices at the core of Western culture and society. The question, however, is to know if one is to take this sort of analysis at face value: is there not another way of interpreting what has been quickly summarized here about this allegory of the gift? An opening to the world As a conclusion to The gift, Marcel Mauss clearly advocates what he sees as a return to the archaic and ancient values that characterize a society based on the gift: First of all, we return, as return we must, to habits of “aristocratic extravagance.” As is happening in English-speaking countries and so many other contemporary societies, whether made up of savages or the highly civilized, the rich must come back to considering themselves— freely and also by obligation—as the financial guardians of their fellow citizens. Among ancient civilizations, from which ours has sprung, some had a (debtors’) jubilee, others liturgies (of duty) such as choregies and trierarchies, and syussitia (meals in common), and the obligatory expenditure by the aedile and the consular dignitaries. We should return to laws of this kind. . . . Thus we can and must return to archaic society and to elements in it. We shall find in this reasons for life and action that are still prevalent in certain societies and numerous social classes: the joy of public giving; the pleasure in generous expenditure on the arts, in hospitality, and in the private and public festival. (Mauss [1925] 1990: 88–89) One may notice once more that such a plea in favor of evergetism seems to echo some of Seneca’s reflections in On benefits.9 May one then conclude that Mauss’ text should be understood as a recent milestone in the line of commentaries about the practices of the gift, which has been ongoing in Western culture from Chrysippus to Hecaton, Seneca to Servius, Marsilio Ficino to Picco dela Mirandola? Some passages written by Mauss in The gift seem to confirm that one may effectively interpret the essay in this perspective. Does he not explain himself, for example, that “the themes of the gift, of the freedom and the obligation inherent in the gift, of generosity and self-interest that are linked in giving, are reappearing in French society, as a dominant motif too long forgotten”? (ibid.: 87). And in another passage, he explains as well that he is “[posing] once more, in different forms, questions that are old but ever new” (ibid.: 5). What distinguishes Mauss, however, from his predecessors is the nature of the argumentation he uses in his essay in order to promote a return to a society based on the gift (an ambition that he quickly reduced, like his predecessors, to a modest plea in favor of euergetism). Until then, none of the authors that we have referred to had ever presented a society exclusively based on gift giving as something that may have actually existed. This is also why the state of “grace” that the existence of such a system would imply was usually presented either as a miraculous outcome that could only result from the interaction between men and deities, or as an allegory illustrated by poets and artists, from Goethe to Raphael. In the work of Mauss, however, one does not find a single reference to Chrysippus or Seneca, nor any allusion to the three Graces, to charis, gratia, to amor, to the notions of charm, grace, gratuity—all notions which have been traditionally at the core of such a problematic in Western culture. To argue in favor of a system of human relations founded on the practice of the gift, authors since antiquity had strived to show in what ways such a system was effectively desirable and they had presented it as a charmed ideal. With Mauss, however, the perspective changed completely, because he believed that ethnographic works brought the historical and sociological confirmation that the logic of gift giving actually constituted the milestone of all societies. Hence, what had generally been presented as an ideal altogether desirable and yet in many ways unrealistic by a long succession of philosophers, religious minds, skilled politicians, disillusioned preceptors, and idle courtiers finally acquired the remarkable dignity of being now considered as a “total phenomenon.” One should not, however, consider, as a result, that the underlying logic of the problematic of the gift had completely changed with Mauss: in fact, one of his merits is that he offered a wider insight into the problem posed with the paradox situated in the “voluntary character of these total services, apparently free and disinterested but nevertheless constrained and self-interested” (Mauss [1925] 1990: 4). What fundamentally changed was the nature of the arguments used. While authors in the past only used rhetorical images and ancient literature in order to illustrate their opinion and defend their point of view, Mauss aimed to show that, as a prudent thinker, it was from social facts, past and present, and only using these, that he built his analyses. This is actually why there is an obvious complementarity between, and, we may say, an underlying logic explaining, Mauss’ absence of interest in the intellectual history which he unknowingly prolonged, and the way he used reconstitutions of sociological realities, even if they were at times fragile, to “demonstrate” that his theses were fully justified. Lévi-Strauss’ conception of the gift, by contrast, breaks away from this underlying logic. From gift to exchange The way in which Lévi-Strauss interpreted The gift in his famous introduction dated from 1950, is quite disconcerting. It is easy to perceive all that Mauss’ reflection owed to a scholarly tradition of which his colleagues and he were the direct heirs, even if they never acknowledged it. But, speaking about Mauss, it is more surprising, for instance, to affirm that “empirical observation finds not exchange, but only, as Mauss himself says, ‘three obligations: giving, receiving, returning’” (Lévi-Strauss [1950] 1987: 46). We have seen, on the contrary, that it was precisely his own cultural tradition that Mauss was following—perhaps unknowingly—when he analyzed the gift, after so many others, by way of these three obligations. Hence it is slightly paradoxical to reproach him, as Lévi-Strauss did, for not having followed completely his own principles in favor of a “New Zealand theory” when he did precisely the opposite. Similarly, when Lévi-Strauss wrote a few pages later that “what happened in that essay, for the first time in the history of ethnological thinking, was that an effort was made to transcend empirical observation and to reach deeper realities” (ibid.: 38), we saw, quite to the contrary, that Mauss’ intellectual originality was precisely of an “empirical” order: it consisted in renewing an originally Western thematic by seeking its validation in new facts, gathered, in particular, from other societies. For Mauss just as much as for the authors of antiquity, the crucial challenge was to find how to instigate a more desirable form of sociability, seemingly embodied in the practice of the gift. But the difference between Mauss and his predecessors is that instead of seeking to convince the reader of the importance of gift giving by emphasizing its moral, desirable, necessary, or rewarding character, he strived to show that such a set of attitudes constituted, in fact, an ineluctable and universal given in every society. Its apparent absence in our society was, as a matter of fact, merely a temporary aberration, and most certainly transitory. This means that just like Chrysippus, Seneca, Servius, or Marsilio Fino, Marcel Mauss in his time sought to convince that there was nothing worse for a society than the “universal cancellation of benefits.” Nevertheless, the ambiguity in Mauss’ approach was to partly conflate the system of specific attitudes characterizing the gift and the very different reality of the exchanges that exist in various domains of social life. This confusion was not total since he considered the practice of gift giving and the attitudes it involved as “archaic forms of exchange,” in opposition to what he called “self-interested exchange,” which he viewed as characteristic of modern society. If we are to trust the meaning of words, we can only qualify a gift as a “gift” if a benefit in return is not systematically guaranteed. Of course, this does not imply that the gift must be disinterested. But what may be viewed as the risk or the inherent greatness of the gift is precisely that it is, essentially, a unidirectional gesture. Hence, the gift may, at most, be assimilated to an exchange if it is understood that it will be an exchange of a particular type, whose nature it is to be always problematic and without the guarantee of reciprocity. Ultimately, this was indeed how Mauss envisioned the problem posed by the analysis of the system of presentation of the gift. Mauss was careful to preserve intact the particular thematic of the gift, while confusing it, in some sequences of his reasoning, with a primitive or fundamental modality of the exchange. Anthropology is not necessarily an exact science. Lévi-Strauss read Mauss literally and refused to see in the gift something other than the objective reality of an exchange. For him, the gift is solely a sophisticated and complex form, whose true nature will generally escape, for this very reason, the indigenous people themselves, as they only have a partial and subjective view of the social universe in which they are immersed. Confronted with such an argument and without developing it further, it may be useful to note that the reasoning is not in fact that radically new, as it was always invoked by the partisans of the gift: of course, they sometimes brought up the idea that it was merely a disguised, and thereby advantageous, form of exchange. However, they obviously had some difficulties convincing anyone that a society existed in which such a conviction was universally shared. This is why they had to resort to the allegory and to a host of varied arguments to convince those to whom they spoke of the value of their analyses. The real innovation, which was transmitted from Mauss to Lévi-Strauss, was, firstly, to assume that primitive and archaic societies could be founded on systems of total presentations of the kind that were expressed through gift giving. But also, it was to do so while suggesting simultaneously that the functioning of such systems did not create any problem, if only possibly in the mind of rare indigenous theoreticians unable to understand the subtleties of their own societies. It must be noted as well that such a point of view could only be helped by the functionalism that has dominated most ethnographic research. The problematic of the gift From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss, therefore, one witnesses the short-lived resurgence of a problematic of the gift, the main interest of which was to open this field of reflection to a diversity of cultures and civilizations. But Lévi-Strauss, because he did not acknowledge, like Mauss, the essentially problematic nature of the gift, struggled on the contrary to assimilate the moments that characterized it as a complex form of exchange. It must be added that, unfortunately building upon what was the most arguable in Mauss’ theses in the framework of his own argumentation, Lévi-Strauss adopted a conception of primitive societies in which the gift, now classified among other categories of exchange, ends up losing its specificity entirely. It is in such a context that we should consider what was lost when the reflection on the gift was cut off, under cover of scientism, from the ancient tradition to which this debate was related. Thus was ignored the most fundamental fact that there is no automatism in the gift and that there never was any. The exchange or the gift: Illustration for a reflection A society based on the gift: it is a dream and a utopia that inspired many reflections and beautiful works of art in the Western tradition. We will give a last illustration, which does not mark a clearly identifiable evolution in our societies but rather reveals the boundless imagination of people (of males in particular, in this case) and of their cultures. We started our investigation by the analysis of the word charis, which led us to refer to Vernant’s analyses concerning this notion: In this connection, one of the essential aspects of Greek charis should be emphasized: charis is the divine power manifest in all aspects of gift giving and reciprocity (the round of generous liberality, the cordial exchange of gifts), which, in spite of all divisions, spins a web of reciprocal obligations, and one of the oldest of all functions of charis is a woman's giving herself to a man. (Vernant [1965] 2006: 163) Figure 8: The Three Graces, Robert Delaunay, 1912, private collection. Therefore is it difficult to conceive of a more total reversal in perspective than Lévi-Strauss’ when he wrote in a scandalous conclusion that “the emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged” (Lévi-Strauss [1949] 1969: 496). By considering the subjects of the gift only as the objects of an exchange, the specificity of the notion of gift was lost entirely. In such a perspective, it is not surprising that the taking into account of notions such as charis, gratia, amor, and their equivalents in other cultures disappeared completely from anthropological considerations on alliance. Incidentally, knowing that Lévi-Strauss was a lover of figurative painting, and considering that his own work unknowingly transformed it into complex sets of abstract kinship schemes, we may wonder what he really thought of his personal contribution to the iconography of the three Graces. Acknowledgments Denis Vidal would like to thank Yves Goudineau, Michel Izard, Gérard Lenclud, Anne de Sales, Carlo Severi, and Alexis Tadié for their comments and their recommendation that this text be published. References Benveniste, Émile. (1969) 1973. Indo-European language and society. Translated by Elizabeth Palmer. London: Faber & Faber. Boyer, Pascal 1986. “The ‘empty’ concepts of traditional thinking: A semantic and pragmatic description.” Man (N. S.) 21 (1): 50–64 Chantraine, Pierre. 1980. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: Histoire des mots. Paris: Klincksieck. Deonna, Waldemar 1930. “Le groupe des trois grâces et sa descendance.” Revue Archéologique XXXI: 274–332 Detienne, Marcel. (1972) 1994. The gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek mythology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Firth, Raymond William. (1901) 1965. Primitive Polynesian economy. 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge and K. Paul. Goldschmidt, Victor 2011. “The Stoic system and the idea of time (1953).” In French philosophy since 1945 : Problems, concepts, inventions, edited by Etienne Balibar, John Rajchman, and Anne Boyman, 153–58 New York: New Press. Gsell, Stéphane. (1877) 1969. “Gratiae.” In Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines: D'après les textes et les monuments, edited by Charles Daremberg and Edmond Saglio, 16658–67. Paris: Hachette. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1969. The elementary structures of kinship. Translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. (1950) 1987. Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss. Translated by Felicity Baker. London: Taylor & Francis. Mauss, Marcel. (1925) 1990. The gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. London: Routledge. Moussy, Claude. 1966. Gratia et sa famille . . . Vol. 25. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Sahlins, Marshall. (1972) 2004. Stone Age economics. London: Routledge. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. 1961. Des beinfaits. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. ———. 2011. On benefits. Translated by Miriam T. Griffin and Brad Inwood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Servius. 2004. Servius’ commentary on Book four of Virgil’s Aeneid: An annotated translation. Translated by Christopher Michael McDonough, Richard E. Prior, and Mark Stansbury. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. Seznec, Jean. (1940) 1961. The survival of the pagan gods: The mythological tradition and its place in Renaissance humanism and art. Translated by Barbara F. Sessions. New York: Harper. Sperber, Dan. 1985. On anthropological knowledge: Three essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 1965. Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs: études de psychologie historique. Paris: F. Maspéro. ———. (1965) 2006. Myth and thought among the Greeks. Translated by Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books. Veyne, Paul. (1976) 1990. Bread and circuses: Historical sociology and political pluralism. Translated by Oswyn Murray and Brian Pearce. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press. Wind, Edgar. 1958. Pagan mysteries in the Renaissance. London: Faber & Faber. Les trois Grâces ou l'allégorie du don: Contribution à l'histoire d'une idée en anthropologie Résumé : ‘L’essai sur le don’ de Marcel Mauss est une des textes les plus fameux de toute l'anthropologie ; certainement aussi un de ceux qui ont suscité les débats les plus nombreux et les plus variés dans cette discipline. Paradoxalement, ces débats ont assez peu porté sur la tradition culturelle dans laquelle ce texte s'inscrivait de manière manifeste. Je voudrais montrer ainsi que les réflexions de Marcel Mauss sur le don prolongent, tout en le modifiant, un très ancien courant de réflexion sur le don, basé sur un ensemble de notions apparentées ayant joué un rôle crucial dans la culture européenne : charis, gratia, grâce. Je voudrais montrer aussi, le rôle central joué dans ce même contexte par une allégorie et par un thème iconographique qui s'est perpétué pratiquement sans discontinuer depuis la Grèce archaîque : celui des Trois Grâces. Denis VIDAL is a social anthropologist whose research is primarily in India. He is a Senior Research Fellow at IRD (URMIS-Paris Diderot) and an Associate Professor at the Museum of the Quai Branly and at EHESS (Paris). His actual research focuses on visual culture and on new ways of approaching technology from an anthropological perspective. Denis VidalÉcole des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales190–198 avenue de France75244 Paris cedex 13Francedvidal@ehess.fr ___________________ Publisher’s note: This article is a translation of Vidal, Denis. 1991. “Les trois Grâces ou l'allégorie du don: Contribution à l'histoire d'une idée en anthropologie,” Gradhiva 9: 30–47. 1. Translated from the French edition of Seneca, Des bienfaits (1961: 7), as cited by Denis Vidal in the original version of this article. Our choice to not use the 2011 English translation for this epigraph results from the rhetorical features of the French translation, which offer “a series of questions” as a translation of the Latin passage. The English translation of the same passage (see Seneca 2011: 20) is not rendered in the same interrogative voice.—Trans. 2. Seneca is not cited once in the exhaustive name index of the complete works of Marcel Mauss published by Les éditions de Minuit in France. 3. Paul Huvelin (1873–1924) was a legal historian and contributor to Émile Durkheim’s L’Année Sociologique. He taught Roman law at the University of Lyon, and notably wrote a famous thesis, “Droit individuel et magie,” exploring the relation between magic and the law. 4. Georges Ambroise Davy (1883–1976) was a French legal sociologist and, like Huvelin, a contributor to L’Année Sociologique. He was a close disciple of Marcel Mauss. 5. This is the translator’s English translation of Vernant’s endnote from the original French edition; it seems that this endnote was lost during the translation of the work into English. —Trans. 6. One may refer to Gsell ([1877] 1969) for further analysis on this matter, and a list of references on the Charites and their cult. 7. For a survey of the iconographic corpus of that period, see Gsell (1969: 1664–65). 8. One should note here the substantial compatibility between Seneca’s analysis in that particular context and the Stoic doctrine regarding space and time, presented in Goldschmidt’s work (2011). 9. To learn more on evergetism in Hellenistic antiquity, both in Greece and Rome, see Veyne ([1976] 1990).  

Favret-Saada: Being affected This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Jeanne Favret-Saada. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) Being affected Jeanne Favret-Saada, Ecole pratique des hautes études Translated from the French by Mylene Hengenand Matthew Carey   Between 1969 and 1972, I conducted fieldwork in rural North-West France, protecting it from media curiosity by vaguely referring to it as the “Western French Bocage [Hedgerow region].” I gathered two types of material from this research: a field journal in which I recounted daily events in great detail, and a typed account of some thirty dewitching seances that I had tape-recorded. Two books were drafted from the material in my field journal: Les Mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1977), and Corps pour corps. Enquete sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1988). The first one progressively introduced the reader to a world that is, in theory, inconceivable for him—that of Bocage witchcraft. The text consists of, one the one hand, accounts of events, narrated by the ethnographer who engaged with them; and on the other hand, an ethnographic commentary that relates them to wider aspects of Bocage culture and so renders them intelligible. The dividing line between the different voices present in the text (those of Bocage peasants, the narrator, and the interpreter-commentator) should be immediately clear to the reader: the ethnography endeavors to assign a particular form of discourse to each. In the second book, Corps pour corps, the narrator and the commentator become one, since it is a personal diary. The text describes my progressive entry into local witchcraft, the way bewitched peasants and their dewitchers gradually accepted my presence, and the difficulties I had in submitting to their demands. It ends on the day when, after eighteen months on the field, I made an appointment for myself with a dewitcher called Madame Flora. Ten years later, the typed record of these séances, as well as their analysis, allowed my colleague J. Contreras and I to identify the various mechanisms of dewitching: these had in fact completely passed me by during my time on the field, and so did not figure in my journal. A dozen articles dealing with this research were published in social science or psychoanalysis journals during the 1980s. In 2009, I returned to this work in Désorceler, a book that concludes the series of texts on Bocage witchcraft. Following my return from the Bocage, I also underwent psychoanalysis, approaching it not as the therapy to rule them all but rather as a therapy among others. This led me to reflect on what a general anthropology of therapy might look like—one that encompassed African rites of affliction, shamanism and Bocage dewitching, as well as a century and a half of a European and American psychotherapies. The main difference between Western psychotherapies and those more commonly studied by ethnologists is that the latter radically isolate and treat the individual psyche as atom, whereas the former (each in their own way) engage with the psyche, the body, life, certain others, material possessions, etc. as a whole. The comparative analysis of these therapeutic treatments together allowed us to interrogate psychotherapy’s theoretical assumptions, and offer a comparative analysis of the mechanisms of therapy. It is within this wider framework that one must read Désorceler, despite the fact that it mainly deals with Bocage dewitching. The book is made up of disjointed chapters, which resist any attempt to craft them into a continuous narrative: nobody could claim to know all of the mechanisms of therapeutic treatment—except of course for the founders of particular doctrines, intent on transforming them into coherent autonomous schools of therapy. Others (practitioners of these therapies, for example), are content to put a certain number of these mechanisms into practice, or, if they are ethnographers, to identify them. Désorceler explores these mechanisms throughout its five chapters. “Prélude” presents the Bocage, along with witchcraft and my conceptual journey into this universe. “La sorcellerie sans le savoir’ demonstrates, by analyzing the use of language and the different types of narrative present in witchcraft, why we should consider witchcraft to be a form of therapy. “L’invention d’une thérapie” compares witchcraft narratives encountered in the Bocage in the early 1970s, with those collected there a century before. All of these narratives refer to “tradition,” but we see this “tradition”‘s content change from one century to another. In addition, the stories I brought back from the field share certain elements with 20th century psychotherapy—whilst retaining a certain enthrallment to “tradition.” “Ah la féline, la sale voisine...” circumstantially examines the means by which Madame Flora, a dewitcher, brings about change in her patients unbeknownst to them. More specifically, she sets in train a “clutch of violence”: a formal device deployed through a complex maneuvering of rhetoric and voice. Finally, “Les ratés de l’ordre symbolique” explores social factors at work in a bout of witchcraft: why it only strikes peasant families, or artisans and shopkeepers working in family businesses; why the bewitched all agree on the fact that their misfortunes began when they became self-employed; why they only accuse their neighbors of having bewitched them, and never their kin. “Etre affecté,” the book’s conclusion, can be read as a stand-alone work: its first version was in fact a lecture given at the American Anthropological Association’s 1987 Congress in Chicago. It is, however, best seen as the culminating point of a three-volume anthropology of witchcraft, two volumes of which describe in detail the situations in which I, the ethnographer, was “caught,” as well as the ways in which I came to understand and accept (or not) the demands made of me. This methodological and epistemological text emerges out of the condition of being “caught” in witchcraft: a condition I was forced to submit to in order to access events relating to it. I deconstruct the confusing comfort-blanket of “participant observation” (being outside while imagining oneself completely inside), and expand on the wider methodological and theoretical usefulness of the notion of “being affect-ed.” * My work on Bocage witchcraft led me to reconsider the notion of affect and the importance of exploring it. Both as a way of addressing a critical dimension of fieldwork (the state of being affected) and as a starting point for developing an anthropology of therapy (be it “savage” and exotic or “scholarly” and Western). And finally as a way of rethinking anthropology itself. Indeed, my efforts to challenge anthropology’s paradoxical treatment of affect as a notion were inspired by my experiences of fieldwork (of dewitching1) and psychoanalysis (therapy). The central role of affect in human experience has frequently been neglected or denied; and when it is acknowledged, this is either (as testified to by an abundant body of Anglo-American literature) in order to demonstrate that affect is a purely cultural construction and has no reality outside of this construction, or (as testified to by French ethnology, as well as psychoanalysis), to condemn affect to irrelevancy by forcing it into the realm of representation. My work, on the contrary, focuses on the idea that the efficacy of therapy depends on an engagement with non-representational forms of affect. More generally, my work calls into question anthropology’s parochial emphasis on the ideal aspects of the human experience, on the cultural production of “understanding,” to employ a term derived from classical philosophy. It seems to me that there is an urgent need to rehabilitate old-fashioned “sensibility,” the more so as we are now better equipped to address it than seventeenth century philosophers were. First, however, a few reflections on the manner in which I obtained my field-data. I could not but be affected by witchcraft, and I developed a methodological approach that subsequently allowed me to put this experience to use. This approach was neither participant observation, nor, above all, empathy. When I went to the Bocage, in 1969, there already existed an abundant literature on witchcraft, divided into two separate currents, each unaware of the other: that of the European folklorists (who had recently upgraded themselves to the status of “ethnologists,” though their way of approaching the subject had remained unchanged), and that of Anglo-American anthropologists, especially Africanists and functionalists. The European folklorists had no direct knowledge of rural witchcraft: following Van Gennep’s recommendations, they conducted regional studies, meeting with local elites—the people least likely to know anything about it—or presenting them with questionnaires, and then tacking on a few interviews with peasants to see if “people still believed in it.” The responses received were as uniform in nature as the questions: “Not here, but in the neighboring village—they’re backwards . . . “ followed by a few skeptical anecdotes, ridiculing believers. In short, French ethnologists interested in witchcraft avoided both participation and observation—indeed, this is still largely the case today (Favret-Saada 1987). Anglo-American anthropologists at least claimed to practice “participant-observation.” It took me some time to work out what they actually meant by this curious expression, in empirical terms. In rhetoric, it’s called an oxymoron: observing while participating, or participating while observing—this is about as straightforward as eating a burning hot ice cream. In the field, my colleagues seemed to combine two types of behavior: an active stance, involving regular work with paid informants whom they would interrogate and observe; and a passive one, in which they attended events linked to witchcraft (disputes, visits to mediums, etc.). The first type of behavior can scarcely be described as “participation” (though the informant does indeed appear to “participate” in the ethnographer’s work); and in the second case, participation seems to mean trying to be present, which is the minimum requirement for observation. In other words, what mattered, for these anthropologists, was not participation, but observation. They had in fact a rather narrow conception of it: their analysis of witchcraft was reduced to that of accusations because, they said, those were the only “facts” an ethnographer could “observe.” For them, accusation was a type of “behavior.” In fact, it was the principal form of behavior present in witchcraft (its archetypal action), as it was the only one that could be empirically proven to exist. The rest was little more than native error and imagination. (Let us note in passing that, for these authors, speaking is neither a behavior nor an act capable of being observed.) These anthropologists gave clear answers to one question and one question only—in a given society, who accuses whom of witchcraft?—and disregarded almost all the others: How does one enter into the state of being bewitched? How does one escape from it? What are the ideas, experiences and practices of the bewitched and of witches? Even an author as precise as Turner does not help us to answer these questions and we are forced to return to the work of Evans-Pritchard’s (1937). Generally speaking, the relevant literature blurred the boundaries between a number of terms that it would have been well to distinguish: “truth” overlapped with “reality,” which in turn was confused with the “observable” (this term also confusing empirically attestable knowledge with that knowledge which could be accessed independently of native discourse) and then with such terms as “fact,” “act” and “behavior.” The only thing that united this terminological nebula was that each term could be contrasted with its symmetrical opposite: “error” overlapped with “imaginary,” which in turn overlapped with “unobservable,” “belief,” and finally onto native “discourse.” Nothing is in fact as uncertain as the status of native speech in these texts: sometimes, it is classified as a behavior (as with accusations) and sometimes as a source of false propositions (as when witchcraft is used to explain illness). The act of speech itself, however, is magicked away and native discourse is reduced to itsend-product—acts of speech mistaken for propositions. Symbolic activity, then, is little more than false propositions. As we see, all these confusions circle around one common point: the disqualification of native speech and the promotion of that of the ethnographer - whose activity seems to consist of making a detour through Africa in order to verify that only he holds . . . we’re not sure what, a set of vaguely related notions that, for him, apparently equal the truth. Let us go back to my work on witchcraft in the Bocage. As I read the Anglo-American literature to help understand my field, I was struck by a curious obsession present in all of the prefaces. The authors—and the great Evans-Prichard is no exception—regularly denied the possibility of rural witchcraft in contemporary Europe: it was seemingly long since dead and buried. Mair, Evans-Pritchard, Douglas, Marwick, Thomas—to cite just a few well-known authors—always discuss it in the past tense.2 Marwick is particularly explicit about this. According to him, the end of criminal trials for witchcraft, in the seventeenth century, represented our “emancipation from widespread belief in witchcraft.” The idea that witchcraft might, in our societies, have continued to bubble along under the surface is “debatable,” a “figment of the imagination.” “In modern society,” witchcraft has been reduced to “myths and fairy-tales,” it has fled to the realm of fantasy. Those practices that still today claim to be “witchcraft” are mere “artificial” cults and “complete fabrications.” Marwick doubtless has in mind the famous British covens, a recent urban practice that should not, in fact, be associated with rural witchcraft (Marwick 1979: 11).3 However, the refusal, within Anglo-American anthropological literature, to admit the existence of rural witchcraft in Europe, was always coupled with reflections on the distance that “we” are meant to maintain with witchcraft. It lies outside our immediate experience and escapes our understanding. So, possessed as we are of a “European spirit,” we must take a detour via exotic anthropology in order to represent it (Middleton, Winter, 1963). Or it is claimed that it only exists in “small-scale societies . . . out of touch with modern science” and with “limited medical knowledge.” Witchcraft being the medicine of illiterate, ignorant peoples, we Europeans, with our education and medical knowledge, have no use for it (Mair 1969: 9).4 And so these anthropologists, supposedly practitioners of the most rigorous form of empiricism, engaged in an absurd attempt to recreate the Great Divide between “Us” and “Them” (“we” also believed in witches, but that was three hundred years ago, when “we” were “them”), and thereby to protect the ethnologist, this acultural entity whose mind only contained true propositions, from contamination by his object. Perhaps this was possible in Africa, but I was in France. Bocage peasants obstinately refused to play the Great Divide with me, as they knew full well where it would end: I would be on the side of truth (that of knowledge, science, the real, see above), and they, of ignorance. The press, television, the Church, school, medicine—all these national bodies of ideological control—were ready to pillory them just as soon as an example of witchcraft went wrong and led to some tragedy. For a few days, some parcel of countryside was transformed into a hotbed of infamy: people believed in witches, accused their neighbors of witchcraft, and collectively cultivated passionate hatred for it. According to the press, the lives of these peasants were not merely insignificant, they were despicable, morally repugnant, shadowed from the light of reason, and blind even to straightforward common sense. And so, Bocage peasants protected themselves from these well-intentioned institutions by building a wall of silence which they justified with statements such as: “if you’ve never been ‘taken’ you can’t speak about witchcraft,” or “we can’t talk to them about it.” Thus, they only spoke to me about it once they thought that I too had been “taken”—i.e. when uncontrollable reactions on my part showed that I had been affected by the real (and often devastating) effects of particular words or ritual acts. Some people took me for a dewitcher and asked me to help out, whilst others thought I was bewitched and offered their help. Notables aside (who were happy to speak of witchcraft the better to dismiss it), nobody ever discussed these things with me because I was an ethnographer. I, myself, wasn’t quite sure whether or not I was bewitched. Of course, I never believed in a propositional sense that a witch might harm me with charms or spells, but then I doubt that the peasants did either. Rather, they asked of me that I personally (rather than scientifically) experience the real effects of the particular network of human communication that is witchcraft. In other words: they wanted me to enter into it as a partner, to stake the contours of my then existence in the process. Initially, I oscillated between these two pitfalls: if I “participated,” fieldwork would become a personal activity, that is to say the opposite of work, but if I attempted to “observe,” meaning keeping myself at a distance, I’d have nothing to “observe.” In the first case, my scientific project was threatened, but in the second, it was ruined. Though I didn’t know, when I was in the field, what I was doing, nor why, I am struck by the clarity of my methodological choices: everything happened as though I had undertaken to make “participation” an instrument for knowledge. During my meetings with the bewitched and the dewitchers, I let myself be affected, without seeking to study what they were doing, nor even to understand and remember it. Once home, I wrote up a sort of chronicle of these enigmatic events (often, situations occurred that were so intensely charged that they would render me incapable of this a posteriori note taking.) This field journal, which was for a long time my only material, had two objectives. The first was very short-term: to try to understand what they wanted from me, to find an answer to such vital questions as: “Who does this person take me for?” (a woman bewitched, a dewitcher); “What does so-and-so want from me?” (that I dewitch him . . . ). And I needed to find the right answer, because next time, I’d be asked to act. In general, however, this was beyond me: the ethnographic literature on witchcraft, both French and Anglo-Saxon, did not allow me to figure the positional system that constitutes witchcraft. Instead, I was discovering this system by staking my own self in the process. The other objective was more long-term: I never accepted that what was, above all, a fascinating personal experience, would remain beyond my understanding. At the time, I wasn’t sure for whom or quite why I wanted to understand. For myself? For anthropology? Or even for European consciousness? But I organized my field journal so that I might make something of it later on. My notes were maniacally precise, so that one day I might re-hallucinate the experience and so—because I would no longer be “taken” but rather “retaken”—finally understand them. Josée Contreras and I rewrote and published parts of this journal as Corps pour corps. Those who have read it may perhaps have noticed that there is nothing in there to link it to the journals of Malinowski or Métraux. The field journal was for them a private space where they could finally let go, find themselves again, outside the hours of work during which they constrained themselves to put on a brave face in front of the natives. In short, a space for personal recreation, in the literal sense of the word. Private or subjective reflections are, to the contrary, absent from my own journal, except when particular events from my personal life were evoked in conversation with my interlocutors, that is to say included in the network of witchcraft communication. One aspect of my fieldwork experiences was all but untellable. It was so complex that it defied memorization and, in any event, it affected me too much. I am speaking of the dewitching séances that I attended either as a woman bewitched (my personal life was closely scrutinized and I was ordered to alter it), or as an onlooker, present at the behest of either client or dewitcher (I was repeatedly ordered to intervene on the spot.) Initially, I took a great many notes once I got home, but this was principally done to soothe the anxiety of having to engage personally. Once I accepted the place that was assigned to me during the séances, I practically never took notes again: everything went too fast, I let situations unfold without second guessing anything and, from the first séance to the last, I understood practically nothing of what was happening. But I discreetly recorded some thirty of the roughly two hundred séances I attended, in order to constitute a body of material on which I could later work. In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I’d like to point out that “participating” and being affected are categorically not techniques for the acquisition of knowledge via empathy, however one defines it. I shall now explore two of its principle definitions and show that neither corresponds to my experience in the field. According to the first definition, drawn from the Encyclopaedia of Psychology, empathizing consists of “experiencing by proxy the feelings, perceptions and thoughts of another.” This type of empathy, then, necessarily implies distance: it is because we are not in the place of the other that we attempt to represent or imagine what it would be like to be them—what we might feel, perceive and think. I, however, was in the native’s position, shaken by the feelings, perceptions and thoughts that affect those who are part of the system of witchcraft. I contend that one must occupy these positions rather than merely imagine them, for the simple reason that what occurs within them is literally unimaginable—at least for an ethnographer used to working on representations. When we are in such a position, we are bombarded with specific “intensities” (let us call them affects) that are, for the most part, unsignifiable. This position and the intensities that come with it must therefore be experienced: it is the only way to address them. The second conception of empathy—as Einfühlung, which we might translate as emotional communion—instead emphasizes the immediacy of communication, the interpersonal fusion one can reach via identification with another. This idea says little of the mechanism of identification, instead stressing its result: the fact that it allows for the knowledge of another’s affective states. I, on the contrary, would argue that occupying such a position in the witchcraft system in no way informs me of the affective state of another; occupying such a position affects me, meaning it mobilizes or modifies my own stock of images, without necessarily informing me of that of my partners. However—and this is crucial, as the type of knowledge I am aiming for hinges upon it—the mere fact of my occupying this position and being affected by it opens up the possibility of a specific form of communication: a necessarily involuntary form of communication, devoid of intentionality, and one that may or may not be verbal. When it is verbal, this is more or less what occurs: something (I cannot say what or why), drives me to speak about, say, unrepresented affect. For example, I might say to a peasant, in echo of something he previously said to me: “Actually, I dreamt that . . . ,” and I’d have a hard time explaining that “actually.” Or, my interlocutor might remark, a propos of nothing: “The other day, so and so told you that. . . . Today, you have these zits on your face. . . .” In both of these cases, the speaker implies that I have been affected. In the first example, the speaker is me, whilst in the second it is somebody else. And what of non-verbal communication? What is communicated and how? We are in fact dealing with the form of immediate communication invoked by the term Einfühlung. However, what is communicated to me is only the intensity with which the other is affected (the young Freud spoke of a “quantum of affect,” or an energetic charge). The images that, for he and he alone, are associated with this intensity, escape this form of communication. I, on my end, receive this energetic charge in my own, personal way: I might, for example, suffer a temporary blurring of vision, a quasi-hallucination, or a change in dimensional perception; or I might be overwhelmed by a sense of panic or massive anxiety. It is not necessary—and in fact not common—that this also be the case for my interlocutor: superficially, he may be completely unaffected. Let us suppose that instead of struggling against this state, I accept it as an act of communication regarding what I do not know. This pushes me to speak, but in the manner mentioned earlier (“You know what? I dreamt that . . .”), or to hold my tongue. In such instances, if I am able to forget that I am in the field, that I have my stockpile of questions to ask . . . , if I am able to tell myself that communication (ethnographic or not, that is no longer the problem) is taking place there and then, in this unbearable and incomprehensible fashion, then I can connect to a particular form of human experience—the state of being bewitched—because I am affected by it. When two people are affected, things pass between them that are inaccessible to the ethnographer; people speaks of things that ethnographers do not address; or they hold their tongues, but this too is a form of communication. By experiencing the intensities linked to such a position, it is in fact possible to notice that each one presents a specific type of objectivity: events can only occur in a certain order, one can only be affected in a certain way. As we can see, the fact that an ethnographer allows herself to be affected does not mean that she identifies with the indigenous point of view, nor that her fieldwork is little more than an “ego-trip.” Allowing oneself to be affected does however mean that that one risks seeing one’s intellectual project disintegrate. For if this intellectual project is omnipresent, nothing happens. But if something happens and the intellectual project is somehow still afloat at the end of the journey, then ethnography is possible. It has, I believe, four distinctive traits: Its starting point is the recognition that ordinary ethnographic communication—i.e., verbal, voluntary and intentional communication that seeks to discover the informant’s system of representations—is among the most impoverished forms of human communication. It is especially inept at providing information about non-verbal and involuntary aspects of experience.I note in passing that when an ethnographer reminisces about the key moments of his time in the field, he always speaks of situations where he was not capable of engaging in this impoverished form of communication, because he was overwhelmed by a situation and/or by his own affect. However, within ethnographies, these situations of involuntary communication, frequent as they are, are never analyzed as what they are: the “information” the ethnographer gleaned from them appear in the text, but with no reference to the affective intensity that accompanied their transmission: and this “information” is placed on the same level as information that emerged out of voluntary and intentional communication. We could in fact say that becoming a professional ethnographer is a matter of learning to disguise any particular episode of one’s experience in the field as an act of voluntary and intentional communication seeking to discover the informant’s system of representations. I, on the other hand, chose to grant those situations of involuntary and non-intentional communication an epistemological status: my ethnography consists of their repeated re-experience. The second distinctive trait of this ethnography is that the researcher must tolerate a form of split experience. Depending on the situation, she must either give precedence to that part of her that is affected, malleable, modified by the experience in the field, or to the part that wants to record the experience in order to understand it, and to make it into an object of science. The process of understanding is spread out in time and disjointed: in the instant one is the most affected, one cannot recount the experience. In the moment when it is recounted, one cannot understand it. The time for analysis comes later. The material collected is of a particular density, and its analysis inevitably leads us to break with certain well-established scientific certitudes. Take dewitching rituals. Had I never been thus affected, had I not taken part in so many informal episodes of witchcraft, I would have accorded a central importance to the rituals: first, because as an ethnographer I am supposed to privilege symbolic analysis; and second, because standard witchcraft narratives grant them pride of place. But, having spent so much time among the betwitched and the dewitchers, both within and without séances, having heard a wide variety of spontaneous conversation on witchcraft, in addition to formal representations of it, having experienced so many affects associated with certain specific instances of dewitching, having seen so many things done that were not part of the realm of ritual, I was made to understand the following:Ritual is an element—the most spectacular but not the only one—through which the dewitcher reveals the existence of “abnormal forces,” the life and death stakes of the crisis his clients are undergoing, and the possibility of victory. But this implies setting in motion a very complex therapeutic device both before and long after the ritual proper. This device can, of course, be described and understood, but only by if we are prepared to run the risk of “participating,” of being affected by it. It cannot simply be “observed.” And to conclude, a word on the implicit ontology of our discipline. Empiricist anthropology presupposes, among other things, the human subject’s essential transparency to himself. Yet my experience in the field—because it allowed space for non-verbal, non-intentional and involuntary communication, for the rise and free play of affective states devoid of representation—drove me to explore a thousand aspects of the subject’s essential opacity to himself. This notion is in fact as old as tragedy itself, and has been at the heart of all therapeutic literature for a century or more. It matters little what name is given to this opacity (e.g., “unconscious”): what is important, in particular for an anthropology of therapies, is to be able to posit it, and place it at the heart of our analyses. References Caro Baroja, Julio. 1972. Les Sorcières et leur monde. Paris: Gallimard. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Douglas, Mary. 1970. Witchcraft confessions and accusations. London: Tavistock Publications. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1937. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. London: Oxford University Press. (French translation, 1972. Sorcellerie, oracles et magie chez les Azande. Paris: Gallimard.) Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1977. Les Mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le Bocage. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1980. Deadly words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Translated by Catherine Cullen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1987. “Les culottes Petit Bateau. Dix ans d’études de la sorcellerie en France.” Gradhiva 3: 19–31. ———. 2009. Désorceler. Paris: Editions de L’Olivier. Favret-Saada, Jeanne and Josée Contreras. 1981. Corps pour corps: enquête sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage. Paris: Gallimard. Glass, Justine. 1965. Witchcraft. London: Neville Spearman. Mair, Lucy. 1969. Witchcraft. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Marwick, Max. 1970. Witchcraft and sorcery. London: Penguin Books. Middleton, John and Edward H. Winter, eds. 1963. Witchcraft and sorcery in East Africa. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the decline of magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Jeanne Favret-Saada is an anthropologist and author of Les Mots, la mort, les sorts. La sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1977, Gallimard; English translation, Deadly words: Witchcraft in the Bocage, translated by Catherine Cullen, Cambridge University Press, 1980) and Corps pour corps. Enquête sur la sorcellerie dans le Bocage (1981, Gallimard, co-authored with Josée Contreras). She has since published numerous other works, including Le Christianisme et ses juifs: 18002000 (Le Seuil, 2004), once more in collaboration with Josée Contreras, Algérie 1962-1964: essais d’anthropologie politique (Bouchene, 2005), Désorceler (Editions de L’Olivier, 2009) and Jeux d’ombres sur la scène de l’ONU. Droits humains et laïcité (Editions de L’Olivier, 2010). Publisher’s note: We are very grateful to Éditions de l’Olivier for giving us the permission to publish this translation of chapter six “Etre affecté,” from the author’s book Désorceler (Éditions de L’Olivier, 2009). ___________________ 1. The term dewitch (desorceler), and its derivatives, has also been translated as unwitch, notably in the author’s book Deadly words: Witchcraft in the Bocage, translated by Catherine Cullen (Cambridge University Press, 1980). 2. See Mair (1969), Evans-Pritchard (1937, 1972), Marwick (1970), Douglas (1970), Thomas (1971). J. Caro Baroja’s book, Les Sorcières et leur monde (1972) was translated into English, but its readers do not seem to draw any conclusions from the few pages where he notes the presence of peasant witchcraft in the Basque country. 3. On these present-day urban cults, see, for example, Glass (1965). To say that rural witchcraft disappeared in seventeenth century Europe is factually false, as attested to by eighteenth century reports of Episcopalian visits; in the nineteenth century, those of the prefects, certain criminal archives and the work of folklorists; finally, in the twentieth century, press and a few European ethnographic works dedicated to witchcraft. 4. I had a long conversation with her on the topic: faced with the empirical fact of rural witchcraft in France (with me as material witness), she immediately abandoned her initial position for that of the French folklorists. Evans-Pritchard, on the other hand, jokingly dismissed it, and I admired his 1937 monograph so much that I did not insist.

Baipurangi’s dreams This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © John Leavitt. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.2.042 TRANSLATION INTRODUCTION Baipurangi’s dreams The interface between ethnography and psychoanalysis in the work of Lucien Sebag John LEAVITT, Université de Montréal Lucien Sebag’s “Analysis of the dreams of a Guayaki Indian woman” appeared in Les Temps modernes in 1964. Never before translated into English, and never reprinted even in French, it marked a unique effort to combine ethnography among the Aché people of Paraguay with structural theory and psychoanalysis. This essay is an attempt to help orient the reader of Sebag’s work by sketching its context in the theoretical conjuncture of the times, in Sebag’s life and the body of his work, and in the history of the Aché people. Keywords: Lucien Sebag, dreams, Aché, structuralism, psychoanalysis It is possible that the dream is describing our common death. ... It would be for her death and my own that Baipurangi was weeping. But here there is no way to reach any kind of certainty.—Lucien Sebag, “Analysis of the dreams of a Guayaki Indian woman” Introduction In June of 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes, the flagship of the intellectual left in France and to a fair degree of French intellectual life in general, published a psychoanalytically inspired analysis of the dreams of a Guayaki (Aché) woman, carried out during fieldwork in Paraguay by the anthropologist Lucien Sebag (Sebag 1964b). The Aché are a hunting and gathering people who speak a language of the Tupí-Guaraní branch of the Tupían family (see an overview in Jensen 1999). They have lived for some hundreds of years in and out of the forests on the margins of territories controlled by numerically larger agricultural [498]populations: Guaraní, then Paraguayan peasant society. Aché “people” is the name these people use for themselves; the more widely known term Guayakí is an insulting name, apparently meaning “rabid rats” (Clastres 1968: 52, cited in Münzel 1973: 69, n. 1), used by surrounding Guaraní-speakers.1 The essay, which is now presented in an English translation for the first time—which has never to my knowledge been reprinted, and which is almost never referred to in the anthropological literature on dreams2—is one of the rare attempts to carry out an analysis that is both rigorously psychoanalytic, based on the particular history and repeating themes of a unique individual as these are deployed in her dreams, and rigorously anthropological. It is thus a potential model for rethinking the relationship between personal destiny and cultural frames. But the paper is also a historical object, and its historical value, given the identity and the subsequent fates of its author and its protagonists, should not be ignored. The paper foregrounds two individuals: Baipurangi, a young Aché woman, and the author-analyst Sebag, an anthropologist who came from Paris to Paraguay and stayed with the Aché for some eight months in 1963. In the paper, Sebag presents himself as a conscientious scholar who for scientific purposes is hearing the dreams and therefore also the confessions of an unhappy young woman; he presents Baipurangi as someone who is looking for a way out of a marriage to a man she does not want to be with. The affection between the two seems real, and is what perhaps stands out the most. But a consideration of sources outside this essay itself gives a sense of the emotional-cum-intellectual load carried by this apparently straightforward scholarly paper. Sebag himself, as it happens, was one of the intellectual heroes of the 1950s and early 1960s, a central player in the theoretical-political debates of the time: a Marxist philosopher and activist who was both involved in the psychoanalytic movement (he was Jacques Lacan’s analysand) and a player in the development of structural anthropology (he was Claude Lévi-Strauss’ most brilliant student and, many felt and feel, his evident successor). Sebag’s passion and connectivity ended tragically: he killed himself in January 1965, some seven months after the publication of the dream paper. As for Baipurangi, both this paper and a book on the Aché written by Pierre Clastres, Sebag’s companion in the field, give us an idea of the double drama that was her life: she was a young woman looking to change her situation within a group whose world was in the process of being destroyed. Here, I will offer a modest triple contextualization for the paper on dreams: of the paper itself and its place in the history of anthropological and psychoanalytic theory; of Sebag and his personal and intellectual destiny; of Baipurangi, her people, and their fate and struggles in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.[499] Sebag’s paper on Aché dreams “An absolutely novel attempt to unite psychoanalytic and anthropological methods in a study of an entirely new order.” This is how his childhood friend the archeologist Jean-Pierre Darmon characterized Lucien Sebag’s dream paper in a memorial to Sebag published in their hometown of Tunis in 1966. Some fifty years later, this looks like a fair judgment. Sebag’s paper is, as far as I know, unique in its genre: an extended—we might say longitudinal—study of a series of dreams dreamed by a single person belonging to a society with very different life patterns from those of the analyst, undertaken by someone with training both in anthropology and in psychoanalysis, and drawing on structural methods of analysis and interpretation. The only thing comparable is George Devereux’s book Reality and dream (Devereux [1951] 1969), which goes through a series of dreams of a Blackfoot war veteran. But Devereux’s theoretical bases, drawing on orthodox Freudianism and Culture and Personality theory, give his analysis a very different tone from the thoroughgoing structuralism that characterizes Sebag’s essay. Sebag’s paper also takes its place as one of a series of what now seem like—and to a degree at the time seemed like—incredibly ambitious attempts by him to synthesize psychoanalysis, structuralism, and Marxism, and at the same time to grant phenomenology and personal experience their due (see Karsenti 2005; D’Onofrio 2005). Sebag was a dedicated Marxist with a real sympathy for phenomenology and existentialism; he felt nonetheless that the nexus of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss (cf. Zafiropoulos [2003] 2016) represented a major transformation in the human sciences and the key to a far more rigorous understanding of human society and human nature—something that could only be helpful in the struggle to improve human conditions. In a series of essays in the early 1960s, Sebag defended Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism against what he felt were misrepresentations and misunderstandings: first against Jean-Paul Sartre’s romantic historicism in an essay on “History and structure” (Sebag 1962) that would later be incorporated into his book Marxisme et structuralisme (Sebag 1964a); then against Paul Ricoeur’s attempt to limit myth analysis to non-Western societies, in a ringing defense of the philosophical sophistication of mythic thought (Sebag 1965, 1971). In each of these texts Sebag follows the same strategy. First he identifies opposing positions then tries to clear up misrepresentations, and in each case this clarification amounts to a defense of the structural method. But there is always a step beyond this, toward something else: a continuing recognition of the importance of the subject, the individual, interpretation, and personal experience. In the end, for Sebag, one comes back to oneself, to one’s own lived experience.3 This openness to phenomenology, to the lived and the personal, is not surprising. Unlike both Lacan, who was a medical man, and Lévi-Strauss, whose aversion for phenomenology and desire to go beyond the surfaces of things was quite [500]explicit (see, for instance, Lévi-Strauss 1955: 60–66), Sebag saw the point of phenomenology and continued to be sympathetic to the study of subjective experience for its own sake. Both of his books end with a return to the individual and his or her own experience. Sebag, after having gone through a strict structural analysis of Pueblo mythology, writes, “a hermeneutic return becomes possible, and . . . I am still concerned with the stories a native of Acoma could tell me” (1971: 485). Here, I would like to go into more detail on three important or problematic aspects of this paper: first, Sebag’s distinctive take on the relationship between myths and dreams; second, issues raised on the nature of Aché society and history; third, limits of the paper as read fifty years on. Myths and dreams One could say that the essential theme in the dream paper is respect: respect for the text of the dreams, respect for the specifics of the ethnographic context, respect for the dreamer and her dream process, and, methodologically, respect for the autonomy and specificity of what might, perhaps unfortunately, be called two levels of analysis: that of the individual subject with his or her own personal history and the continuing traces derived from that history; and that of the social institutions, the encounter with which led to the production of this subject. Dreams can be analyzed neither in isolation from their social context nor as a mere expression of that context. These principles derive from what was perhaps a fragile cross-disciplinary collaboration between structural anthropology, with its inspiration from structural linguistics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, inspired in part by structural anthropology and itself drawing heavily on linguistics (see a discussion in Wilden 1968).4 At the beginning of Sebag’s paper, he lays out the rules of interpretation he will be following. There are two. First, interpret a dream in the syntagmatic context of the series of dreams of which it is part. Insofar as it is possible let the dreams comment on each other, allow interpretation of a symbol in a given dream to be guided by its appearance and role in other dreams. Second, read the dream symbols and events in light of the (paradigmatic) ethnographic context, including what the interpreter knows about dreamer, her history, and her current life. This broad, ideally encyclopedic ethnography is there as a background to be referred to at any point. Note that this more or less the method Lévi-Strauss ([1955] 1963) proposes for the analysis of myths: to recognize that myth is a discourse, a form of language; to re-place the myth in the cycle or series of which it is part, look for repeating [501]patterns—images, events, themes—appearing through the cycle and use these as guides to interpretation; to interpret myth symbols in the context of other symbols appearing in the same myth or the same cycle, which define it by contrast (see especially Lévi-Strauss 1962); to consider the whole, initially at least, not as an expression of a postulated universal humanity but in terms of the society that gave rise to the myths.5 Myths are not dreams, and personal productions should not be confused with collective productions. Yet Lévi-Strauss’ view of myths and Sigmund Freud’s view of dreams have something important in common. What Nicole Belmont says of fairy tales applies a fortiori to myths: “The fairy tale, like the dream . . . presents a manifest content under which one suspects that there is a latent content” (Belmont 1999: 214; my translation). Freud’s reading of dreams, Lévi-Strauss’s reading of myths, are readings at two levels, calling for a method of interpretation. In fact, Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of myths is directly inspired by Freud’s interpretation of dreams, especially as carried out in The interpretation of dreams. This is clear from the chapter on “How to become an anthropologist” in Lévi-Strauss’ autobiographical essay Tristes tropiques (1955, chapter 6), an extended discussion of finding hidden messages “under” surface messages. But this is analysis, not replacement: the specifics of the surface text must be respected; they hold the signs of what lies beneath. The respective modes of production of dreams and myths are, of course, completely different. Dreams are messages sent by the dreamer to the dreamer, while myths are messages that are elaborated over generations, with the constant possibility of adjustment and transformation as the story is retold and passed from teller to hearer to teller. Yet there is a parallel between dream texts and myth texts—not an identity or a direct derivation in either direction, but a parallel. Both are texts, first of all, and more specifically syntagmatic narratives, narratives of a series of images and events. Second, these are narratives that seem to lack surface coherence, that suggest, as we have seen, that there is more going on than the manifest story. Given the specificities of their respective modes of production, it may be argued that this more going on is made up of messages of importance to the subject in the case of dreams, to the multigenerational collectivity in the case of myths. In both cases we are dealing with coded messages, messages that for one reason or another the dreamer or the tellers and hearers of the myth are not ready to utter in a direct form. Lévi-Strauss holds that myth is a form of language, and the model he draws on is from structural phonology. But myths are texts, not phonemes, or morphemes, or sentences. The analysis of texts was already the domain of the discipline of philology; modern linguistics has until recently operated primarily on lower levels, up to and including that of the sentence. The principles Lévi-Strauss actually uses to analyze [502]myths, and which Sebag will use to analyze dreams—that is, respect for the text and respect for the context—are the principles of good philology, the art, as Friedrich Nietzsche said, of reading slowly (Nietzsche [1886] 1982: 5). * * * Respect for text and respect for context motivate Sebag’s critique of some alternative approaches at the end of the dream paper. He uses exactly this kind of critique in his book on Pueblo myth, where he attacks “historical, psychological, or psychoanalytic theories of myth” for immediately replacing the myth text itself with another level that is supposed to hold its secret. . . . The coherence that [these approaches] seek to introduce is an external coherence. . . . [For them] the myth may be merely a transposition of certain historical events that have been picked up and treated as exemplary by the collective imagination; it may be an attempt to respond to the intellectual concerns of those who seek to interpret the movements of the stars and planets; it may illustrate the Oedipal conflicts that constitute all subjectivity, or, again, may combine atemporal archetypes which are deposited in the soul and give it its depth. (Sebag 1971: 454; my translation) In the dream paper, Sebag criticizes three approaches to dream analysis for neglecting either the specificities of the text or those of the context. First, he attacks a common anthropological mode of defining the person entirely in terms of sociocultural norms. He calls this culturalism; what he is alluding to are primarily North American tendencies, which, starting in the 1920s but reaching a peak in the culture and personality, modal personality, and national character studies of the 1940s and 1950s, define cultural norms and locate individuals in terms of fit to or deviation from these norms (see Bock 1988). Such an approach in anthropology was compatible with the dominant North American mode of psychoanalysis as ego psychology, which saw the goal of analysis as strengthening the analysand’s ego, itself a cultural construct, and promoting good adjustment of the subject to his or her sociocultural milieu. All of this was anathema to Lacan (see, for instance, the attack on “adaptation” in Lacan [1953] 1977: 38; cf. Turkle 1978: 7–8, 53–54), then to Sebag, for whom the subject always exceeds what it is identified with and what defines it for the milieu. For Lacan, the ego was a paranoid construct, and the goal of psychoanalysis was by no means the patient’s adaptation to cultural norms, but the patient’s discovery of his or her truth. In a sort of aside to this discussion of culturalism, Sebag proposes an equally sharp critique of its inverse: the orthodox psychoanalytic tendency to explain social institutions as projections of personal problems and obsessions. Freud himself launched this mode of explanation in Totem and taboo, first published in 1913, which sees all of human civilization as a reaction formation to an originary trauma of killing the father. This kind of explanation of whole cultural traditions as ways of dealing with the standard Freudian constructs (e.g., penis envy or the Oedipus complex), sometimes called an “ontogenetic foundation of society,” was extended by Géza Róheim (cf. Muensterberger and Nichols 1974) and continues to be a major tactic for “the psychoanalytic study of society” (the name of an important series of publications since 1960). Sebag sees it as the replacement of one level with [503]another, “a confusion of structure and event,” and therefore as an abuse. He is not alone in this: most anthropologists who are not psychoanalytically oriented (not to mention many who are) see deriving social institutions directly from individual complexes as unjustified, to say the least. Finally, Sebag gives a synopsis and critique of C. G. Jung’s use of archetypes; these few pages probably represent the most important structuralist critique of Jung that we possess. For Jung, certain symbols figuring in the dreams of an individual—notably symbols that correspond to those of myths—are archetypal, part of the general human heritage that he calls the collective unconscious. Lévi-Strauss ([1955] 1963) had attacked this view of the symbols found in myths, arguing that to attribute a universal human meaning to any given symbol was the same kind of enterprise as attributing a universal meaning to a given speech sound. On the contrary, Lévi-Strauss argues, just as phonemes serve as elements of larger signifying systems, so do the images offered in myths: to know what a mother or a raven means in a given myth requires consideration of the cultural background and of other myths of the same cycle (Lévi-Strauss 1962). Sebag brings this kind of critique back to dream symbolism. If Jung is right, then any human being can serve equally well as the source for interpretation of archetypal symbols; the dreamer him- or herself has no privilege. Jung even says that he could free associate on someone’s dream symbols himself and, insofar as these symbols are archetypal, come up with material that is as valid as would be the dreamer’s associations. For Sebag, this shows the bankruptcy of Jung’s model. To the extent that the analyst’s associations provide valid material for interpreting the analysand’s dreams, he holds, this can only be because the analyst and the dreamer share cultural background knowledge. If there is a collective unconscious, Sebag writes, “it is coextensive with the myths, rituals, institutions, representations of a given culture”; it is neither universal nor subjective. The subject is both less and more than this. This point is worth elaborating. For Sebag, as for Lacan, the subject always exceeds the norms, keeps the prerogative of reorganizing cultural material at his or her will. Such reorganization is what is happening both in play and in dreams. To focus this claim, Sebag compares the dreamer to the small child who produces all the sounds of all human languages in prelinguistic babble, and who learns a single language by suppressing most of them. As a model for socialization, this suggests that entering into a human cultural order is largely a process of suppression, of loss of possibilities. This figure is one of the key images in what we might now be entitled to call classical structuralism: it plays a central role in Lévi-Strauss’s setting-up of The elementary structures of kinship ([1949] 1969: 93–94), where he uses it as a metaphor for the potential variety and actual limitation of social arrangements. Lévi-Strauss himself says he derives this model from Roman Jakobson; however, it was current in North American linguistics and anthropology from early in the twentieth century and this is presumably where Jakobson got it. It plays a central role in “culturalist” work such as Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of culture (1934: 23–24), and the idea that speaking a given language means limiting an originally limitless set of sounds, and therefore of potentialities, is fully in place in Franz Boas’ introduction to the Handbook of American Indian languages (1911: 15–16). What Lacan brings to this anthropological-linguistic chestnut, which will be picked up by Sebag, is the idea that this original free play is still there, potentially, in playing, [504]in lapses, and in dreams: culturalized, but never fully culturalized, human subjectivity is the result of the encounter of the subject with a specific, historically given cultural order. This argument will be the central theme of Louis Althusser’s essay “Freud and Lacan” ([1964] 1999), published the same year as Sebag’s dream paper. * * * Sebag’s goal is, again, dual: on the one hand, to see how dream material illuminates ethnography; on the other hand, to see how the ethnography illuminates the dream material. He is quite happy about the results of the first: “dream analysis, pursued steadily in certain privileged circumstances, reveals whole sections of the cultural edifice which remain hidden to normal observation and interrogation.” But this is not to say that the dreams simply reflect what’s there in daily social life. On the contrary: in dreams, the subject is free to distort and play with whatever he or she knows. Sebag will use this fact as a key to interpretation. The dream “message [takes] on its full value from the disparity between the code proper to the society in question and the transformations it undergoes on the level of the individual. This dislocation has revelatory value.” This is another parallel between dream and myth that echoes the myth-work of Lévi-Strauss. In “Asdiwal,” Lévi-Strauss ([1958] 1976) criticizes Boas’s earlier attempt to describe Tsimshian life and society on the basis of Tsimshian mythology (Boas 1916). Such a project ignores one of the essential things about myths: that they are not reproductions of known reality but narratives that use elements of that reality for their own purposes. They are, therefore, just as likely to reverse a cultural or ecological feature as to present it “straight.” This play of distortion in dreams and myths seems not simply possible but perhaps is a fundamental part of their elaboration, their conveying of multiple messages. Certainly, it doesn’t seem excessive for Belmont (1997: 124ff.) to propose that the mechanisms Freud attributes to the dreamwork—figuration, condensation, secondary elaboration, and displacement—are also behind the creation of myths. This is not because myths and dreams are the same thing, but because these are the kinds of mechanisms we would expect to find in the elaboration of any text that carries multiple levels of meaning. So we come back to philology. * * * When Lévi-Strauss analyzes a series of myths, he is trying to get at the nonlinear, nontemporal armature of oppositions that underlies the unrolling narratives. We have already seen the parallels between Sebagian dream analysis and Lévi-Straussian myth analysis; here, we have to note that Sebag ends up taking the syntagmatic development of the dreams as seriously as the unstated frame behind them. In the analysis of myth, only Terence Turner (1969) would undertake something comparable, as seen in his reanalysis of the Oedipus cycle. For Turner, each new incident recalls preceding incidents but also transforms the situation: there is a dynamic of transformation from the beginning of the cycle to the end. The twenty-nine dreams that Sebag selects and presents in chronological order represent about two months of working and transformation in Baipurangi’s understanding of her own, equally evolving, situation. The movement can be considered as one of deepening of levels. At first, and throughout the series of dreams, [505]Baipurangi wants to get away from her husband, Jakugi. In her dreams, she tries out a series of variations on this theme, including her own death—murdered by Jakugi or taken by the souls of the vengeful dead; Jakugi leaving her for another woman; her parents taking her back; her own transformation into a solitary unmarried woman, directly or in the shape of her dreamed daughter; finally, Jakugi’s death. But through this series of dreams that are ostensibly about the current situation, we keep getting glimpses of another narrative: her sense of abandonment by her parents, and particularly by her father, Kandegi. The issue that emerges is her own acute feeling of having disappointed her father by being born a girl and the fantasy of making it up to him by producing a son. And this links into Baipurangi’s growing anxiety about her own childlessness. One wonders about the omnipresence of Jakugi, given the situation of dreamtelling. Sebag makes it clear that Baipurangi was transferring onto him—this mysterious stranger who was so interested in her dreams, with whom she talked about her dreams and her life every morning. Transference is a psychoanalytic term for falling in love. Some of the dreams are quite explicit, showing Baipurangi dreaming (she is dreaming of dreaming) of making love with Sebag and having a daughter with him. The continued negative attention to her husband could have been a way of telling Sebag that she was interested. This, of course, does not affect the broader analysis, which is about childhood and identity more than about flirtation. Some Aché notes and queries The Aché people, who are so present in this paper, have become known to the international community both as victims of an apparent genocide and as subjects of some of the most ambitious work to be done on the relationship of culture and ecology. A number of questions about Aché ethnography and history remain open. Aché economy. The Aché are presented in this paper, as elsewhere, as almost paradigmatic hunter-gatherers and primarily as hunters. We know that personal names among the Aché are drawn from game animals; Sebag writes: “Meat has extraordinary affective and social value for the Guayaki. A Guayaki who spends a week without eating meat becomes morose and seems to have lost all interest in life” (“Analysis,” note 26; cf. Baldus 1972: 507; my translation: “For the Guayaki, a meal with lots of meat is the finest banquet.”). For hundreds of years they have lived in the forests on the margins of settled agricultural societies, Guaraní and Paraguayan. The prevailing interpretation of this situation is that the Aché way of life is a survival from the Stone Age. As León Cadogán puts it in the preface to his Aché dictionary, “We were dealing with the most primitive culture of the Tupí-Guaraní group, probably the most primitive culture of the Americas” (Cadogán 1968: v; my translation). Four years later, in his own book, Clastres presents the Aché as immemorial hunter-gatherers; this view is maintained in the more recent work of Hill, Hurtado, and their collaborators (e.g., Hill and Hurtado 1996). Yet there is an alternative interpretation. Particularly given the close affinities of the Aché language with those of neighboring peoples who have had agriculture for a very long time, other scholars see the Aché as marginalized former agriculturalists. Indeed, Clastres himself expressed this view several years before publishing his book: “The Guayaki are nomadic hunter-gatherers. We must ask ourselves therefore whether or not this is [506]a case of survivors from a more or less distant period in which agriculture was still unknown in South America. On the contrary, we have noted cultural discordances which suggest a horizon that included agriculture: rather than archaic, the Guayaki are regressive” (Clastres 1968; my translation). The Aché would be another example of the “archaic illusion” (Robert Crépeau in Beaucage and Crépeau 2001) well known elsewhere in South America (Lévi-Strauss 1955). There is a third possibility, raised by Philippe Edeb on the basis of ethnohistorical and field research conducted in the middle and late 1980s (Edeb 1992). Edeb puts together evidence that the current Aché dependence on meat protein is a relatively recent development, and that the earlier Aché economy was largely based on the exploitation of sometimes massive and extremely dense stands of pindo palms (Butia capitata, also called the jelly palm). The pith of the palm provided, and to some degree still provides, several kinds of highly nourishing food of which the Aché are very fond. What Edeb proposes is a traditional economy based both on hunting, carried out primarily by men and involving high mobility, and on exploitation of the pindo palm, carried out by women and involving periodic settlement. This fairly unique mode of production, a nonagricultural way of life based on an extraordinary abundance of plant resources, presents a very different picture from either that of primordial nomadic hunters or that of marginalized former farmers. That there was once a parallel drawn between hunting animals and cutting pindo palms is suggested by the fact that the word oó designates both meat and the “meat” of the pindo (Cadogán 1968: 131, cited in Edeb 1992: 153n23). This parallel also would mean that there was a greater balance between men’s and women’s work than what is suggested by the simple valorization of hunting, a balance that would fit the “profound respect for women” found in traditional Aché society (Münzel 1973: 30). Work as play. One of the most memorable scenes in Sebag’s paper is evoked by Baipurangi’s third dream, the dream of many laughing children. That day, Sebag reports, Baipurangi had “cleared an area of ground using an axe; all the children helped her and the work turned into a game in which Baipurangi and her little companions enjoyed themselves tremendously.” For this reader, at least, this scene of work turning into play, of work as play, is both touching and amusing, and it clearly charmed Sebag. But its resonances may go deeper. Years later, Edeb will be told of the hilarity marking intense periods of women and children’s work cutting pindo palms and extracting and preparing their pith: “More than the energy invested or the violent effort required for grinding the pulp of the pindo, it was the routine nature of this drudgery that must have traditionally been the greatest obstacle to its intensification. It must therefore have been animated by motivations that went beyond the domain of (immediately) utilitarian rationality. We know, from those involved, that this work was most willingly carried out collectively, in a real atmosphere of wild festivity (atmosphère de liesse) in which the exchange of jokes and general good humor came together to encourage the participants” (Edeb 1992: 152; my translation). A mode of working as playing, then, may have typified at least the women’s part of the traditional Aché economy. The picture of Baipurangi and the children making a wild game out of clearing some ground may owe as much to a cultural pattern as to the particular circumstances, or to the particularities of Baipurangi’s personality.[507] The individual as species. Aché personal names are derived from the words for the animals one’s mother ate while she was pregnant (Baldus 1972: 515–16; Clastres [1972] 1998: 52–56). This would seem to be an essential aspect of personal identity; it would be extremely helpful to have consistent—instead of apparently haphazard—translations of these names. Checking Cadogán’s Aché dictionary helps with many names, but not much with Baipurangi’s. He gives the word baipurä as meaning horse (Cadogán 1968: 16); were the Aché catching and eating horses in the late 1940s, the time of Baipurangi’s conception? Yet the very close baipu, the source of the name of Baipurangi’s mother Baipugi, means jaguar (Cadogán 1968: 16); bai by itself means animal in general (12). Jakugi is named after a large bird resembling a pheasant (66); the name of Baipurangi’s father, Kandegi, comes from the small peccary (87), that of her other father, Pikugi, from a fish (143), that of her late husband, Krajagi, from the howler monkey (94–95), that of her jware (the man who molded her head when she was born) Japegi from the crocodile (68); the name of her jware Doro Paregi simply means “first-born son” (43). The important male figures Kybwyragi and Jyvukugi, the latter often presented as the “chief” of this group of Aché, are named for a bird and for “a large feline” respectively (105, 83). I was not able to elucidate the names of Baipurangi’s grandmother Pampigi (called Pampingi by Clastres) or of her friend and protector Japekujagi. In one case, in the discussion of Dream 24, not knowing the meaning of names becomes very frustrating. In the dream, Jakugi kills a couple of deer. Sebag takes pains to tell us that his own name among the Aché was Wachu “deer”; this was also the name of Baipurangi’s little brother, who had been sick, whose death had been foreshadowed in a number of the dreams, and who by the time of this dream had died. But Sebag does not make the connection with something else we know about Baipurangi: in the discussion of Dream 21 we are told that just before her birth some men from the group happened upon a deer that had just been killed by a jaguar; Baipurangi’s mother-to-be “took part in the meal, which explains why the child, who was born a few weeks later, is named after the deer.” Putting these stories together suggests that Baipurangi, Sebag, and Baipurangi’s brother are all deer, and certainly suggests a wider interpretation of the dream. Is the horse, baipurä, thought of as a kind of deer? Or is one of Baipurangi’s names Wachugi as well? Another important gap in information involves incidents around her brother’s death, of which Sebag tells us almost nothing but Clastres tells a good deal. I will return to this issue below. Limits in the paper While there is no denying that Sebag’s dream paper shows its age fifty years after its publication, we must distinguish between real insufficiencies and mere changes in taste and mode. The paper reflects the prevailing assumptions of the time, some of which are different from prevailing assumptions today; yet, as Jürgen Trabant says in a little apothegm worthy of Freud, “What has collapsed has not necessarily been superseded” (Trabant 1986: 206; my translation). Let me put on record my own strong sense of the unfairness of judging earlier writers in terms of today’s criteria, which are themselves likely to look like temporary fads in twenty years; such “presentism,” as George Stocking calls it (1968), seems utterly unanthropological and utterly un-self-critical, and it smacks of a [508]smugness and self-congratulation that, probably because of elements of my own personal history, I find abhorrent. Having said that, let me now proceed to do the abhorrent and note aspects of this text that are likely to put off its readers in 2017. One thing that may strike a reader today, especially a North American reader, is Sebag’s belief in cultures as boundable wholes, his apparent assumption that you can discuss Aché culture as a single, homogeneous entity. This contrasts with the recent interest in hybridities between cultures and divisions within them. Note, however, that this opposition is much sharper in English-speaking North America than in France or, for that matter, in the French- or Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking world. These intellectual cultures had never gone in for what now seems to have been the idealistic faith in the uniqueness and homogeneity of cultures-as-wholes that dominated North American anthropology in the 1970s: the monism of Clifford Geertz, a version of what Sebag calls culturalism, or the sealed Parsonian layers of David Schneider, for whom culture, society, and personality formed autonomous internally coherent “systems.” Anthropologists of romance languages, therefore, never experienced the despair felt by many American anthropologists when things turned out to be a lot more complicated, when it was no longer possible to avoid facing transcultural processes, intracultural variation, and the role of the ethnographer as part of the situation. While Sebag and Clastres do not make a big deal about problematizing the notion of Aché culture, they do constantly show how problematic, how fragile, how threatened, how reactive to outside forces, how internally divided it is between young and old, women and men, collaborators with and resisters of the Paraguayans. Related to this relatively uncritical view of ethnographic activity is the political activist Sebag’s apparent failure to discuss two essential aspects of his own role among the Aché: what must have been a striking disparity in power relations between the European anthropologist and the members of a marginalized, harassed, and threatened indigenous South American society; and between himself as an adult man (he was twenty-nine and thirty when he was in Paraguay) and the eighteen-year-old woman who was telling him her dreams. But again, condemnation is too easy and requires some nuance. Calling Sebag European is not actually so evident. Sebag was in fact African, although French-speaking; although he was French-speaking he was no vieille souche Frenchman but a North African Sephardic Jew. Consider his two teachers: one, Lévi-Strauss, was an Ashkenazic Jew, an Alsatian actually, from a line of rabbis; the other, Lacan, was a French Catholic, educated by Jesuits, which made him ethnically part of the majority culture but a minority figure in psychoanalysis, which has always had a strong Jewish representation and something of a Jewish spirit (Schneiderman 1983: 14). Of course, there is nothing new about the marginalized members of a politically and economically central society being the ones to go off and live with even more marginalized people. It remains that in this paper Sebag presents himself both as the visiting foreign anthropologist who does not apparently question his own role or his own reactions—and this is acute, given his immediately subsequent history—and as the analyst who analyses the analysand but leaves his own countertransference in the dark. We would feel more comfortable—again, especially given what would follow this period in Paraguay—to have Sebag’s own dreams to put next to Baipurangi’s.[509] While the relationship of male to female among the Aché is pretty sharply analyzed in this essay and in Clastres’ book, it remains unproblematized here in terms of the relationship between visiting male analyst and local female analysand. In fact, some recent work on dreams (Handman 1996; Xanthakou 2002) suggests that in a great many societies, what women tend to dream about is women’s specific oppression. It happens that the same issue of Les Temps modernes that published Sebag’s essay also contains the last part of the French translation of Betty Friedan’s The feminine mystique. The story of Sebag Lucien Sebag was at the heart of one of the great intellectual ferments of the twentieth century: he was at the confluence of phenomenology, the renewal in Marxist philosophy, the reorientation of psychoanalysis by Lacan, and the new structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss. Sebag was born in Tunis in 1933 and lived there until the early 1950s. As an adolescent, he was a student of the philosopher François Châtelet. He became an activist for Tunisian independence in the Tunisian Communist Party. After he moved to Paris at age twenty, he became an activist in the French Communist Party. Sebag spent his twenties moving among key sites and players in the developing structuralist and Marxist paradigms of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956, Sebag was critical of the Party’s support for the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian rebellion. He was expelled from the Party in 1957, from which point on he continued to agitate from the left. Around this time, he completed his philosophical training and discovered both ethnology and psychoanalysis, quickly coming to the attention of both the leading psychoanalyst of that place and time, Jacques Lacan, and the founder of structural anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss. By the early 1960s, Sebag had begun an analysis with Lacan; he was a member of the CNRS, the French research corps, teaching courses under Lévi-Strauss’ auspices at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. This was the time that Lévi-Strauss was carrying out his exploration of South and North American mythologies that would lead to the four volumes of the Mythologiques. In the course of this research, two North American civilization complexes seemed to stand out as internally coherent and distinct from the rest: the Iroquois in the northeast, the Pueblos in the southwest. Lévi-Strauss handed the analysis of Pueblo mythology over to a team of anthropologists-in-training led by Sebag. The group included, among others, the Africanist Pierre Smith, the South Americanist Jacqueline Bolens (later Duvernay), and Sebag’s analyst’s daughter, Judith Lacan, herself destined for a distinguished career as a philosopher and guardian of the Lacanian heritage: a “hot group” (Lipman-Blumen and Leavitt 1999) if there ever was one. Lévi-Strauss (1971: iii) would later write about how wonderful that seminar was: “May I bear witness that through a long academic career I have never known an enterprise pursued with regularity, week after week, that offered the chance for such a fervent, and I believe I may also say fruitful, collaboration between the working group, the auditors, and their professor?” While Sebag was working on Pueblo mythology, Lévi-Strauss arranged for him to undertake fieldwork in South America along with his fellow philosophy student [510]Pierre Clastres, another name to reckon with. In 1963, on the eve of his departure for South America, Sebag handed in the manuscript of a major attempt to integrate the paradigms that were of greatest concern to him, called, straightforwardly enough, Marxisme et structuralisme, the publication of which would coincide with his return to France in 1964. From February to September 1963, Sebag conducted field research with Clastres among the Aché. In September, Sebag went to the Chaco to live with Ayoréo groups in Paraguay and then in Bolivia. He returned to France in February 1964. Upon his return to Paris, Sebag’s future seemed assured. He is remembered widely as the most brilliant of Lévi-Strauss’ students, often as his apparent successor, and often enough by those who knew him as “le plus intelligent, le plus beau et le plus sympa” among the anthropologists of his generation (Rémi Savard, pers. comm.). He was slated to conduct a second period of field research in South America in July of 1965. He was planning a new book, an analysis of the discourse that takes place in the course of a psychoanalysis. Sebag, by all accounts a person of intense engagement both intellectual and personal—Lévi-Strauss (1965: 6) would call him “this infinitely intelligent but vulnerable being”—was in love with his teammate, Judith Lacan; his book Marxisme et structuralisme is dedicated to her. She was finished with the relationship, but Sebag was not. The interpersonal dynamic seems oddly and sadly reminiscent of the one around which Sebag constructs the dream paper: a man in love with a woman who is not in love with him, with, as in the dream paper, the complicating factor of the powerful and hard-to-define presence of her father. Oral tradition has it that Sebag gave Judith Lacan a specific ultimatum, an attempt at emotional blackmail to which she did not bend; he made good on his threat and killed himself on January 9, 1965, at the age of thirty-one. Sebag’s death immediately entered into legend. Lacan expected to be blamed for it (Althusser [1992] 1993: 180–81; Roudinesco 1993: 400–401), and those who didn’t like Lacan indeed blamed him;6 orthodox Communists, for their part, claimed at the time that Sebag didn’t kill himself for personal reasons at all but because he was unable to overcome the antinomy between structure and history (Jean-Claude Muller, pers. comm.). The anthropologist Lucas Bessire, who lived with the Ayoréo after Sebag’s visit, tells another story. One of the shamans with [511]whom Sebag had worked blamed himself for Sebag’s death. He had allowed Sebag to persuade him to sing a song that was simply too powerful for the good of either of them. “This chant was so powerful that it broke Sebag’s reel-to-reel tape recorder. In that instant, the words also infected Sebag. ‘Before, I did not know how to put my words to one side and Luciano died because the ujñarone broke his recorder and went directly to him.’” (Bessire 2014: 32). And I have been told two different stories of who found Sebag’s body. Sebag’s death was a trauma for many who knew him (see, for instance, Boons and Boons 1965; Guattari [1977] 1984), and they are still pained by it fifty-odd years later. As Sebag’s fellow student, the anthropologist Rémi Savard, put it, “Il est passé parmi nous comme un météore” (pers. comm.). At the same time, Sebag’s death represented a trauma for a central slice of the French intellectual community and marked the end of what might be called structuralism’s first—growing and optimistic—phase. In fact, this period of increasing interdisciplinary ferment was about to be consolidated in a series of big books: 1965 would see the publication of Althusser’s For Marx and Reading Capital with his antihumanist and antiphenomenological reading of Marx, as well as Barthes’ Elements of semiology and Critique et vérité; 1966 produced Foucault’s The order of things, Benveniste’s selected writings in linguistics, and Lacan’s Ecrits; 1967 brought Barthes’ Système de la mode, Foucault’s Archaeology of knowledge, Derrida’s Grammatology and Writing and difference; and then came 1968 and a new constellation. On January 15 and 22, 1965, Sebag was scheduled to give lectures at the Collège de France, an institution that allows the general public access to intellectuals who are considered to be national treasures. Especially in 1965, with the increasing fame of and curiosity about Lévi-Strauss, this would have meant a large and probably enthusiastic audience. Had he lived even a little longer, it is likely that Sebag would have been one of the major recognized intellectual figures of the period. Sebag’s death was at least as great a trauma for the Tunisian Jewish community, which had seen him as one of their brightest stars (Muriel Djeribi-Valentin, pers. comm.). In a heartbreaking memorial essay published in Tunis in 1966, Sebag’s friend J.-P. Darmon wrote of “his warmth and the luminous gaiety that shone from his extreme intelligence,” saying that Sebag was on the way to becoming a millennium-transforming thinker, the like of which Tunisia had not produced since Ibn Khaldûn. After Sebag’s death, a considerable body of his work was published, largely at the impetus of Lévi-Strauss. This included a long essay on shamanism among the Ayoréo (1965b). In 1971, Sebag’s manuscript on the mythology of the Eastern Pueblo was published as L’invention du monde chez les Indiens pueblo. Sebag had completed the draft not long before his death. In the 1960s and 1970s, Sebag’s work was translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German; none has heretofore been published in English. * * * A word must be said here about Pierre Clastres. Clastres was born in 1934, the same year as Sebag. Like him, he was a student of philosophy, and both turned toward anthropology, and Lévi-Strauss, at the same time (J. C. Muller, pers. comm.). Clastres returned to the Aché for a second period of field research in 1965. His time with them resulted in a remarkable document, the Chronicle of the Guayaki [512]Indians, published in 1972. It is a classic of sensitive ethnography, which was translated into English by Paul Auster; after many misadventures befell the manuscript of the translation (described in Auster’s preface to the English edition), it would be published only in 1998. Clastres’ experience with the Aché, a people with no coercive leadership, led him to construct a political anthropology that was neither structuralist nor Marxist, but that saw the rise of the state as the great watershed in human history. His collection of essays, Society against the state ([1974] 1977) had an enormous impact on a new, essentially anarchist, political anthropology and political philosophy. Clastres died in an automobile accident in 1977. Baipurangi, Jakugi, and the Aché If Baipurangi is still alive, she is in her seventies. We know about her as a young woman from this essay: unhappy with her husband Jakugi, whom she finds to be jealous, frightening, and sexually demanding, she turns to Sebag himself, the outsider who listens to her dreams every morning but, unlike the “enterprising” Paraguayans, maintains what he calls an “affective neutrality.” This is apparently quite entrancing for a while: at first, Baipurangi’s dreams seem to indicate to Sebag how much she likes men who are not sexually insistent (she wants to be with her undemanding late husband, Krajagi, rather than the desirous Jakugi), then move on to express direct sexual interest in Sebag himself. But in the end, she seems to tire of the game. The picture of Jakugi we have from Sebag is of a husband who appears as jealous and angry, full of desire and frustration, who, Sebag lets us know, starts getting nervous about all the time his wife is spending with Sebag. Clastres gives us a much richer picture of Jakugi in his book, one that is both more sympathetic and more disturbing. Here is how Clastres presents Jakugi and his marriage: Jakugi was a peaceful man. At certain times, he suffered from the knowledge that he was being deceived. The alluring Baipurangi, his young wife, did not know how to say no, and she often forgot what a good husband she had: he was always in the forest, tracking game, spotting beehives, and gathering grubs. She had everything she could wish for and yet she was not satisfied. He could have beaten her, but he did nothing. Who was playing the flute sadly, after nightfall? The five pure notes escaped from the tubes of rosewood. Prettily, they called out to the woman who no longer wanted to sleep next to her husband and who had taken refuge at a distance in her parents’ tapy. When he was troubled, Jakugi did not become violent. He would take up his flute. ([1972] 1998: 251) Is it just me, or is there something a little sinister in this repeated insistence on how peaceful Jakugi is? We are not really surprised to read the next sentence: “And yet he was called Brupiare, Killer.” And Clastres spend much of this chapter telling the story of a series of deaths of children, killed to compensate for the deaths of other children,7 which culminated in Jakugi killing a young girl.[513] Toward the end of the book, Clastres tells the story of the events surrounding the death of Baipurangi’s young brother. Here we learn that it is not only Baipurangi’s father, Kandegi, who would like her to have children, but also her husband: “Jakugi . . . who was very much in love with his wife, Baipurangi, was suffering for two reasons: she was unfaithful to him and had not yet borne him any children” (Clastres [1972] 1998: 342). When Baipurangi’s brother died, the Aché cooked and ate his body: this was at a time when they were supposed to have given up cannibalism. Remember that in Dream 21 Baipurangi dreams of the death of Jyvukugi: “the meat is divided among all the members of the camp; as for me, I eat the penis.” Eating the penis is supposed to guarantee that she will give birth to a son. Now this was in a dream. In waking life, according to Clastres, Jakugi, eager to resume normal relations with Baipurangi and to have her produce a son, tried to get her to eat her late brother’s penis. Baipurangi refused indignantly: one does not eat any part of one’s close kin. Angry, Jakugi hit her; it was at this point that she left him and moved in with her father—not the father Kandegi, her mother’s current husband, who figures so centrally in her dreams, but her other father, Pikugi. During the time Sebag tells us that Baipurangi was fantasizing and dreaming about leaving Jakugi and recreating a childhood situation by moving back in with parents, Clastres tells us that she was doing just that; and she was doing it, it turns out, at least partly as a refusal to have a son with Jakugi—even though her dreams show how much she wants to have a son—and at least partly as an expression of support for an etiquette, a proper way of doing things, that was already in ruins. One thinks of Lacan’s treatment of Antigone (Lacan [1960] 1992; cf. Schneiderman 1983: 165–71), who becomes the instrument of the Gods’ order rather than of her own wish to live. The fate of the Aché Baipurangi and Jakugi were living out their personal dramas in the midst of a collective trauma. The picture Sebag and Clastres give of the situation of the Aché is dire. In 1959, the Aché Gatu, Baipurangi’s group, unable to survive in the forest that was left to them, had settled at Arroyo Moroti under the authority of a man whose name Sebag gives as “Manuel de Peyreira.” This is the group otherwise known as the Ypety Aché (Hill and Hurtado 1996: 49). A number of people Baipurangi was close to had already been kidnapped or otherwise disappeared. Clastres writes that at the time of his arrival, there were about one hundred Aché living in the group; by the time of his departure, a quarter of these had died. But worse was to come. Apparently, “between 1963 and 1968, about half the members of the Yvytyruzu [the Aché Kwera] and Ypety groups died from contact-related respiratory infections” (Hill and Hurtado 1996: 49; for a history of this period and after, see Hill and Hurtado 1996: 49–56). The early 1970s saw an intensification of the invasion of Aché lands by Paraguayan peasants and a concomitant effort to move Aché groups into mission-controlled reserves. The result—whether through deliberate murder and enslavement or through illnesses and other situational factors—was a decimation of the population. A number of reports in the 1970s detailed and denounced what came to be known as the Aché genocide (Münzel 1972, 1976; Arens 1976). [514]The individual who comes in for the greatest blame in these reports is Manuel de Jesús Pereira, the same “Peyreira” who figures in Sebag’s essay as the “protector” and exploiter of the Aché and who is a major player in Clastres’ book. Clastres ends his book with a prediction of the imminent disappearance of the Aché, and reading the genocide reports makes one wonder if there are any left. Yet peoples have a way of not dying out when they are expected to. After the outcries of the 1970s, we find that the scholarly literature on the Aché in the 1980s and 1990s is dominated by research on forest ecology and forest economics carried out by North American–based teams of anthropologists and biologists (e.g., Hill and Hurtado 1996) working with an apparently viable society; a number of these publications appear with the names of Aché coauthors (e.g., Hill, Padwe, Bejyvagi, Bepurangi, Jakugi, Tykuarangi, and Tykuarangi 1997). This crop of authors presents a less apocalyptic picture of the Aché present and their recent past. While they recognize that the Aché have gone through terrible times, Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado (1996) deny that there was an Aché genocide as such, but say that there was rather a “situation in the twentieth century . . . of small-scale war between the Aché and invading peasants. . . . This was a classic case of conquest, but not a case of genocide. . . . It should instead be described within the context of the slow conquest of the Americas that has been going on for more than five hundred years. Perhaps that entire process could be labeled genocide, given the all too frequent extermination of small tribal populations” (p. 169). Aché did die in great numbers in the 1970s, the period of intensive contact and settlement, but this, they say, was due more to respiratory illnesses picked up in the contact situation than to an anti-Aché policy. There are now about fifteen hundred Aché living in six communities, four of which have “resident missionaries.” The Aché continue to hunt and forage on land adjoining these communities, particularly in the Mbaracayu Forest Reserve, established in 1991, where they have “permanent use rights for traditional subsistence activities” (Hill and Hurtado 1999: 95). Some of the Aché are getting money from USAID “to improve reservation infrastructure” (Hill and Hurtado 1999). The year 2000 saw the foundation of the Liga Nativa por la Autonomía, Justicia y ética,8 an organization for the defense of Aché rights, by Aché and sympathetic non-Aché. At the same time, the Aché are said (Hill and Hurtado 1999) to be losing many of their traditional practices and to be giving up their language in favor of Guaraní. Again, how much these changes are their own choice, how much they are being forced on them, and to what extent they are reactions to an enormous collective trauma, will be matters for historians to decide. The Aché have certainly not disappeared. With the election of Paraguay’s first leftist president, Fernando Lugo, in 2008, the Aché activist Margarita Mbywangi—who had been kidnapped as a child—was named Minister of Indigenous Affairs, the first indigenous person to hold this post. Mbywangi lost her position in 2009 and went on to help found a new Aché community at Kuetuvy. While this community, like the others, remains under pressure from corporations and what are called landless peasants, they are defending themselves and continue to play a role in Paraguayan society.[515] * * * In the preface to his translation of Clastres’ Chronicle ([1972] 1998: 13), Paul Auster writes: “No matter that the world described in it has long since vanished, that the tiny group of people the author lived with in 1963 and 1964 has disappeared from the face of the earth. No matter that the author has vanished as well. The book he wrote is still with us.” Stéphane Mallarmé once wrote that the world was made to produce a beautiful book (le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre)—but it does matter whether or not the Aché have disappeared. They have been through hell but they have not disappeared. Sebag is gone, Clastres is gone, Baipurangi and Jakugi may well be gone, you and I will be gone soon enough, but it looks like the Aché will reside on Earth for some time to come. Acknowledgements Thanks to Mark Mancall who gave me Sebag’s text and proposed that I translate it. In the intervening forty years, I’ve done some informal folklore research on Sebag himself, asking about him in Paris and among colleagues in Montreal who had known him. For help, suggestions, and/or reminiscences I am grateful to Marion Abélès, Nicole Belmont, the late Hélène and Pierre Clastres, Muriel Djeribi-Valentin, Lori Harreman, the late Michel Izard, Patrick Menget, the late Jean-Claude Muller, and Rémi Savard; and thanks to Robert Crépeau for his guidance in the forest of South American ethnography. Any errors or misrepresentations are my own responsibility. Some parts of this text were published in French as “L’analyse des rêves” in the “Dossier ‘Autour de Lucien Sebag’” in Gradhiva 2: 109–24 (2005). 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Turkle, Sherry. 1978. Psychoanalytic politics: Freud’s French revolution. New York: Basic Books. Turner, Terence S. 1969. “Oedipus: Time and structure in narrative form.” In Forms of symbolic action: 1969 proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, edited by Robert Spencer, 26–68. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wilden, Anthony. 1968. “Lacan and the discourse of the other.” In The language of the self, 152–322. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Xanthakou, Margarita. 2002. “Rêves en écharpe: Anamnèse onirique dans le Magne (Grèce).” Cahiers de littérature orale 51:79–118. Zafiropoulos, Markos. (2003) 2016. Lacan and Lévi-Strauss or the return to Freud (1951-1957). Translated by John Holland. London: Karnac.[519] Les rêves de Baipurangi: La croisée de l’ethnographie et de la psychanalyse dans le travail de Lucien Sebag Résumé : Le texte de Lucien Sebag “Analyse des rêves d’une Indienne guayaki” parut dans Les Temps Modernes en 1964. Jamais auparavant traduit en Anglais, et jamais republié depuis, même en Français, il s’agit pourtant d’une tentative unique en son genre de combiner l’ethnographie auprès des Achés du Paraguay avec la théorie structurale et la psychanalyse. Cet essai contextualise le travail de Sebag en ébauchant le contexte théorique dans lequel il fut écrit, ainsi que sa situation dans la vie de l’auteur et parmi ses oeuvres, ainsi que dans l’histoire du peuple Aché. John LEAVITT teaches in the anthropology department of the Université de Montréal, specializing in linguistic anthropology. He has conducted field research in the Central Himalayas of northern India and in Ireland and has published on oral poetry and divine possession, comparative mythology, and the history of linguistic relativity. John LeavittDépartement d’anthropologieUniversité de MontréalC.P. 6128, Succursale Centre-VilleMontréal, QuébecCanada H3C 3J7john.leavitt@umontreal.ca ___________________ 1. On the Aché, see Métraux and Baldus (1946); Clastres (1968a, [1972] 1998); Baldus (1972); Hill and Hurtado (1996). 2. An honorable exception is the introduction to an issue of the Cahiers de littérature orale on dreams (Belmont 2002: 8). 3. This willingness to suspend the will to unity, to accept two parallel tracks—one rigorously scientific, seeking the realities behind appearances, the other dwelling on appearances in order to understand them better—reminds one of the dual philosophical legacy of Gaston Bachelard (cf. Leavitt 2011: 192–97). 4. More recent years have seen returns to psychoanalytic inspiration among anthropologists both in North America (note the work of Katherine Ewing, Gillian Gillison, Gananath Obeyesekere, Robert Paul, Melford Spiro) and in France (e.g., Nicole Belmont for European folk traditions; Patrice Bidou for South America; Bernard Juillerat for New Guinea; C. H. Pradelles de Latour for Africa; these scholars are all affiliated to the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the Collège de France, which has a team on “Recherches en anthropologie psychanalytique”). The names I have listed represent different tendencies that range from a pretty orthodox explanation of specific social institutions by a generalized Oedipus complex to considerations of the interaction of social expectation, personal constellation, and discursive process. 5. Lévi-Strauss himself carries out this program most coherently in his analysis of the Tsimshian myth of Asdiwal ([1958] 1976), a text that Sebag cites frequently. The mass of Lévi-Strauss’s mythwork, notably the four volumes of the Mythologiques, follows along from myth to myth, cycle to cycle, and society to society, seeking the cognitive patterns that emerge in myth rather than the role of myth in a particular social formation. For an exemplary structural analysis of myth that holds still long enough to reveal a given cosmology, see Detienne ([1972] 1994). 6. Lacan told Althusser that he had felt it his duty to withdraw as Sebag’s analyst when he learned that Sebag was in love with his (Lacan’s) daughter; on the other hand, he insisted, he continued to see Sebag every day and to give him moral support. This account, reprinted by Elisabeth Roudinesco from Althusser’s memoirs, has undergone a remarkable twist in Raymond Tallis’s diatribe against Lacan (“The shrink from Hell”)—ostensibly a review of Roudinesco’s history of psychoanalysis ([1986] 1990)—published in the Times Higher Education Supplement and frequently reprinted and cited on the Internet; this may be the only information that many English-speaking readers have about Lacan’s life. Tallis’s version (1997: 20) is that “The brilliant ethnologist Lucien Sebag killed himself at 32 after having been discharged abruptly from treatment—because Lacan wanted to sleep with Sebag’s teenage daughter.” If Sebag had a teenage daughter I haven’t heard about her; since he died at thirty-one, he would have been a teenager himself when she was born. Note that one of Tallis’ favorite tactics is to accuse others of distorting the facts. 7. In a radio interview on Clastres’ book (Beaucage and Crépeau 2001), Robert Crépeau proposes that what Clastres presents as a constant desire for revenge on the part of the Aché, and of their spirits, might better be understood as a religion of sacrifice. 8. www.geocities.com/linaje79/.  

What is a gift? This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Alain Testart. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.1.026 Translation What is a gift? Alain TESTART, Centre national de la recherche scientifique Translated from the French bySusan Emanuel and Lorraine Perlman This article introduces the subject of defining a gift in an ironic way, imagining Martian anthropologists conducting fieldwork among terrestrial human beings, hearing so many times the verb “to give” (for instance “giving” money to pay in a shop, or to pay taxes) and concluding to the importance of “the gift” in modern human society. Such a fiction serves to show that “to give” is not the same as “to make a gift.” It can also be shown from Latin etymology. Finally, the article ends by way of a precise definition of what a gift is, and insists on the notion of requirement to pay. What marks an exchange is the requirement to repay with an appropriate counterpart of each of the transfers. With a gift, on the contrary, the counterpart (counter-gift) may be given, but cannot be required. Keywords: gift, counter-gift, exchange, Mauss, obligation On the difference between “give” and “gift” In English, does “to give” mean the same thing as “to make a gift”? In French, donner and faire un don do not mean the same thing. Let’s consider the followingexample drawn from a common experience of daily life in France. I went to the butcher but did not know what to buy, and I ended up saying to him: “Give me a steak!” And he answered: “I'm going to give you some sirloin, it’s very good today!” When I went to pay, I had no change and I told him: “Can I give you a 50 Euro bill?” Then we went on to talk about taxes, a favorite subject of all small businessmen who always consider them excessive, and the butcher summed things up by saying: “Just think of how much we give them!” This small example shows that the verb “give” was used four times, but not once in the context of a gift. Of course I never thought that my butcher was offering me a gift of a steak, nor did he think he was giving away his sirloin, any more than I was giving him a gift when I held out my banknote to pay, or that it was a matter of gifts when we talked about taxes. “Giving” therefore is not making a gift; “to give” is not to make a donation. This is our first observation, and it is indisputable. However, there is also no doubt that if we confuse these two meanings, we create serious misunderstandings. We will return to this observation. First of all, that such a great difference exists between the two terms might seem strange, since in Romance languages it seems they might have the same root, that of don-. But this linguistic inference is incorrect, since, our verb “donner” actually derives from a confusion between two distinct Latin verbs. The first, donare, signifies to make a gift, to make a donation. The second, dare, has a much more general meaning: it signifies to put into someone’s hands, to bestow, grant, concede. Dare actually applies to any movement of goods, any change of hands, any translation or transfer (the latter is the general term we are going to employ) and is just as suitable to use for a gift as for any other transfer. The verb “to give” therefore can be applied to any kind of transfer (exchange, taxation, transmission through inheritance, etc.), not just to a gift. The noun “gift” (don), on the contrary, designates a particular mode of transfer, a mode of transfer that possesses a particular quality that we are trying to characterize. An initial approximation might be reached through the fact that a gift is a matter of a free or gratuitous act. It is obvious that receiving something as a gift (when it is a gratuitous act on the part of the person who is providing it) is the opposite of having to pay for receiving it (when, from the perspective of the person who furnishes it, it is an act that must be paid for); we may now summarize these first reflections in a little diagram: It remains to be determined which term should fill the position we have left blank (namely, how we should label “the opposite of gift”), but for the time being, let’s explore some of the simple ideas we have mastered. Mistakes by Martian anthropologists Let us imagine that anthropologists from another planet—let us say Mars—were present at the butcher’s shop and witnessed our conversation. Imagine, too, that these anthropologists, like human anthropologists from earth, have little taste for law and economics or for studying arid treatises, and prefer the direct and living observation of what they call “a slice of life.” Imagine that they carefully note down everything said around them. The words I exchanged with my butcher were quite banal, and they could easily have heard similar exchanges with many other customers. It is likely they would have noted the recurrent use of the word “give.” Ignorant of its Latin etymology and therefore assimilating “give” and “make a gift,” the Martian anthropologists might certainly conclude that “the gift” is very import-ant in modern French society. “You can see,” they would say, “commercial prin-ciples are unknown in this society, but gift-giving practices are widespread: the butcher gives his cuts of meat and the customers make counter-gifts. Even the principle of taxation is unknown, since taxpayers don't mind giving to the revenue authorities, etc.” The mistakes of the Martians are clear, as are the misunderstandings they might infer/promote about the nature of our society. Now, I believe that social anthro-pology, from Marcel Mauss in the 1920s to our day, has made the same mistakes relating to preliterate societies and has correspondingly misunderstood the nature of these societies. More specifically, I maintain that this anthropology: has always confused gift and giving because it has never had a clear definition of what a gift was, and consequently has tended to overestimate the importance of the gift in preliterate societies. As an example of the first error, we can cite the recurrent usage in French and English anthropology of the terms “givers” and “takers” of women in generalized exchange,1 and the concomitant idea (often implicit, occasionally explicit) that this involves a “gift” of women. This is curious because most examples of generalized exchange from Burma to eastern Indonesia—for instance, the Kachin—are associa-ted with particularly large marriage payments. In order to marry, considerable goods must be furnished, such as several buffalo; a man may even commit himself to be a “buffalo” if he does not have one (meaning he becomes a beast of burden), he can be prosecuted for debts his grandfather contracted on his wedding day, or else be reduced to slavery for not being able to pay.2 These practices seem scarcely compatible with an ambiance that (usually) involves gifts and presents. The opposite of the gift In order to fill the empty box in our last diagram, let us take a simple social example. Children, after school, still play marbles. We adults, even if we still remember the charm of the iridescent sparkle of glass balls, attach no great importance to marbles. But once upon a time, we eagerly collected them, played games to win them, and even tried to acquire them by other means. And as the children that we all were, we already made a clear difference between a gift and an exchange. “I'm giving you that one!” meant—with no ambiguity possible—that the child engaged in this generous gesture was giving up his marble without wanting to recuperate one in exchange. We knew very well that giving (making a gift) was the opposite of exchange. To be precise: “I am giving it to you” means that the person who gives (i.e., the donor) gives it without any need for me to give him back anything at all. In contrast, the expression “I am swapping it for that one” (identical in form to “I am giving it to you for that one”) means that the one who gives (and who is definitely not a donor) only gives his marble if I give him mine. The reader can see that in these two different situations the word “give” has the different meanings of donare and dare. This we already know; and here we are making another point: in the exchange, my marble that I should “give” in order to obtain the one offered to me plays exactly the same role as the money I “give” to the butcher to obtain the sirloin he offered me. Handing over my marble is the payment necessary to obtain the coveted marble. The exchange is in all respects an act that is paid for. The word “pay” by no means supposes the existence of money: one may pay in kind, as once was done for taxes. And in the exchange of marbles, the marble that is relinquished constitutes the payment for the marble obtained. The same is true in any barter economy: the ceding of one good to obtain another represents the payment for this other good. We may now complete our diagram by writing: Thus, exchange is the opposite of gift, just as paying for something is the opposite of getting something for nothing. We can now see that if Martian anthropology confuses the two meanings of “give,” it likewise confuses gift and exchange. As does social anthropology. Marcel Mauss was guilty of this in his excessively famous “Essay on the gift” (and, actually, should have been called “Essay on giving,” which would have eliminated the ambiguity). In numerous passages, he maintains that certain “primitive” transactions relate to both gift and exchange, and he introduces the expression “gift-exchange.”3 But this mixes up two things as one: the confusion is either in the heads of the so-called primitive peoples or else it is in the heads of the anthropologists. Mauss’ thesis—and it is explicit—is that the confusion is in the heads of the primitive peoples, and that they are, in this respect, more primitive than children who easily make a distinction between exchange and gift. We may trace this thesis directly back to the old assimilation (common to both anthropology and psychoanalysis): primitive = childish = pathological. It also conforms exactly to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s view that “a primitive mentality” is characterized by a confusion of ideas.4 Such notions were widely shared at the time but today are strongly rejected as ethnocentric, if not racist. But when Lévy-Bruhl indignantly described “the primitive” and Mauss became incensed about it, we forget the intellectual atmosphere in which they worked. This atmosphere was governed by two great ideas that oriented all that era’s anthropology (as it does a part of anthropology today): primitive societies are supposedly simple, much simpler than ours are, and as a consequence, their intellectual categories (legal, economic, social, etc.) seem to confuse things that we can distinguish/analyze. My own position, by contrast, is that preliterate societies are extremely complex (and, on many points, more complex than ours) and that their conceptual and linguistic structures are highly subtle (often more so than ours). There would be no argument about this if we examined the great complexity of these societies’ vocabularies relating to the gift and to exchange.5 In other words, I think that the confusion lies not in primitive structures (intellectual or social), but in the heads of anthropologists. We should now progress to the definition of gift, a concept that we were beginning to discern without having yet defined it. Our example of marble games leads us to think that the question of counterpart (what one needs or doesn't need to offer in order to obtain something) may be central. First considerations on the counterpart By counterpart, we usually refer to what comes back in return for the first transfer. We call “counter-transfer” the movement (in the sense we spoke of the “move-ments of goods”) that delivers this counterpart. There is no exchange without counterpart: each of the goods exchanged is found to be the counterpart of the other. But counterpart may also exist in the activity of making a gift. The child who received a marble from a playmate may, some time later, make him a present of one of his own marbles: this is a way of thanking and of maintaining a friendly relationship. This, then, is an instance of a counter-gift. There may be a counterpart (counter-transfer) in a gift as in an exchange, and therefore it is not the existence or absence of a counterpart that differentiates the two. Nor is it that gift and counter-gift may be deferred in time. In our example this is the case, but the recipient might wish to make a counter-gift on the spot, which does not change the fact that he has indeed received a gift and offered a counter-gift. Similarly, an exchange may be immediate or deferred. We might pursue this parallel by saying that the regularity that seems to charact-erize exchanges (in capitalism a regularity interrupted only by crises and serial bankruptcies) may also arise in gift-giving. Very well brought-up people may unfailingly respond to a received gift with a gift offered, or to an invitation received with an invitation offered. But, I think we see well enough that it is not the kinetic aspect—an expression referring to everything concerning the movement of goods, the possibility of a counterpart, its regularity, etc.—which enables us to make a distinction between the different modes of transfer. It must be something else. What is it? To answer this question, we need to explore “exchange.” The three meanings of the term “exchange” Dictionaries (Le petit Robert and the OED) tell us that the noun “exchange” possesses various meanings, the first two of which correspond to two meanings of the verb “to exchange.” The first meaning is economic: exchange is an exchange of goods, and to exchange is “to cede in return for a counterpart.” The second meaning (said to be by analogy, and in existence in both French and English in the seventeenth century) concerns any reciprocal communication: to exchange is to address and receive reciprocally. Thus we speak of exchanges of smiles, courtesies, blows—the verb applies to all these situations. The third meaning concerns only the noun and in French was originally (1865) biological: “the passage (in both directions) and circulation of substances between the cell and the external milieu.” This meaning easily extends to physics when we speak of heat or fluid exchange. But we see it could be applied to all other domains, for example if speaking of the exchange of cars between the city and the country. Of course, I am not saying these meanings are different because they arise in different domains (economy, linguistics, biology) but that they differ in a more profound way because they have different formal properties. Let’s start with the least rich, the third. This is a purely mechanical (or kinetic) exchange with no link between cause and effect. It refers only to a movement in both directions through a permeable partition that nevertheless permits distinguishing between an interior and an exterior. This is why the term can be applied equally well to the cell as to an inanimate body, to an organic body as to a social ensemble like a city. It refers to a simple action in two directions, a reciprocal action or interchange (in the very general sense that one speaks of a reciprocal action or force, without intentionality.) In contrast, the second meaning is inseparable from the notion of intentionality. The dictionary speaks of “address.” In an exchange of smiles, each person addresses a smile to the other. Without this address, there would be only two smiling humans; but without one to the other; there would not be an exchange of smiles. Addressing signifies something, aiming at a certain goal, or hoping to do so. If I address a smile to someone, it is because I hope for a response that may take the form of a smile or something else. The address presupposes the hope of a response. Of course, in an exchange of blows, I do not give one in the hope of receiving one in return, but the other person gives me one in response to the one I gave him. Indeed, the common denominator of these exchanges (smiles, blows, courtesies) lies in the idea of response. An act (a smile, a blow, a courtesy) responds to a precedent. There is no exchange except to the extent that there is a response that conforms, is suitable, and in proportion to the demand implicit in the first address. There has to be a certain balance between the two. And there is an order between the two acts, one following the other, and possibly occasioning a third: the exchange is a series of acts that respond to each other; the preceding one is always the cause of the following one. Thus there is much more in exchange in the second sense than in the third, with its mechanical or biological sense. Everything in the third is also in the second: a similar reciprocal displacement, we might say, means that something from each goes toward the other. But the second sense of the word “exchange” has more intentionality, signification, address, an idea of response, and causality. Now look at the first meaning in the dictionary’s listing, an economic sense, an exchange of goods. This is also the fundamental meaning, since all the other definitions are impoverishments of this rich and strong sense, and this is also the strict sense, since it is more limited than the other two. Everything in the third is found here: reciprocal displacement of goods between two actors. And everything in the second is also there: intention, obviously, since I cede my good only to signify to the other that I expect to acquire his; equally present are address and response; and finally, causality, since each of these transfers elicits the other. There is much more as well. As the dictionary says, to exchange is “to cede in return for a counterpart.” In the exchange of goods, one does not cede one’s good unless the other cedes his. One does not cede it except on condition that the other does likewise. One does not cede it except by reason of the engagement of the partner to cede his. And this is what differs completely from the second meaning, since in an “exchange” of words, I do not address words to someone only on condition that he speaks to me, any more than I address a smile to someone solely on condition that he smiles back to me. To summarize: the third meaning has little relevance for us since it designates simple reciprocity and says nothing more: a thing leaves A and goes to B, while from B something goes in the opposite direction to A. This is simple displacement in two directions, in a purely kinetic sense, a simple reciprocity of actions taking place in space. The meaning is purely kinetic. The second meaning is reciprocity plus the idea of response, which corresponds to reciprocate: this reciprocity is intentional, desired, signifying. But the idea of reciprocity in itself does not take us much farther. The first meaning is quite different: it designates an insitution that is human, complex, and perfectly specific. It is human because, as Adam Smith once said, we have never seen animals proposing an exchange of goods with each other. They do exchange in the second sense, but not the first. It is complex because there is a prior engagement or understanding, an “agreement of wills,” as jurists say about contracts, which must precede the acts of transfer. And it is perfectly specific, finally, because the characteristics that we have just identified relative to exchange in the first sense distinguish it from other gift transfers; one does not give something on condition that the other promises to give you back an adequate counter-gift. We are making progress in understanding exchange, and gift as well. (It is always useful—even necessary—to understand non-A in order to understand A). Let us pause for a moment and return to our Martians. More Martian mistakes The Martian anthropologists who are still listening to our conversations and recording them in their ethnographic notes, have not failed to observe how frequently the terms “exchange” and “to exchange” appear in Western languages. They most likely conclude that our societies are based on exchange, as most other human societies probably are. Failing to notice that exchange in the third sense was often found simultaneously in biology, in ecology, as well as in physics, they will think they have discovered a great truth of social science by disclosing that human societies are founded on exchange. But their statement is a flat and banal one, as it is true in any sphere—physics, biology, and the social world—and does not define any one of them (reciprocal action is one of the fundamental principles of mechanics). Perhaps they can claim that the differences in political economy, linguistics, and social anthropology are based solely on the fact that the first deals with the exchange of goods, the second with the exchange of words, and the last with the exchange of women among men. Since they do not make a distinction between the different meanings of the world “exchange,” they see no essential difference separating the exchange of words from the exchange of goods. And after noting the expression “exchange of gifts,” they would probably also say that there is no great difference between exchange and gift—for the simple reason that they would not have seen that the term “exchange” in this expression implies the second sense of the word (we exchange presents like we exchange courtesies) whereas in the expression “exchange of goods” the first sense is implied. Finally, their failure to differentiate between exchange and gift allows the Martians to assert that a statement about the importance of the gift in Western society (their first proposition, remember), is equivalent to this one about the importance of exchange. And thus a complete confusion in Martian anthropology will be established. This confusion has reigned over structuralist anthropology for the last fifty years. And it will reign over any anthropology and any discipline that employs words from everyday language, with all the polysemy and ambiguity that characterize them, with no concern for defining scientific concepts—and defining them rigor-ously—in order to be scientific. The result of all this is that if we are interested in the transfer of goods, we will use the term “exchange” only in the first sense, the restricted and economic sense, and the only one that is specific to institutions and the social sciences. The distinctive feature implied in this exchange is the necessity for a counterpart, and this must be understood as simultaneously the condition, cause, and purpose of the exchange. This counterpart is also obligatory. What does that mean? Obligation and requirement to pay back If there is one aspect for which Mauss’ formula of “three obligations”6 can be reproached, it is that it appears empty of content since the very idea of obligation is coextensive with social life as a whole. In fact there is no social relation without obligation. Whether it is a kinship relation, an amorous commitment, or the relation of the citizen to the state, obligations are found everywhere. But they are not all of the same nature. Obligation makes sense only if the type of obligation is specified—without this, it is almost tautological. Jurists have written comprehensive treatises on obligations, anthropologists never. They think the notion of obligation is self-evident. It is not. I cannot claim to fill this void here, or even to tackle the subject in a significant way, but we must at least make the distinction between a moral obligation and a legal obligation. A moral obligation merely pricks your conscience. But a legally recognized obligation gives rights to the one who has this obligation over you; and it gives him the means of action. We might say that the exchange includes a legal obligation to furnish the counterpart, whereas the gift does not carry such an obligation, or, at most, a moral obligation. We might even correlate this with the notion of sanction, in which we similarly distinguish between moral and legal sanctions. This already goes much farther than Mauss (and all of subsequent anthropology) went, but it carries difficulties linked to the controversial question of how to define legality in preliterate societies—a subject to which we return in chapter 2. But the idea of legality itself shows us another path. What is specific to legal obligation is that payment is required. Payment may be obtained by all legitimate means that exist in a society, including by violence, from the moment it is conducted in forms recognized as legitimate. In a state society, the obligation may be requited by resorting to legal procedures (when agents of the state are involved in the recovery); in a stateless society, payment is obtained through violence of creditors (or right-holders) who may resort to a vendetta, this being the normal way of carrying out one’s own justice. If the notion of compulsion to pay appears clear and generally applicable, we can now see how it sheds light on the question of gift and exchange. First element in the definition of the gift Suppose that you have seen my fountain pen and find it a very nice one. “Monsieur, you have a beautiful fountain pen!” you say. And I say to you: “I am giving it to you!” You protest, you are too kind, there is no reason to, but finally you accept. You offer effusive thanks and you depart with the fountain pen. Fine. A few days later, we meet and I demand that you give me the hundred euros that represent the value of the pen. My demand astonishes you, but I insist, maintaining that, since you accepted my pen, you owe me this sum and that you must pay me. What would you say? Simply: “But then it wasn't a gift!” It is clear where the problem is: the fact that I require a counterpart demolishes the idea that I made you a gift. If several days later, as a gesture of appreciation, you make me a present— valued at one hundred euros, whether more or less doesn't matter—no one would deny that because of this act, I have given you a present. The existence of the counter-gift does not cancel the nature of gift in my original gesture. If, in fact, I had given you my pen in the hope that you would render me some service, this would still make the gesture a gift. It would have been a gesture with an ulterior motive, a selfish one certainly, but a gift nevertheless. The fact of expecting a counter-gift does not cancel the nature of my gesture as a gift. If I later asked you to lend me one hundred euros, on the pretext that I was short of money and reminded you of the gift I gave you a few days earlier, you might find it hard to refuse me, but you could not say that my original gesture was not a gift. It certainly was self-interested and my behavior was deplorable, but still nobody would deny that this gesture was a gift. The fact of soliciting a counter-gift does not annul the nature of my act as a gift. What does annul it is that I claim something in return and that I assert my right to do so. Either it is legitimate for me to claim something and so it is not a gift, or else I have no legitimacy to demand anything at all and it is indeed a gift. We may conclude that the gift is the transfer of a good that implies the renunciation of any right over this good, as well as of any right that might issue from this transfer, in particular something requiring a counterpart. The idea of gift contains the notion of abandoning. The donor abandons a good, any right over this good, as well as any right that might emanate from its transfer. In the exchange, on the contrary, whoever exchanges something has a right to require a counterpart—and it is the right itself that defines the exchange. We may now say precisely in what way Mauss’ expression “exchange of gifts” is (strictly speaking) contradictory: it is because exchange is founded on the right to demand a counterpart, whereas the gift is a gift only because the right to require it is renounced. The key point of this initial approach—which is not yet a definition—is a matter of right: is it legitimate to claim, to require? This key point resides neither in the movement of goods (as does the matter of the counterpart—what we have called the kinetic aspect of transfers), nor in the actors’ psychology (generous or selfish), nor in their behavior (solicitation of the donor). Definition completed This first definition is still inadequate. It allows us to distinguish between gift and exchange, but it does not distinguish between gift and a third type of transfer. Consider the matter of fines, or whatever we are obliged to pay as damages and interest, plus the reparations growing out of a misdeed or a responsibility we are liable for. What is the nature of such transfers? They are obviously not gifts. And they are hardly like exchanges since, although one sees a certain reciprocity at work in the idea of reparation as in the classic exchange, there is a difference of scale enters between the two.7 What marks the exchange is the requirement to repay each transfer: although the reparation may be obligatory, the damage that it is supposed to compensate for is not. Nor is there, in the reparation, the kind of reciprocal causality that characterizes the exchange when each of the exchanging partners agreeing to cede a good causes the other to agree to cede his own. In reparation, the offense is the cause of the reparation, but the reparation is not reciprocally the cause of the fault. We are always wrong to confuse exchange and reciprocity, for if exchange is indeed a form of reciprocity, not all reciprocal acts are exchanges. Finally, the reciprocity associated with reparation is not the same as with exchange. Reparation, being neither gift nor exchange, is a transfer of a different kind, what we will call T3T, a transfer of the third type.8 I will not list here all its characteristics, but say only that it is a transfer that results from an irrevocable obligation (the wronged party having the right to demand reparation from the person who caused him the wrong) and without counterpart. Taxes are another example of a T3T transfer. Now this is our problem: the definition which we use to characterize the gift applies equally to the T3T and so does not allow a distinction between gift and T3T, which is absurd. Consequently we have to refine our definition of gift so it cannot be applied to what is obviously not a gift. Could we say that the gift is voluntary and that no T3T (compensation or tax) is? Could we say that the gift is elective, while taxation is coerced and reparation is compulsory? This would introduce endless and difficult discussions, similar to the ones we wanted to avoid regarding obligation. Now everybody has known situations in which we feel “obliged” to give a gift. For example, we do not feel “totally free” to not make a gift when it is a matter of a tip or a charitable donation. Where does the line of demarcation lie? Could we say that what characterizes the gift is that, even if you are not totally free not to give, you still give “as much as you want,” in the hallowed phrase? But note that the tipping rate is known and customary; and when there is a collection you know that you cannot really give what you want, for there a tacit minimum below which you cannot go beneath. In truth, the notion of freedom covers an infinitely varied range—a range similar to what obligation covers. There are moral pressures that limit freedom and they are quite different from legal constraints, which rely on force. A short parenthesis is appropriate here in order to dispel a false solution that consists of observing: by paying the tax, I do not renounce any right as a result of this gesture, since by this gesture I now have the right to no longer be subject to the demand to pay the tax. A payment acquits a debt; it either creates a right or cancels the obligation that others held over us. We say the same of an individual who caused someone a wrong—once he pays for it. On this basis, we might claim that our first characterization of the gift suffices to differentiate it from T3T. But, in fact, these considerations are not general enough and are valid only for the taxpayer and the author of a reparable wrong. They are not valid for a serf—taillable et corvéable à merci, a French medieval expression meaning “subject to unlimited exploit-ation.” The serf’s tax (payment in money) is, like the corvée (payment in services), a transfer of the third kind. But by furnishing them, the serf acquires no right. For these transfers, our preceding definition of the gift would apply, and this is contrary to reason. A simple solution is found by reconsidering the necessity for payment. The tax must be paid. Every tax bill states as much. The compensation payment, the serf’s tax and corvée (labor), are similarly mandatory. A gift is not. No one can require a gift of you. A gift can be expected, solicited, etc., but not required without losing its character as a gift. At this point we return to the discussion we had about the counterpart. To conclude, we will say that a gift is a transfer of a good that implies the renunciation of any right over this good as well as of any right that might arise from this transfer, in particular that of requiring anything by way of counterpart; and that is not itself required. [In the rest of this book (Testart 2007),] these definitions will enable me to demonstrate that of the two great institutions of the preliterate world that are considered to be founded on the gift—the potlatch and the kula—only the former actually is based on gift-giving; the latter is not (see chapters 3 and 7). These definitions will also permit us to perceive that a form of commercial exchange that has been mistakenly conceived in terms of gift and counter-gift is in fact an exchange—but not a mercantile one (chapter 5). In a general way, these precise definitions will serve as the basis for a critique of the classic theses of social anthropology concerned with the role and importance of the gift in preliterate societies. References Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1923. Primitive mentality. Translated by Lilian Ada Clare. London: G. Allen. ———. 1928. The “soul” of the primitive. Translated by Lilian Ada Clare. London: G. Allen. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1963. Les argonautes du Pacifique occidental. Translated by Simonne and André Devyver. Paris: Gallimard. Mauss, Marcel. 1950. “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison des l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.” In Sociologie et anthropologie, edited by Marcel Mauss, 145–279. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 1990. The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. Translated by Wilfred Douglas Halls. London: Routlege. Smith, Marian W. 1940. The Puyallup-Nisqually. New York: Columbia University Press. Testart, Alain. 1997. “Les trois modes de transfert.” Gradhiva 21: 39–58. Testart, Alain, Valérie Lécrivain, and Nicolas Govoroff. 2002. “Le prix de la fiancée: Richesse et dépendance dans les sociétés traditionnelles.” La Recherche 354: 34–40. Testart, Alain. 2007. Critique du don. Paris: Syllepse. Qu'est-ce qu'un don? Résumé : Cet article introduit la question de la définition du don sur le mode humoristique en imaginant des anthropologues venus de la planète Mars et entendant si souvent le verbe « donner » (par exemple « donner » de l'argent pour payer dans une boutique, ou pour désigner tout ce que l'on « donne » en impôts) qu'ils en concluent à l'importance du don dans notre société actuelle. Cette fiction sert à montrer que « donner » n'est pas la même chose que « faire un don ». On peut aussi montrer cela en remontant à l’étymologie latine. L'article se termine par une définition précise du don, insistant sur la notion d'exigibilité. Ce qui caractérise l’échange est que l'on est en droit d'exiger la contrepartie de chacun des transferts. Dans le don, au contraire, la contrepartie (le contre-don) peut être donné, mais pas exigé. Alain TESTART is Director (emeritus) of Research at the CNRS in Social Anthropology and has published fourteen books on Australian Aborigines, Hunters and Gatherers, religion, slavery, money, and other topics. He is currently working with Prehistorian Archaeologists on the interpretation of deposits, Neo-lithic and Palaeolithic iconography, and the conception of social evolution. Laboratoire d'anthropologie socialeCNRS, EHESS and Collège de France52 rue du cardinal Lemoine75005 ParisFrancealain.testart@college-de-france.fr ___________________ Publisher’s note: This article is an edited translation of Chapter One of Testart, Alain. 2007. Critique du don. Paris: Syllepse. We have retained all references to other chapters. 1. The expression used by Lévi-Strauss and structuralist anthropology that is inspired by a particular form of matrimonial system. 2. Bibliographic references in Testart, et al. (2002: 34). 3. Elsewhere in the essay, Mauss speaks of a “salary-gift” and of “gifts to the chief” that are “tributes.” 4. What was implicit in Lévy-Bruhl (in Primitive mentality, English translation of 1923, and The “soul” of the primitive, English translation of 1928) is explicit in Mauss’s essay, where he speaks of “the slightly puerile legal language of Trobriand Islanders” and of their vocabulary complicated “by a strange inaptitude to divide and define.” 5. For the Trobriand Islanders, see Malinowski (1963: 238–52); for the Puyallup (Salish south coasts of Puget Sound), see Smith (1940: 146–50); see also the chapter on the kula. Note that it is rare for observers to take the trouble to study in detail the vocabulary of these societies; partial and incomplete notes always give the impression of simplicity, when the fault really lies in deficient ethnographic observation. 6. See the systematic critique in chapter 4. 7. This point will be developed in the following chapter (Three situations compared). 8. The presentation of this type transfer in my 1997 article, “Les trois modes de transfert,” was incomplete because reparation was not envisaged there, and so it was partially erroneous due to the overly exclusive link I made with a dependent relationship (which does not exist in the case of reparation), a topic taken up in the following chapter.  

The ajiaco in Cuba and beyond This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © João Felipe Gonçalves. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.031a TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE The ajiaco in Cuba and beyond Preface to “The human factors of cubanidad” by Fernando Ortiz João Felipe GONÇALVES, Tulane University   Latin American anthropology, in its early developments, had a clear nationalist mission. Instead of focusing on faraway cultures and societies, as did their Western European and North American counterparts, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American anthropologists concentrated their efforts on interpreting their own nations. Although the degree to which this happened varied in different countries, Latin American anthropologists played a key role in articulating national(ist) imaginaries, and their ideas have been disseminated through textbooks, rituals, museums, monuments, and popular culture. It is revealing that the discipline obtained its largest and most robust infrastructure precisely in those two countries—Mexico and Brazil—where it has been most influential in the production of nationhood. Although this situation has changed considerably in the last few decades—again, in different degrees across the region—Latin America has long produced what Claudio Lomnitz (2001: 228) has called “national anthropologies,” that is, “anthropological traditions that have been fostered by educational and cultural institutions for the development of studies of their own nation.” One could thus think that, while Euro-American anthropologies traditionally have been concerned with “the other,” Latin American anthropologists have been mostly interested in “the self ”—that is, the self of that imagined community that they helped construct. But the recursive character of the distinction between the other and the self is no secret, and much of classic Latin American anthropology has studied those domestic others—the oppressed and marginalized ethnic and racial groups that today we like to call subaltern—that were supposed to best represent the authentic national self. This has earned Latin American anthropologists some criticism, according to which these mostly white middle- or upper-class urban intellectuals contributed to the exoticization and exploitation of the groups they studied (e.g. Golte 1980). This indictment, however, is unfairly one-sided. As public intellectuals, anthropologists in the region have been active participants in the struggle for social justice and for the rights of indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and lower classes. They have been doing this not only in their scholarly texts, but also in the public sphere and in the political arena: in social movements and governmental organizations, in newspapers and television shows, in law courts and constitutional assemblies (see Poole 2008). Throughout the twentieth century, the public mission of Latin American anthropologists has led to a complex relationship between their scholarship and the ideologies of racial and cultural hybridity that have characterized many national imaginations in the region (see de la Cadena 2000; Miller 2004). Such ideologies envision national cultures as the result of racial and cultural admixture between European, African, Amerindian and, to a lesser extent, Asian elements. This process is often referred to by the Spanish term mestizaje, derived from mestizo, whose original meaning refers to a person of mixed race, but is also applied as an adjective to things of mixed cultural background. Since the 1950s, many Latin American anthropologists have simply avoided or harshly criticized such ideologies, denouncing their empirical and political limitations. However, like other intellectuals—historians, pedagogues, journalists, visual artists, novelists, and poets—anthropologists have sometimes participated in the formulation of mestizaje nationalisms. The two most influential cases were those of Gilberto Freyre (1900–87) in Brazil and Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) in Cuba, the founders of modern sociocultural anthropology in those countries.1 The text that follows is a translation of one of the most original and sophisticated conceptualizations of mestizaje by a Latin American anthropologist and public intellectual. Fernando Ortiz first delivered “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad” as a lecture at the University of Havana in 1939, and published it in the following year in the journal he edited, Revista Bimestre Cubana. He was given the topic of the talk—“the human factors of Cubanness”—by the fraternity that invited him to speak, which indicates the public interest in an anthropologist’s expertise in characterizing national culture. But his very words in the lecture, as well as his larger trajectory, show that defining Cuban culture was for Ortiz himself an existential mission, a life-long project with clear political concerns. The lecture that Hau is now publishing also summarizes Ortiz’s view that one could only understand Cuban culture by seeing it as a “mestizaje of races, mestizaje of cultures” and by examining the various cultural elements that composed it. The text is thus a classic example of a Latin American anthropologist participating in the public imagination of nationhood based on a view of mestizaje. This context is critical to understanding “The human factors of cubanidad.” But we have not chosen to translate it into English only as a historical example of a style of “peripheral” anthropology. For most non-specialists, the relevance of this text may lie in the extent to which it escapes its original nationalist goals and offers a unique understanding of mestizaje radically different from other views that are better known in the English-speaking world. By using the culinary metaphor of the ajiaco (a typical Cuban stew made of several elements), by defining Cubanness as a process rather than an essence, and by distinguishing between Cuban culture and identity, Ortiz’s conceptualization of cultural mixture may shed new light on processes occurring elsewhere, as demonstrated in a recent work by Stephan Palmié (2013). Before explaining this in more detail, I will offer a brief overview of Fernando Ortiz’s life and work. It is often observed that many nationalist Latin American intellectuals and artists were educated in Western Europe and the United States and used the knowledge acquired there to interpret their own nations. This typically refers to their higher education, but the case of Fernando Ortiz was more extreme: born in Havana in 1881, he was mainly raised in the Spanish island of Minorca, where his family moved the following year. After a short period in Havana in his adolescence, Ortiz went back to Spain, this time to Madrid and then Barcelona, where he obtained respectively a bachelor’s and a doctor’s degree in Law. The years of his youth were politically turbulent in Cuba. As a teenager in Havana, Ortiz saw the country’s last war of independence, which ended in 1898 with the American intervention in what became known outside the island as the Spanish-American War. After four years of American occupation, Cuba was granted formal independence in 1902. That same year, a recently graduated Ortiz became a diplomat of the new nation, representing it in Spain, France, and Italy.2 Fernando Ortiz only settled permanently in Cuba in 1905, at the age of twenty-four. He then launched an extremely productive career as a writer, lawyer, public prosecutor, criminologist, and politician. It was Ortiz’s criminological interests that first led him to anthropological research. The racist notions that prevailed in Cuba at that time linked several criminal activities to witchcraft of supposed African origin, and this was the topic of his first book, Los negros brujos, published in 1906. Under the influence of Cesare Lombroso—with whom he had presumably taken classes during his diplomatic stay in Genoa and who wrote the preface to the book—Ortiz attributed crime and witchcraft to biological factors. During the following ten years he wrote several monographs on what he called “Afro-Cuban” topics: folklore, religion, slavery, rebellions, and language. In these books, partly influenced by the work of Oswald Spengler, he gradually abandoned his initial racialist perspective and adopted a more sociological and cultural approach, and by the 1920s he had become an outspoken opponent of Cuban racism. In the first three decades of the century, Ortiz also wrote articles and delivered speeches on Cuban politics, in which he denounced several problems of the early republic and proposed solutions, especially to the economic dependency on sugar and to the endemic corruption that made political office-holding one of the most profitable activities in the country. He also criticized the control the United States exerted over Cuba’s economy and politics, and he called for a reform of the terms of Cuba’s relations with its northern neighbor. Already a prominent public intellectual and a professor of public law at the University of Havana, Ortiz also engaged in formal politics as a member of the Liberal Party. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1917 and stayed there until he resigned ten years later. The presidency of Gerardo Machado (1925–1933) marked the end of Ortiz’s involvement in formal politics. Running on a reformist platform that included the diversification of the Cuban economy and the end of the Platt Amendment (a provision that permitted American intervention in Cuban politics), Machado not only fell short on his promises, but also became a ruthless dictator who violently repressed any opposition and protected American interests in the island. Like most liberal intellectuals, Ortiz had strongly supported Machado at first, but he joined the opposition in 1927. Eventually forced into exile in 1931, he continued to attack Machado from Washington, DC, until the fall of the dictator in 1933. Although he advised the short-lived revolutionary government that was then established, he soon became disillusioned and skeptical about formal politics and from then on dedicated all his efforts to intellectual pursuits. Between 1934 and 1940 Fernando Ortiz published no book-length monographs, but, as fascism grew in Europe, he intensified his attacks on racism in Cuba through public lectures and articles in the press. In this period Ortiz was involved in intense research and in the rethinking of Cuban culture, which in 1940 resulted in the publication of what would become his most influential work: Cuban counterpoint: Tobacco and sugar (the first English translation published in 1947). This book used baroque prose to interpret Cuba’s history and culture by comparing the island’s two most important agricultural products, considering everything from their physical aspects as plants to the different forms of their consumption and their effects on human bodies. Against an intellectual tradition that, since the late eighteenth century, had linked Cuban pride to the production and export of sugar, Ortiz praised the tobacco industry for having fostered the most progressive—even revolutionary—factors in Cuban politics and for being based traditionally on small properties, national land ownership, and free labor. He contrasted this to the sugar economy, which he depicted as having a lasting conservative effect on the country due to its association with large estates, foreign capital, slavery, and the intense exploitation of labor. 1940 was a turning point in Ortiz’s career. The two main pieces that he published that year—Cuban counterpoint and “The human factors of cubanidad”—exemplify how his political concerns for Cuba from then on were expressed through anthropological writing rather than in formal political involvement. That year was a turning point for Cuban history as well. It saw the promulgation of a new Constitution, widely celebrated for its social-democratic character and the hopes it brought to different social groups. But the experience with representative democracy that followed was plagued with corruption scandals and political violence, and ended with Fulgencio Batista’s coup d’état in 1952. Fernando Ortiz’s relative silence about formal politics—except for brief statements in interviews and press articles— remained during Batista’s dictatorship (1952–58) and the ten years of Fidel Castro’s government that he lived to see. It was clear that Ortiz’s political battles had shifted to the field of cultural production, in which he worked ceaselessly during the last three decades of his life. In this period he published several long volumes on Cuban history and Afro-Cuban issues (especially music and dance), besides a book and several articles analyzing and attacking the continued existence of racism in the country. What is more, he left a vast collection of research notes and incomplete manuscripts, which are still being edited and published by the indefatigable staff of the Fundación Fernando Ortiz, Cuba’s main institution of anthropological research. Created in 1995 by the writer Miguel Barnet, the Foundation most recently published Ortiz’s (2008) manuscript about the cult of Cuba’s patron saint, remarkably edited by José Matos Arévalos. I was in Havana at the time of the release of this book, which was widely publicized in mass media. I was impressed by the impact the new book had on the city’s non-specialist reading public, who enthusiastically bought all available copies and avidly read and discussed it in the following months. This should come as no surprise, given Fernando Ortiz’s impact on Cuban intellectual life throughout the twentieth century. Besides his activities as a researcher and public intellectual, Ortiz was a real institution builder. In 1907 he joined the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, a learned society that since the late eighteenth century had dedicated itself to the mission of promoting the study of Cuba’s economy, society, and culture. As its president between 1923 and 1959 (when it was closed by the revolutionary government), Ortiz gave the Sociedad a new impetus as a sort of national modernist think-tank. During those years he also edited the institution’s Revista Bimestre Cubana, a journal that he turned into one of the main forums for twentieth-century Cuban intelligentsia. Among the important institutions he created were the Sociedad de Folklore Cubano, an association of folklore studies (1923); the Institución Hispanocubana de Cultura, a cultural association of exchange with the Spanish modernist vanguards (1926); the Panamerican Institute of Geography (1928); and the Alianza Cubana por un Mundo Libre (1941), an anti-fascist organization. But it was mainly in the field of Afro-Cuban studies—a field of his own founding—that Ortiz left his indelible mark on Cuban intellectual life. Having coined and disseminated the term “Afro-Cuban,” in 1937 he created the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos, a scholarly association dedicated to the field (see Bronfman 2004). The several journals he founded and edited along his life were also important venues for the publication of Afro-Cuban studies. Ortiz was also closely related to Cuba’s most important visual artists and writers, and had a strong impact on the artistic milieu of his time. His work was especially influential on afronegrismo, an artistic movement of the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated Cuba’s mestizo heritage and used Afro-Cuban motifs in poetry, novels, music, dance, and visual arts (see Kutzinski 1993, de la Fuente 2001). For all these reasons, Cuban intellectual Juan Marinello called Ortiz, following his death, “the third discoverer of Cuba”—after Christopher Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt (who visited and wrote about the country in the nineteenth century)—an epithet by which he is still widely known in Cuba today. Outside his native island, Fernando Ortiz became better known for creating the concept of “transculturation,” which he introduced in Cuban counterpoint. He proposed it as an alternative to the idea of acculturation, which he criticized for supposing that in the encounter between two societies one of them would simply lose its culture and adopt that of the other. This was fundamentally wrong, according to Ortiz, because the process of cultural contact and change never moves in one direction only. Rather, all cultures in contact transform each other and create a new culture, different from the original ones. He gave this process a central role in the interpretation of his own country: “the real history of Cuba is the history of its intermeshed transculturations” (1995: 98). Nowhere else, he claimed, did transculturations happen so quickly and powerfully, and nowhere else did they bring so many diverse traditions together. From this angle, then, this concept can be read as a particular instantiation of the visions of cultural hybridity that for so many Latin American intellectuals defined their nations. However, unlike other Latin American thinkers who saw hybridity as something specific to their nations only, that which made them unique, Ortiz also attributed a theoretical value to the concept of transculturation. He first introduced it to “suggest that it might be adopted in sociological terminology” (1995: 97), and not only in the study of Cuba. He defended it in general terms: “the word ‘transculturation’ better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture” (ibid.: 102). Although it was most radical and evident in Cuba, Ortiz argued, transculturation happens “among all peoples” (ibid.: 98). That he saw a potential for his concept beyond Cuba is also suggested by the fact that it was at the center of the exchange he entertained with Bronislaw Malinowski, both in person and by correspondence (see Coronil 1995, 2005, and Santí 2002). At Ortiz’s invitation, Malinowski wrote the preface to the original edition of Cuban counterpoint, giving his endorsement to the idea of transculturation. And Ortiz (1995: 103) himself reminded the reader, in the body of the book, of this “eminent sponsorship” of his concept! What is more, according to Enrico Mario Santí (2002: 52–53), Ortiz had an English translation in mind and modified the structure of his book following Malinowski’s comments on the expectations of an English-reading public. All this points to the fact that Ortiz gave a properly theoretical value to “transculturation.” This concept, for him, both defined Cubanness and had a general validity for all cultures—a form of ethnographic theory. It was the element of human history that Cuba revealed to the world, or, to play with the title of the lecture translated here, it was one of the Cuban factors of humanity. The generalizing ambition of the concept of transculturation contrasts starkly to the nationalist goals and content of “The human factors of cubanidad,” published in the same year as Cuban counterpoint. In this lecture, Fernando Ortiz talks to a young Cuban audience whom he addresses as compatriots and among whom he wants to instill a sense of urgency to understand national culture—“your lives depend on it” are his concluding words. Nationalistic deictics—like “we” to designate Cubans and “here” to designate Cuba—abound in the piece, whereas the word transculturation does not appear at all. The contrast between the book and the lecture is even more evident if one considers that Ortiz uses several sentences in both texts, word for word, in the passages that describe the traumatic uprooting of the groups that came to Cuba and their violent contacts on the island. In the lecture, his concern is to define cubanidad—“the specific quality of a culture, the culture of Cuba”—and distinguish it from cubanía, a neologism by which he means “a cubanidad that is full, felt, conscious, and desired.” Although both terms could be translated as “Cubanness,” the distinction—analogous to that between “culture” and “identity”—is fundamental to Ortiz’s argument. In his view, one could have cubanidad without having cubanía, that is, one could be Cuban without identifying oneself with the nation. He also argues that this identification emerged first among the most oppressed and marginalized Cubans, that is, among Blacks and poor Whites. In his words, “cubanía did not rain from above; it sprouted from below.” At first this might remind one of the idea, common in many national(ist) imaginaries in Latin America and beyond, that the authentic essence of nationhood is to be found among the subaltern—peasants, women, indigenous peoples, etc. However, Ortiz is not arguing that underprivileged Cubans are more authentically Cuban than others, but only that they have felt themselves Cuban earlier than others. That is, his point is not about culture and synchronic essence, but about identification and diachronic precedence. If populist nationalisms tend to silence those who are represented as the heart of nationhood (Chatterjee 1993, Lomnitz 2001), Ortiz stresses the consciousness and agency of the oppressed in the emergence of a national identification. But the centerpiece of “The human factors of cubanidad” lies in the culinary metaphor it uses to describe cubanidad—the ajiaco. This dish, Ortiz says, is “our most typical and most complex stew, made of various sorts of legumes, which here we call viandas, and of pieces of assorted meats. All of this is cooked with boiling water until it gives off a very thick and succulent broth.” Likewise, he argues, Cuban mestizo culture is composed of multifarious cultural ingredients—mainly European and African, but also Asian, North American, and Amerindian—that blend to different degrees. These cultural ingredients are found in a myriad of gradations between the initial state in which they entered Cuba and the state of total dissolution into that thick broth. To quote the author again, Cuban culture is “a heterogeneous conglomerate of diverse races and cultures, of many meats and crops, that stir up, mix with each other, and disintegrate into one single social bubbling.” The ajiaco metaphor powerfully subverts an image that is found in several nationalistic discourses across the globe: that of “roots.” Nationalists often describe their purported ethnic origins as “roots” and claim that the “roots” of their imagined communities connect them to their territories. Ortiz in this lecture is doing precisely the opposite. He emphasizes that no one can claim roots in Cuba—not even indigenous peoples, who also came from somewhere else (no one has ever found the Garden of Eden, he reminds us!) and are mostly vanished anyway. This lack of roots is the message of the various vegetable metaphors that Ortiz uses throughout the text: Spaniards can aspire at most to be Cuba’s “cultural trunk”; but, like Africans and everyone else, they were “uprooted and transplanted,” “but never well-sowed in the island.” The only roots that Cubans can claim are real roots are the delicious roots that go into the ajiaco. Literary critic Gustavo Pérez Firmat (1994: 16) incisively comments on the consequences of Ortiz’s images: We Cubans have a peculiar relation to our roots: we eat them. What is the ajiaco if not a root roast, a kind of funeral pyrex? You take your favorite aboriginal roots—malanga, ñame, yuca, boniato—and you cook them until they are soft and savory. In keeping with your roots’ roots, you might even cook them in a hole in the ground. But then you consume them. You don't freeze them. You don't preserve them. You don't put them in a root museum. This passage points out that, by replacing metaphorical roots by real ones that are mixed in a stew, Fernando Ortiz creates a de-essentialized view of culture and hybridity. If Cuban culture is an ajiaco, it cannot be ossified into exhibitions or petrified in landmarks; it is to be consumed in its constant flow. This is perhaps why—in contrast to the telluric preferences of other nationalists—Ortiz uses plenty of hydraulic metaphors. In his text, people come to Cuba in “exogenous streams” and “abundant migratory flows”; “the torrent of the slave trade” was replaced by “rivulets of immigrant labor”; American civilization is a “very powerful Niagara” that brings “streams that drag us but also elevate us to their froth”; and Cuban history is full of “waves, whirlpools, bends, rapids, and quagmires.” In sum, cubanidad is a “vital concept of constant flow.” After all, it is into water that Cuban roots are thrown in order to be cooked and eaten. If a real ajiaco is full of roots, “The human factors of cubanidad” reads as a textual ajiaco of metaphoric uprooting and water. Of course, the water held by a pot could also become a problem for a conception of a culture in flow. When the ajiaco’s water dissolves all the ingredients that are thrown into it, it risks becoming a placid homogenous broth. Fernando Ortiz recognizes this tendency towards cultural homogenization, but he insists that people keep getting in and out of Cuba and therefore new cultural ingredients never stop entering the stew. The ajiaco serves as a good metaphor precisely because it is constantly cooking and is never ready: yesterday’s ajiaco always takes whatever new ingredients are available today, and the boiling and mixture never stops. This is important because Ortiz locates cubanidad both in the temporary end-results and in the process of mixture: “One might think that it is necessary to search for cubanidad in this sauce of new and synthetic succulence, formed by the fusion of the human lineages dissolved in Cuba. But no. Cubanidad is not only in the result, but also in the complex process of its very formation, disintegrative and integrative.” That is, in Ortiz’s lecture cultural mixture appears as an endless process of transformation. The image of cultural cooking recovers the idea of process that the term “mestizaje” originally expressed and that had been lost somewhere in the long history of its repeated use. But Ortiz denied the ajiaco the theoretical value that he gave to “transculturation.” “The human factors of cubanidad” frames that metaphor only as a tool to interpret Cuba and does not suggest that it could help understand other contexts. Accordingly, whereas the first English translation of Cuban counterpoint came out in 1947, it is only now, in 2014, that an English translation of the lecture is being published. Perhaps Ortiz thought that a sociological concept was more apt for generalizations than a culinary metaphor. But fortunately, the anthropologist Stephan Palmié has recently done for the ajiaco metaphor what Ortiz failed to do—to show its theoretical value far beyond the nationalist goals of the text in which it first appeared. Palmié (2013: 101) tells us: Once we choose the ajiaco as a metaphor circumscribing our perspective, the world of clearcut units is lost to us. Inside the olla cubana [Cuban pot] Africa, America and Europe can no longer be disentangled. There are, at best, unstable gradations by which one mutates into the other, and this process of refraction, decomposition, and its corresponding movement of recomposition and autopoiesis generates a potentially infinite series of possible perceptions of difference. What we face is nothing short of a meltdown of the pluralistic epistemic infrastructure guaranteeing a good deal of the anthropological project, as traditionally conceived. The ethnographic interface has expanded into a total, and thoroughly totalizing, social phenomenon, with little, if anything, clearly discernible on either side. The ajiaco, in other words, circumscribes a fractal pattern. History cooks us all. Thus, if decades ago a Polish anthropologist awkwardly tried to fit Ortiz’s concept of transculturation in his own functionalist framework, today a German anthropologist successfully establishes a fruitful connection between Ortiz’s ajiaco metaphor and recent anthropological theorizations. 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The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coronil, Fernando. 1995. “Introduction to the Duke University Press edition. Transcul turation and the politics of theory: Countering the center.” In Cuban counterpoint, by Fernando Ortiz, ix–lvi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2005. “Transcultural anthropology in the Américas (with an accent): The uses of Fernando Ortiz.” In Cuban counterpoints, edited by Mauricio Font and Alfonso Quiroz. 139–156. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. de la Cadena, Marisol. 2000. Indigenous mestizos: The politics of race and culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. de la Fuente, Alejandro. 2001. A nation for all: Race, inequality, and politics in twentieth-century Cuba. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Font, Mauricio and Alfonso Quiroz, ed. 2005. Cuban counterpoints: The legacy of Fernando Ortiz. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. García-Carranza, Ariceli, Norma Suárez Suárez, and Alberto Quesada Morales. 1998. Cronología Fernando Ortiz. Havana: Fundación Fernando Ortiz. Golte, Jürgen. 1980. “Latin America: The anthropology of conquest.” In Anthropology: Ancestors and Heirs, edited by Stanley Diamond, 377–394. New York: Moulton Publishers. Kutzinski, Vera. 1993. Sugar secrets: Race and the erotics of Cuban nationalism. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Lomnitz, Claudio. 2001. Deep Mexico, silent Mexico: An anthropology of nationalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Matos Arévalos, José. 1999. La historia en Fernando Ortiz. Havana: Fundación Fernando Ortiz. Melo, Alfredo César. 2007. “A face de Janus no ensaísmo latino-americano.” Chasqui 36:1, 121–132. Miller, Marilyn. 2004. Rise and fall of the cosmic race: The cult of mestizaje in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ortiz, Fernando. 1940. “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad.” Revista Bimestre Cubana XLV, 161–186. ———. (1940) 1995. Cuban counterpoint: Tobacco and sugar. Translated by Harriet de Onís. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. (1940) 2002. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Edited by Enrico Mario Santí. Madrid: Letras Hispánicas. ———. 2008. La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre: Historia y etnografía. Edited by José Matos Arévalos. Havana: Fundación Fernando Ortiz. Palmié, Stephan. 2013. The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. 1994. Life on the hyphen: The Cuban-American way. Austin: University of Texas Press. Poole, Deborah, ed. 2008. A companion to Latin American anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell. Santí, Enrico Mario. 2002. “Introducción. Fernando Ortiz: Contrapunteo y transculturación,” in Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y al azúcar, by Fernando Ortiz, 23–119. Madrid: Letras Hispánicas.     João Felipe GONÇALVES received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University and a Research Fellow at the University of São Paulo. His work focuses on Cuba and its diaspora, nationalism, urban space and place, and the production of history. João Felipe GonçalvesDepartment of Anthropology101 Dinwiddie HallTulane University6823 St. Charles AvenueNew Orleans, LA 70118jgoncal@tulane.edu Gregory Duff MORTON is a graduate student in anthropology and social work at the University of Chicago. He studies labor, the external quality of value, and welfare money in rural Northeastern Brazil. Gregory Duff MortonDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of Chicago1126 E 59th StreetChicago, IL 60637duffmorton@uchicago.edu ___________________ 1. Arroyo (2003) and Melo (2007) offer excellent comparisons between these two authors. That Arroyo and Melo are literary scholars indicates that the writings of both Freyre and Ortiz have a major literary value, and both are widely acknowledged as important and innovative writers in their languages. 2. This brief biographical sketch of Fernando Ortiz is based on several secondary sources: Coronil 1995; García-Carranza, Suárez Suárez, and Quesada Morales 1998; Matos Arévalos 1999; Santí 2002; Font and Quiroz 2005.   This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Fernando Ortiz, João Felipe Gonçalves, and Gregory Duff Morton. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.031b TRANSLATION The human factors of cubanidad Fernando ORTIZ Translated from the Spanish by João Felipe Gonçalvesand Gregory Duff Morton Originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Havana in 1939 and first published in 1940, this text is a classic of Latin American anthropology and a key statement on racial and cultural mixture in the Americas. Following the tradition of the Latin American essays of national interpretation, Fernando Ortiz discusses the social and cultural bases of Cuban nationhood. He distinguishes cubanidad—Cuba’s unique culture—from cubanía—the consciousness and attachment to that culture—and argues that the latter first emerged among Black and poor Cubans. As for cubanidad, he defines it as both the process and the ever-changing results of the mixture of uprooted cultural elements coming from different world areas, especially Europe and Africa. He interprets Cuban culture as a permanent flow, located in “the complex process of its very formation, disintegrative and integrative.” Ortiz describes cubanidad through the metaphor of the ajiaco, a stew that never stops cooking because the multifarious ingredients that compose it are constantly renewed, mixing with each other and dissolving into a broth. The text discusses the cultural contributions of the different groups that moved to Cuba and interprets Cuban history as based on violent processes of migration, exploitation, and conflict. Keywords: Cuba, Afro-Atlantic world, Latin America, nationalism, mestizaje, race, identity My friendly audience: In another life, in another life of mine, twenty-five years ago, I was a professor at this University of Havana, my alma mater. I left the post to become, once again, a mere student in the varied disciplines that fate and my Cuban condition were presenting to me as subjects in which my mental curiosity might matriculate. Today I return to this beloved university, brought back by the students and by their fraternity. It is not without emotion that I come to this ceremony, a ceremony that for me evokes far-off days. Everything in the university has changed. There is left but one stone of the old colonial military powder-house, a building transformed by the good judgment of free Cubans, who chose not the explosiveness of saltpeter but the dynamism of ideas. There remain but few professors from the group that taught with me in my first youth, the most useless of my youths. My students who are still here are now professors. I remember, among others at this college, the very well-educated Dr. Salvador Massip, who so sensibly opened this conference series some afternoons ago; he regularly studied public law with me and ended up as a good professor of geography. Others of my disciples from those days are scattered in other professorships; others have been chiefs of staff, magistrates, and legislators; some soldiers and sailors, lawyers and teachers; some have become heroes, and others probably continue to be rascals, including one who spent time in jail. Some have died, bequeathing to their native land their names covered in halos of glory; perhaps one of them will one day end up on an altar. And today’s students are different as well. I know few of them personally; I know them better by observing them in mass. More lively and mentally ambitious than their equivalents from yesteryear, they are our hope for the human future, Cuban and universal, which with so much tragedy is fermenting the world with new leavening. The future Cuban nation will depend on both their intelligence and their character. These are not the students of my time, who would tell me—and sometimes believe it, in their tender innocence—that I could teach them something just by glancing at the books. Today’s students, with better judgment, approach me as one student to another, so that I might work with them on new labors of research and criticism. From time to time they ask my counsel on how to avoid some of the shortcomings in the old teachings, some of the outmoded insipidness, the hollow pomposity, the concealed craftiness. Today I come back to this beloved university as a student, as a student of Cuban studies. I am one more novice, among so many others, who asks for your benevolence in this difficult initiation moment, in this rite of passage, as Van Gennep would say, through which the students of Cuba, like those of all countries and even the most savage tribes, celebrate with boisterous symbolic extravagance the step from childhood to the plenitude of personality. I do not know what you might have prepared for my hazing, but you can already count on my gratitude for your generous sympathy. And let us go to the topic that was laid out for me: the human factors of cubanidad.1 In this theme, the human factors of cubanidad, there are two focal elements and one reference point: cubanidad, the human dimension, and their relationship. As such, it seems, according to solid logic, that one would first have to define cubanidad and that which is human, so that afterwards one might be able to follow the relationship of correspondence between the two terms. This may not be an easy task. It would be wasteful for us to entertain ourselves by defining that which is human, yet it seems indispensable to have some previous idea of what must be meant by cubanidad. What is cubanidad? The response seems simple. Cubanidad is “the quality of that which is Cuban,” or, in other words, its way of being, its character, its quality, its distinctive condition, its individuation inside of the universal. Very good. All of this is in the abstraction of language. But let us go to the concrete. If cubanidad is the adjectival peculiarity that attaches itself to a human noun, then what is it to be Cuban? Here we find ourselves easily in the presence of an objective element that can serve as a foundation: Cuba, that is, a place. Not that Cuba is the same concept for everyone. Our competent professor of geography told us some afternoons ago that Cuba is an island; but he also said, with the same precision, that Cuba is an archipelago, in other words, a set of many islands, hundreds of them, some of which are larger than others whose names have resounded in history. Moreover, Cuba is not just an island or an archipelago. It is also an expression with an international meaning that has not always been accepted as coterminous with its geographic meaning. Let us remember that only a few years ago there occurred a widespread debate among pre-Hitlerian statesmen, historians, and geographers over whether the Island of the Pines was or was not an integral part of Cuba, and whether or not there should be a declaration of Anchluss by a neighboring power, so as to protect a minority irredenta of subfloridian Sudeten.2 Perhaps we will get closer to the concept of cubanidad if we recognize that Cuba is at once a land and a people; that that which is Cuban is that which is particular about this country and its occupants. Saying this may satisfy many, but it is still nothing when one aspires to sociological, psychological, or ethnographic classification of the Cuban condition and of cubanidad. Let us now distinguish cubanidad from cubanismo. Cubanismo, in a strict sense, refers to the phrasings or style of speech characteristic of Cubans. For example, to order a fruta-bomba in a New York restaurant, as I have heard happen, is a cubanismo as authentic as it is alarming.3 In the broader sense, cubanismo is the whole character associated with Cubans, even beyond language. To appear in Washington, as I have seen happen, carrying a coco-macaco in one’s right hand is a cubanismo as genuine as it is unpardonable.4 Cubanismo could also be thought of as the tendency or inclination to imitate that which is Cuban, to love it, or to serve it. An Anglo-Saxon can experience cubanismo and feel himself to be cubanista, without thereby acquiring either the genius of Cervantes or cubanidad, or the Cuban style, or Cervantes’. Cubanidad cannot be understood as a tendency or a trait, but rather, to use today’s fashionable idiom, as a complex that constitutes a condition or quality, as a specific attribute of the Cuban. Taking the concept of Cuba as definitive, and limiting ourselves here to the human, who is there who might be considered characteristically, unmistakably, and fully Cuban? In general and common language, there are various ways to be Cuban: by residence, by nationality, by birth. One is Cuban because one is part of this human nucleus that is called the people or the society of Cuba. But this cubanidad ascribed to the person who lives in Cuba, is it genuinely characteristic? No, because in Cuba there are many inhabitants who are foreigners. One is Cuban because one holds the citizenship of the state that is named Cuba; but is this cubanidad of the Cuban citizen fully and typically characteristic? No, because here we have a citizenship that absorbs people too unselectively, like that beautiful color, toasted yet superficial, that Nordic beauties come to win for themselves in Cuba through the burning caresses of our sun. It is a citizenship more like a shirt than a skin, a llega-y-pón citizenship5 as our popular language would call it, and there are fellow citizens whose cubanidad barely extends past the edges of their official documents, hiding itself covered up in the same pocket as their coinage. Is the Cuban the person born in Cuba? In a primary and strict sense, yes, but with great reservations. First, because not few are the people who, having been born in Cuba, soon spread themselves in other lands, gaining exotic customs and manners. Their only Cuban quality is the accident of having seen their first sun in Cuba; they do not so much as recognize their native land. Second, because not uncommonly found are the Cubans, citizens or no, who, born across the seas, have grown and formed their personalities here, among the Cuban people. They have integrated themselves into its mass and are indistinguishable from the natives. Already they are Cubans or like Cubans, more Cuban than others who have the name only because of their cradles or their documents. These foreign-born Cubans are the ones who, as folklore says, have gone native like plantains.6 Third, because even among us, the natives of Cuba—among us, the indigenous Cubans, as much those of yesteryear as those of the present—there is to be found such an assortment of manners, characters, temperaments, and figures that any effort to individuate cubanidad and its types becomes an extraordinarily uncertain task. Fourth, because the expressions of Cubans have varied in accordance with the changing times and the diverse ethnogenic flows, and also in accordance with the economic circumstances that have moved and inspired them. For this reason, quite ostensible forms, at one point taken to be typical, may shortly thereafter be abandoned as insignificant. And fifth, because some traits that are quite marked in the Cuban people are not exclusive to this people. Rather, these same traits appear among people with similar ancestry, and even among those of other races with an analogous social fermentation. In conclusion, it must be agreed that, at least for now, cubanidad can only be vaguely defined as a relationship of belonging to Cuba. But what is this relationship? We have already said that cubanidad cannot depend simply on the Cuban land in which one is born, nor on the political citizenship that one enjoys … and from which one sometimes suffers. In cubanidad there is something more than a meter of earth watered by the first tears of a newborn, something more than a few inches of white paper marked with seals and symbolic scribbles from an authority that recognizes some tie, whether official, truthful, or supposed. Cubanidad is not given in conception; there is no Cuban race. And there is no pure race anywhere. Race, after all, is nothing but a civil status granted by anthropological authorities; but this racial status tends to be as conventional and arbitrary, and sometimes as changeable, as the civil status that fits men into one or another nationality. Cubanidad, for the individual, is not in the blood, nor on the paper, nor in the habitation of a place. Cubanidad is most of all the specific quality of a culture, the culture of Cuba. To speak in contemporary terms, cubanidad is a condition of the soul, a complex of feelings, ideas, and attitudes. But still there is a fuller cubanidad. One would say that it comes from the entrails of the native land and envelops and penetrates us like the breath of creation that springs from our Mother Earth after she has been made fecund by the rain sent to her by the Father Sun. It is something that makes us languish in the love of our breezes and snatches us away in the vertigo of our hurricanes. It is something that attracts us and draws us to love, like a woman who is one in three persons: mother, wife, and daughter. Mystery of the Cuban trinity, for in her we are born, to her we give ourselves, her we possess, and in her we must survive. There is something ineffable that completes the cubanidad of birth, of nation, of coexistence, and even of culture. There are Cubans who, even being Cuban for the reasons enunciated here, do not want it and even feel shame and deny being Cuban. In these people cubanidad lacks fullness; it is castrated. For complete cubanidad it is not enough to have in Cuba one’s birthplace, nation, life, and conduct. One must also have consciousness. Full cubanidad does not consist merely in being Cuban because of any of the environmental accidents that have surrounded the individual personality and forged its conditions. What is also necessary is the consciousness of being Cuban and the will to want to be it. Perhaps it would be appropriate to invent, or to introduce into our language, a new word that, without prior impure associations, could express this fullness of conscious and ethical self-identification with the Cuban condition. That brilliant Spaniard known as Miguel de Unamuno, such a master of language and so sensible to the necessities of the spirit, thought that in man one would have to distinguish his humanity, the generic and involuntary condition of a person, from something called his hombría,7 the specific condition responsible for his individuality. Similarly, Unamuno argued, in the field of Spanish realities one must differentiate the concepts of hispanidad and hispanía. I think that for us Cubans, what would be fitting is the distinction between cubanidad, the generic condition of the Cuban, and cubanía, a cubanidad that is full, felt, conscious, and desired; a responsible cubanidad, a cubanidad with the three virtues said to be theological: faith, hope, and love. We have said that cubanidad on the human plane is above all a condition of culture. Cubanidad is belonging to the culture of Cuba. But what is the characteristic culture of Cuba? To know it, one would have to study a very intricate complex of emotional, intellectual, and volitional elements. Not only as manifested in the individuals made prominent in Cuban life by the highlights of their personalities, but also in all of the sediments, in the mountain peaks, in the hillsides, in the valleys, in the savannahs, and even in the swamps. All culture is essentially a social fact. Not only at the level of today’s life, but also in terms of its historical rise and its foreseeable becoming. All culture is dynamic. And not only in its transplantation from multiple foreign environments, but also in its local transformations. All culture is creative. All culture is creative, dynamic, and social. Such is that of Cuba, even if one has not clearly defined its characteristic expressions. Thus it is inevitable that the theme of this present discussion be taken to be a vital concept of constant flow. It is not a synthetic reality, already formed and known. Rather, it is the experience of the many human elements that have come to this land called Cuba—and that continue coming, physically or spiritually, in order to merge into its people and codetermine its culture. It has been said repeatedly that Cuba is a melting-pot of human elements. This comparison applies to our native land, as it does to the other nations of America. But perhaps one might present another metaphor, one more precise, more comprehensive, and more appropriate for a Cuban audience, since in Cuba there are no foundries with melting-pots, aside from the very modest plants of some artisans. Instead, let us make a Cuban simile, a metaphoric cubanismo, and we will understand each other better, more quickly, and in more detail. Cuba is an ajiaco. What is an ajiaco? It is our most typical and most complex stew, made of various sorts of legumes, which here we call viandas, and of pieces of assorted meats. All of this is cooked with boiling water until it gives off a very thick and succulent broth, and it is seasoned with the very Cuban chili pepper (ají) that gives the stew its name. The ajiaco was the characteristic stew of the Taíno Indians, as of all of the primitive peoples who, while passing from a merely extractive and nomadic economy to a sedentary and agricultural one, learned to cook food in pots on the fire. All peoples have known similar stews, with varying nutritional ingredients according to their particular ecologies, and such stews are sometimes preserved as survivals of remote agrarian life. So in Europe we see the so-called “rotten pot”—which in French is known as pot-pourri—the cocido, the potaje, the sancocho, the minestra, et cetera.8 This “single dish,” a primitive element of cave cuisine, consisted of a pot with boiling water on top of the hearth. Into it were thrown the vegetables, the herbs, and the roots that the woman cultivated and had in her small plot according to the seasons. In with these were placed meats from every sort of creature, quadrupeds, fowl, reptiles, fish, and shellfish that the man obtained in his predatory races along the mountains and the coastline. Into the pot went everything edible, the meats without cleaning and sometimes already rotting, the vegetables without peeling and often with worms that gave them more substance. Everything was cooked together and everything was seasoned with strong doses of chili pepper, doses that covered all of the unpleasantness through the supreme stimulant of their sting. From this pot one would take what one wanted to eat at the moment; the remainder would stay there for meals to come. Just as now in Cuba we savor “sleeping beans” (frijoles dormidos), which are those left over from one meal and kept for the next day, thus one always did with the original ajiaco. It was always a “sleeping” stew. The following day the ajiaco would wake up to a new cooking; water would be added to it, new vegetables and creatures would be thrown in, and it would be boiled again with more chili pepper. And so it would continue day after day, the pot uncleansed, its bottom full of substances dissolved into a pulpy and thick broth. It made a sauce analogous to that which can be found in our most typical, delicious, and succulent ajiaco, now with greater cleanliness, better spicing, and less chili. The image of the creole9 ajiaco symbolizes well for us the formation of the Cuban people. Let us follow the metaphor. First of all, an open pot. This is Cuba, the island, the pot placed in the fire of the tropics, which the other afternoon was painted for us with fine artistry by Dr. Massip. An unusual pot, this land of ours, just like the pot of our ajiaco, which must be made of clay and quite open. Then, the lively fire of the flame and the slow fire of the embers, to divide the cooking in two, just as happens in Cuba, always under the fire of the sun but with the rhythm of two seasons, rains and dryness, heat and mild weather. And therein go substances of the most diverse types and origins. The Indians gave us corn, the potato, malanga, the sweet potato, yuca, the chili pepper that serves as its condiment, and the white cassava xao-xao10 with which the good Creoles11 of Camagüey and Oriente decorate the ajiaco when they serve it. Such was the first ajiaco, the pre-Columbian ajiaco, with meat from hutias, from iguanas, from crocodiles, from majá snakes, from turtles, from sea snails, and from other hunted and fished creatures that are no longer appreciated for the palate. The Castilians cast aside these Indian meats and replaced them with their own. With their pumpkins and turnips they brought fresh beef, cured beef, smoked meats, and pork shoulder. And all of this went to give substance to the new ajiaco of Cuba. Alongside the Whites of Europe arrived the Blacks of Africa, and they brought us bananas, plantains, yams, and their cooking technique. And then the Asians with their mysterious spices from the East. And the French with their balancing of flavors, which softened the caustic quality of the savage chilies. And the Anglo-Americans with their domestic machines that simplified the kitchen—and who want to metallize and convert into one of their “standard” kettles the earthen pot that nature gave us, along with the flush of the tropics to heat it, the water of its skies to compose its broth, and the water of its seas for the sprinklings of the salt shaker. Out of all this our national ajiaco has been made. By its very name, the ajiaco is already a linguistic ajiaco, composed of a linguistic root of Black African origin denoting an Indian-Cuban solanaceous plant, and of a Castilian ending that gives the word a pejorative tone, utterly appropriate for a conquistador facing a colonial stew.12 And thus the ajiaco of Cuba has gone on boiling and cooking, on a lively fire or on embers, clean or dirty, varied in each era according to the human substances placed in the pot by the hands of the cook, who in this metaphor is the vagaries of history. And at every point our people has had, like the ajiaco, new and raw elements that have just entered the pot to be cooked; a heterogeneous conglomerate of diverse races and cultures, of many meats and crops, that stir up, mix with each other, and disintegrate into one single social bubbling. And there, on the bottom of the pot, is a new mass already settled out, produced by the elements that, when they disintegrated in the historic boil, were laying down as sediments their most tenacious essences in a rich and deliciously-garnished mixture. It already has its own character of creation. Mestizaje13 of kitchens, mestizaje of races, mestizaje of cultures. Dense broth of civilization that boils up on the Caribbean cookfire … One might think that it is necessary to search for cubanidad in this sauce of new and synthetic succulence, formed by the fusion of the human lineages dissolved in Cuba. But no. Cubanidad is not only in the result, but also in the complex process of its very formation, disintegrative and integrative. Cubanidad is in the substantial elements that entered into this action, in the environment in which the action is carried out, and in the vicissitudes of its course. That which is characteristic of Cuba is that, being an ajiaco, its people is not a finished stew, but rather a constant cooking. From the dawn of its history until the hours that now scurry by, the pot of Cuba has always known the renewing entrance of exogenous roots, fruits, and meats, an incessant gush of heterogeneous substances. This is why the composition is changed and cubanidad has a different flavor and consistency depending on whether it is scooped from the bottom, from the fat belly of the pot, or from its mouth, where the vegetables are still raw and the clear broth bubbles. It can be said that, strictly speaking, in every people something similar occurs. As of yet no one knows where the Earthly Paradise was located, the native land of Adam and Eve, although it was much sought in these beautiful lands of America by that great seeker named Sir Christopher Columbus. No one knows where humankind was born, and that is why every history begins with an immigration, with some first settlers coming from some place, even though we may know little or nothing about their origins. And then, with the unfolding of the centuries, every people, like that of Cuba, has passed through invasions, interferences, and exotic contacts of a genetic, material, and spiritual nature, which, inside the zone of its own ecology, have bit by bit bestowed on it its particular flavor. But there must be few countries like Cuba, where, in such a small space, in such a brief time, and with such constant and abundant migratory flows, the most disparate races have crossed. Their loving embraces have, in few countries, been more frequent, more complex, more tolerated, and more prefigurative of a universal peace among the bloods—not of a so-called “cosmic race,”14 which is pure paradox, but rather of a possible, desirable, and future deracialization of humanity. Since prehistory, Indians have been coming to the island of Cuba. First were the most archaic, the Ciboney, the Guanahatabey, and afterwards the Taíno, and perhaps some Caribs on an adventure. In the sixteenth century there came the Caribs, the Guajiro, the Jíbaro, the Macurije, the Tairona,15 and other continental Indians, victims of slavery imposed by the conquerors. Later arrived the Indians of Yucatán and Mexico, who entered in Cuba as slaves or soldiers and who appear in our local histories as campechano and guachinango Indians.16 In the nineteenth century, when the slave trade ended, a governor of Yucatán sold Indians from his land to the hacendados17 of Cuba. Even up until the present years of this century, the revolutionary convulsions of nearby continental nations and the ease of regional communications have brought to us waves of political exiles, and not a few of these have aboriginal blood. Since 1492 the Whites of Europe have arrived, and they have not stopped coming. If in Columbus’ caravels there were Castilians, Andalusians, Catalans, Galicians, Basques, Jews, Italians, and one or another Englishman, over the centuries the entrances would not cease: from the Mediterranean, the Alps, northern Europe, people of the most far-flung provenances. With the Whites of Diego Velázquez18 and perhaps before, in the clandestine cabotage that violently sacked the Indians, the Blacks came. With the White conqueror on horseback came the Black groom. With the sugar hacendado came the hard-working Black laborer. And for the joy of the court in Santiago de Cuba, Pánfilo de Narváez19 had Guidela, a Black jester. The ethnic flow of Melanian peoples has never stopped in Cuba: from Africa, over centuries, in slavery; then from the neighboring islands, especially Jamaica and Haiti, in a similar servitude. Finally, in the nineteenth century, when the torrent of the slave trade had to be shut off, rivulets of immigrant labor were opened. These workers came bound by indissoluble contracts of peonage, and they originated in all races, including the yellow, with the coolies of Macao and Canton. This Mongoloid immigration has continued, now through traders, fishers, gardeners, and probably spies—many Asians from China and Japan. Perhaps now we can understand better the meaning of the theme “the human factors of cubanidad.” What are the human elements that melted into Cuban life to produce cubanidad? The human factors of a people are typically studied through various means: in terms of the component races, the historical episodes that mark their presence, the alien antecedents of their indigenous institutions, and the cultures grafted onto the people’s own trunk. But these factors can be studied, above all and best, by examining the very process by virtue of which the native elements and the outsiders become bonded in a given environment, through their lineages, needs, aspirations, means, ideas, labors, and vicissitudes. Thus they come to generate this creative process of mestizo mixture20 that is indispensable for characterizing a new people with a distinctive culture. It seems easy to classify by race the human elements that cross in Cuba: copper-colored Indians, white Europeans, black Africans, and yellow Asians. The four great common races have embraced, crossed, and re-crossed in our land, raising up generations. Cuba is one of the most mixed peoples, a mestizo people stemming from all origins. And each of the so-called great races that arrived in Cuba was already, in itself, an inextricable tangle of disparate ancestors. Perhaps the Indians were the most homogenous in their lineage. The Blacks were seized by the slave trade from every African coast and from the corresponding internal regions: from the beaches of Mauritania through Senegambia, Guinea, Gabon, Congo, and Angola, on the Atlantic Ocean, up to the ports of Zanzibar and Mozambique, on the Indian Ocean. And in the heavy loads arrived Africans of very diverse Melanian races, so much so that one faces the ironic paradox that many of the Blacks who peopled Cuba, like the Congolese or the Bantu, for example, cannot be referred to as Blacks today because anthropological science has prohibited it—and, on the other hand, not a few ethnologists claim that there is in Africa no human group that does not have some White racial mix. And what will one say of the Whites, now so vexed with each other over questions of race? They speak of race not only in terms that are natural and admissible by anthropologists for purposes of classification; they also speak of those mythological and artificial races created by despots delirious with barbarism, used as pretext for cruel injustices and egotistical depredations. What will we say of these German, French, English, or Italian races, which do not exist except in the fantasy of those who labor to convert a changeable concept of history into a hereditary and fatal criterion of biology? What will we say of that Spanish race? It is a pure fiction but is officially exalted each year on the 12th of October, “the day of the race,” with perfumed rhetoric, just as in Havana one celebrates on every 16th of November, with liturgical incense, the Christianized pagan myth of a Saint Christopher who also never existed. Might there be the miraculous reality of a race in the large and heterogeneous neighboring nation of Angloamerica, where some have similarly sought to discover among their din of peoples and colors a race chosen by God, one with a “manifest destiny?” It would be futile and erroneous to study the human factors of Cuba through its races. Apart from the conventional and indefinable quality of many racial categories, one must recognize the real insignificance of race for cubanidad, which is nothing but a category of culture. To understand the Cuban soul one needs to study not races but cultures. In one same race there are distinct cultures; compare the Lucayans21 to the Aztecs, the White man from Spain to the White man from Scandinavia, the Black man from Ampanga to the Black man from Jamaica, the yellow person from Canton to the Eskimo of the Arctic. In one same level of culture there are diverse races; look how heterogeneous are all of the political parties in Cuba, or this very polychromatic audience in our beloved university. What are the cultures that have been melting together in Cuba? The whole cultural scale that Europe passed through in more than four millennia—Cuba has experienced it in less than four centuries. What was there a climbing of steps has been here a progress in fits and starts. This has gone on ever since, over the course of the sixteenth century, Cuba ceased being one of the most lost great islands in the world and turned itself into the “key of the Indies,” placed at the crossroads of the Americas, where all peoples and civilizations woo and kiss. The first culture of Cuba was that of the Ciboneys and the Guanahatabeys, the Paleolithic culture. This was our archaic stone age; rather, our age of stone and wood; of rustic stones and woods; of seashells and fishbones that were like stones and thorns from the ocean. The words ciba and cigua mean “stone,” and cibao the hills; guana and cana mean “palm trees” and guanao and caonao mean “palm groves.”22 The Ciboney were the men of the rocky hills and caves; the Guanahatabey were the dwellers of the jungles where the palm trees reigned. This theory seems to be confirmed by the fact that in the rugged eastern region—the only one that had the name of “Cuba” (and “Cuba”comes from “ciba”)—palm trees are scarce and look as if they are imported rather than autochthonous. Cuba’s central region used to be called Cubanacán, a word inherited from the Indians. The toponymy of this region still retains another term from the same background: siguanea. Cubanacán perhaps referred to the intermediate zone between the eastern hills (ciba or Cuba) and the saos, saonas or sabanas. This latter region is the land of the plains, home to the cana and the guano—except for Trinidad’s cavernous mountains, the cibaos, the region of the sigua or the siguanea.23 It is very probable that the Ciboney, Guanahatabey, as well as the Lucayans24, that is, the proto-Cuban Indians, were all the same, differing from each other in their geography, but not in their race or culture, which was unified: the culture of Cubanacán, of ciba and cana, caves and palm trees. Very little remains of this culture in Cuba. There are some stones used as pestles. There is, maybe, the use of the bajareque25 for shelter and of the barbecue26 to roast hutias, fish and turtles. Perhaps there is also the use of manatee skin to make bats and give lashes. Doubtless we have also inherited the memory of those strings of seashell and coral that, all along our beaches, are flaunted by the women of today, beautiful and naked as the mythic Guarina.27 Just like her, today’s women have their lips and cheeks painted in red, their eyebrows and eye contours painted in black, white powders on the their faces and creams on their visible flesh. Today they buy these cosmetics under Parisian brand names, never thinking that the same were employed—the red anatta28, the black genip,29 the pearly chips of seashells, and the emollient grease of the loggerhead turtle—by those ladies of Cuba’s first society, as savage as they were refined, as careful as our current elegant and civilized women in the biosocial task of enhancing their beauty. Perhaps we also owe to these proto-Cubans who dwelled in cibaos and caonaos the symbols of the hills and the palm tree as emblems of Cuba, which have been transmitted by successive cultures until they were painted onto our republican coat of arms. At any rate, we owe very little to the Ciboney and Guanahatabey, to the people of Cubanacán. None of the important items of Indian-Cuban culture that survive in our current culture can be attributed with certainty to this primitive culture, which was only the prologue to the second Indian culture, the Taíno. This is the culture that Columbus discovered when he arrived in Cuba, the one that has gave us words, traditions, heroes, things, and techniques that still remain—among us and even around the world. The Taínos were a branch of South America’s Arawak Indians, a branch that invaded and ruled the Antilles. In Cuba they only occupied the eastern part of the island. They came from the neighboring island of Haiti and their invasion of Cuba had not gone beyond the central and western regions of savannahs and jungles, which their culture did not reach. If the Taínos had their caudillo in Hatuey—who was the Dominican Máximo Gómez of his time—the brave Cuban Guamá could not be a Maceo and invade Guanes, the far reach of Vueltabajo, the ancient province of the Guanahatabey.30 “Taíno” is a social category of lordship and aristocratic distinction. The Taínos had a more advanced culture. They were Neolithic, as one would say if studying the anthropology of Europe. This was the age of the polished stone; rather, let us call it the age of the burnished stone and carved wood. In their seaborne nomadism they had made wars and won victories; they had conquered lands that belonged to others and made slaves out of the vanquished. As you see, they were on their way to becoming civilized. And they had already carried out the first revolution, that of establishing agriculture, which made them sedentary. This revolution gave them a stable and growing population, food security and abundance, intercommunication, discipline, and peacefulness. All of these qualities are indispensable for calm reflections, for experimentation, for invention, and for fruitful solidarity. The Taínos left us many of their foods, especially vegetables. Several Cuban fruits are today tasted all over the world—above all the pineapple, “the queen of fruits,” as King Ferdinand the Catholic himself said when one day he savored a sample that had reached his eminent palate. The maize of the Taínos, which was discovered here, today feeds many peoples on faraway continents. These same peoples enjoy the sweet potatoes, peanuts, tomatoes and other foods that White civilization found in Cuba and in other Antilles. We ourselves still preserve several of the roots and tubers raised by those Indians—above all, yuca. The Taínos had remarkable techniques. Their cotton fabrics spread throughout Europe in the form of petticoats worn by women, fishing nets used by men, and especially hammocks, the Indians’ beds adopted by the wandering conquerors and by sailors and fishermen on all seas. The Taínos already had simple but efficient and ingenious machines. The cibucán31 was, in its own way, the mill at the heart of the complex yuca industry, which produced casabes,32 xaos-xaos, alcohols, starch foods, poisons, and catibías.33 The cunyaya,34 an elementary mill used by the Taínos to extract juices from roots and fruits, is still used by rustic peasants to squeeze juice out of sugarcane. The jabas and jabucos (straw bags and crates) of our people originate in indigenous basketry. The Taínos had their chemistry: they knew toxic substances, which they made and extracted. They treated metals, albeit soft ones— copper and gold—and they worked guaní,35 although not iron pyrites or bronze. We keep words from the Taíno language, especially in geography, wildlife, flora, and some folk traditions. When we evoke the tribal and barbarian figure of a petty political leader we call him cacique, like the Taíno kinglet. And we call caciquismo his personal and authoritarian rule, maybe offending the memory of the real Indian caciques, whose rule was democratic and community-oriented. Despite the reiterated statements by romantics who are more given to fantasy than to truth, nothing survives from Taíno music: not instruments, not melodies, not songs, not the dances of their areítos.36 A purported Dominican areíto song by Anacaona37 is only a French couplet, which was amulatado38 as an anti-White song by Haitian Blacks. And although some of the Taíno visual arts are lost, and others are nearly forgotten, we still retain some remainders, complete with autochthonous symbols that will someday live again, when our anemic spiritual nationalism gets reanimated as a defensive passion. We still have items from Taíno religious pottery with supernatural images; chairs carved with incrustations and inlays of stylized drawings; little quartz idols, white like ghostly genii, used in warriors’ and priests’ diadems; and those beautiful tonsil-shaped axes, whose color, carving, outline, and polishing are as perfect as the diamonds of today’s jewels. Cuban culture incorporated very little of Taíno religion, their gods, cosmogonies and rituals—maybe some superstition about owls. Taíno religion, known only by the relation of Friar Ramón Pané,39 had not evolved yet to the phase of metaphysical subtlety characteristic of anthropophagous rites. The Taínos did not eat their fellow people to assimilate their life energies, nor did they eat their transubstantiated gods to obtain their grace. All that was sacred to the Indians died and left with them. The idols we find in caves today are as lifeless as the empty skulls of those who believed in them. All is gone, except for a liturgical and magic ceremony, a sacred Taíno ritual, which was discovered here by Cristopher Columbus. It was made profane, incorporated into Cuba’s new culture, and today is still a customary trace of cubanidad: tobacco smoking. Civilized girls, compatriots of mine who are listening to me, if you have just now tolerated me as I reminded you of the savage origin of your ornaments and cosmetics, please allow me to tell you now that when you flirtatiously smoke a cigarette, you are doing nothing but actualizing a ritual of our ancestors from the barbarian times of Hatuey—the earliest, most accepted, and most delightful gift that Cuba gave to universal culture. There must have been already among the Indians—especially among the Taínos, who were agrarian—some rudimentary cubanidad, born out of the social solidarity of their human group, of their rooting in the territory, of the cohesive identity of their peculiar culture and the consciousness of their ancestral unity. But it is doubtful that a Taíno group from Cuba would have felt its own historical personality to be distinct from that of their fellows and predecessors, the Taínos from Haiti. There is no doubt that Cuba’s Taínos felt Taíno, but it is hard to ascertain whether they also felt Cuban. In an October that saw no hurricanes from the sky, a human hurricane emerged from the horizon. Christopher Columbus arrived. And with him, so did iron, gunpowder, horses, wheels, sails, compasses, money, capital, salaries, letters, print presses, books … And a revolutionary vertigo shook the peoples of Cuba, pulling up their institutions by the roots and shattering their lives. In one moment there occurred a leap from the sleepy stone ages to the quite awakened age of the Renaissance. Millennia and ages passed in one day in Cuba. We could say that thousands of “culture-years” passed, if such a metric were admissible in the chronology of peoples. If these American Indies were a New World for the peoples of Europe, Europe was a Very New World (Mundo Novísimo) for the peoples of America. These two worlds discovered each other with a crash. The collision of the two cultures was terrible. One of them perished, as if it had been struck down. The Indians were extinguished. Not long ago some were said to remain, albeit amulatados, around the mountains of Santiago and Pinar del Río. But nothing can be ascertained scientifically about whether they were the offspring of the Cuban Indians or of the numerous loads of Lucayans, Guanajos, Guajiros, Jíbaros, Macurijes, Taironas, Yucatecans, Guachinangos, and Floridian Indians40 that were brought to Cuba and which, together with the Blacks subjected to the same unhappiness, ran away to live free on the top of the hills, founding villages and palenques,41 in a hidden and vivid maroon liberty. The basic human sediment of native society was eliminated, and all of Cuba’s population had to be transmigrated here – the class of the rulers as well as the class of the ruled. This curious social phenomenon was very important for cubanidad: since the sixteenth century all races, classes and cultures were equally invaders, either through force or through subjection to force. They were all exogenous and torn away, experiencing the trauma of an original uprooting and a rough transplantation. The Castilians brought their culture to Cuba from Spain. It imposed itself as the predominant one and constitutes our cultural trunk, with its virtues—which are great and many—and its vices—which are fewer and lesser. Castile’s culture arrived with the Whites: Andalusians, Portuguese, Galicians, Basques, and Castilians came enshrouded in it. One could say that it represented Iberian culture, the White sub-Pyrenean culture. But the first migratory waves also brought Genoese, Florentines, Jews, Levantines, and Berbers—that is, Mediterranean culture, a millenary mixture of peoples, cultures, and complexions, from blonde Normans to black Sub-Saharans. We do not need to speak at length of the traits of these peoples, which are well-known and which were, at that moment, in the middle of their most splendorous age. But we should say that whereas some Europeans brought the feudal economy—as conquerors looking for looting and for peoples to subjugate and to convert into plebeians—others were moved by the economy of mercantile capitalism and even by that of budding industrial capitalism. Various economies—mixed and in transition—came to Cuba and were superimposed onto other economies—also various and mixed, but primitive and impossible to adapt by these Whites who came in the dusk of the Middle Ages. The very fact of crossing the ocean changed the Whites’ spirits. They left broken and lost and they arrived as lords. They had been dominated in their land and became dominators in the land of others. And all of them—warriors, friars, merchants, and villains—came as adventurers, torn lose from an old society to be grafted onto another one that was new in its different climates, peoples, foods, customs, and fates. All of them had ambitions, tense or hurried, to acquire wealth and power and return home once their lives began to decline. In other words, all of them were always involved in ventures of a quick and transitory audacity, following a parabolic line, beginning and ending in a foreign land and only passing by this land in order to prosper. We do not believe that there have been human factors more important for cubanidad than these continuous, radical, and contrasting transmigrations of the settlers—transmigrations of a geographic, economic, and social character. Nothing was more important for cubanidad than this permanent transience of purpose and this life with no roots in the land it inhabited, this life always maladjusted to the society that sustained it. Men, economies, cultures, and longings—everything here felt foreign, provisional, changing; “birds of passage” over the country, at the country’s expense, against it, and despite it. In these White elements there are already some factors of cubanidad. Each Spaniard who arrived in Cuba, by the simple fact of that arrival, was already different from what he had been; he was no longer a Spaniard from Spain but an Indian Spaniard. This constant restlessness, this fleeting impulsivity, these provisional attitudes were the primal inspirations of our collective character, which tends to adventure and impulse, to excitement and luck, to gambling, to profit, and to changeable hope.42 With the Whites arrived the Blacks—coming first from Spain, then multiplied by Guinean and Congolese slaves, then from all Nigritia.43 They brought their diverse cultures, some as rustic as that of the Ciboney, some in advanced barbarism like that of the Taínos, and some of greater social and economic complexity, like the Mandinka, Wolofs, Hausa, Dahomeyans, and Yoruba. These peoples already had agriculture, slaves, money, markets, foreign trade, and centralized governments effectively ruling over populations and territories as big as Cuba. Their cultures were intermediary between those of the Taíno and the Aztecs, with metals but with no writing. With their bodies, the Blacks brought their spirits (a bad deal for the hacendados!), but neither their institutions nor their instruments. A multitude of Blacks came with a multitude of origins, races, languages, cultures, classes, sexes, ages, confused in the boats and barracoons of the slave trade and made socially equal under the same regime of slavery. They arrived ripped out, wounded and broken like sugarcanes on the plantations. Like the canes, they were milled and squeezed so as to extract the juice of their labor. No human element has been in deeper and more continuous transmigration of environment, culture, class, and consciousness. Like the Indians, they moved to a more powerful culture. But the Indians did so on their native land, believing that once they died they would pass to the invisible side of their own Cuban world. The Blacks had a crueler fate: they crossed the sea in agony, thinking that even after dying they would have to cross it once more to live in Africa again with their lost parents. It is true that, like the Whites, the Blacks were torn away from another continent. But they came unwillingly and ambitionless, forced to leave their free tribal tranquility to become desperate in slavery here. The White man, in contrast, left his land in desperation to arrive in the Indies in an orgasm of hopes, converted into an ordering master. And whereas Indians and Castilians, in the midst of their sorrows, found support and consolation in their families, their fellows, their leaders, and their temples, Blacks found none of this. The most torn of all, they were crowded together as beasts in a cage; always in a powerless anger; always anxious to escape, emancipate themselves, and move away; always in a defensive ordeal of inhibition, dissimulation, and acculturation to a new world. Year after year, century after century, thousands of human beings were brought to Cuba from overseas continents in this predicament of uprooting and social amputation. Blacks as well as Whites subsisted in this country in a lesser or greater degree of dissociation. Above or below, all lived in the same environment of terror and force: the oppressed terrified by punishment, and the oppressor terrified by revenge. They were all beyond justice, beyond adjustment, and beside themselves. The contribution of Blacks to cubanidad has not been small. Their immense labor force made possible Cuba’s economic incorporation into world civilization, and their liberating pugnacity opened the way for the advent of national independence.44 Aside from that, their cultural influence can be noticed in Cuban food, cuisine, vocabulary, verbosity, oratory, affectionate character, materialism, harsh childraising, in this social reaction called choteo,45 etc. But above all their influence can be felt in three manifestation of cubanidad: art, religion, and the tone of collective emotiveness. In art, music belongs to them. The extraordinary vigor and the captivating originality of Cuban music is a mulato creation.46 All original music, all of that beauty given to the other world by America, is black-and-white music. Even Count Gobineau,47 the pontiff of racisms, conceded that Negroid races ruled in aesthetics. Cuba did not give birth to the North American spirituals (Blacks singing their pain and hope, as in the Christian psalms of Anglo-Saxon Protestants) nor to jazz (dancing music of Blacks adjusted to the rhythms of the mechanics of those Whites who were musically uncultivated). But we in Cuba possess a glory of tangos, habaneras, danzones, sons, and rumbas, besides all the mestizo dances that since the sixteenth century have been departing Havana with the fleets to spread overseas. Today the whole world dances to Afro-Cuban music, that is, to mulato music from Cuba. In the rich and poor cabarets of New York’s nightlife, the sweeping movement of our native conga drags crowds in the anesthetic delight of its neurotic anxieties. In religion, Blacks mistrusted the ruling colonial clergy that kept and exploited them in slavery, and they compared their myths with those of the Whites. Thus they created among the great masses of our lower classes a syncretism of equivalences, a syncretism so lucid and brilliant that it is sometimes tantamount to a critical philosophy and opens the way towards superior and freer ways of conceiving and treating the supernatural. Some may go on to agnosticism, or to Presbyterian, Methodist, or Baptist Protestantism. Or, influenced by the unsolved mystery of the alienating trance, they may enter the experimental and ethical beliefs of metempsychosis, of the spiritualism of mediums and reincarnations, and of theosophy’s sanctioning and perfectionist karma, which offers no authoritarian hierarchies to obfuscate their discernment. An evolutionary impulse runs through Black religious transformation, and this impulse has a great influence on the attitude of humble Whites, an attitude that also abounds in superstitions but is also increasingly capable of a free improvement. Blacks’ own culture and soul, always in a crisis of transition, penetrate cubanidad through the mestizaje of bodies and cultures. They soak cubanidad with this juicy, sensual, playful, tolerant, accommodating, and decisive emotiveness that constitute its grace, charm, and its most powerful force of resistance for survival in the constant ardor of sorrows that has been the history of this country. A multi-ethnic human mass was formed out of people uprooted from their lands but never well-sowed in the island. Cuba’s human settlements grew roots bit by bit through the action of economic pressures and the circumstances of territory, agriculture, trade, and war. What was never achieved was normal integration, and thus were created curious Cuban peculiarities. The husbandry brought by the Spaniards was extensive here, but it lacked the transhumance practiced on the Castilian plateaus and was done in huts and on circular fenceless ranches, propitious to the theft of cattle. The agro-industrial production of sugar created the large plantations with absolute lordship and slavery. And slavery here was, as it everywhere else, corrupt and corrupting, degrading slaves and masters, Blacks and Whites alike. Tobacco, in contrast, created the horticultural farm with White peasants and a family-based economy, but this was a reduced and humble middle class, defenseless and powerless. Commerce—transatlantic and restricted by the metropole from the very beginning—led us to share the table with filibusters, through which we received abundances, comforts, exchanges, compromises, and contact with heretics and progressive civilizations. But it also forced us into the custom of contraband—almost always allowed and often practiced by authorities, who for this reason were continually seen as intruding, temporary, oppressive, and corrupt. Habitual contraband deformed our collective life, requiring a constant conventional cover of hypocrisy, a practice of unpunished illegitimacy, and a cynical civic indifference, with no sanctions of punishment or rewards. Laws here were not laws. Governors solemnly put the royal ordinances on the top of their heads and reverently declared that they abided by them but did not comply with them.48 If the Laws of the Indies49 were usually a dead letter, then the letter of encyclicals, synods, pastorals, sermons, and catechisms was moribund. The liberal constitutions promulgated in Spain were blocked in Cuba by the rebelliousness of Spaniards who lived there, even with the connivance of the island’s supreme authority. Cuba’s general captains were several times demoted or killed by poison by their fellow Spaniards, who were as intransigent in their privileges as in their “patriotism” when they feared that their profits might dwindle. The battalions of “volunteers” were the army of the merchants.50 When authorities wanted to suppress the merchants’ monopolies and abuses, these battalions were more equipped and fiercer against the military authorities of their native Spain than against Cubans who complained about the law courts. This regime—a transitive, cruel, double, and law-defying life—lasted for whole centuries. The other cultures that entered Cuba did not change it for a long time; often, they served as its collaborators and beneficiaries. Only a few years after the Mediterraneans conquered and settled Cuba, the French—and soon after them the English and the Dutch—visited the island and shook it with their piracy, their looting, and their commercial traffic. This was the White culture of ultra-Pyrenean Europe. These people held the responsibility for the international regime of fraudulent trade, a system sustained by a remarkable structure of buccaneers, filibusters, and pirates, superimposed on Spain’s official framework. Everyone here did contraband: governors, bishops, hacendados, merchants, lawyers, and plebeians. Contraband of hides, sugar, tobacco, textiles, jewels, luxuries, slaves, weapons, and books. All of Cuban history was smuggled, and it cannot be explained without this filibuster commercial regime that was more organized and powerful than the governmental regime. In 1762 the English conquered Havana, opened the port and showed the advantages of free trade, which Spain would be forced progressively to allow. Many of the officers who took Havana soon joined George Washington’s separatist troops. The Anglo-American colonies became the United States of America, and since then the Anglo-Saxon world has had an extraordinary influence upon us due to its proximity, its democratic institutions, its religious freedom, its marvelous technical progressivism, and the heavy weight of its imperial economy. In the nineteenth century this Anglo-American culture gave us the steam engine, which transformed the sugar industry. We had railroads in Cuba before Spain and other European nations. The steam engine brought us big industrial capitalism when slavery was still the labor regime. Slaves, machines, virgin land and capital! All in great amounts and all at once, all operating together! The most sybaritic opulence together with the most abject poverty. We also owe to this Anglo-Saxon civilization the fast and intense mobilization of our natural wealth, the consequent fast increase in population (which trebles in thirty years), and the fortunate globalization51 of many customs of ours which were miserably provincial one generation ago. The proximity of this powerful culture is one of the most active factors of our culture; positively or negatively, but undeniably. Let us not be blinded by the latent resentment we have felt for their invariable selfishness, for their frequent clumsiness, sometimes for their evil deeds and often for their contempt. It is not a matter of gratitude, but of objectivity. Following the pendulum of our history, Cubans get either farther from or closer to the great neighboring power. Contact with North Americans is now burning once again. Some Cubans are annexationist in the morning and abhor the Uncle52 in the afternoon, depending on whether the price of sugar is rising or falling, since this is the thermometer of patriotism for those minds soaked in syrup. We know our neighbors’ history, habits, petulance, high-handedness, cold and disdainful dryness, and absorbing imperialism… . We know that, although this powerful sugar industry, which dominates us and is dominated by anonymous foreigners, has made in one single harvest profits greater than the value of all capital invested in it, it has not given Cuba a single modest benevolent or educational foundation that would show the Cuban people the reality of some spiritual gift among the foreign industrialists who took away our sweetness. Despite everything, this very powerful Niagara of forces that is American civilization has brought us streams that drag us but that also elevate us to their froth—streams that take us far away, making us capsize, but not sink. May it be true that Cuba is an island made of cork?53 Perhaps we retain something from our naked ancestors that allows us to dodge the waves, waterfalls, whirlpools, bends, rapids, and quagmires of our history? The future lies in taking advantage of the stream without submerging ourselves in it. A few years after the Anglo-Saxons, the French came to Cuba, expelled from Haiti and moving away from Louisiana. They created coffee farms richer than the sugar mills; they established trade with their metropole; they created in the East of the island a center of refined culture that made Havana envious. But a bishop of Cuba preached their extermination and expulsion—as is done today against Jews— and they were persecuted and banished and had their goods confiscated. However, once the Napoleonic winds and the absolutist reaction were gone, they returned, rebuilt ruined farms, constructed new mills, and founded towns in deserted bays.54 They brought us the Marseillaise, romanticism, the elegant fashions and the exquisiteness of French culture. All that shone as cultivated or beautiful in Cuba had to be French. Writers and thinkers became Frenchified, and beautiful Cuban ladies triumphed in the courts of Paris (la Merlín, la Fernandina …).55 Even today an old lady from Camagüey who once was a beautiful princess cries over the ruins of Poland’s Frenchified aristocracy. In the nineteenth century, the Spanish and Portuguese Americas grew spiritually close to France and Italy, from where we received the liberal vibrations that Spain denied us. This is why our America likes to be Latin America. I should talk about still other cultures, the contributions of the Jews, Chinese, Germans … Since the time of discovery we have had Jews and Judaizing people. Jews were present when tobacco was discovered in Cuba and when it was commercially developed; they were present in the founding of sugar industry in the Antilles and all along its complicated history. And Jewish blood—if such a blood exists—has flowed and still flows in Cuban history in drops or in torrents, from the arteries of both Catholic Monarchs56 to those of the liberating patriots, presidents of the Republic, generals, tycoons, planters, ranchers, lawyers, doctors and merchants; from peddlers to bankers, without excluding church authorities and servants of the Holy Inquisition. Given the millenary Iberian mixture, can any Spaniard be sure that he does not have in his heart some cell of the same Jewish blood that Christ had? Jewish culture has often hidden among that of other groups in order to avoid persecution. If it arrived among us with Spaniards from all regions, it has penetrated equally or even more in the guise of the Portuguese, Flemish, Italians, British, French, even the Germans and later on the North Americans and Poles. They have doubtlessly contributed in important ways to Havana’s commercial internationalism, to the financial orientation of certain sectors in Cuba, to the musical sensibility of the Cuban people, to a certain idealist and Messianic tone in its patriotism … Asians, who came by the thousands since the middle of the nineteenth century, have penetrated less far into cubanidad; but, although their trace is recent, it is not absent. They are often said to be responsible for Cubans’ passion for gambling; but this passion was a sign of cubanidad before the arrival of the Chinese. They may have spread some exotic custom or other, but scarcely. More than once in recent decades, observers have noted an extraordinary tendency towards minutiae and fineness of detail and to executive coldness among highly-placed politicians, professionals of knowledge, and poet laureates who also had some yellow ascendance. At any rate, Asian influence is not noticeable beyond individual cases. But, if cubanidad has received flows from all these cultures, in which of them has cubanía been distilled the most? As happens in the ajiaco, that which is synthetic and new lies on the bottom, in those substances that have already been decomposed, precipitated, mixed, melted, and assimilated into a common juice; in the broth and mixture of peoples, cultures, and races. Blacks must have felt, not with greater intensity, but perhaps earlier than Whites, the emotion and consciousness of cubanía. Cases of Blacks returning to Africa have been very rare. African-born Blacks had to lose very early the hope of going back home, and in their nostalgia they could not think of repatriation as a retirement at the end of their lives. Creole Blacks57 never thought of being anything but Cuban. In contrast, White settlers envisioned their return even before they arrived in Cuba. If they came, it was in order to go back rich and maybe made a noble by royal grace. Even the creole Whites had connections with the Peninsula,58 through their parents and relatives, with whom they long felt a link, as if they were islander Spaniards. Creole Whites went overseas and became generals, admirals, bishops, and powerful people … and there have even been Havanan professors at the University of Salamanca. Creole Blacks could not achieve or desire any of this. Nor even mulatos could, except for the few cases of brown sons of white nobles who obtained the privilege of a transracial pass and a royal certificate of whiteness. Cubanía must also have sparkled in the lower layer of disinherited and unprivileged Whites. Cubanía, which is consciousness, will, and root in the native land, emerged first among people born and raised here, with no return or retirement, with the soul rooted in the land. Cubanía did not rain from above; it sprouted from below. We would have to wait until the dusk of the eighteenth century, and then again until the dusk of the nineteenth century, for the economic requirements of this society—anxious for free exchange with other peoples—to make the planter class acquire a consciousness of their geographic, economic, and social discrepancies with the Peninsula. Only then did they listen positively, even if still guiltily, to the temptations of nationhood, freedom, and democracy that came to us from independent North America and revolutionary France. A century of commotions progressively united, fused, and recast heterogeneous elements into a common Cuban consciousness. But the nation is not yet made, and its mass is not yet integrated. Even today exogenous streams—white, black, and yellow; of immigrants, interests, and ideas—ceaselessly arrive, stir, and get dissolved in the Cuban broth, delaying the consolidation of a definitive and basic national homogeneity. The study of the human factors of cubanidad is today more important than ever for all of us. Forgive me the schematic and elementary character of these notes. It will be up to you, young Cuban students, in cubanidad and cubanía, to finish the research, the experience, the judgment, and even the practice. Do not lose heart in this study. Your life depends on it. References Jorge Mañach. 1991. La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba /Indagación del choteo. Miami: Ediciones Universal. Ortiz, Fernando. 1923. Catauro de cubanismos: Apuntes lexicográficos. Havana: Colección Cubana. ———. 1924. Glosario de afronegrismos. Havana: Siglo XX. ———. 1940. “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad.” Revista Bimestre Cubana XLV, 161–186. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. 1985. “The philological fictions of Fernando Ortiz.” Notebooks in Cultural Analysis 2: 190–207. Les facteurs humains de la cubanidad Résumé : Ce texte, présenté à une conférence de l'université de la Havane en 1939 et publié pour la première fois en 1940, est un classique de l'anthropologie latinoaméricaine et une contribution majeure au sujet du métissage racial et culturel aux Amériques. Dans la lignée latino-américaine des essais d'interprétation nationale, Fernando Ortiz considère les fondements sociaux et culturels de l'identité nationale cubaine. Il distingue la cubanidad - la culture spécifiquement cubaine - de la cubanía - la conscience de l'existence de cette culture et le fait d'y être attaché -, et suggère que cette seconde attitude s'est développée initialement parmi les Cubains noirs et pauvres. En ce qui concerne la cubanidad, elle est définie à la fois comme le procès et les résultats toujours changeants du mélange d’éléments culturels venus de différentes parties du monde, en particulier d’Europe et d’Afrique. Il conçoit la culture cubaine comme un flux permanent, mu par le “procès complexe de sa propre formation, désintégrative et intégrative.” Ortiz élabore une métaphore pour décrire la cubanidad, celle de l'aijaco, un ragoût qui n'arrête jamais de mijoter car ses ingrédients sont constamment renouvelés, se mêlant et se dissolvant en un bouillon. Le texte évoque les contributions culturelles des différents groupes qui se sont installés à Cuba et présente l'histoire cubaine comme un violent processus de migration, d'exploitation et de conflit. Fernando ORTIZ (1881–1969) was a Cuban lawyer and anthropologist who dedicated most of his life to the study of Cuban history and culture, focusing especially on what he called “Afro-Cuban” issues. One of Cuba’s most important public intellectuals, his conceptions of Cubanness had a fundamental impact on Cuban nationalistic imagination. Ortiz founded and directed major scholarly institutions and journals in his country and is widely acknowledged as the founder of Afro-Cuban studies and modern Cuban sociocultural anthropology. Having worked as a professor of law at the University of Havana and as a public prosecutor, Ortiz was also active in formal politics until 1933. He remained until his death one of the most important critics of racism in Cuba and published more than twenty books and numerous articles on topics like religion, music, folklore, language, slavery, and politics. His most influential book, Cuban counterpoint: Tobacco and sugar (Duke University Press, 1995), first published in Spanish in 1940 with a preface by Bronislaw Malinowski, introduced the concept of transculturation to describe the process of mutual transformation of different cultures and brought together historical, cultural, and political-economic approaches to the analysis of Cuba. ___________________ Translator’s Note: This lecture was given to the students of the Iota-Eta fraternity at the University of Havana on November 28, 1939 (note in the original). The text was first published in Spanish in the journal Revista Bimestre Cubana (Ortiz 1940). All subsequent footnotes are by the translators. 1. Literally, “Cubanness.” In this text, Ortiz uses the terms cubanidad, cubanía, cubanismo, and lo cubano. Each of these relates to a dimension of “being Cuban,” but one of the text’s key points is the careful distinction between these concepts, as it will become clear below. In our translation, we have left the first three terms in the original Spanish, and we have translated lo cubano as “that which is Cuban,” “the Cuban condition,” or “what it is to be Cuban.” 2. Ortiz is here making reference to the controversy surrounding sovereignty over the Isla de los Pinos, today known as the Isla de la Juventud, a large island to the south of the main Cuban island. By the time of Cuban independence in 1902, both the United States and Cuba had claims to the Isla de los Pinos, and US agitators called for its annexation because it was home to some US planters. The Hay-Quesada Treaty, signed in 1904 and ratified by the US Senate in 1925, recognized Cuban sovereignty over the island. Ortiz here compares US ambitions over the island to Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria (the Anchluss) and the so-called Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, both events that took place in 1938, shortly before this lecture. 3. Fruta-bomba is the colloquial Cuban term for papaya. The word papaya, commonly employed in other Spanish-speaking areas to denote the fruit, is used in Cuba as a vulgar slang term for women’s genital organs. 4. Coco-macaco is a sort of stick or club. 5. Ortiz’s phrase is “ciudadanía de ‘llega y pon.” Although often used to refer to shantytowns or informally-constructed areas in Cuba, llega y pon literally means “come and put it up” and is employed here in the original sense, to denote an area that is up for grabs by anyone, of any social class, who can suddenly settle there without any real commitment to it. 6. Ortiz uses here the word aplatanado, a common Cuban term that expresses someone’s psychological and cultural adaptation to a new land, especially to Cuba. It derives from plátano—plantain or banana, several species that have been imported and adapted well to Cuba to the point of seeming to be native to the island. 7. Literally, “manliness” or “manhood.” Hombría is contrasted to humanidad, and the difference in the ending of these terms is reflected in Unamuno’s difference between hispanidad and hispanía and in Ortiz’s own distinction between cubanidad and cubanía. 8. These are different kinds of stew typical of different regions of Southern Europe and Spanish America. 9. In Latin America, the adjective “creole” (criollo) denotes the quality of a person born in the Americas or a thing originating in the New World. In several areas, like in Cuba, “creole” may also refer to something taken to be genuinely or typically local or national—especially in reference to food or customs. In this specific passage, Ortiz seems to use the term in this latter meaning; he certainly means “the Cuban ajiaco.” As a noun, “creole” designates a person native to the Americas or to a specific place therein. 10. A flat bread made of cassava; a thinner version of casabe (see note 32). The term is not commonly used today, but in his dictionary of Cubanisms, Ortiz identifies the words xao-xao or chau chau in texts by colonial chroniclers, according to whom these were Caribbean indigenous names for that kind of food (Ortiz 1923: 44). 11. In this case, “Creoles” designate people native to these Cuban provinces, of whatever racial or ethnic background. See note 9. 12. Ortiz is referring to the fact that a term of supposedly African origin—ají—is used to name a plant of indigenous origin. He argues, further, that the Spanish ending -aco gives a derogatory tone to the word ajiaco. Therefore, between its etymology and its signified, the term ajiaco carries elements coming from Amerindian, African, and European origins. The African etymology of the word ají is highly disputed, but Ortiz insists on this point in his dictionary of words of African origin (Ortiz 1924: 17–18). On the political relevance of Ortiz’s Afrocentric etymologies, see Gustavo Pérez Firmat 1985. 13. “Mestizaje” refers to racial, ethnic, and cultural mixture. This abstract noun comes from the adjective and noun mestizo, applied to people and things of mixed racial and cultural origins (not only of European and Amerindian origins, as the term is often taken to imply in English). As an idea, mestizaje has played a key role in many Latin American national ideologies, and it is often celebrated as the basic feature of the region’s national societies. See the translator’s preface to this translation. 14. Ortiz is here referring to the ideas of José Vasconcelos, the Mexican thinker and politician whose influential essay La raza cósmica (The cosmic race), published in 1925, foresaw the creation in Iberian America of a single race, born out of the mixture of all previous races. For Vasconcelos, this superior “fifth race” would lead the way to universal peace and beauty. Ortiz’s dismissal of Vasconcelos’ idea indicates the vast differences between different versions of Latin American mestizaje ideologies, especially regarding the different meanings and values they gave to the concept of race. 15. These ethnonyms refer to circum-Caribbean ethnic groups. Given the difficulty in finding valid correspondences between the ethnonyms used by Ortiz and those used today, we have chosen to keep the author’s original terms, except when terms widely used in English today correspond undoubtedly to the ethnonyms used by Ortiz: “Ciboney,” “Guanahatabey,” and “Caribs.” It is probable that the “Guajiro” referred to by Ortiz are the Wayuu that inhabit today’s northern Colombia and Venezuela. Some indigenous groups of Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon are commonly referred to as Jíbaros, or Jivaroan, but it is unclear whether these are the people that Ortiz has in mind, especially because in several Spanish-speaking areas the term “jíbaro” means “savage” or “rustic.” The Tairona are a Chibcha-speaking group from northern Colombia, where this ethnonym is still used. 16. Ortiz is playing with words here. “Campechano” originally refers to people from the Mexican region and state of Campeche, but in common Cuban parlance this term is used as an adjective meaning “friendly and cheerful.” Similarly, the term “guachinango” is sometimes used in the Caribbean to refer pejoratively to a Mexican person, but in Cuba it is mainly used as an adjective to characterize someone as either “clever” or “agreeable.” Therefore, Ortiz is both referring to the geographical origins of these “Indians” who migrated to Cuba and to the local reputation of their personalities. 17. “Hacendados” are owners of haciendas, or large estates. This category includes planters and ranchers. 18. Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar led the Spanish invasion of Cuba in 1511 and became the first governor of the island. He founded Cuba’s original colonial settlements, including Havana and Santiago de Cuba. 19. Pánfilo de Narváez took part in the invasion of Cuba led by Diego Velázquez and served as his lieutenant during his governorship. 20. Ortiz’s word is amestizamiento, that is, a process of creation of a mestizo people or culture through the mixture of elements of diverse origins. The adjective mestizo is applied to people and things of mixed racial and/or cultural origins (see note 13). 21. Lucayos in the original. Ortiz is referring here to the Lukku-Cairi, the Taíno inhabitants of the Bahamas before the European arrival. 22. Ortiz is arguing that the names of the two indigenous groups he mentions are partly based on these indigenous words and reveal their connection to different environments. Most of the terms he lists here are known today mainly as roots in toponyms across Cuba and other Caribbean islands and have not been retained as whole words in vernacular Cuban Spanish. Two exceptions are “cigua,” which in Cuba denotes both a kind of tree and a species of sea snail, and “guano” (a variation of “guana”), which refers both to a kind of palm tree and its dry leaves, commonly used in Cuba to cover rural buildings and to make hats and baskets. According to Ortiz, “ciba” is also the root of at least three Cubanisms (Ortiz 1923: 142, 156, 168). 23. Again, with the exception of “cigua” (given a different spelling in this paragraph) and “guano,” these indigenous terms are not used in Cuban Spanish today and are mainly retained as toponyms or roots thereof. 24. Lukku-Cairi; see note 21. 25. A modest kind of wattle-and-daub house, made of wood, stone, and clay, typical of the Cuban countryside. 26. The English word “barbecue” comes from the Spanish barbacoa (used by Ortiz in the original), itself probably derived from the Taíno word for the wooden framework that several Amerindian groups used as a grill. 27. An indigenous woman who, according to Cuban folk narratives, was the companion of the indigenous hero Hatuey (see note 30). 28. Bija, in the original. It can refer to either the Bixa orellana tree, native to the tropical Americas, or the red dye (anatta, in English) that is extracted from its seeds and was used by Amerindians for body painting. 29. Jagua in the original. It refers to the tropical Genipa americana tree, whose fruit juice was used by several Amerindian groups as body paint. 30. Ortiz is here comparing early indigenous rebel heroes to later leaders of Cuba’s anticolonial struggle. Hatuey was a Taíno who came to Cuba from the neighboring island of Ayiti (today’s Hispaniola) and headed the first uprising against the Spaniards in Cuba in the early sixteenth century. Similarly, Máximo Gomez left his native Hispaniola to become one of the major leaders of Cuba’s nineteenth-century wars of independence. Antonio Maceo was also an important leader in those anticolonial wars. Guamá was another Taíno leader who led a rebellion against the Spaniards between 1522 and 1532. Ortiz refers to the fact that both Guamá and Maceo were born on the eastern side of Cuba but, unlike Maceo, who brought the war against Spain to the outskirts of Havana, Guamá was unable to extend his rebellion beyond Cuba’s central region. 31. A kind of colander made of palm leaves used to squeeze yuca roots and remove their poisonous juice. 32. Another name for the flat yuca breads that modern Cubans inherited from the island’s indigenous groups. Unlike “xao-xao,” this term is still widely used in Cuba today. 33. Grated and pressed yuca. 34. A rudimentary tool composed of a lever placed against the branch of a tree. Roots, fruits and sugarcanes are placed between these two elements and the lever is pushed against the vegetables in order to extract their juice (See Ortiz 1923: 210). 35. A form of low-grade gold found in the Antilles. 36. Taíno rituals that involved music and dance. 37. A Taíno female leader from Ayiti (Hispaniola) who negotiated with Columbus upon his arrival on that island. Mentioned by Bartolomé de las Casas in his famous Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Short account of the destruction of the Indies), she has a mythic status, in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as a composer of areíto songs and as a virtuous woman who preferred to be executed rather than becoming the lover of a Spanish man. 38. Given a mulato form, that is, with mixed features of African and European origins. 39. A Hieronymite monk who went to the Caribbean in the late fifteenth century as one of the first European missionaries in the New World. The piece mentioned by Ortiz, Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios (An account of the antiquities of the Indians), is thought to be the first Spanish account on Amerindian peoples. 40. Indigenous groups from the continental circum-Caribbean area. On the usage of these ethnonyms, see notes 15 and 16. 41. The name given to the communities created by runaway slaves in Cuba. 42. Here, Ortiz uses the richly ambiguous phrase esperanza alburera. This literally means hope related to albures, which can designate the first cards played in the Monte Bank card game, the contingencies that can decide the result of an endeavor, or the moment in which one suddenly leaves a place (as in the Cuban expression albur de arranque). The expression, thus, evokes gambling, profit, adventure, moving, and sudden change, all at once. 43. An archaic term that originally referred to parts of Central or West Africa, sometimes extended to all of Sub-Saharan Africa. Ortiz seems to use the word in this latter meaning. The word in the Spanish original is Nigricia. 44. It has long been known that the Cubans who fought in the nineteenth-century anticolonial wars were disproportionately Black. 45. “Choteo” is a kind of cynical and disparaging humor that many Cubans imagine to be a characteristic of a purported national character. This argument was best articulated by the intellectual Jorge Mañach in his influential 1928 essay on the topic, in which he harshly attacked choteo as a force undermining social order. Mañach defined this kind of humor as “a habit of disrespect, motivated by one psychological fact: a repugnance to all authority” (1991: 58; our translation). Fernando Ortiz seems to be implicitly criticizing Mañach here, by pointing out that choteo is not a psychological habit, but a “social reaction” (presumably to exploitation and inequalities). 46. “Mulato” originally refers to a person of mixed African and European descent. As an adjective, it is used to characterize anything that has features taken to be of African and European origin. We chose to keep the original word—as opposed to the English mulatto—because of the wider meaning and mostly positive connotation that the term has in Cuban Spanish. 47. Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) was a French count, diplomat, and writer. One of the most influential articulators of nineteenth-century racial determinism, he wrote the Essay on the Inequality of Races, in which he developed the theory of the Aryan master race and attacked racial miscegenation as a factor leading to social and cultural decline. 48. Ortiz is referring here to the fact that the Spanish administrators of the American colonies often ignored the laws coming from the metropole. This attitude is best encapsulated in the customary sentence Obedezco pero no cumplo—“I obey but do not comply”— through which they would refuse to comply with metropolitan rules while not defying the power of the crown in general. Ortiz is obviously paraphrasing this sentence. 49. The body of laws promulgated by the Spanish monarchy for the management of its empire, laws often disregarded in the Spanish colonies. 50. Mercaderes in the original. This term refers to the large-scale merchants involved in overseas colonial trade, typically born in Spain and protected by the metropole’s strict commercial regulations. 51. Ortiz uses here the word mundialización, which comes from mundo (world). We chose to translate it as “globalization” for lack of a better term, but we acknowledge that this choice is somewhat anachronistic. The term globalización is widely used in Spanish today, but it was not used at Ortiz´s time. 52. This is an obvious reference here to Uncle Sam, a figure that in Latin America is used to represent not only the United States government, but also that country as a whole. 53. Isla de corcho—“island of cork”—is a phrase often used in Cuba to refer to the country, meaning that it is unstable but unsinkable, that is, indestructible. 54. This is a reference to the city of Cienfuegos, founded by French settlers in 1819 next to a bay in southern Cuba. 55. The Cuban writer María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Countess of Merlin (1789–1852), was born and raised in Havana but spent most of her life in Spain and France. Although she wrote primarily in French, her most important writings narrated her experiences in Cuba and she is celebrated as one of Cuba’s first female writers. Her literary salon in Paris was one of the most successful in Restoration France, attracting the likes of Chopin and Balzac. The Cuban aristocrat Serafina Montalvo de Herrera, the third countess of Fernandina, was famous in the Parisian salons in the second half of the nineteenth century. 56. The title “Catholic Monarchs” was bestowed by Pope Alexander VI in 1494 to King Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516) and Queen Isabella I of Castille (1451–1504), the rulers whose marriage was an important step in the unification of the Spanish state. They sponsored Christopher Columbus’ exploration travels and were therefore the first Spanish monarchs to rule Cuba. 57. In this paragraph, “creole” Blacks and Whites refer to Blacks and Whites born in Cuba. 58. “The Peninsula”—a reference to the Iberian Peninsula—was in Cuba a common way to refer to Spain, especially during colonial times.  

Descola: Beyond nature and culture: Forms of attachment Publisher’s note: This article is chapter 13 of the forthcoming translation by Janet Lloyd © by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published 2013. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637. The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London. Originally published as Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2005) © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2005. We are very grateful to the University of Chicago Press for permission to publish this chapter. Beyond nature and culture Forms of attachment Philippe Descola, Collège de France Translated by Janet Lloyd   Modes of identification broadly schematize our experience of things, distinguishing between parcels of ontological properties distributed in accordance with the arrangements of existing beings, arrangements whose structural characteristics we have examined above, each in turn. It is a distribution of beings according to their attributes, the principles according to which socio-cosmological collectives are organized, the dominant regimes of knowledge and action, and the boundaries of identity and otherness. Each of these forms of identification defines a specific style of relations with the world. Long-established expressions of these relations are to be found in geographical regions, many of which are immense, and over very long periods. Yet we cannot use those styles as criteria for distinguishing between singular collectives with contours limited both in time and in space—the kind that historians, ethnologists and sociologists usually choose to investigate. Rather, we should regard those stylizations of experience as what are usually called “world views,” “cosmologies” or “symbolic forms,” all of these being terms of vague epistemological status yet that constitute a handy intuitive way of synthesizing under a simple label (such as “the modern West,” or “shamanistic societies”), “families” of practices and mind-sets that seem to display affinities despite the diversity of their concrete manifestations. However, within those great archipelagos marked out by a shared mode of identification one comes across numerous kinds of collectives that consider themselves to be very different from one another (and that are, indeed, perceived as different by those who study them). This is not only on account of their different languages, institutions and, more often than not, the discontinuity of their territories, but also because the interactions within them present remarkable contrasts. For even when the ontological distribution of existing beings and the ways that they come together are based on identical principles, the links that they weave between one another, the ways that they affect one another and the manner in which they treat one another can all vary through and through. It is thus primarily the general form of the local relations that structure the connections between entities that are all distinguished by the same process of identification, which makes it possible for collectives to differentiate themselves from one another and for each to display the singularity of their own particular ethos, of which any observer soon becomes aware. Like modes of identification, relational modes are integrating schemas; that is to say they stem from the kind of cognitive, emotional, and sensory-motor structures that channel the production of automatic inferences, orientate practical action, and organize the expression of thought and feelings according to relatively stereotyped patterns. A relational schema becomes dominant in a collective when activated in a whole range of very different circumstances in relations with humans or nonhumans. The effect of this is to subject all relations to its particular logic, either by limiting their field of application or by subordinating this to the achievement of the ends that the dominant schema embodies. But, unlike modes of identification, dominant relational modes are also identifiable thanks to the fact that in many cases they express the greatest possible difference from those in action in the immediate neighbourhood. It is as if each collective would concentrate its greatest efforts on whatever it judged to be capable of distinguishing it most effectively from the collectives surrounding it and with which it coexists: namely, the styles of interaction and behaviour that its human members are led to adopt in the course of daily life. However, the nature and the limits of a collective of this kind are never fixed a priori since it is, on the contrary, the area covered by the dominant relational schema that establishes them in the first place. A collective defined in this way does not necessarily coincide with a “society,” a “tribe,” or a “class,” all of which are misleading terms to use because of the substantive closure that they imply. Rather, it is characterized primarily by the discontinuity that is introduced all around it on account of the ostensible close presence of other principles for the schematization of relations between existing beings. Its existence is thus positional, not intrinsic, and is revealed through comparisons. When seen as dispositions that bestow form and content upon the practical links between myself and a human or non-human alter, relational schemas can be classified according to whether or not that alter is or is not equivalent to me on an ontological level and whether the connections that I establish with it are or are not mutual. So numerous are the kinds of relations that can be established between the entities that fill the world that it is clearly not possible to summarize them all. So let us concentrate here upon no more than one group of six types of relationships which appear to play a preponderant role in the connections that humans establish between one another and also with non-human elements in their environment. Whether they are identified by the words that I use or are given other names, these relations have for many years attracted the attention of the social sciences, some of them even to the point of becoming key concepts. The relations in question are those of exchange, predation, gift, production, protection and transmission. These relational modes that come to modulate all modes of identification may be divided into two groups. The first is characterized by potentially reversible relationsbetween terms that are similar. The second is characterized by univocal relations that are founded upon connections between non-equivalent terms. The first group covers exchange, predation and gift; the second covers production, protection and transmission. Giving, taking, exchanging The relations at work in the first group correspond to three formulae that ensure the movement of something valuable between two terms of the same ontological status, terms that may themselves actually contain that value and therefore circulate in such a way that one may be led to disappear physically as a result of being absorbed by the other. The first relationship, that of “exchange,” appears as a symmetrical one in which any agreed transfer from one entity to the other requires something in return. The other two are asymmetrical. In the one, entity “A” takes something of value from entity “B” (perhaps its life, its body or its interiority) without offering anything in exchange: “predation” is what I call this negative asymmetry. In the other, entity “B” offers something of value to entity “A” (maybe even itself) without expecting any compensation: I call this positive asymmetry “gift.” At least two of the terms that I use to qualify these relations have a long anthropological history, so I need to specify their meaning in relation to previous definitions. As is well known, Lévi-Strauss ascribes a crucial role to exchange in the developing and functioning of social life. The prohibition of incest is a rule of reciprocity in that it instructs a man to renounce a woman for the benefit of another man who, in turn, rules out his use of another woman who thus becomes available for the first man. The prohibition of incest and the exogamy that is the positive side to it would therefore simply be a means of instituting and guaranteeing reciprocal exchange, which is the basis of culture and a sign of the emergence of a new order in which the relations between groups are governed by freely accepted conventions. But culture does not play a totally innovating role here. According to Lévi-Strauss all it does is codify universal mental schemas that pre-exist the norms that bring them into play. Among these categorical imperatives that are written into the architecture of the mind before the emergence of the symbolism that makes it possible to express them, one finds “the notion of reciprocity regarded as the most immediate form of integrating the opposition between the self and others; and the synthetic nature of the gift, i.e. that the agreed transfer of a valuable from one individual to another makes these individuals into partners and adds a new quality to the valuable transferred” (Lévi-Strauss 1969 [1967]: 84). The pre-eminence of reciprocity and gift thus results from the fact that those two means of founding and maintaining the social link are a legacy of human phylogenesis, a reminder of the function of natural predispositions in the structuring of the “being together” that is organized by culture. It is no doubt not necessary to go as far as Lévi-Strauss and postulate an innate neural basis for reciprocity and gift, in order to agree with him that those two relational schemas do indeed orientate many forms of human behaviour. Besides, there is nothing new about the idea. The suggestion that reciprocal exchange and gift constitute the true cement of all social life seems to be a leitmotif in Western political philosophy, in which it is hard to sort out how much of the idea stems from empirical observation and how much from a moral ideal regarding the most desirable way of ensuring that a collective of equals sticks together. Although he does not explicitly acknowledge it, Lévi-Strauss is thus positioned along the main line of development from a tradition recorded as early as Antiquity. Aristotle, for instance, declares that reciprocity in relations of exchange “is the bond that maintains the association,” and Seneca declares that gift “constitutes the chief bond of human society.”1 However, this venerable precedent should not deter us from asking two questions. Is it legitimate to associate reciprocity and gift within the same set of phenomena? And is it certain that every collective considers those two values as the basis of its social life? In answer to the first question, we must briefly look back to Marcel Mauss’ famous Essay on the gift and consider this text’s influence on Lévi-Strauss (Mauss 1950).2 Although critical with regard to certain aspects of this essay, Lévi-Strauss does confirm the conception of the gift that Mauss presents there, namely “a system of total prestation,” characterized by the three obligations of giving, receiving, and giving back. Lévi-Strauss does not challenge that definition, but he does criticize the way in which, he claims, Mauss explained the reciprocity involved in the exchange of gifts and counter-gifts, namely by resorting mainly to a local theory centred on the Polynesian notion of hau, a mysterious force that resides in the given gift, which forces the gift-receiver to reciprocate. Lévi-Strauss claims that Mauss allowed himself to be mystified by a deliberate interpretation put forward by a group of native specialists instead of endeavouring to discover the underlying realities of exchange where they could be found, that is to say “in the unconscious mental structures that may be reached through institutions” (Mauss 1950: xxxix). If exchange plays a founding role in social life, according to Lévi-Strauss that is because it constitutes an absolutely primitive phenomenon, “a synthesis immediately given to, and by, symbolic thought” (Mauss 1950: xlvi). What is paradoxical about this famous critique is that Lévi-Strauss seems not to have realized that Mauss’ characterization of the gift, with which he himself does not disagree, was in truth derived from another theory, every bit as native as that of the hau, but also truly Western. For Mauss implicitly echoes his own cultural tradition when he interprets the gift as resting upon the obligations of giving, receiving, and giving back. As Denis Vidal has shown, this is a common interpretation that goes back to the well-known ancient image of the Three Graces. These constitute a most precise allegory of the three obligations that surround gifts, as Seneca makes perfectly clear: “some would have it appear that there is one for bestowing a benefit, another for receiving it, and a third for returning it” (Seneca 1935: 13). Despite his extensive classical culture, Mauss never mentions this line of thought on the theme of gifts, which commentaries on the Three Graces have high-lighted from Chrysippus right down to Pico de La Mirandola. But it seems unlikely that that unacknowledged source did not affect his conception of the nature of gifts (the three obligations). It may also have affected his desire to see restored the values associated with it, namely generous behaviour, in particular the energeticism ofprominent figures, that testifies to a reputedly more authentic sociability as illustrated by archaic societies (Vidal 1991).3 In view of its antecedents, it thus seems reasonable to question whether this concept of the gift bequeathed by the Ancients, which anthropology then took to its heart in the wake of Mauss, really does match the practice that it claims to characterize. For, unlike exchange, the gift is above all a one-way gesture that consists in abandoning something to someone without expecting any compensation other than that, possibly, of gratitude on the part of the receiver of the gift. For if the notion is given its literal meaning, reciprocal benefaction is never guaranteed where a gift is concerned. To be sure, reciprocation is a possibility that one may well hope for, either as a tacit wish or an out-and-out calculation, but the realization of such a wish remains independent of the actual act of giving, which would, ipso facto lose its meaning if it was conditioned by an imperative to obtain something in compensation. Alain Testart is thus quite right to draw a clear distinction between exchange and gifts: the former consists in handing something over in return for something else; the latter, in doing so with no expectation of reciprocity (Testart 1997). Thus, the presents that I receive from those close to me on the occasion of my birthday cannot in any way be regarded as a deferred return in exchange for the presents that I gave them on their birthdays, for there is no obligation inherent to the custom according to which these gracious transfers take place that would make the present given to me conditional upon the gifts that I offered. It is true that one may say that one is “much obliged” by the gift that one receives. But, contrary to what Mauss claims, the fact that one is “obliged” in no way makes a counter-gift obligatory, at least not in the sense in which an initial favour might be accompanied by a compelling clause such as those that stem from a contract or responsibility and which, ignored, might well lead to sanctions. In the case of a present, the obligation to repay one’s benefactor in some way is purely moral. If one evades it, one may eventually be despised, lose face or be labelled stingy by the gift-giver, although for him there can be no recourse to any means of obtaining reciprocity for something freely given and that he would never even think of demanding. If the gift gives rise to any obligation, it is, strictly speaking, neither obligatory nor obliging (Testart 1997: 43). In this respect, a gift is profoundly different from an exchange. Every gift constitutes an independent transfer by reason of the fact that nothing can be claimed in return. There are, of course, societies where it is customary to respond to a gift with another gift, as in the potlatch of the Indians of the north-west coast of America, which is very much to the fore in the Essay on the gift: the riches offered during a ceremony provided the opportunity of presenting some appropriate counter-gift in the course of some later ceremony. Yet no-one was, strictly speaking, obliged to honour a gift with a counter-gift. In societies that had placed generosity at the pinnacle of their values, not to do so certainly meant that one’s honour was seriously sullied and one’s access to the highest spheres of political prestige would be compromised wherever that political prestige was founded above all on one’s reputation for liberality. But even if, as in many other societies too, the fear of being discredited no doubt constituted a powerful motive to respond with a counter-gift, that was not the same as the obligation to repay that would have been implied in a contractual and quasi-legal way by the fact of accepting the original gift. Exchange, in contrast, requires as a necessary condition that something be obtained in return. Regardless of whether or not it is equal in value to the thing received, it is this return that represents both the purpose and the means of the exchange, whether this be immediate or deferred and whether or not it be a commercial deal. For even when its nature is not explicitly stipulated or when the time allowed for repayment is not specified, some kind of reciprocation can always be demanded: each party only gives away the goods that he has in exchange for other goods. In this sense, as Testart also notes, the essence of exchange lies in two transfers in opposite directions, transfers that are intrinsically linked, since each of them results from an obligation the raison d’être of which lies in the other. The whole operation is thus a closed system, which may, of course, be inserted into a whole series of similar transactions, but each of which is formed by an independent combination of two elementary mirrored operations (Testart 1997: 51). Unlike a gift, which is a single transfer that may eventually prompt a counter-transfer but for motives other than the principle of liberality that made it possible in the first place, each of the two transfers that an exchange involves is both the cause and the effect of the other. A reciprocal relationship is inherent to this kind of deal and is peculiar to it: I give to you so that you give to me, and vice-versa. This is why the all-too vague notion of reciprocity should be set aside when analysing transfer relations. Literally, reciprocity only designates what happens between term “A” and term “B” and subsequently between term “B” and term “A.” There is no overt indication of the nature of the obligations that link the two terms. Thus, a gift may be reciprocal when it is followed up by a counter-gift, although reciprocity, even so, does not constitute an intrinsic characteristic of this type of transaction, given that a gift in return is not obligatory or binding as it is in an exchange. On the other hand, exchange does necessarily imply reciprocity, since it is precisely the obligation to respond with a counterpart that defines it. I shall therefore be using the word “exchange” to refer to what Lévi-Strauss sometimes means by “reciprocity”: namely, a transfer that requires something in return and, contrary to the use established by Mauss, I shall use the term “gift” to refer to an accepted transfer with no obligation to provide a counter-transfer. It is difficult altogether to avoid the cinematic illusion that leads to characterizing transfers of things or persons by the directions in which they move (and I am aware that I myself did that in my initial definition of exchange, predation and gifts). But if one takes into account the form of the transfers according to the obligations that they impose, it becomes possible largely to correct that distortion of perspective. In any case, it encourages one to distinguish between phenomena arbitrarily grouped under the same rubric simply because they involve the circulation of things between particular terms. It then becomes impossible to continue to set on the same level the exchange of goods in all its different forms, the exchange of signs in language, the exchange of women in marriage alliances, the exchange of deaths in a vendetta, or the sequence of gifts and counter-gifts. Whether understood in the general sense that Lévi-Strauss lends it or in the more specific sense that I give it, exchange is certainly present in all societies and takes such diverse forms that it is not hard to understand the point of view of those who have wished to see it as the principal “bond that maintains association.” Gifts are also common at every latitude. From the Stoics down to Mauss, many authors have hinted at their nostalgia for a hypothetical golden age in which this disinterested practice was more widespread and have expressed their desire to see a generalization of benevolent practices that would give some idea of the consideration that people have for one another. All the same, no moralist has ever seriously thought that gifts could become the key regulatory institution in any real society. So what grounds do I have for saying that gifts might constitute the integrating relational schema in certain collectives? How can one even think of undermining the pre-eminence of exchange by suggesting that patterns of behaviour founded on the principle of agreed gracious transfers may have been adopted as an ideal norm by certain human communities? These rhetorical questions prompt a reminder: a mode of relations does not become dominant because it has successfully supplanted schemas of interactions that do not accept its logic. It does so because it provides the most effective cognitive model for a simple and easily remembered synthesis not only of many patterns of behaviour but also, and above all, of those recognized to be the most distinctive of the collective not only by its members but also by outside observers. Just as with modes of identification, no relational schema is hegemonic. The most that can be said is that one or other of them acquires a structuring function in certain places, even if it is not always possible to put a name to it, when, in an immediately recognizable manner, it orientates many attitudes vis-à-vis both humans and non-humans. It is not the case that exchange disappears when the ethos of gifts dominates, for in truth it is simply encompassed by the latter. If one accepts this, one has to agree that there are plenty of collectives that do seem to place the logic of the gift at the heart of their practices. Without anticipating the ethnographic case studies that will be discussed in the next chapter, I would like to draw attention to the importance granted to the action of “sharing” in recent studies devoted to hunter-gatherer societies, in order to characterize both their internal relations and those that they maintain with plants and animals. Bird-David has played a decisive role in this domain, at least at the terminological level, by forging the expression “a giving environment” to synthesize the conception that the Nayaka of Tamil Nadu have of their forests. Just as humans share everything between them with no thought of obtaining anything in return, similarly the environment unstintingly hands out its liberalities to the Nayaka, so that the human and the non-human components of the collective find themselves integrated into one and the same “cosmic sharing economy” (Bird-David 1990). The idea and practice of the gift constitute among the Nayaka a habitus so deeply rooted that it is inconceivable not immediately to give someone whatever he asks for. When, very exceptionally, the Nayaka do not want to part with something, “rather than disrupt the ongoing sense of sharing—the rhythm of everyday social life—they hid it away or avoided people” (Bird-David 1999: 72). For Bird-David, the values of sharing and the gift are typical of hunter-gatherer societies in general, a point of view that Ingold takes up and elaborates. His view is that what characterizes the so-called “sharing” relations of this kind of society (both with other humans and with non-humans) is simply “trust,” that is to say a particular combination of autonomy and dependence. According to him, to place my trust in a person is to act vis-à-vis him or her in the expectation that he or she will behave toward me in the same favourable spirit as I am manifesting, and will continue to do so for as long as I do nothing to limit his or her autonomy, that is to say his or her option of acting differently. This is thus a situation of dependence that is freely entered into and that places a high value on my partner’s choice to adopt toward me the same attitude that I adopt toward him. In short, “any attempt to impose a response, to lay down conditions and obligations that the other is bound to follow would represent a betrayal of trust and a negation of the relationship” (Ingold 2000: 70; italics original). The difference between on the one hand the giving or sharing and, on the other, exchanging could not be expressed more clearly. The former is unconditional: even to suggest that it is not condemns it immediately to vanish and give way to the latter. Disinterested trust is then replaced by a tacit or contractual obligation. Hunter-gatherers—to use the current term—do not constitute the only kind of collectives that are characterized by a high value set upon sharing. Those are also the terms that Joanna Overing and some of her disciples use to analyse indigenous sociability in Amazonia, when this is apprehended at the level that seems to them the most significant, namely within the framework of a local group with consanguineous kinship relations. It appears that this domestic and village sphere is marked above all by relations of mutual trust that are confirmed by productive cooperation, daily and festive commensality, an affectionate solicitude for others and a constant flow of gifts and counter-gifts. This is a kind of moral economy based on intimacy, free of calculation and ambiguities, the effect of which is to render those within it so consubstantial that they consider themselves to be of the same species. Within this “aesthetic of conviviality,” sharing plays a central role in that it testifies to a disposition to open oneself up to others with generosity and compassion and thus, through concrete acts, expresses the ethical insistence on unreservedly helping one another that informs the whole of social life.4 Further examples are really not necessary, for our account need not ratify all the ethnographical interpretations that we have mentioned. At this stage in our enquiry all we need do is recognize that there are at least some very diverse societies which, as anthropologists confirm, are animated by an ideology of sharing, here understood as the pre-eminence of the role played by reciprocal gifts in interpersonal relations. * The opposite of a gift is seizing something, making no offer of anything in return. It is an action that creates no more obligations for its perpetrator that the gift does for the gift’s recipients. If one wishes to underline the illicit and generally condemned aspect of the operation, it may be called theft, seizure or wrongful appropriation. However, the term “predation” seems preferable here, in that it conveys the idea that an appropriation of this kind may not result from a desire to harm or some fleeting need. Instead, it may be prompted by the fundamental constraint to which the lives of animals are subjected. Every animal needs to replenish its sources of energy at regular intervals, by consuming some prey, a body originally distinct from itself but that the animal in question ends up assimilating in such a way that it becomes a part of its own organism. Humans are not excepted from that imperative, for they have obeyed it for tens of millennia, even if, thanks to the development of livestock-raising and the deferred consumption of products already transformed by agriculture and herding, the evolution of techniques of subsistence has by now succeeded in partly blurring the memory of the intrinsic link between the capture and the ingestion of prey. Nevertheless, predation remains a central mechanism in the preservation of living creatures, an elementary way in which animals are related to their environment, so much so that René Thom has constructed a mathematical model of the “predation loop,” which seems applicable to many biological processes (Thom 1990: 222-231, 526-530). Predation is thus a phenomenon of productive destruction that is indispensable for the perpetuation of individuals: far from being an expression of gratuitous cruelty or a perverse desire to annihilate others, it on the contrary transforms the prey into an object of the greatest importance for whatever creature ingests it. Indeed, it is the very condition of that creature’s survival. But is it legitimate to transpose a biological phenomenon to the social sphere and claim that collectives have simply converted predatory patterns of behaviour into a dominant relational schema? First, we should bear in mind (indeed, how could we forget?) that the primacy of exchange and sharing is not accepted by all those who have reflected upon the foundations of political existence. Hobbes was by no means alone in emphasizing, following Plautus, that man’s original condition is to be a wolf to his fellows, for his egoistic awareness of his own interests constantly leads him to try to dispossess others. And although Hobbes’s pessimism has, not without reason, above all been interpreted as an unconscious naturalization of competitive interpersonal relations within a nascent market economy, it cannot be reduced solely to that. For there is no denying that violent appropriation and the destruction of others are not the doubtful privileges of individuals fashioned by a bourgeois society. Traces of both are to be found in every period, at every latitude, and it would be as ridiculous to deny this predatory propensity as to claim it to have been the dominant characteristic of human nature up until such time as the latter was pacified by institutions introduced by the social contract. Predation is a disposition that, among others, is a legacy of our phylogenesis, and if certain collectives have adopted it as their own particular ethos, this means not that they are more savage and primitive than others, but simply that they have found it a paradoxical means of incorporating the deepest kind of otherness while remaining faithful to themselves. My ethnographic experiences among the Achuar led me, some years ago, to come to that conviction and to apply to the Achuar the notion of “predation” in order to explain a style of relating to both humans and non-humans, based on capturing principles of identity and vital substances reputed to be necessary for the perpetuation of the self. This predatory attitude was evident not only in warfare and its rituals but also in many aspects of daily life; and it was not peculiar to the Jivaro groups. I noticed very soon that signs of it were detectable here and there among other indigenous Amazonian societies, in total contrast to the philosophy of equal exchange by which the Amazonian form of social life had long been exclusively defined. However, it was not at all my intention to substitute one hegemonic relationship for another, for it was also perfectly clear that some of the peoples in this vast cultural region did, for their part, adhere fully to the obligations that exchange imposed (Descola 1990, 1992, 1993). At about the same time and in parallel fashion, Viveiros de Castro was developing his own thoughts about the ontological foundations of cannibalism and warfare in the Tupi world and this led to a model of “the symbolic economy of predation” on the basis of which he set out to elucidate the sociological peculiarities of Dravidian kinship in Amazonia. Far from being symmetrical, as in other Dravidian systems, here the opposition between affinity and consanguinity seems to be characterized by a hierarchical reversal that is dynamically inspired by a diametric structure. Although masked at the level of a particular local group by the behaviour-patterns and values associated with consanguinity, in relations with other local groups affinity seemed to predominate and was itself subordinated to a more totalizing relationship for which it provided a specific code: namely, cannibalistic predation on enemies (Viveiros de Castro 1993). With the passing of time, and despite a few minor divergent interpretations, the idea that, for many Amazonian societies, predation constituted the cardinal schema for relations with “others” has become widely accepted (See Taylor 1993, 1996; Fausto 2001; Surrallés 2003). But it has also encountered resistance and given rise to many misunderstandings. Without going into the ethnographic details, which we shall be examining in the next chapter, I should make it clear that predation is above all a disposition for incorporating otherness, both human and non-human, because this is reputed to be indispensable for a definition of the self: in order truly to be myself, I must take possession of another being and assimilate it. This can be done by means of warfare, hunting, real or metaphorical cannibalism, the seizure of women and children or by ritual methods of constructing the person and mediating with ideal affines, in which violence is confined to the symbolic level. Predation is not an unbridled manifestation of ferocity or a deadly impulse set up as a collective virtue. Even less is it an attempt to reject as inhuman some anonymous “other.” It constitutes recognition that without the body of this other being, without its identity, without its perspective on me, I should remain incomplete. This is a metaphysical attitude that is peculiar to certain collectives, not a troubled exaltation of violence that some ethnologists might be guilty of, as they project their own fantasies upon the Amerindians. * The trilogy of the gift, exchange and predation seems to present affinities with the distinction that Marshall Sahlins draws between the three forms taken by reciprocity in tribal societies: “generalized” reciprocity qualifies altruistic transfers within the local group and requires no automatic reciprocation; “balanced” reciprocity corresponds to a direct exchange of equivalent values within the tribal group; “negative” reciprocity consists in trying to obtain something for nothing, sometimes in a dishonest or violent fashion, and is a feature of intertribal relations (Sahlins 1968: 82-86; who takes over this typology from Service 1966). But the resemblance is no more than superficial, in the first place because neither the gift nor prédation involve reciprocity. In both cases what is involved is a unilateral operation: the gift comes unaccompanied by any binding obligation to return the favour; and a predatory act is unlikely to imply that the perpetrator ardently hopes for a reciprocal response. Such a response is always possible and in fact often takes the form of reprisals, but it is certainly not constitutive of the intention that prompted the action. Besides, the three kinds of reciprocity affect the direction of movements and the balance sheet, positive, negative or equal, of the passage of objects, not the causes and obligations inherent to each of those kinds of transfers; and it is precisely those causes and obligations that make it possible to distinguish exchange, predation and gift as classes of heterogeneous phenomena. Finally, the typology of reciprocity describes modes of circulating goods that are to be seen everywhere in operation and that, when combined within a single society, are differentiated from one another above all by their position along a continuum defined by the greater or lesser spatial and kinship distance between the agents in those transfers. In contrast, in the sense in which I understand them here, exchange, predation and gift are general relational schemas that concern far more than the circulation of goods, since one or other of them may come to structure the ethos of a collective in a distinctive fashion. Producing, protecting, transmitting The relations in the first group allow for reversibility of movement between the terms: this is indispensable for an exchange to take place and it remains possible, though not always desired, in predation and gift. In contrast, the relations in the second group are always univocal and operate between terms set in a hierarchy. This is particularly clear in the case of production. The genetic antecedence of a producer over his product does not allow the latter, in return, to produce its producer (even if it may help to support him), and this places the product in a situation of dependence vis-à-vis the entity to which it owes its existence, at least initially. Marx dispels any doubt about the matter. Production is both a relationship that humans weave among themselves according to well-defined forms in order to procure jointly their means of existence (the relations of production); and it is also a specific relationship to an object that one creates for a particular purpose. In the famous pages of his Introduction to a critique of political economy, Marx stresses that “the act of production is, therefore, in all its aspects an act of consumption as well” (Marx 2010 [1897]: 277). This is because, in the first place, the individual who develops his faculties by producing something expends energy in this operation and consumes raw materials, which are the means of production; this is “productive consumption.” But consumption is also, in an immediate fashion, a production, in the sense that all consumption, whether of food or other things, contributes toward creating the body and the conditions of subsistence of the subject who produces it; this is “production geared to consumption.” “In the first [productive consumption], the producer transforms himself into things; in the second [consumptive production], things are transformed into human beings” (Marx 2010 [1897]: 277). Although an identity is established between production and consumption, this is only possible thanks to a mediating movement between the two terms: “Production furthers consumption by creating material for the latter, which otherwise would lack its object. But consumption, in its turn, furthers production, by providing for the products the individual for whom they are the products” (Marx 2010 [1897]: 278). However, this extremely original dialectical parity between objectivizing production and subjectivizing consumption fades away a few lines further on, when Marx forthrightly reaffirms the primacy of production over consumption. In effect, consumption is simply a particular moment in production since, once the individual who has produced an object returns it to himself by consuming it, he is acting as a productive individual who is thereby reproducing himself; in consequence, “production forms the actual starting point and is, therefore, the predominating factor” (Marx 2010 [1897]: 282). Marx’s position is indicative of the more general tendency of modern thought to regard production as the element that determines the material conditions of social life and as the principal way for humans to transform nature and, by doing so, transform themselves. Whether or not one is a Marxist, it is now commonly thought that the history of humanity is primarily founded on the dynamism introduced by a succession of ways of producing use-value and exchange-value of the materials that the environment provides. But it is fair to question whether this pre-eminence ascribed to the process of productive objectivization applies generally to all societies.5 To be sure, humans have always and everywhere been productive; everywhere they have modified or fashioned substances intentionally in order to procure themselves the means of existence, thereby exercising their capacity to behave as agents who impose specific forms and purposes upon matter that is independent of themselves. But does this mean that this kind of action is everywhere apprehended in accordance with the model of a relation to the world known as “production,” a model so paradigmatic and familiar to us that we have become accustomed to use it to describe extremely heterogeneous operations carried out in very diverse contexts? It seems hardly necessary to recall first that the idea of production by no means suffices to define the general manner in which many hunter-gatherers conceive their subsistence techniques. That is why some specialists of those societies now prefer to use the term “procurement” rather “production,” the better to underline that what we call hunting and gathering are primarily specialized forms of interaction that develop in an environment peopled with intentional entities that are comparable to humans (Bird-David 1992: 40; Ingold 2000: 58-59). But the inadequacy of the notion of production is also obvious when it comes to accounting for the way in which great non-Western civilizations conceptualize the process by which things are engendered. Francois Jullien shows this clearly, in the case of China, in his commentary on the oeuvre of Wang Fuzhi (Jullien 1989). For this seventeenth-century neo-Confucian scholar, who systematizes a fundamental intuition of Chinese thought, the whole of reality can be conceived as a continuous process resulting from the interaction of two principles, neither of which is more fundamental or more original than the other: for example, yin and yang, or Heaven and Earth. From this stems a logic of a mutual relationship with no beginning and no end that excludes any external founding agent, any need for a creator-agent as an initial cause or prime mover and any reference to some transcendent “otherness.” The process of rest alternating with movement that is given dynamism by the primacy of movement, acts in a totally impersonal and unintentional manner; “So order cannot be imposed from outside by a deliberate act of some subject or other implementing a certain plan . . . it is inherent in the nature of things and stems totally from their continuous development” (Jullien 1989: 85). In short, the world is not produced by the intervention of an actor with a plan and a will. It results solely from its own internal propensities (lishi), which manifest themselves spontaneously in a permanent flux of transformations. This self-regulated process is a far cry indeed from the heroic model of creation as developed in the West and proclaimed as an unquestioned fact on the twofold authority of the biblical tradition and Greek thought. The idea of production as the imposition of form upon inert matter is simply an attenuated expression of the schema of action that rests upon two interdependent premises: the preponderance of an individualized intentional agent as the cause of the coming-to-be of beings and things, and the radical difference between the ontological status of the creator and that of whatever he produces. According to the paradigm of creation-production, the subject is autonomous and his intervention in the world reflects his personal characteristics: whether he is a god, a demiurge or a simple mortal, he produces his oeuvre according to a pre-established plan and with a definite purpose. Hence the abundance of craftsmanship metaphors that are used to express the origin of this type of relationship. In the Psalms, the creator is compared to a well-sinker, a gardener, a potter, and an architect. In the Timaeus, the demiurge creates the world, fashioning it as a potter would. He carefully composes the mixture that he is about to work on; he turns it on his wheel to form a sphere, then he rounds it off and polishes the surface (Plato 1929: 61-65). Here, the image of fabrication, poiesis, is central; and so it remains in the modern conception of the relationship of a producer and that which he produces. What also remains is the idea of the absolute heterogeneity between them: the creator, craftsman or producer possesses his own plan of the thing that he will bring into existence and gives himself the technical means to realize his intended purpose by projecting his will upon the matter that he manipulates. In the same way, just as the creator and his creation are incommensurable in christian dogma, in the Western tradition there is no ontological equivalence between the producer and whatever he brings into being. Nothing could be more alien to the manner in which the Indians of Amazonia conceive their relations with the entities upon which they feed. For the Achuar, for example, it would be meaningless to speak of “agricultural production” or “hunting production,” as though the aim of those activities were to bring into being a consumable product that would be ontologically dissociated from the material from which it came—even if such operations may come to be quantified and assessed vis-à-vis the potential productivity of resources, as by myself in the past (Descola 1994 [1986], Ch. V-IX). Achuar women do not “produce” the plants that they cultivate: they have a personal relationship with them, speaking to each one so as to touch its soul and thereby to win it over, favour its growth and help it to survive the perils of life, just as a mother helps her children. Achuar men do not “produce” the animals that they hunt. They negotiate with them personally, in a circumspect relationship made up, in equal parts, of cunning and seduction, trying to beguile them with misleading words and false promises. In other words, here it is the relations between subjects (humans and non-humans) that condition the “production” of the means of existence, not the production of objects that conditions (human) relationships. In Amazonia, even the production of artefacts seems not to fit into the classic model of the demiurge-craftsman. This is what is suggested by Lucia van Velthem’s studies of the wickerwork of the Wayana of the northern Para, who, like some of their Carib and Arawak neighbours, are noted for the diversity and refinement, both technical and aesthetic, of the objects that they plait (Van Velthem 2000, 2001). Wickerwork is a masculine activity that is both valued and prestigious, complete mastery of which is only acquired quite late in life, at least in the creation of the most difficult pieces such as the great katari anon, the carrying basket that is entirely decorated by plaited motifs that differ on each of the external and internal sides. However, the Wayana do not regard the fabrication of baskets as a virtuoso fashioning of a raw material, but rather as an incomplete actualization, in slightly different forms, of the bodies of animal spirits that they reconstitute using plant fibres that are assimilated to human skin. Their baskets, receptacles, trays, mats and the plaited containers in which they press manioc are thus, as Van Velthem puts it, “transformed bodies” (Van Velthem 2001: 206). Each has an anatomy—a head, limbs, breasts, a trunk, ribs, buttocks and genitals—and the motifs that adorn them are stylized representations of the being of which they constitute a transmutation. The designs on the inner sides of baskets even represent that being’s internal organs: the point is, in this way, to evoke the predatory capacity of assimilation of the animals’ spirits which, however, is rendered inoffensive in the artefact by virtue of its incompleteness. For the fibre body differs from the threatening body of the prototype of which it is an actualization, given that it is not recomposed altogether identically, and on that account it lacks the intentionality of the original. However, that is only so in the case of domestic basketry, the daily use of which makes it necessary somehow to “devitalize” it. Objects woven for ceremonial use are said, on the contrary, to be complete materializations of the bodies of animal-spirits. The most expert of the basket-makers are even credited with the ability to recompose in their handiwork the non-visual characteristics of the prototype, such as its movements, sounds and smells. This ontological mimetism allows these objects to function, in their turn, as agents of transformation. They are used extensively in healing rites, since they possess properties identical to those of the entities of which they are reincarnations. Far from being apprehended as the production-creation, out of inanimate material, of a new thing informed by the art and purpose of an autonomous agent, the work of a Wayana basket-weaver is regarded as something that can make a veritable metamorphosis possible, that is to say it can produce a change in the state of an entity that already exists as a subject and that preserves all or part of its attributes throughout this operation. As a way of conceiving action on the world and a specific relationship in which a subject generates an object, production thus does not have a universal applicability. It presupposes the existence of a clearly individualized agent who projects his interiority on to indeterminate matter in order to give form to it and thus bring into existence an entity for which he alone is responsible and which he can then appropriate for his own use or exchange for other realities of the same type. Now, to return to our two examples: the production model does not correspond either to the concept of a continuous autopoietic process as expressed in Chinese thought, nor to the priority that, in Amazonia, is granted to reciprocal transformation over fabrication ex nihilo. For this reason, anthropologists are perhaps unwise when they succumb to the convenient temptation to use the familiar language of production to interpret the very diverse phenomena by means of which a reality, whether or not of a material nature, comes to be instituted. To speak of the “production” of a person, of social links, of a subject or the difference between the sexes outside the Western context in which, for several millennia, this notion has encompassed an altogether singular relationship, is at best, in most cases, an abuse of language that leads to false parallels. * Protection, too, implies the non-reversible domination of the protector over the one who benefits from that protection. But although it is never reciprocal, the relationship may certainly be reversed in the course of time. The care that parents devote to their children right up to the dawning of adulthood will perhaps be repaid by their children when they grow old. It also sometimes happens that a protector is himself protected by someone more powerful, in particular in relations of patronage that sometimes take the form of a hierarchical chain of dyadic links of clientship. And, finally, frequently protection is mutually profitable in that it guarantees the protector not only the gratification brought by real or supposed gratitude of the person protected, but also the possibility of enjoying help from the latter and also whatever advantages stem from the situation in which he is placed. But even where there is a reciprocal interest, the relationship remains inegalitarian, for it is always founded on the fact that the offer of assistance and security by which it is manifested stems from the initiative of the party who is in a position to make that offer. A child who is a minor is no more able to refuse the protection of its parents than a citizen is able to refuse that of the State or than pandas are in a position to refuse the protection offered by their ecologist defenders. In relations with non-humans, protection becomes a dominant schema when a group of plants and animals is perceived both as dependent on the humans for its reproduction, nurturing and survival and also as being so closely linked to them that it becomes an accepted and authentic component of the collective. The most complete model of this is probably the extensive kind of herding that pastoral societies practise in Eurasia and Africa. Of course, some of the herded animals are consumed by the humans, either directly or indirectly, but it is seldom this utilitarian function that is foremost in the herdsmen’s idea of their relations with the animals that they tend on a daily basis. They commit themselves above all to take charge of the animals, to help them and watch over them and to offer them care in every domain of life, since the control that wild animals possess over their destiny is here passed over to humans. The latter must therefore see that the animals are fed, if only by choosing the best pastures and water-holes for them. They also have to ensure that the animals reproduce, providing a collective of descendants in the most favourable conditions; and they do this by selecting the reproducers, organizing fertilization and aiding the new-born. Furthermore, they must defend the herd against predators and care for any diseased animals. Although the term “production” is sometimes used to designate this way of making it possible for the animals to live, it hardly seems suitable, since the direct action exerted upon the animals is of an entirely different order from the work of a craftsman or worker fashioning an artefact out of inorganic material. Whatever the degree of standardization achieved by selection, each animal remains different, with a character of its own and its own whims and preferences. So the idea of protection is the one better able to suggest the mixture of constant attention, individualized control and well-meaning forms of constraint that define the relationship between the herdsman and his animals. In fact, in some cases, such as Nilotic societies, those duties take on the appearance of a total subjugation of humans to the mission of satisfying their animal partners. As Evans-Pritchard wrote, “The cow is a parasite on the Nuer, whose lives are spent ensuring its welfare” (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 36). East Africa is also where the famous “cattle complex” of nomadic herdsmen has been best described. What this expression implies is a super-valuation of the herd, the effect of which is to make all utilitarian aims seem to disappear, producing a situation in which this sole source of wealth comes to play a mediating role in social relations generally: humans are named after the beasts that they control; the possession of those beasts provides both the means of exchange and the principles upon which social aggregation and transmission are based. As Evans-Pritchard, again, observes in connection with the Nuer, “They tend to define all social processes and relationships in terms of cattle” (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 19). Godfrey Lienhardt asserts the same of the Dinka, adding that these neighbours of the Nuer “conceive their own lives and the lives of cattle on the same model” (Lienhardt 1961: 16). Such interdependence between the domesticated animals and the human society cannot be reduced to the classic interpretation of fetishism, which regards relations with non-humans as the basis of inter-human relations. Here, the interdependence indicates that the animals are indeed full members of the collective, and so are not just a socialized segment of nature serving as a metaphor or idiom for relations between humans that are external to it. Lienhardt furthermore emphasizes that the Dinka do not anthropomorphize their animals but, on the contrary, seek at every level to imitate the characteristics and behaviour of their cattle, which is why these constitute the best possible substitutes for humans. In other words, the relational schema here seems to be twofold: the humans’ protective attitude toward the livestock is combined with relations of a different nature between the humans themselves; and these, paradoxically, are copied from those that structure the world of the cattle. The organization of the herd, the competition between bulls and the relations between the male and female animals serve as models for thinking about political and spatial organization, about the bellicose nature of men and about the relations between the sexes. This is why, despite the exorbitant role played by cattle-raising among the herders of East Africa, protection does not play the role of a general principle of action that structures all the interactions between humans and non-humans, however fully the latter are integrated within the collective. To find clearer illustrations of what Haudricourt calls “the pastoral treatment” of humans, we need to turn to the ancient Mediterranean civilizations: the Roman world, for example, where under the imperious but protective “crook” of the paterfamilias, a little cohort of dependent beings would develop. Within the order and relative safety of the living conditions guaranteed by their master’s authority, women, children, slaves and flocks all found the means to contribute to the common prosperity, by fulfilling their respective roles. Virgil, better than anyone, sketched in the ideal picture of this agricultural Arcadia, in which a diligent labourer, through wise management of his dependents, “provides sustenance for his country and his little grandson and . . . for his herds of kine and faithful bullocks” (Georgics, Book II: 514-515). Two of the four books that make up the Georgics are devoted to care for the animals, the measures to take in order to protect them against danger, the services that they render and the benefits that they provide. Thanks to their virtues and their sense of duty, the fat oxen, the powerful bulls, the mettlesome chargers and the industrious bees all behave like responsible citizens under the enlightened supervision of their owner, just as he himself flourishes on his land in Campania under the aegis of Augustus, the defender of the power and prosperity of the State. Under Virgil’s pen, submission is sweet, and even slavery is almost tolerable, given that all that is required is a little obedience and a lot of hard work in return for the security that one’s master offers! The mutual benefits that protection is believed to procure are often part of a long chain of dependence that link several ontological levels by a series of duplications of asymmetrical relations. Just as humans take care of the animals and plants from which they derive their subsistence, they may themselves be protected by another group of non-humans: the deities, who derive from their patronage the most substantial of advantages, namely their own raison d’être. These deities, who are in some cases hypostases of a plant or an animal particularly important to the local economy, are thus seen as founding ancestors and guarantors of the humans’ well-being. At the same time, they are regarded as the condition (or even the direct creators) of the effective domination over the non-humans that the humans use and protect. This is clearly illustrated by the example of the Exirit-Bulagat, a group of Buryat herders in Cisbaikalia (Hamayon 1990, Ch. XII). For these people, herding, although adopted only relatively recently, has become their dominant activity and the motor of their social and ceremonial life; so much so, indeed, that they claim to have been engendered by a heavenly bovine, Buxa nojon, or Lord Bull, the tribe’s principal deity upon which minor ancestral figures depend. Several times each year, mares are sacrificed to the Lord Bull and to the ancestors to ensure good luck and wealth and to persuade them to protect the herds and ensure their growth. The victims are sacrificed to the deity in order that it will then fill their meat with grace and so too the humans when they consume it. Furthermore, every herdsman has in his herd a “consecrated” bull that must never be maltreated or mounted or sold or castrated. This is the embodied emissary of the Lord Bull and of his inexhaustible virility and it guarantees and promotes the fecundity of the domesticated animals. The care that the humans lavish upon this bull represents, as it were, a service that they render to their bull-ancestor to thank it for its fertilizing power, while the souls of the sacrificed mares that are offered up to this deity, as a substitute for human souls, constitute a propitiatory gift motivated by the hope that the deity will concede its benefits to the humans and its protection to their herds. By distinguishing between these oblations—on the one hand a restitution of life through care for the sacred animal and, on the other, a restitution of souls through the death of the mares—the humans avoid having to repay the bull the debt that they have incurred toward its hypostasis. In this way, protection can become the all-encompassing value of a system of interactions that combines two asymmetrical relationships: a relation of predation in which one takes the lives of non-human dependents without allowing them any direct recompense, and a gift-giving relation in which one offers protected non-humans to non-human protectors so as to encourage the latter to perpetuate the domination that they allow the humans to exercise over the former (For a fuller analysis of the case of the Exirit-Bulagat, see Ch. XV). * As I understand it, transmission is above all what allows the dead, through filiation, to gain a hold over the living. We may owe many things to those who have preceded us: material goods and land received as bequests, prerogatives that are inherited—responsibilities, hereditary statuses and functions, and symbolic attributes such as a name or the possession of certain kinds of knowledge; and also physical, mental or behavioural characteristics reputed to be inherited. The extent of this material and immaterial patrimony through which we are indebted to previous generations varies enormously from one civilization and social situation to another, but it largely depends not only on the quantity of transmitted items, but also and above all on the importance ascribed to the very phenomenon of transmission, understood as an accepted dependence upon more or less distant ancestors. In every collective, things pass down from one generation to another in accordance with precise and recognized norms. However, it is only in certain circumstances that this ceding process acquires the form of a veritable debt owed by the living to the dead, the former considering themselves to be debtors of the latter with regard to more or less everything that conditions their existence. This includes the order and values according to which they live, the means of subsistence placed at their disposition, the differential advantages that they may enjoy and even their very persons, in as much as a person is formed by principles, substances and in some cases a destiny that stems from one’s direct parents and those who, in the past, engendered them. In order to transmit such things, real and fictitious genealogies are certainly needed, genealogies that go back quite a long way and explicit indications stipulating what each individual has the right to receive by way of the identity, privileges and obligations that are transmitted through these channels stretching down from the past. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that initial conditions are less important than the institutional consequences that the preponderance of some specific schema of relations with others may gradually have acquired. The depth of genealogies, the rules unequivocally confirming a maternal or paternal filiation, the segmentation into different descent groups that act in the manner of moral persons, and the legitimation of rights stemming from particular ancestral groups: all these are mechanisms that anthropologists for a long time failed to recognize to be by no means universal. Now however, it seems that they should be regarded as the means that certain collectives employ in order dogmatically to perpetuate the sovereignty that the dead exercise over the living through relations of transmission. The clearest expression of this relationship can be found where the dead are converted into ancestors to whom a cult is devoted. These are close ancestors, not the distant and more or less mythical figures also conventionally called “ancestors,” who are sometimes placed at the origin of clans or tribes but are nevertheless not accorded any direct influence over the destiny of those they have created. Immediate ancestors are individualized, named, often given material form on domestic or lineage altars, and nothing that concerns the living eludes their meddlesome jurisdiction. West Africa is one of the places that such ancestors favour most, as can be seen from the example of the Tallensi of Ghana. The patrilineages of the Tallensi, which are localized, set in segmented hierarchies and enjoy a relative political independence, trace their identity and solidarity back to the cult that each devotes to a group of agnatic masculine ancestors, which goes back twelve generations at the most. In his Oedipus andJob in West African religion, Fortes describes the despotic domination that the ancestors exert over the living, a domination that is analogous in its content to the absolute authority of a father over his sons. Just as a man has no economic rights, legal status or ritual autonomy as long as his father is living, similarly, the members of a lineage depend upon the ancestors for access to land, the exercise of political responsibilities and the well-being of each one of them (Fortes 1959). A son does not, in any case, succeed his father in his rights and privileges until such time as he has executed the funerary rites that turn his father into an ancestor, thereby transforming his own subordination to a living individual into an authority delegated to him by earlier generations. The power of the ancestors manifests itself at two levels. Collectively they require that the living should conform to the moral precepts and respect the values upon which their socio-political organization is founded. Every death is thus interpreted as a sanction organized by the ancestors on account of a misdeed that an individual or even his father or an agnatic relative may have committed, in many cases inadvertently. But every human being is also flanked by a specific ancestor deemed to watch over him/her provided he/she submits to its will, as this is revealed by a diviner. Hence the importance of the ancestor cults, which take the form of sacrifices, prayers, and libations. As Fortes explains, “their solicitude is gained not by demonstrations of love, but by proofs of loyalty” (Fortes 1959: 50). The prerogatives that may be enjoyed within the framework of a lineage, the possessions at one’s disposal, and the quota of happiness or misfortune allocated to each individual are all fixed by the ancestors who extend over the living a cloak of justice as impossible to question and as terrible and inaccessible to human understanding as that which the suffering Job eventually credited to his God. Among the Tallensi, as in other West African civilizations, the cult addressed to the ancestors is thus not so much a way of honouring them and thanking them for all that they transmit; rather, it is an attempt to conciliate them and dispel their anger, an attempt that one can never be sure will be crowned with success. The movement between the generations is strictly one-way, for what one’s forebears have given can never be returned to them, starting, for all of us, with the lives we have received from our parents. Nor, in the present case, is it a matter of the ancestors acting with liberality, since they have no choice but to transmit, in their turn, whatever they themselves received, and by doing so they commit their descendants to a spiral of dependence from which they can never free themselves. The debt that the living inherit is thus passed on inexorably from one generation to the next, as the indebted members of the collective join the mass of the dead and so become creditors; they can now make their descendants pay, just as they had to, for the right to existence and all that makes this possible, in return for unswerving obedience to the power that they hold. For the ancestors, this constitutes a precious guarantee of survival of a sort. Like Aeneas, fleeing from Troy, every man carries his father on his back, but also his father’s father perched on his father’s back and so on, in a by no means metaphorical pyramid, the weight of which crushes the freedom of movement of the living. In these collectives, the burden, both vital and deadly of the ancestors, is perpetuated by a filiation that cannot be rejected and it is fair to apply to them what Pierre Legendre says of the subject of transmission in general: “The genealogical institution functions against the background of the subject’s distress” (Legendre 1985: 80). However, in Africa, that distress does not encompass a tragic dimension such as that which pervades the particular destiny of an individual faced by capricious gods or the hermetic purposes of the Christian god, since all concerned, including the ancestors, share the fate of dependency upon earlier generations, for better or for worse. So, despite the reference to Oedipus in the title of Fortes’ book, it is unlikely that a Tallensi would lament using the words that Sophocles puts into the mouths of the chorus surrounding Laius’ son: “Not to be born comes first by every reckoning” (Sophocles 1994: 547). Transmission is not only a relationship within the segments of a collective that links in a chain of dependency on the one hand living people destined to become ancestors and, on the other, the dead who live on and whose power and will are felt in all circumstances. It is also what distinguishes one collective, with all its elements, from another. For some collectives claim as the principal source of their contrastive identity the fact that they have their own particular groups of ancestors from whom stem both their legitimacy as an autonomous social body and also all the attributes attached to it. The latter range from the right to live in a particular space and exploit its resources—echoes of which are to be found in the notion of a fatherland—to a consciousness of sharing certain hereditary physical and moral properties. This use of transmission in the definition of collectives and their properties is altogether specific to certain regions of the world and should not be confused with the universal phenomenon of ceding certain material and immaterial assets from one generation to the next. In Indian Amazonia, for example, nowhere does one find the kind of hold exerted by the ancestors that exists in Africa and in China. In Amazonia, the very idea of an ancestor seems incongruous. The recently dead are supposed to disappear as soon as possible from the memory of the living and if anything of them does remain for a while, it is in the form of more or less malicious spirits whose company is to be shunned. Moreover, genealogies seldom go back further than the grandparents’ generation and descent groups, in the rare cases where these exist, control neither access to the means of subsistence nor the devolutions of the latter; and they may anyway concern only a fraction of the population, as is the case of the Sanumâ of Brazil. No cult is addressed to the dead and if there is anything to be inherited from them, it will be, not so much a meagre physical patrimony (their objects are usually destroyed) but, rather, symbolic attributes: names, songs, myths, the right to make certain garments, or to wear certain ornaments.6 In short, the dead are excluded from human collectives and have no power over them. This is probably a feature of the animist regime in general. So when Ingold criticizes the use of the model of a genealogical tree and the primacy of ancestrality as a means of explaining the relations of indigenous peoples to one another and to the space that they occupy, he finds most of his examples in the kind of collectives that I call animist: the Chewong of Malaysia, the Nayaka of Tamil Nadu, the Ojibwa, the Cree and the Yup’ik of North America, and so on. According to Ingold, the image of a rhizome, which he borrows from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is far more appropriate for characterizing the reticular relations that these people, who are indifferent to unilinear filiation, maintain with the various components of their environment (Ingold 2000: 140-146). Ingold’s point is fair enough provided one does not go to the other extreme and declare that all reference to transmission and ancestrality should be banned if the aim is accurately to restore the idea that “indigenous peoples” have of themselves (Ingold 2000: 140).7 For there is no reason to exclude the Tallensi or the Malgaches from the benefit of autochthony and a distinctive identity, or to believe that they have succumbed to the Western perversity of the genealogical principle and a cult of lares. By choosing to ascribe considerable importance to their dead and all that these transmit and control, some collectives have made the matrix relationship to the ancestors the main lynch-pin of the precepts and values that organize their common lives. Others have preferred to ignore that dimension of human life and instead to base their individual and collective identity on a dense and shifting network of multi-polar relations with a mass of entities both contemporary and of the same status as themselves. Just because anthropology has for a long time tended, when interpreting the practices of animist collectives, to adopt as a standard the institutions of the ancestor-worshippers, there is no reason why the contribution made by the latter type of collective to the diversity of world-states should be considered suspect or allowed to fall into oblivion. The relational modes that we have just considered fall into two groups: the first covers potentially reversible relations between substitutable terms, since the latter are situated at the same ontological level (exchange, predation and gift); the second covers one-way and irreversible relations between non-substitutable terms, since these are intrinsically hierarchical (production, protection and transmission). The former are characteristic of the symmetrical or asymmetrical movement of something of value between subjects of equal status whose identity or essence is not transformed by the actualization of the relationship that links them. Meanwhile, the latter imply a connection of a genetic, spatial or temporal order between the agents and the objects of an action by means of which the disparity of their respective positions is either created or maintained. Figure 10: The distribution of relationships depending on the type of relations that exist between the terms involved A place in this inventory could no doubt be found for many other relational modes. Most, though, can be included either as the complement to one of the relationships that we have considered here or at least to one of its dimensions. There is no protection without dependence, no liberality without gratitude, no exchange without obligation. As for domination and exploitation, the absence of which might well be criticized in view of the role that they have played in history, those can be fitted into other relationships, as one of their components: domination is inherent to protection and transmission, exploitation manifests itself in the relations of force that are established at the time of dictating the conditions of production or exchange. Moreover, unlike the relations that we have picked out, only rarely are exploitation and domination seen as what they are by those whom they concern. More often, they affect the appearance of a relationship involving an exchange of services that to some extent masks their fundamental inequality: payment in exchange for work, protection against forced labour, prosperity in return for subservience. But that is really beside the point. For, I repeat, my intention is not to examine all the relations that occur between existing beings and that are given an institutional form. Rather, it is simply to mark out a few major schemas of action that structure the lives of collectives, in order to examine how compatible or incompatible they may be with the modes of identification picked out earlier. So this typology makes no claim other than to group together a few of the elementary structures that make up the great variability of ways of intervening in the world; and that variability is so rich that it would not be possible to propose any more than a rough syntactical sketch of them. Although relational schemas are based on specific cognitive mechanisms, such as schematic induction, analogical transposition from one domain to another, or the influence of affects upon memorization, they are not categorical imperatives written into the architecture of the human mind. Rather, they should be considered as objectivised properties of all collective life. They are properties that are embodied in mental, affective and sensory-motor dispositions by means of which behaviour patterns stabilize in distinctive forms of interaction. Giving something or oneself to another, taking from another, receiving from another, exchanging with another, but also appropriating another, protecting him, producing him or placing oneself in his dependence are all actions inherent to the phylogenetic evolution of social primates. They are actions that all humans perform both within the family unit and also in wider contexts. They provide a register of combinations upon which all collectives draw, selecting (we do not really know why) one field of relations rather than another, in order to orientate their public behaviour. But none of these practical schemas, on its own, dictates the ethos of a collective. Rather, each schema constitutes an indeterminate ethical landscape, a style of mores that one learns to cherish and by which one differentiates oneself from one’s neighbours: a style of mores that colours one’s daily attachments to beings and things, with underlying nuances. However, this does not rule out other types of relations to others, ones that individual idiosyncrasy, the unpredictability of feelings, and the arbitrariness of conventions all make it possible to express more discretely in less stereotyped situations. References Aristotle. 1926. Nicomachean ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Bird-David, Nurit. 1990. “The giving environment: Another perspective on the economic system of hunter-gatherers.” Current Anthropology, 31: 189–196. ———. 1992. “Beyond the hunting and gathering mode of subsistence: culture-sensitive observations on the Nayaka and other modern hunter-gatherers.” Man (N. S.) 27: 19–44. Descola, Philippe (1986) 1994. In the society of nature: A native ecology in Amazonia. Translated by Nora Scott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990. “Cosmologies du chasseur amazonien.” In Pour Jean Malaurie: 102 témoignages en hommage à quarante ans d’études arctiques, edited by Sylvie Devers, 59–64. Paris: Plon. ———. 1992. “Societies of nature and the nature of society.” In Conceptualizing society, edited by Adam Kuper, 107–126. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1993. “Les affinités sélectives: alliance, guerre et prédation dans l’ensemble jivaro.” L’Homme 126–128: 171–190. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1940. The Nuer: A description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fausto, Carlos. 2001. Inimigos fiéis. Historia, guerra, xamanismo na Amazônia. Säo Paolo: Editora da Universidade de Säo Paolo. Fortes, Meyer. 1959. Oedipus and Job in West African religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jullien, François. 1989. Procès ou création. Une introduction à la pensée des lettrés chinois. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Godelier, Maurice (1996) 1999. The enigma of the gift. Translated by Nora Scott. Cambridge: Polity. Gregory, Chris A. 1982. Gifts and commodities. London: Academic Press. Hamayon, Roberte. 1990. La Chasse à l’âme. Esquisse d’une théorie du chamanisme sibérien. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. London and New York: Routledge. Legendre, Pierre. 1985. L’Inestimable objet de la transmission. Etude sur le principe généalogique en Occident (Leçon IV). Paris: Fayard. Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1961. Divinity and experience: The religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Overing, Joanna and Alan Passes, eds. 2000. The anthropology of love and anger: The aesthetics of conviviality in Native Amazonia. London and New York: Routledge. Marx, Karl. (1897) 2010. A contribution to the critique of political economy. Translated by N. J. Stone. Charleston, South Carolina: Forgotten Books. Mauss, Marcel. 1950. Sociologie et anthropologie. Précédé d’une Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss par Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: P.U.F. Plato. 1929. Timaeus. Translated by R. G. Bury. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1968. Tribesmen. Englewood Clifs: Prentice-Hall. Seeger, Anthony, Roberto Da Matta and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 1979. “A construçào da pessoa nas sociedades indigenas brasileira.” Boletim do Museu nacional 32: 2–19. Seneca. 1935. De beneficiis. Translated by John W. Basore. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Service, Elman. 1966. The hunters. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Sophocles. 1994. Oedipus at Colonus. Translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Surrallés, Alexandre. 2003. Au coeur du sens. Perception, affectivité, action chez les Candoshi. Paris: Editions du C.N.R.S. Fondation de la M.S.H. Taylor, Anne Christine. 1993. “Les bons ennemis et les mauvais parents. Le traitement de l’alliance dans les rituels de chasse aux têtes des Shuar (Jivaro) de l’Equateur.” In Les Complexités de l’alliance, edited by Elisabeth Copet-Rougier and Françoise Héritier-Augé, 73–105. Paris: Editions des Archives contemporaines. ———. 1996. “The soul’s body and its states: An Amazonian perspective on the nature of being human.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (2): 201–215. Testart, Alain. 1997. “Les trois modes de transfert.” Gradhiva 21: 39–49. Velthem, Lucia van. 2000. “Fazer, fazeres e o mais belo feito.” In Os Indios, Nós, edited by J. P. de Brito, 174–180. Museu Nacional de Etnologia Velthem, Lucia van. 2001. “The woven universe: Carib basketry.” In Unknown Amazon: Culture in nature in ancient Brazil, edited by Colin McEwan, Cristina Barreto and Eduardo Neves, 198–213. London: The British Museum Press. Vidal, Denis. 1991. “Les trois Grâces ou l’allégorie du Don: Contribution à l’histoire d’une idée en anthropologie.” Gradhiva 9: 30–48. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1993. “Alguns aspectos da afinidade no dravidianato Amazônico.” In Amazônia: etnologia e historia indigena, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 149–210. Säo Paolo: NHII-Universidade de Säo Paolo. Philippe Descola holds the chair of anthropology at the Collège de France where he heads the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie sociale and is also a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Besides publishing over a hundred articles and book chapters, he is the author of, among others, In the Society of Nature (Cambridge, 1994), The Spears of Twilight (New York, 1996), Par-delà nature et culture (Paris, 2005), La Fabrique des images (Paris, 2010), Diversité des natures, diversité des cultures (Paris, 2010), and L’écologie des autres. L’anthropologie et la question de la nature (Paris, 2011). He is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science. ___________________ 1. See Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, V.5.6: “But in the interchange of services Justice, in the form of Reciprocity, is the bond that maintains the association” (Aristotle 1926: 281). Seneca, De beneficiis I.IV: “What we need is a discussion of benefits and the rules for a practice that constitutes the chief bond of human society” (Seneca 1935: 19). 2. On this point, see, Année sociologique, republished in Mauss 1950: 145-279. 3. Maurice Godelier addresses another criticism to Mauss (and to Lévi-Strauss). He claims that they did not draw the consequences from the fact that a thing given is not alienated by reason of having been given, since the giver continues to be present in that thing and through it exercises pressure on the receiver, not to give it back but, himself, to give it away. According to Godelier, such an enigma only becomes comprehensible if the things that one gives are defined by those that one does not give, chief among the latter being sacred objects that represent collective identities and their temporal continuity; it is because such objects exist that exchange is possible: “The formula for social behaviour is thus . . . to keep in order [to be able] to give and to give in order [to be able] to keep” (Godelier 1999 [1996]: 36, modified). 4. See, for example, Overing & Passes (2000), in particular the Preface and the Introduction. 5. As Chris Gregory saw clearly in his study of the circulation of goods in Melanesia, see for example (Gregory 1982: 31-32). 6. Although published over twenty years ago, the critique of the application of the African model of transmission to the Amerindian context proposed by Seeger, Da Matta & Viveiros de Castro (1979) remains totally up to date. 7. “I believe that a relational model, with the rhizome rather than the tree as its core image, better conveys the sense that so-called indigenous people have of themselves and of their place in the world” (Ingold 2000: 140).

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Marcel Mauss and the new anthropology This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Valerio Valeri. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.1.027 Translation Marcel Mauss and the new anthropology Valerio VALERI Translated from the Italian by Alice Elliot Editor’s Abstract: “One cannot merely refer to Mauss; with him, one must debate.” In this essay, Valerio Valeri takes on precisely this task of critical dialogue with Mauss’ work. Valeri characterizes Mauss as having inaugurated a “new anthropology” that breaks decisively with its predecessors. It does so by engaging seriously with the full diversity of human categories and self-understandings, rather than extending European concepts of humanity as a supposed universal standard against which all others are measured. Valeri tracks a unity of method and theory across Mauss’ essays on magic, the gift, the person, the body, and death, a unity revolving particularly around the problem of relations between collective and individual psychology. Valeri’s article, written in 1966 and informed in part by writings of Lévi-Strauss, is a still-timely synthetic explication of the graceful longevity of Mauss’ oeuvre. It also reads as a charter of Valeri’s own transition to the vocation of anthropology, from advanced study in philosophy. In the humanistic key of Mauss, Valeri advocates an anthropology adequate to the reality that “ ‘other’ civilizations are other men that are living here and now on this earth, with us: they are not ‘primitive societies,’ they do not belong to our past, but to our present, and to the common future of humanity that is on the road of rediscovering itself in all its parts.” Keywords: Marcel Mauss, gift, magic, sacrifice, the body, death, the person, humanism, psychology, sociology, anthropology Everything that has been is eternal: the sea will cast it up again Friedrich Nietzsche “Above all it is essential to draw up the largest possible catalogue of categories; it is essential to start with all those which it is possible to know man has used. It will be clear that there have been and still are dead or pale or obscure moons in the firmament of reason” (Mauss 1979: 32). With this phrase, Marcel Mauss captures the entire meaning and program of anthropology. The phrase has sustained, for more than half a century, his extraordinary and prophetic oeuvre, which becomes increasingly timely as its deepest intention materializes in new discoveries, in the evolution of the science he contributed to establish. So, paradoxically, despite aging, Mauss becomes increasingly “new,” and one is obliged to take a stance, as we are barely at the beginning of the road he has mapped out. One cannot merely refer to Mauss: with him, one must debate. The originality of the themes he addresses and the brilliance with which he sketches a solution sets in motion his readers, pushing them forward, beyond the page, so that they cannot but sense him as being both dated and contemporary at the same time, as it is he who pushes beyond himself. To the page corresponds the man, to his humanism a moral figure, a mental toolkit able to reckon with the whole of humanity. “Mauss knows everything,” his students used to say. But his wasn't a self-satisfied knowledge, forgetful of how things are always vaster than what they seem. He knew only too well that one cannot build a universe within oneself, but only between oneself and others. And that we need to advance as much as possible into the latter kind of universe. Indeed, few have created such an array of tools as Mauss did for relating to mankind. His knowledge of sociology, ethnology, psychology, psychopathology (he was a student of Ribot, and among the first to acknowledge the contribution of psychoanalysis to the explanation of ethnological facts), linguistics, history, and philosophy, his prodigious memory, his extraordinary intellectual curiosity and his ability to arouse that of others, made of him an exceptional scholar and teacher. His students, all of them excellent, bear witness to this: Marcel Griaule, B. Maupoil, Michel Leiris, Denise Paulme, Roger Bastide, Jacques Soustelle, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Henri Lehmann, Alfred Metraux, and Georges Devereux. The merits of Mauss, however, were more than this. He had a profound knowledge of all aspects of the Classical, Germanic, and Celtic worlds, and was above all a remarkable Indologist. For many years, in fact, he was Professor of the History of Indian Religions and, as Louis Dumont (1964: 90) recalls, he never ceased, even in his later lectures, to attach great importance to the Indian world and the Orient in general. His interests, however, increasingly moved towards ethnology, and he became Director of the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris in 1925, together with Lévy-Bruhl and Paul Rivet. Mauss was thus a man for humanity as a whole, a man, that is, who would not settle for living and thinking within the limits of Western culture. It is for this reason, as Lévi-Strauss has highlighted, that his opus has such an “anticipatory” character, with his theories forerunning those of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead and, more generally, the American “culture and personality” school. He also anticipates Cannon in the study of the relationship between the physiological and the social. His rigorous method and his patient empirical research influenced English anthropology: not so long ago Evans-Pritchard (1954: 7) wrote: We are far from the rigorous discipline which men like Mauss had in mind, a discipline which supposes the specialist study of a lifetime and which, while setting limits to aims and problems, necessitates scholarship which embraces not only a vast range of information about primitive peoples but also the study of the history of religions, of sacred texts, and of exegesis and theology. In a sense then, because of the extreme breadth of his conceptions, Mauss is still “ahead” of modern anthropology. Such knowledge, such (thoroughly scientific) care for the tools of compre-hension and interpretation, denote a profoundly new mental approach, a humanism which is not self-indulgent, and that refuses to speak of man without knowing him in his most diverse, and contradictory, manifestations—those that reveal him. A humanism that does not settle for a certain cultural tradition, whose history is chewed over again and again to the point of making it unusable, but which, rather, is well aware that venturing out in space is possibly more important than venturing out in time, as time always and only means our time, the time we feel as completed and solid, behind us. In this sense, it is by reverting once again to the teachings of Mauss that Lévi-Strauss is able to write the manifesto for the new anthropology: a science that strives to make the Kantian project of the study of the laws of human thought, of that which makes man man—symbolic activity—scientific. But, the ethnologist, unlike the philosopher, does not feel obliged to take the conditions in which his own thought operates, or the science peculiar to his society and his period, as a fundamental subject of reflection in order to extend these local findings into a form of understanding, the universality of which can never be more than hypothetical and potential. Although concerned with the same problems, he adopts an opposite approach in two respects. Instead of assuming a universal form of human understanding, he prefers to study empirically collective forms of understanding, whose properties have been solidified, as it were, and are revealed to him in countless concrete representational systems (Lévi-Strauss 1986: 10–11). The ethnologist thus chooses the most divergent symbolic systems “in the hope that the methodological rules he will have to evolve in order to translate these systems in terms of his own system and vice versa, will reveal a pattern of basic and universal laws” (ibid.: 11). This approach, whereby all men are equal in the common problem of the essence of man, to which everyone makes a contribution; this humanism, of which ethnology—insofar as it is our code for gathering together these scattered contributions in a single reference system—is its main organ, exposes all the distance between the new and the old anthropology. When confronted with the savage world, Frazer spoke of a “tragic chronicle of human error and folly, of fruitless endeavours, wasted time, and blighted hopes” (1936: vi), while in his Notebooks, Lévy-Bruhl confessed how myths “no longer have any effect on us… strange narratives, not to say absurd and incompre-hensible… it costs us an effort to take an interest in them.”1 Behind these judgments there stood a concept of man identifiable with the concept produced by the West, or rather, with the man of the industrial revolution. The West’s arrogance, the mask of its imperialism, is in fact a recent phenomenon. Until Rousseau, and later still, the savage world, the world of the “others,” was still a term of reference for thinking of man; indeed, in the savage world, humanity’s common essence revealed itself in its most simple guise, thus allowing empirical analysis. It is perhaps not by chance that Rousseau’s “new science” is closely associated with ethnology: “when one wants to study men, one must look around oneself; but to study man, one must extend the range of one’s vision. One must first observe the differences in order to discover the properties” (1966: 30– 31). Humboldt (1920: 21) too was convinced that an objective knowledge of man required an analysis of the entirety of man’s subjectivities: “the subjectivity of humanity as a whole becomes however in itself something objective.” Barely sixty years later, Baker, one of the very first ethnographers—whose accounts were central to the development of Lubbock’s theories—declared, however, that “human nature viewed in its crude state as pictured amongst African savages is quite on a level with that of the brute, and not to be compared with the noble character of the dog” (Baker 1866: 227). Hegel said, “the transition from monologue to dialogue is the birth of man.” With the rejection of “dialogue” so typical of classic anthropology, the exorcism of the specter of the savage, man was dead. He was dead, at least, as a man who poses himself as a problem. One sets oneself as a problem only by considering all men, and thus all the living manifestations of man. All men interest us, as they are all actualizations of what we can be. With the Industrial Revolution, however, the “other” men are not men anymore; they are just objects, nature. Their scientific objectification corresponds to their economic objectification: a purely naturalistic anthropology emerges. But the negation of the savage’s humanity corresponded to the negation, within western civilization itself, of many of man’s “provinces,” and man was conceived as pure Homo Oeconomicus, as pure producer.2 As Roger Bastide (1964) has noted, the concept of praxis emerging from Marxism is still actually ethnocentric, as it limits itself to the praxis of the western man. Marxism, being concerned solely with the problem of alienation, disengages itself from many of man’s components, “from dream, from sensibility and affection” (ibid.: 445); faced with these phenomena, Marx narrows down the concept of praxis of his youth and adopts a “reductionist” approach. European culture ends up by reacting irrationally to this mutilation of man; the savage world, which has conserved intact a lost reality, is once again reduced to the status of “thing,” distanced, mythicized. Savage thought is, for Freud and Jung, a revelation of the unconscious, for Piaget—following in Freud’s footsteps—it is narcissistic regression, for Lévy-Bruhl it is “mystic participation” and “paralogism,” and for Frobenius, Jensen, and Volhard it is “paideuma,” the original intuition of the world, religious emotion. It is in this context that Mauss works, with a clear humanistic conscience. His approach is closer to that of the Renaissance than to Descartes. For Descartes, it is sufficient to know oneself in order to know the whole of man. Rationalism shuts itself off from all of humanity’s experience, while the Renaissance, right from the start, related itself to configurations of civilization that were “other” in order to know and complete itself. The Classical world, the Hebraic world and the freshly discovered New Worlds weren't just myths: they were manifestations of a common humanity, and had to be investigated in order to solve one’s own problems. The Renaissance lives in a tension toward the other, the different to oneself; man who seeks completeness feels incomplete in the absence of all other existing men. Thus Montaigne (1743: 20), convinced as he is that “every man carries the entire form of human condition,” anticipates the approach of Mauss and modern anthropology. Montaigne searches for a direct contact with those men that we call barbarians solely because “everyone gives the title of barbarity to everything that is not in use in his own country” (228), queries at length a man “that lived ten or twelve years in the New World, discovered in these latter days” (224), “a plain ignorant fellow, and therefore more likely to tell the truth” (227), and collects, as a true ethnologist, savages’ songs, of which he declares: “now I have conversed enough with poetry to judge thus much: that not only there is nothing barbarous in this invention, but, moreover, that it is perfectly Anacreontic. To which [it may be added that] their language is soft, of a pleasing accent, and something bordering upon the Greek terminations” (228). He also defends cannibals, accusing Europeans of being far more barbaric than them, who only eat the bodies of the dead. He engages in a long dialogue with a savage arrived in France, interrogating him on common human feelings: honor, courage, pride, and recognizes him as a man. Mauss, who has contributed, perhaps more than any other, to the launching of the new anthropology and, above all, given it its meaning (wherein scientificity becomes the attainment of a better humanity and man’s reclamation of everything that is human), is closer to the humanism of the Renaissance, the deepest meaning of which we ourselves have lost. Despite the limitations of its time, his oeuvre still at least preserves, intact and fresh, this reference to man in his totality. This approach is perfectly reflected on the methodological plane: the concept of total social fact, his most interesting contribution, is the angle from which the whole of his work needs to be read and discussed. The total social fact has a tridimensional character: 1) sociological, 2) historical, 3) physio-psychological. It is able, in certain instances, to set in motion society and its institutions as a totality. These “total” facts exist at the social level, but can only be perceived in concrete data, in individuals: The tangible fact is Rome or Athens, or the average Frenchman or the Melanesian of some island, and not prayer or law as such. Whereas formerly sociologists were obliged to analyse and abstract rather too much, they should now force themselves to reconstitute the whole. This is the way to reach incontestable facts. They will also find a way of satisfying psychologists who have a pronounced viewpoint, and particularly psycho-pathologists, since there is no doubt that the object of their study is concrete. They all observe, or at least ought to, minds as wholes and not minds divided into faculties. (Mauss 1969: 78) The tridimensional character of the total social fact on the one hand, and the problem of the relationship between society and the individual on the other (with its corollary problem of the relationship between collective and individual psychology), form the conceptual core of Mauss’ project, which is developed in different dimensions through his essays. It is thus necessary, and more helpful, to trace the development of the theoretical endeavor of Mauss in relation to the concrete analyses to which it is linked. Only this way—remaining loyal to his method—can we attempt to explain what a “total fact” is, and what its explicative value may be. Compared with his more mature work, the essay “Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie”—first in the Sociologie et anthropologie collection, now translated in Italian with the title Teoria generale della magia e altri saggi,3 written in collaboration with Henri Hubert and published in 1902–3 in Année sociologique—is, in a way, part of prehistory. It is however one of Mauss’ most beautiful and organic essays, and has something of a revolutionary character, with an approach radically contrasting to that of British anthropology, and in particular Frazer. The point of departure for Mauss lies in French sociology’s critique of British sociology, which was to be summarized by Lévy-Bruhl (1985: 23) as follows: collective representations are social phenomena, like the institutions for which they account; and if there is any one point which contemporary sociology has thoroughly established, it is that social phenomena have their own laws, and laws which the analysis of the individual qua individual could never reveal. Consequently, any attempt to “explain” collective representations solely by the functioning of mental operations observed in the individual (the association of ideas, the naïve application of the theory of causality, and so on), is foredoomed to failure. As we know, this critique dates back to Durkheim’s article Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives (1898). Mauss, who was Durkheim’s nephew and also his collaborator in Le suicide (1897) and “De quelques formes primitives de classification” (1901–2),4 always remained faithful to this approach, although integrating it with the advances that had been made in psychology and sociology. This is why the essay on magic has a clearly sociological tone right from the outset: “magic should be used to refer to those things which society as a whole considers magical, and not those qualified as such by a single segment of society only” (Mauss 1972: 18). Magic cannot thus be explained, as Frazer did, as a deformation of individual psychological laws, and nor can it be affirmed that “its two great principles [homeopathy and contagion] turn out to be merely two different misapplications of the association of ideas” (Frazer 1980: 12). What is fundamental, in the determination of magical representations, is their sociological character. What requires investigation are thus magic’s agents, acts, and representations. Mauss also criticizes some of Frazer’s other postulations. Sympathetic principles are characteristic not only of magic, but also of religion. And, more generally, magic and religion cannot be clearly distinguished on the basis that the rites of magic are constraining and those of religion persuasive. Rather, religion and magic should be postulated as two opposite poles with a whole range of often difficult to distinguish phenomena appearing between them. Magic is the pole of sorcery, religion the pole of sacrifice. From a sociological perspective (and thus, for Mauss, from a “total” perspective), magic is anti-religion: “a magical rite is any rite which does not play a part in organised cults—it is private, secret, mysterious and approaches the limit of a prohibited rite” (Mauss 1972: 24).5 Magic is thus defined on the basis of the conditions in which its rites are produced and the role they play in social life. Mauss thus analyzes with extreme care the sociological elements he has identified in magic and the psychological consequences derived from them that can explain it. Firstly, the most important thing to notice is the particular relationship between magician (or shaman) and social group. This topic, which mobilizes and raises the question of the complex relations between the physiological, psychological, and sociological dimensions, will never cease to interest Mauss who, in 1909, again in collaboration with Hubert, was to write an essay on “L'origine des pouvoirs magiques dans les sociétés australiennes,” and in 1926 a comment—published in Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique—on the physical effects that the community’s ideas about death have on the single individual. The issue, however, remains open to this day and, despite de Martino’s studies and the essays by Cannon and Lévi-Strauss (later collected in Anthropologie structurale), the problem has yet to be solved. We still know far too little about the complex relations between the physiological and the psychological, the individual and the group, to be able to provide a satisfactory explanation of those phenomena that are exploited by magic and yet exist, under different guises, also in our own society. In this sense, Mauss was one of the first to highlight the abnormal nature of the magician and the shaman, in an attempt to match them more closely to our psychopath. Exceptionally excitable or abnormal individuals constitute a social class that has magical properties “as a consequence of society’s attitude towards them and their kind” (Mauss 1972: 28). From this angle, the issue implies a number of problems, and raises the question of the relationships between ethnology and psychology. Firstly, if we consider society as a system of information, that is a system of symbols, what relationship does the psychopath’s symbolism have with that of the group? Taking the issue even further, are psychopathological phenomena exclusively individual? Can the language used to speak of non-collective phenomena be used by the anthropologist for the explanation of collective facts? As Lévi-Strauss noted in his introduction to Mauss, Ruth Benedict was the first to discover how the phenomena dealt with by ethnologists and psychologists are expressible in psychopathological terms. But precisely because she did not have a clear knowledge of the problems we have just outlined here, she was not able to explain this paradox. In truth, the issue could only be solved if we knew something more about the nature of the symbolic function. This too is a field that still lies ahead for anthropology. We can nevertheless agree with Lévi-Strauss when he states that psychological phenomena must be subordinate to sociological ones: it was thus imprudent of Benedict to use psychiatric terminology to characterize social phenomena; if anything, the relationship should be the opposite way, between psychiatry and sociology. “It is natural for society to express itself symbolically in its customs and its institutions; normal modes of individual behaviour are, on the contrary, never symbolic in themselves: they are elements out of which a symbolic system, which can only be collective, builds itself. It is only abnormal modes of behaviour which, because desocialised and in some way left to their own devices, realise the illusion of an autonomous symbolism on the level of the individual” (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 12). On the other hand, the domain of the pathological is never confused with that of the individual, as disorders are classified in categories, and each society has its favorite categories of disorders: the actual psychopathological phenomena themselves are determined by society. Here, a double set of problems arises, which Mauss, with the limited progress of his time in the psychological and social sciences (he still hadn't met Freud when he wrote A general theory of magic), could only glimpse from afar. The first problem pertains to the relationship that exists between our psychopath and the sorcerer. Do they or do they not belong to the same order of phenomena? To address this first problem, we will use the approach Lévi-Strauss adopts in his introduction to the essays of Mauss. Firstly, as regards phenomena of shamanism, psychiatrists have ruled out that these can be considered identical to our psychopathological states, as this would be too simplistic. Furthermore, when not in a possessed state, sorcerers are normal. The contradiction can be solved in two different ways: Either “trance” behaviors have no connection with our psycho-pathological behaviours Or, they are of the same kind, but in this case “it is their connection with psychopathological states that we need to consider as contingent and as resulting from a condition peculiar to the society in which we live” (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 15) The latter solution leads to a further alternative: Either the alleged mental illnesses must be considered as the effect of sociological factors on the behavior of individuals “whose history and personal constitution have partially dissociated them from the group” (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 16) Or, a truly pathological state is indeed present in these patients, but one of physiological origin, which simply creates fertile ground for certain symbolic behaviors “for which a sociological interpretation would still be the only appropriate thing” (ibid.). Let us now turn to the second problem: what relationships exist between society and the phenomena it classifies as pathological? The problem is of interest for two reasons: on the one hand, in fact, it is only by approaching it in this way that we can hope to achieve an understanding of ecstatic, shamanistic, and magic phenomena. On the other, it addresses the actual meaning of the presence of psychopaths in our society, and also the possibility of curing them. It is clear then that these considerations re-connect to points (a) and (b): they do not claim to answer them (only an aprioristic mentality could hope for this in the absence of empirical research), but only to delineate a possible direction for research. We note first of all two things: 1) from the studies of Mauss (particularly the 1909 ones) it emerges that the shaman or the magician, despite being “normal” when not in a possessed state, is subject to a whole series of taboos and prescriptions which maintain him in a state of psychological tension, and separate him from the group, intentionally relegating him to a situation of abnormality. Again: people considered “abnormal” (because unexplainable or socially unclassifiable), such as women during menstruation, children (a world in themselves), psychopaths, foreigners, etc., are particularly fertile ground for magical phenomena, under the psychological pressure of the group. 2) Each society categorizes mental disorders in variable classes. Each society, that is, seems to provoke—one could almost say create the possibility for—only certain disorders. It thus seems that society, while on the one hand taking cognizance of abnormality, on the other generates it, almost as if it needed it and therefore “chooses” only certain kinds of abnormality. Mauss had already affirmed that “it is public opinion which makes the magician and creates the power he wields” (Mauss 1972: 40). What, then, is the meaning of pathology and its cure? Is pathology definable unequivocally, or only in relation to a specific society? We already know, from Malinowski’s studies in the Trobriands, that the latter alternative is more plausible. Malinowski (1949) has shown that one of the pathological models present in our society (the Oedipus complex) is absent in Trobriand society, whereas another is present (the matrilineal complex). If, on the basis of these experimental grounds, we can make a generalization, it could perhaps be argued, hypothetically, that in every society there are: models of normality models of pathology strictly complementary and dependent on the constant asymmetry between social structure (which tends to be synchronic) and individual demands (which tend to be diachronic). An attempt to explain this reciprocal functionality, where society specializes in two groups, one immensely more vast, the other smaller (although maybe, as Lévi-Strauss has suggested, in a relationship with one another that remains, for each society, stable), can be based on documentary material provided by Lévi-Strauss in Chapter IX of Anthropologie structurale, and by Nadel (1946). A hypothesis on the relationship between the two groups can be derived from these essays. Society responds to the individual’s demands with certain behavioral models that correspond to certain specific possibilities for fitting into the social organization. But, because of the asymmetry mentioned above, a number of demands remain unsatisfiable in terms of “normal” models unless there is a profound restructuring of the social organization itself. Society, however, needs to frame this residue socially. This presents it simultaneously with a problem of organization and a psychological problem that triggers a classification mechanism. Society classifies its centrifugal tendencies, in the sense that it makes possible only certain so-called “pathological” behaviors in order to demonstrate their eccentric and peripheral position in relation to its social organization and depict them negatively. This classification, on the other hand, is strictly complementary to the psychological problem that the pathological elements themselves pose to the group, and to the “abnormal” tendencies that are repressed in “normal” individuals. Probably, a satisfactory explanation for this contradictory yet functional relationship can be attained only by ordering all the social system’s elements within a single informational model. Only then perhaps can we understand exactly the instinctive mechanism which, on the one hand, has to deal with the problem of socially framing centrifugal forces that it cannot satisfy, and, on the other, producing these forces according to certain models, in order to placate a potential dissatisfaction (and thus a potential centrifugal force) in its normal elements. A society, in fact, is a system that has to reckon with individuals, who are never entirely reducible to the terms of the model it maps out. If what we are saying is true—that society is unable to include within normal behavioral models certain “demands,” and thus certain characteristics, of the individual, and can only offer pathological models of stabilization and “normalcy”—then the complementary relationship between normal and pathological could be expressed as follows. On the one hand, society gives a “peripheral” status to anything not falling within its “central” code, while on the other it makes use of its peripheral elements to vent, through specific “rituals,” the potentially pathological and centrifugal traits of normal individuals, deriving from the incomplete overlap between social models of behavior and individual “demands.” The shaman thus is used to discharge all the group’s anguish and aggression, to objectify and project elsewhere the aggression, the psychic material removed from the group, by means of the scene he acts out. In this sense, as Lévi-Strauss has brought to light, the shaman has a function that can be compared to that of our psychoanalyst. What the group also asks of the shaman (or of the psychopath in general) is a unilateral exacerbation of his psychic energies, of his abilities, in a direction that remains extraneous to the group. This explains why the shaman or the magician has tangible “abilities”—and possibilities—for emotional and intellectual experiences that the group uses to rebalance itself. In this sense, the magician’s tricks and prestidigitation are functional behaviors, as they satisfy the group’s needs. An experimental confirmation of this hypothesis can be found in Nadel’s study, where he ascertains that societies with shamans—unlike those without shamans— have not recorded an increase in mental illness because of the influence of their contact with our civilization, which is generally a traumatizing event for any group of “primitives.” One could even ask if society needs a class of “abnormals.” Because it is through “abnormality” that experiences extraneous to the “normal” person are possible, experiences that he needs for reassurance, for overcoming what de Martino so effectively termed a “crisis of presence,” by actually exceeding his “normal” condition, which, in movements of anguish, is felt to be profoundly unsatisfactory. This would explain the compensatory and calming role played by abnormality, and the “exceptional” behavior of certain individuals with regard to the “normality” of the group. A number of equivalents to this relationship can be found in our society: the dictator, the actor, the singer—don't they all produce phenomena extremely close to those observed in magic or shamanic rituals? Notorious criminals like Jack the Ripper are needed by our calm bourgeoisie for venting its sadistic and aggressive instincts. The mentally ill themselves have an important function. Although in a marginal position, with regard to the system, they are integrated in it. As Lévi-Strauss (1987: 18) observes: “the group seeks and even requires of those individuals that they figuratively represent certain forms of compromise which are not realizable on the collective plain; that they simulate imaginary transitions, embody incompatible syntheses.”6 The magician, says Mauss (1972: 96), “is a kind of official, vested by society with authority, and it is incumbent upon the society to believe in him.” Mauss’ value, regarding the question we have tried to clarify, is that he was the first to shed light on the terms of the problem. His essay is a turning point because it addresses the relationship between psychological and social phenomena and the relationship between collective and individual behavior. The clarification of the problem, however, has no corresponding satisfactory solution, which, after all, Mauss still didn't have the tools to provide. The qualitative jump to be made was from the portrayals of magical phenomena in some societies to the level where an explanation can be found for these portrayals that unifies them. Mauss wasn't able to make this step. But, here too, he made an important breakthrough by removing magic from the domain of the arbitrary. Magic is the manifestation of the classifying and ordering faculty of human thought. Going back to the themes of the well-known essay De quelques formes primitives de classification ([1902] 1963), Mauss argues that sympathetic relations group things and their properties by similarity and opposition: “in this way, the system of sympathetic and antipathetic magic can be reduced to one of classifying collective representations. Things affect each other only because they belong to the same class or are opposed in the same genus” (Mauss 1972: 78). “Magic becomes possible only because we are dealing with classified species. Species and classifications are themselves collective phenomena. And it is this which reveals both their arbitrary character and the reason why they are limited to such a small number of selected objects” (78–79). But what mental operation lies at the heart of magic? Mauss realizes that it is not possible to explain it from an intellectualist perspective, as British anthropology had done. “From the point of view of an individual’s intellectualist psychology” (181), magic would simply be an absurdity: “let us see whether a non-intellectualist psychology of man as a community may not admit and explain the existence of this idea” (ibid.). Mauss thus wants to avoid the danger of interpreting categories that are alien to us with our own. But does the method he chooses allow him to achieve the goal he had set himself? The procedure with which Mauss obtains the “single principle” of magic is a good example of his “method of residues,” which Lévi-Strauss sets against Durkheim’s method of concomitant variation.7 Mauss explains his method as follows: “the various explanations which can be brought forward as motives for beliefs in magical acts leave a residue, which we must now try to describe…. It will be here that we shall find the real basis of these beliefs” (Mauss 1972: 106). In truth, this method of residues is simply masking a process of induction: as such, it does not question our interpretive categories, as was postulated, and ends up explaining the problem on the basis of them. The single principle of magical facts cannot be obtained with the normal inductive process we use for our own cultural facts. And this is because the categories of the European observer of European social facts belong to the same order as the objects being studied, while the same cannot be said of the anthropologist, who constantly has to exercise “anthropological doubt”: This “anthropological doubt” does not only consist of knowing that one knows nothing, but of resolutely exposing that which one thought one knew, and indeed one’s very ignorance, to the insults and contradictions which are directed at one’s most cherished ideas and habits by those who can contradict them to the highest degree. Contrary to appearances, I think it is by its more strictly philosophic method that ethnology is distinguished from sociology. (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 120–21) The purely sociological induction procedure, in fact, applies categories that are commensurable to the social facts, because sociologists are subjects that belong to the social and cultural world they measure. In the induction procedure for cultural facts that are radically different to those the observer (the subject of the research) belongs to, a kind of mental revolution is necessary in order to create some elements of communication between my own subject and the subjects that have produced the fact I am studying. What are necessary are intermediary categories that allow the transition from our cultural and classificatory system to theirs. It is this typically philosophical operation of subjecting the actual categories of our research—the very ways in which we ourselves think—to criticism and analysis, that is vital to the anthropologist. The final result cannot—we think—be the reaching of the very “essence” of the phenomenon studied, but the setting of the conditions for communicating with it. In anthropology, it is a relationship between different subjects that is established, rather than a relationship between subject and object. In this sense, the result is characteristically philosophical; it is communication, dialogue, knowledge of a neutral ground where an encounter is possible, and thus the only possible form of comprehension. Mauss, therefore, has not developed all the implied consequences of the revolutionary concept of the total social fact. As Lévi-Strauss (1987: 30–31) notes in his Introduction, “an appropriate understanding of a social fact requires that it be grasped totally, that is, from outside, like a thing; but like a thing which comprises within itself the subjective understanding (conscious or unconscious) that we would have of it, if, being inexorably human, we were living the fact as indigenous people instead of observing it as ethnographers.” Internal learning needs thus to be transposed in terms of external learning. Accomplishing this task is possible because the social sciences reject any clear-cut distinction between the subjective and the objective: [T]he subject itself—once the object-subject distinction is posited—can then be split and duplicated in the same way, and so on without end, without ever being reduced to nothing. Sociological observation, seemingly sentenced by the insurmountable antinomy that we isolated in the last paragraph, extricates itself by dint of the subject’s capacity for indefinite self-objectification, that is to say (without ever quite abolishing itself as subject) for projecting outside itself ever-diminishing fractions of itself. (ibid.: 31–32) The importance of anthropology in its new humanism derives from the fact that “it offers this unlimited process of objectification of the subject, which is so difficult for the individual to effect; and offers it in a concrete, experimental form” (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 32). Different societies become the subject’s different objects: in no case, though, can the subject forget that these objects proceed from him and that analysis integrates them into subjectivity. The qualitative jump Mauss was not able to accomplish was to reach the level of the unconscious, where the subjective and objective meet. The laws of unconscious activity reside in fact beyond subjective learning, but determine the modalities of this learning. Mauss actually attributes a lot of importance to the subconscious. But does he draw all the consequences from the statement quoted above, that magic phenomena should be studied like linguistic phenomena? Mauss is not alone in his awareness of the necessity to reform ethnology by bringing it closer to the methods used in linguistics (the first of the human sciences to make itself more scientific). Troubetzkoy, for example, according to his autobiographical notes, was already convinced just a few years later that “ethnology, history of religion, culture history, etc. could pass from the ‘alchemic’ stages of development to a higher stage only if, with regards to method, they would follow the example of linguistics” (Trubetzkoy 1971: 311). But adopting such a method implies studying cultural facts at the level where they become similar to linguistic facts, and thus at the level of the subconscious rules of speech. Just as one speaks unconsciously following grammatical and syntactic rules, so one thinks and performs certain acts following categories that one is unaware of. Ethnological research requires us to move beyond the conscious interpretation an individual or group gives to the phenomena we are studying. It is precisely this that Mauss did not do. The notion of magic that he applies (like that of the gift, later) is taken from a Melanesian interpretation of magic’s potential. Mauss (1972: 108) says the idea is that found in Melanesia under the name of mana. Nowhere else is it so clearly evident…. Mana is not simply a force, a being, it is also an action, a quality, a state. In other terms the word is a noun, an adjective and a verb…. On the whole, the word covers a host of ideas which we would designate by phrases such as a sorcerer’s power, the magical quality of an object, a magical object, to be magical, to possess magical powers, to be under a spell, to act magically. This, thanks to the method of residues, is where the analysis arrives at. In actual fact, in identifying the notion of mana, Mauss was only able to discover the semantic value it has for the savage. Thus he always remains in the realm of the savage’s own description of magic—an ambiguous description, because the essence of magic escapes him, as it does us. The issue is not to know what the savage designates with the word mana, but the nature of those ambiguous phenomena that he designates with the ambiguous word mana. An analysis of the concept of mana, therefore, can only be an analysis of the degree of the savage’s understanding of these phenomena, and not an analysis of what is being designated with such a term. Lévi-Strauss (1987: 53) suggests that mana might be “a function of a certain way that the mind situates itself in the presence of things,” which must therefore make an appearance “whenever that mental situation is given.” Mana is one of those indeterminate terms like truc, coso, whose function is to fill in the gap between signifier and signified. Words such as orenda and mana are used to designate phenomena that are not strictly magic, but that become magical to our eyes precisely by virtue of the extremely generic sign attributed to them. It is precisely this semantic vagueness, this indistinctness, that makes us call these designations magical designations. With this word, the savage designates facts whose precise meaning escapes him, but which he feels immersed in and which he uses (e.g., parapsychological and psychosomatic phenomena, which science, however, isolates). Magic’s substantial ambiguity, seen from the perspective of the indigenous interpretation and subsumed under “objective interpretation” of the phenomenon is, on the other hand, repeatedly acknowledged by Mauss. Regarding this, however, two questions can be asked: Whether the term “magic” subsumes phenomena that are only provisionally declarable as similar to one another, and, if so, whether the analysis of magic actually refers to that level that Mauss doesn't reach but which is the only one common to all these phenomena; Whether this level resides precisely in that confusion of images that he recognizes as being typical of magic, but that he does not examine in depth. What we need to consider, however, is whether this “confusion” has its own laws, and what its actual meaning may be. If we do no more than talk of “confusion,” we remain as outsiders and merely state our ignorance, with the properties we attribute to the object being the opposite to the thought we are judging it by. Magic, on the other hand, like art and myth, is a specific symbolic process, and its scientific investigation is still at a very early stage. There is probably a relationship between the three forms, residing precisely in the trait we have termed “confusion of images”: in these symbolic processes, there is no empirical corroboration and language is used in an “overabundance of meaning” that it has with regard to the object, and nothing is done to put it in a rigorous relationship with the object that has been preliminarily established by a method of investigation. The condition for the construction of an order, in myth as in art as in magic, resides in the use of laws that allow for the possibility of constructing an entirely linguistic order. This condition is to be found first and foremost in the very imprecision of language, in the possibility of making it work without a direct confrontation with experience. Is it not the case that what is present in magic under the guise of technique is present in all dimensions of this symbolic level? Language is posed as a creator in relation to the world, not as something that requires verification. Language is always true, as long as it acquires a form. In magic and myth this form is more strictly traditional, as it is very much in art. The fact that in art language is more flexible, does not make art less “traditional,” in the sense that the words, the semantic “pieces” through which it operates, are never artificial, conventionally postulated by the artist: the Saussurean “arbitrariness of the sign” does not exist in art. These semantic “pieces” can be used poetically only because they already contain “resonances” of deep meaning in the language they inhabit: “love” and “heart,” as Umberto Saba said, is in fact the most difficult of rhymes,8 to which all poets dedicate themselves. Do these words take on poetic value because they are in a context that awakens their immanent poetic quality? Why are poetry, myth, magic, at different levels and each in its own field, dominated in such impressive ways by the same themes? But even if we wanted to limit ourselves to the observation that words have resonances of meaning and a semantic value (which the artist finds already formed, and upon which he works), circumscribed to a certain historical domain, does the reasoning not remain nevertheless valid? In any case, Mauss’s theory of mana is an interesting chapter in the history of epistemology: it exhibits the importance of words in knowledge. When cultural phenomena, so to speak, are of the same order of the language used to discuss them, the weight of the words is much less perceptible. But in the case of anthropology, the issue becomes macroscopic. The hermeneutic use of certain categories such as mana, orenda, potlatch, or totem, has played nasty tricks on anthropologists. Words like these indicate a relation between objects and subjects. For example, the word totem, in a given society, corresponds to the human-animal or human-plant relation. But while the objects in the relation remain the same in different societies, the word, and hence the relation, changes. The word, then, is the real distinctive and discriminating criterion, as it is inserted in a system of relations that gives it its meaning, a system it indirectly reflects. The human-animal relation can have very different meanings, and cannot be reduced to the interpretation of any one society. For the ethnologist looking from the outside, the criterion will be that of reconnecting all the relations he knows objectively to a certain subjective interpretation of that relationship, an interpretation which, in truth, should be in the class of the objects only, as it is only the interpretation of one studied group. Only subjective interpretations can be compared to each other: otherwise, phenomena belonging to different classes would be compared as if they belonged to the same class. The ethnologist’s task can thus only be that of comparing all the subjective perspectives, all the languages with which certain facts are discussed: to know them, it will not be possible to reduce them to one of those being observed as an object, from the outside. The essential task will be to compare these to our subjectivity, to our language, digging deeply until the points of contact between us and them are found. The misunderstanding we encountered in the notion of mana crops up again in “Essai sur le don” (Année Sociologique 1923–24). And despite this, the essay has remained beautiful, exciting. It is in this essay that, for the first time, the concept of total social fact is expressed with extreme clarity, and its hermeneutic value is proven. Another thing that makes the essay interesting is its novel approach, the discoveries it discloses (particularly about the primitive economy) have been made possible by direct ethnographic research. Mauss, in fact, draws mainly on Malinowski’s ground-breaking studies in the Trobriand, thus demonstrating the importance of research “in the field.” The phenomenon that Mauss analyzes is this: in many societies: “contracts are fulfilled and exchanges are made by means of gifts. In theory such gifts are voluntary but in fact they are given and repaid under obligation” (Mauss 1969: 1). Within this class of phenomena, one single aspect is isolated: “prestations which are in theory voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous, but are in fact obligatory and interested” (ibid.). The problem to be solved will thus be: “in primitive or archaic types of society what is the principle whereby the gift received has to be repaid?” (ibid.). To solve this problem, Mauss accepts the use of a restricted comparative method, applied within limited areas, in order not to create confusion. Basically, he applies the method of Durkheim, who had criticized the false “exhaustiveness” of the British comparative method, working instead on “crucial facts” in order to arrive, through successive extensions, at a characterization of the social fact under investigation. The structure of the The gift is thus determined by its method: firstly, the problem is posed; secondly, it is solved by taking as objects of investigation facts that are particularly significant in two delimited, but far apart, geographical areas (some areas of the Pacific and Australia; North America); thirdly, through successive extensions, the survival of gift-based exchange systems in ancient Roman Law, classic Indian law, Germanic law, Celtic law, and Chinese law are studied. Finally, Mauss draws some “conclusions of a moral nature”: if sociology is society becoming conscious of itself, it can do no other than end with conclusions such as these, as it says something about the orientation of human actions. The essay’s structure gives a glimpse into the extraordinary richness of its content. With exceptional erudition and agility, Mauss presents numerous facts in an entirely new light, and unmasks the myth of primitives’ inability to conceptualize economic value (as sustained by Karl Bücher). He also reaches a fundamental conclusion: barter is not—as Bücher believed— the primitive form of exchange and, on the other hand, sale on credit is not found in evolved societies only; indeed, it derives—necessarily—from the gift. “Barter arose from the system of gifts given and received on credit, simplified by drawing together the moments of time which had previously been distinct. Likewise purchase and sale—both direct sale and credit sale—and the loan, derive from the same source” (Mauss 1969: 35) What is the explanation Mauss feels he can provide for the legal bond of the gift as a primitive form of exchange? Once again, he postulates an indigenous interpretation as an “objective” interpretation. The interpretation is provided by the Maori: the hau. The hau is the spirit of the thing given as a gift, which has such a constraining power that it forces its restitution through another object. “In Maori custom this bond created by things is in fact a bond between persons, since the thing itself is in fact a person or pertains to a person. Hence it follows that to give something is to give a part of oneself” (10). Exchange has the role of maintaining unity between groups and implementing an actual division of labor. The best example of this is the Trobriand Kula studied “in the field” by Malinowski. This seems to be the culminating point of a whole system of prestations and counter-prestations: “the kula is the gathering point of many other institutions” (25). Gift and exchange are the same thing in this system. In the context of social solidarity, in fact, an entirely free gift does not exist: exchange always requires reciprocity. This specific kind of relationship guarantees foreign, interinsular trade, but also sheds light on the very essence of archaic society: what we have is one of those total social facts that activate the societal structure at all its levels. “The obligation is expressed in myth and imagery, symbolically and collectively; it takes the form of interest in the objects exchanged; the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them; the communion and alliance they establish are well-nigh indissoluble. The lasting influence of the objects exchanged is a direct expression of the manner in which sub-groups within segmentary societies of an archaic type are constantly embroiled within and feel themselves in debt to each other” (Mauss 1969: 31). “The circulation of goods follows that of men, women and children, of festival ritual, ceremonies and dances, jokes and injuries. Basically they are the same. If things are given and returned it is precisely because one gives and returns ‘respects’ and ‘courtesies’. But, in addition, in giving them, a man gives himself, and he does so because he owes himself—himself and his possessions—to others” (44–45). The conclusion Mauss draws from the archaic system of exchange goes as follows: “the spirit of gift-exchange is characteristic of societies which have passed the phase of ‘total prestation’ (between clan and clan, family and family) but have not yet reached the stage of pure individual contract, the money market, sale proper, fixed price, and weighed and coined money” (45). But the study of the gift leads to some considerations concerning the economic structure of our own society. Against the supposedly “natural economy” (which, in reality, as Mauss has demonstrated, is merely a myth unproven by history), against the rigidity and cruelty of our law, against the marked distinction between real and personal rights, Mauss argues that we need to return to a “group morality”: “we should return to the old and elemental” (67), to a system of total prestations. “A wise precept has run right through human evolution, and we would be as well to adopt it as a principle of action. We should come out of ourselves and regard the duty of giving as a liberty, for in it there is no risk” (69). These “moral reflections” are not as utopian as they may seem. Today, even revolutionary theories—as Fortini9 recently pointed out—seem to tend exclusively towards a “rationalization” of bourgeois society. The archaic concept of exchange as gift, though, is so much part of our axiological structure that, it seems to us, even the concept of alienation is permeated by it. The rejection of alienation signifies indeed an attempt to return to a model that sees exchange as a gift, and not as a transfer of goods. Alienation only ends when human labor is not “thing-ified,”10 reduced to pure instrument, but is considered an integral part of the man who is doing it. Giving one’s work means—exactly as for the savage—giving something of one’s self, giving a hau that evokes human solidarity, that demands a return that is equal to the gift; a kind of exchange, thus, that does not allow pure “thingification.” In a certain sense, the exchange model exists prior to all the rest, and is the categorial form in which man thinks of himself socially. Wherever society comes into being, the category also comes into being: it is not possible to reconstruct its origin from a combination of scattered elements. Therefore, even Mauss’ attempt to explain the gift through his particular interpretation of a given group ends up betraying the a priori and irreducible nature of exchange. As Lévi-Strauss (1987: 58–59) observes: “exchange is not a complex edifice built on the obligations of giving, receiving and returning, with the help of some emotional-mystical cement. It is a synthesis immediately given to, and given by, symbolic thought, which, in exchange as in any other forms of communication, surmounts the contradiction inherent in it; that is the contradiction of perceiving things as elements of dialogue, in respect of self and others simultaneously, and destined by nature to pass from the one to the other. The fact that those things may be the one’s or the other’s represents a situation which is derivative from the initial relational aspect.” But the conclusions of the “Essai sur le don” suggest a further consideration, particularly important at the methodological level. The total social fact cannot be understood, for Mauss, other than in individual elements, in tangible social blocks. The total social fact, that is, exists socially, but it is through concrete experience that one is guaranteed to perceive it. “In society there are not merely ideas and rules, but also men and groups and their behaviors” (Mauss 1969: 78). Here, it seems we can go further than Mauss and argue that what is consolidated in social relationships needs also to be rediscovered in the individual who lives in them, being one of their poles. Taking it even further, we could perhaps add that the relationships forming the total social fact have to be related, through systematized rules of transformation, to the individual investigating them. As Wiener and Lévi-Strauss have highlighted with regard to the social sciences, the observer is part and parcel of the object studied. “To call the social fact total is not merely to signify that everything observed is part of the observation, but also, and above all, that in a science in which the observer is of the same nature of his object of study, the observer himself is part of his observation” (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 29). The observer, in fact, is not only in a theoretical relationship with his object: he is in a concrete relationship with it, as the conditions of observation make him part of the object itself. Recently, Gurvitch, once again, set this interpretation against the fact that “Mauss was a partisan of collective conscience and experience”.11 Gurvitch’s observation questions Mauss’ interpretation of “collective representations.” In actual fact, the assertion that it is necessary to find the total social fact at the individual, or concrete, level does not necessarily imply a complete abandonment of the differentiation between collective and individual psychology. Examining an individual as a specimen in whom the total social fact concretizes itself doesn't mean examining individual, and not social, psychological phenomena. Certainly, though, Lévi-Strauss has provided an interpretation of Mauss which is, at the same time, one step ahead, this being justified however by the fact that the strict Durkheimian separation between collective and individual representations is not shared by Mauss without “nuances.” The essay “Real and practical relationships between psychology and sociology” (published for the first time in the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, 1924),12 part three of the collection Sociologie et anthropologie, clearly demonstrates this. Here, Mauss states that certain discoveries in psychology (for example the notions of “mental vigor,” “psychosis,” “symbol,” “instinct”) are essential for understanding social facts, and that this convergence between psychology and sociology is made possible by the common “totalizing” approach to their object. Addressing psychologists, Mauss makes this important observation: all these advances “derive from your consideration not of such and such a mental function, but rather of the mentality of the individual as a whole. You will see that those of the facts that we can submit to your reflections in exchange belong to the same order” (Mauss 1979: 18). The marked separation between psychology and sociology is here overcome: the two sciences collaborate in their common objective of considering man in his totality. In this sense, it seems to us that Mauss is indeed on the track of Lévi-Strauss, despite Gurvitch’s claim to the contrary. The essay’s conclusions confirm this. Although Mauss starts by stating that psychology is the study of individual consciousness, while sociology is the combined study of collective and community consciousness (and not, as McDougall thought, an extension of psychology), he ends by asserting that: “whether we study special facts or general facts, it is always the complete man that we are primarily dealing with, as I have already said. For example, rhythms and symbols bring into play not just the aesthetic or imaginative faculties of man but his whole body and his whole soul simultaneously. In society itself, when we study a special fact it is with the total psychophysiological complex that we are dealing” (ibid.: 27). The sociologist has to ask of the psychologist for “a theory of the relations between the various compartments of the mentality and those between these compartments and the organism” (ibid.). The assertion that “sociology is only a part of biology just like psychology” (ibid.: 5) will thus be justified. The current separation between sociology and psychology is destined to fade increasingly until the day comes when Mauss’ hoped-for theory is formulated. Anthropology, intended as that body of research that tendentially and knowingly approaches this unification, “belongs to the human sciences, as its name adequately proclaims; but while it resigns itself to making its purgatory beside the social sciences, it surely does not despair of awakening among the natural sciences at the hour of the last judgment” (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 118). This tendency of Mauss to consider man’s social being as integrated and realized in his physical being, becomes more accentuated over the years. Evidence of this can be found in the last three essays in Sociologie et Anthropologie: “The physical effect on the individual of the idea of death suggested by the collectivity” (1926); “A category of the human mind: The notion of person, the notion of self” (1938) and especially “Techniques of the body” (1934).13 These works also clarify why a thorough study of the total social fact implies the observation of concrete individuals. If the fact needs to be reconstructed in all its dimensions, bridging the gap between social and physiological facts, then it will be necessary to see how representations and social relationships condition man’s corporeal being and how the latter, in turn, makes the former possible. But the corporeal being is an eminently concrete fact; it is the human body, which needs to be studied, and the explanatory model extracted from it can only be compared with an individual body, not with something collective consisting of a set of relationships. This body’s physiological processes, though, are inexplicable without those sign relations that connect them to others. Proof of this is given in the first essay: “Physical effect of theidea of death,” which studies information gathered in Australia and New Zealand that corroborates the existence of a direct link between the physiological-psychological and the social. Mauss analyzes the rapid death of individuals that are considered and declared as “dying subjects” by society, despite being physiologically healthy and sound. The individual “believes, for precise collective causes, that he is in a state close to death… [he] believes himself to be bewitched or at fault and dies for this reason” (Mauss 1979: 38). The actual physiological explanation for these events was not given until much later, by Cannon. Once again, Mauss anticipated more recent discoveries by posing the problem in the correct way. In these phenomena—he declares—man’s social nature immediately catches up with his biological nature. This is thus a particularly significant example of a total social fact and of how the phenomena it generates span from the pure individuality of the single body where physiological facts take place, to the collectivity that provokes them. The essay on the notion of person also covers the whole spectrum, from the social to the “bodily”: “it is clear… that there has never been a human being without the sense not only of his body, but also of his simultaneously mental and physical individuality” (61). Mauss reconstructs the evolution of this concept, from its most primitive forms to modern philosophy, explaining the relationship between mask and person, suggested immediately by the Latin term “persona.” Also from this sociological study, moral conclusions can be drawn. The evolution of the concept of the person, which up to the nineteenth century was identified with rational and cognizant activities, is now reacquiring its more vast archaic meaning. Although until not so long ago the “person” as mask, the social being, had superseded natural man, de-naturalizing him completely, many present-day phenomena make us think that a slow reaction to this tendency may be taking place. In this sense, we are rediscovering a problem that is vaster than the person itself. How are we anchored to the world? Is our person only form, categorization, discursivity, and thought that shapes the world? Or is it itself produced by the world, by “nature”—not in the sense of a set of concepts that define what is natural, but in the sense of something that is the actual condition for conceptualization, but that also escapes it? The last essay, on the techniques of the body, is something like a program for the new anthropology that Mauss dreamed of. The techniques of the body are “the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies” (97). The human body is an immensely vast and unexplored ethnological field: it is “man’s first and most natural instrument”(104). To orient research, Mauss thus proposes a classification of these “physiopsycho-sociological assemblages of series of actions” (120).14 Sadly, this field has been left largely unexplored, despite Lévi-Strauss proposing the creation of “International Archives of Body Techniques,” “providing an inventory of all the possibilities of the human body and of the methods of apprenticeship and training employed to build up each technique” (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 8). Experience teaches how useful is it for Europeans to study “savage” techniques, techniques made necessary by work conditions similar to those in which primitive man developed them. It is with this revitalization of the “total” man—“total” at the level of the individual, from his conscious being to his physical being, “total” at the level of humanity, spanning the whole arc of space and time of civilization—that the oeuvre of Mauss closes and the new anthropology begins. The ethnologist’s journey, as any other journey, ends with a return. The knowledge of a world different to ours corresponds to a better knowledge of ourselves, to the wish to be in a new relationship with the savage that is now more familiar to us, because he is part of us. As Remo Cantoni (1963: 252) writes: “the problem of our times… is to explore without preconceptions the real breadth of man, the real breadth of history.” Our very language brings us to classify the phenomena of non-western societies with the term “primitive,” evaluating them through the diachronic opposition of “before” and “after,” in parallel with those moments of development of western civilization that for us constitute the necessary order of progress. This simply exposes how much our mental categories, our so called “historic” categories (where the magic word “history” becomes the panacea of the lazy), are tainted by ethnocentrism. They are not able to admit, synchronically, simultaneously to us, historical developments and forms of civilization radically different from ours. Our language is impotent (because our history and our experience is impotent) when faced with a so-called primitive civilization. The only place it has found, in our classificatory terms, has been the myth of the past and of the primeval that the West—with a secret and perennial dissatisfaction—has dragged with it through all its history: the golden age, the paradise lost, the Garden of Eden, the state of nature. Primeval moments that always presuppose two contradictory evaluations of our civilization: liberation from a primeval state of barbarism and wilderness, or decadence from a primeval state of goodness and perfection. The only thing that Western civilization—closed in the magic bottle of its own apparent self-confidence and its firm belief in its “magnificent and progressive destiny”15—held on to in this myth of the primeval was a secret remorse, the possibility of a radical overturning of values, of total critique of the direction in which it moved. This myth was like a limit concept, from which the direction of our civilization’s progress could be observed and evaluated. And it is significant that it is precisely in these terms that Rousseau intended it. But when “primitive” peoples, those civilizations different to ours, have presented themselves to us with a direct impact, the myth of the primitive has served only to chase them back into the confusion of the primeval and indistinct state, into the “tourbillon mistique,” so that we could relate to them not as terms of comparison or as possibilities for evaluating our own values, but as extraneous, necessarily overtaken by the West’s millenarian development. Behind this attitude lies a specific metaphysics of history, a secret anguish and a fear of comparison with others. Marx and Engels also attempted to make “other” civilizations fall within the metaphysical limbo of our primitive, of our past, in the timid steps of the first day of Creation. But “other” civilizations are other men that are living here and now on this earth, with us: they are not “primitive societies,” they do not belong to our past, but to our present, and to the common future of humanity that is on the road of rediscovering itself in all its parts. References Baker, Samuel White. 1866. The Albert N'yanza: great basin of the Nile, and explorations of the Nile sources. London: Macmillan & Co. Bastide, Roger. 1964. “L'ethnologie et le nouvel humanisme.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 4: 436–51. ——— (ed.). 1965. Usi e significati del termine struttura. Milan: Bompiani. Cantoni, Remo. 1963. Il pensiero dei primitivi: Preludio a un antropologia. Milan: Il Saggiatore. Dumont, Louis. 1964. La civilisation indienne et nous: esquisse de sociologie comparée. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin. Durkheim, Émile. 1898. “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 6: 273–302. ———. 1912. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Durkheim, Émile and Marcel Mauss. 1963. Primitive classification. Translated and edited with an introduction by Rodney Needham. London: Cohen & West. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1954. The institutions of primitive society: A series of broadcast talks. Oxford: Blackwell Frazer, James George. 1936. Aftermath, a supplement to The golden bough. London: Macmillan. ———. 1980. The golden bough: A study in magic and religion. Abridged edition. London: Macmillan. Gurvitch, Georges, with Wilbert E. Moore. 1947. La sociologie au XXe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1920. Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Gesammelte Schriften: Ausgabe Der Preussischen Akademie Der Wissenschaften, IV. Berlin. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. “The scope of anthropology.” Current Anthropology 7 (2): 112–23. ———. 1977. Structural anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1986. The raw and the cooked. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1985. How natives think. Translated by Lilian A. Clare with a new introduction by C. Scott Littleton. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1949. Sex and repression in savage society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mauss, Marcel. 1947. Manuel d'ethnographie. Paris: Payot. ———. 1969. The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison with an introduction by E. E. Evans-Pritchard. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1972. A general theory of magic. Translated by Robert Brain. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mauss, Marcel. 1979. Sociology and psychology: Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Montaigne, Michel de. 1743. Montainge’s essays in three books with notes and quotations. The sixth edition corrected and amended. Translated by Charles Cotton. London: Printed for T. Basset, M. Gilliflower, and W. Hensman. Nadel, S. F. 1946. “A study of shamanism in the Nuba Mountains.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 76: 25–37. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Johan Gottfried Herder. 1966. On the origin of language. Translated with an afterward by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Trubetskoy, N. S. 1971. Principles of phonology. Translated by Christiane A. M. Baltaxe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marcel Mauss et la nouvelle anthropologie Résumé de la rédaction : « On ne peut pas simplement se référer à Mauss; avec lui, il faut débattre. » Dans cet essai, Valerio Valeri engage précisément un dialogue critique avec l’œuvre de Mauss. Valeri caractérise Mauss comme ayant inauguré une « nouvelle anthropologie » qui rompt résolument avec celle de ses prédécesseurs. Il le fait en prenant sérieusement en compte toute la diversité des catégories humaines et formes de compréhension de soi, plutôt que par extension des concepts européens de l'humanité comme norme universelle supposée contre laquelle toutes les autres seraient mesurées. Valeri révèle une unité de méthode et de théorie à travers les essais de Mauss sur la magie, le don, la personne, le corps et la mort, une unité centrée autour du problème des relations entre la psychologie individuelle et collective. L'article de Valeri, rédigé en 1966 et inspiré en partie par des écrits de Lévi-Strauss, est une explication synthétique et toujours d'actualité de la longévité de l’œuvre de Mauss. Il se lit aussi comme une charte de la transition de Valeri, qui des études de philosophie s'est ouvert à la vocation l'anthropologique. Dans la tonalité humaniste de Mauss, Valeri préconise une anthropologie adéquate à la réalité que les « “autres” civilisations sont d'autres hommes qui vivent ici et maintenant sur cette terre, avec nous : ils ne sont pas des “sociétés primitives”, ils n'appartiennent pas à notre passé mais à notre présent, et à l'avenir commun de l'humanité qui est sur la voie de se redécouvrir dans sa pluralité. » Valerio VALERI (1944–1998) was an Italian anthropologist with an expertise in the societies and cultures of Polynesia and Southeast Asia. From 1971–73, he conducted ethnographic field research among the Huaulu of Seram, Eastern Indonesia, on topics of exchange, marriage, mythology, and magic. In 1976, he completed a second PhD in anthropology at the University of Paris, based on archival research concerning pre-contact Hawaiian religion and politics. That same year, he moved to the United States and began teaching in the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago where he remained as Professor of Anthropology until his death in 1998. He is the author of Kingship and sacrifice: Ritual and society in Ancient Hawaii (University of Chicago Press, 1985), The forest of taboos: Morality, hunting and identity among the Huaulu of the Moluccas (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), and two posthumous volumes: Uno spazio fra se e se: L'antropologia come ricerca del soggetto (A space between oneself and oneself: Anthropology as a search for the subject, Donzelli, 1999, edited by Janet Hoskins and Martha Feldman) and Fragments from forests and libraries (Carolina Academic Press, 2001, edited by Janet Hoskins). ___________________ Editor’s note: This essay is a translation of Valerio Valeri’s first publication, “Marcel Mauss e la nuovo antropologia” appearing in 1966 in the Italian journal Critica Storica 2: 677–703. It was written while he was finishing his first PhD in Philosophy at the Scuola Normale, University of Pisa (1968). We are grateful to Critica Storica and Janet Hoskins for their kind permission to publish this translation. 1. In Lévi-Strauss (1966: 121). —Trans. 2. It is interesting to note that Mauss explicitly affirms in The gift: “it is only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal” (1969: 74). 3. Translated in English as A general theory of magic (1972). —Trans. 4. We have included full references for these texts here as they were not included in the original publication. Durkheim, Émile. 1897. Le suicide: Étude de sociologie. Paris: Félix Alcan. Durkheim, Émile and Marcel Mauss. 1901–02. “De quelques formes primitives de classification.” Année Sociologique 6: 1–72. —Ed. 5. This argument will be resumed by Durkheim in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912). 6. One just needs to think of the ways in which some societies—particularly in moments of crisis—have idealized illness as a privileged and eccentric state of being with respect to a system increasingly felt as profoundly unsatisfactory for individual needs. Cf., for example, some of Thomas Mann’s reflections in The magic mountain. 7. See “La sociologie française,” in La sociologie au XXe siècle, Vol. 1 (1947: 542). 8. The words love (amore) and heart (cuore) rhyme in Italian. The banal yet complex nature of the rhyme particularly struck the Italian poet Umberto Saba, as we read for example in his poem “Amai” (1946). —Trans. 9. Quaderni piacentini. Italian trimestral journal (1962–1984) on culture and politics, with Franco Fortini as one of its main collaborators. —Trans. 10. In the Italian original: cosizzato.—Trans. 11. In Bastide (1965: 125). 12. Published in English as Part I of the volume Sociology and psychology: Essays (1979). —Trans. 13. Parts II, III, and IV respectively of Sociology and psychology: Essays (1979). —Trans. 14. Cf. Mauss, Manuel d'ethnographie, 1947. 15. Valeriis here evoking Giacomo Leopardi’s bitterly ironic critique of the Enlightenment’s scientific optimism and progressivism in his poem “La ginestra.” — Trans.  

Godelier: Begetting ordinary humans This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Maurice Godelier. Begetting ordinary humans* Maurice Godelier, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales   Another look at the Inuit Let us take again the example of the Inuit to complete it and to introduce the analysis of a few other representations of what it is to “make a baby.” For the Inuit, to make a baby, the parents must have sexual intercourse. The father makes the child’s bones, its skeleton, with his sperm. With her blood, the mother makes its flesh and its skin. The child takes shape in the mother’s womb. It will resemble its father or its mother, depending on the strength of the life force of each. Its body will be nourished by the meat from the game killed by its father and eaten by its mother. At this stage of intrauterine life, the child is a foetus with no soul. The foetus is still not a human being. The child becomes human on the day of its birth when Sila, the master of the universe, introduces a bubble of air into the child’s body that will become its breath, its life principle. This bubble of air connects the child with the cosmic breath. It contains a soul, another gift from Sila, which will grow with the child’s body and be its double, a double that will leave only at the person’s death and travel to the world of the dead. This inner soul is endowed with intelligence and partakes of Sila, who is the mind of the world. A human child is born. But the newborn baby is not yet a social being. This is something it becomes when it receives one or several names from its parents in a ceremony attended by all of the relatives together with the neighbours and the parents’ friends. For the Inuit, names are not merely labels. They have a soul. They are souls themselves, since they harbour the identity and the life experience of those who have carried the same name. Unlike the inner soul that animates the body and grows with it, the child’s soul-name completely envelops it and transmits the identity of all those who form the chain of its homonyms. And since an Inuit child usually receives several names over its lifetime, it will experience itself as both one and many, in so far as it knows that it is the meeting point of the reincarnation cycles of several soul-names, which live again each time they are given, in a different form and with a different human face. Who are these soul-names and who chooses them? They are chosen by the child’s parents and are the names of relatives or close friends of the father or the mother, deceased during her pregnancy, or even before, and whom the parents want to bring back to live with them by attaching them to the body of their child. Sometimes these are close relatives or friends who, feeling the end draw near, ask the man and/or the woman to give their name to their next child. These (imaginary) representations of the process of begetting a child and the ingredients of its inner identity are what underpin the Inuit practice of raising a boy as a girl or a girl as a boy, depending on the sex of the person whose name was given at the child’s birth. Nor should it be surprising to hear an Inuit woman address her son as though he were his own prematurely deceased father. But it is noteworthy that these practices, which separate social gender and physical sex, cease when the child reaches puberty. The son goes back to being a boy and the daughter ceases to be one. This occurs precisely at the moment when each is going to have to take part in reproducing life by assuming the role designated by his or her biological sex. What are the theoretical assumptions inherent in the Inuit representation of begetting children? For the Inuit, sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is necessary to make a foetus but is not enough to make this foetus into a child. The father and the mother, as the child’s genitors, take part in producing and giving form to the foetal body through distinct and complementary contributions. Each partakes in the child by giving it matter and form, but they do not give it life. Life begins when Sila, the supernatural power, introduces a bit of his breath into the child’s body, which connects the child to the fabric and the movement of the universe into which it has just been born and where it will grow up. But this breath is also connected to a soul that will later enable the child to understand the world around it and which will survive after the person’s death. This soul is singular and sets the newborn baby apart from all other humans who have ever been born, but it is not enough to make the child a complete human being, with its place both in the cosmos and in society. The soul gives the child life and the capacity to learn from its own experience. However the child still does not have a name that will connect it to the whole chain of human beings who have carried the name since time immemorial. When the newborn child receives one or several names, in the course of a public ceremony, it brings to life in itself members of its kindred and, more broadly, members of its community who have gone before. By receiving these persons into itself, the child gives both them and its community a new future. These soul-names were not thought up by the child’s parents: they existed before the parents and will live on through the child. They are thus spiritual components of a child’s identity, which do not depend on the matter that comprises its body or on its shape. Because of these soul-names, an individual in Inuit society is never an absolute point of departure: he or she does not face life with his or her own experience alone, but with that of all of the homonyms who have gone before and who, thanks to the parents, now accompany him or her for the rest of his or her life. Lastly, it should be noted that names have a life of their own and are not attached exclusively to a paternal or a maternal side, or even to the kindred of the child’s parents, which is very different from the case in most kinship systems, especially uni- or bilineal ones. We can thus sum up the main points of this theory. For the Inuit: Sexual intercourse between a woman and a man is necessary to make a child but it is not sufficient. Other actors also play a role: gods, and deceased relatives or friends who want to live again and whose intervention is just as indispensable to completing the child and endowing it with an identity that is known and recognized in its society. By mixing his sperm and her blood, the man and the woman produce the raw material that makes up the child’s body and provides its shape. In this, the child is indeed “their” child, and therefore belongs to their “kindred.” The contribution of sperm and blood “legitimizes,” as it were, the child’s appropriation by its parents. After the birth, the parents can either keep the child and raise it or give it, for instance, to one of its father’s sisters who is childless or whose children have all died, or to its maternal grandmother so that it will take care of her and keep her company. The parents’ role is not limited to making the child’s body. They also give it one or several names and, along with the soul-names, transfer to their child the experience of the deceased who have already carried the name and to whom they wish to give new life. These names are not transmitted exclusively in the paternal or maternal line and are not necessarily those of the child’s relatives. In emphasizing the parents’ bilateral contribution to making their child and the undifferentiated transmission of its names, these representations of conception correspond to the Inuit kinship system, which is cognatic. But we also observe that these representations bring into play forces that lie well outside kinship relations, reaching into the universe of the deceased and the gods. For Sila and the other supernatural powers that control the universe—the masters of the wind, the rain and the game—do not belong to one family or band rather than another. These powers hold sway over all Inuit, and Sila places in each of their children, whoever their father and their mother may be, whatever band they may belong to, whatever camp they are about to be born into, a bit of his cosmic breath and a soul that will grow with the child and become its double. So Inuit representations of conception not only insert a child beforehand into a network of kinship relations and a kindred, they also give it a place in the overall society and in a particular cultural universe shared by all. The society and the culture that produced these beliefs, which will be self-evident for the child, will also offer it at birth a “self-image” that will ground its own experience of itself and of others. The twice-borne man of the Baruya society Let us leave the Inuit now and look at the representations other societies have developed of what a child is. We will begin with the Baruya. The Baruya kinship system, it will be recalled, is patrilineal; their marriage is based on the direct exchange of women between two lineages; and their society is characterized, at the political-religious level, by the existence of large-scale male (and female) initiations, whose explicit aim is to grow boys and legitimize their right to govern society and exercise various forms of power and domination over women and young men. The Baruya too believe that, in order to make a baby, a man and a woman must have sexual intercourse. The man’s sperm (called “penis water,” lakala alyeu) produces the child’s bones, its skeleton, whatever endures after the body’s death, but also the child’s flesh and blood, which increase as the embryo develops. The woman makes no contribution whatsoever. Her womb contains a sort of sack or bag (tandatta), which the sperm enters and where the child develops. Sometimes, if some of the woman’s blood stays in her uterus, the child will look like its mother or someone in her family. As soon as the woman ceases having periods, which tells her she is pregnant, she informs her husband, and from that day on the couple increase their sexual relations because the man’s sperm is believed to nourish the foetus the woman carries in her womb. The Baruya woman can thus scarcely be regarded as her child’s genetrix, since nothing passes from her body into that of the child, and her womb is merely a container for a body engendered and nourished by the man, who is thus both the genitor and the nurturer of the unborn child. Yet the man and the woman are not enough to make this child, for, despite the father’s repeated contributions of sperm, the foetus still does not have a nose, eyes, a mouth, or fingers and toes. In short, this being could not see or speak or breathe or walk or hunt, etc., if the Sun did not intervene in the mother’s womb to fashion the missing organs and give this now-human body his breath. The baby breathes when it is born, but it still has no soul, no spirit. It seems that, for the Baruya, the spirit-soul (kouhe) enters the child’s body and lodges in its head, near the top of the skull just under the fontanel. The nose that will be pierced during the initiations links the breath to the soul. The soul-spirit comes from an ancestor in the child’s patriline or its clan and reincarnates itself in one of his or her male or female descendants. Apparently the spirit soul takes possession of the child’s body only when its parents give the child its first name, the one it will carry until its nose is pierced and it receives its “big” name, the name carried by all initiated men and women. The other name, the little name, will become taboo, forbidden to pronounce, cast into oblivion. But before giving the child its first name, the parents wait a year or so to be certain that it will live and that the father has the time to make the child’s maternal kin, its mother’s side, a series of ritual gifts that detach the child from their lineage. During all this time the father is forbidden to even glimpse the face of his child, which the mother keeps concealed in a loosely woven net. If the child should die in the interval, it is buried without ceremony by its mother, in a remote spot (and not on land belonging to its father’s lineage). The two names given to the child—one before and the other after its initiation—are always clan names. Each clan has a pool of names proper to it. Gwataye, for instance, is a “big” (post-initiation) name that can only belong to an Andavakia man, but he could not be called “Maye,” a name reserved for the Baruya Kwarrandariar clan, which always provides the most important master of the male initiations. The Baruya carefully avoid giving the same name to two people from the same clan. The two names given to a child are thus those of one of its male or female ancestors, on the father’s side, in the direct or collateral line, belonging to the generation of its grandparents or great-grandparents. Inasmuch as a child’s soul is believed to enter its body at pretty much the same time as its parents confer its name, and inasmuch as this name is that of one of the child’s ancestors, it can be surmised that the soul which enters the child is that of the ancestor whose name it will carry from then on. But I have never had a firm confirmation of this hypothesis. When questioned, the Baruya would answer only that it was possible or that it was likely. What seems certain is that the soul that enters a child’s body is always that of a male or a female ancestor. What is not certain (for me) is that this soul is that of the ancestor whose name the child will carry. How can we describe the different stages involved in the process of conceiving a Baruya child? We will distinguish three moments in its intrauterine life: begetting, intrauterine development and finally, in the last weeks before the birth, the intervention of the Sun, to complete the child’s body. Later, after its birth, the child will receive a name and a soul. Summing up: For the Baruya, sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is needed to make a child, but it is not enough, for this only produces an unfinished foetus. That the union of the sexes is necessary is borne out by Baruya mythology. According to one of these myths, at the dawn of time, the man and the woman both had sexual organs and an anus, which were not pierced and could therefore not be used. one day Sun took pity on them and threw a flintstone into a fire. The stone exploded and pierced the man’s and the woman’s sexual organs and anus, and humans have been able to copulate and have children ever since.1In another version, it is Moon,2 Sun’s wife, that pierces the girls when they reach puberty and causes their first menstrual flow.3 or, it is not the Sun but the first woman who indirectly pierced the man’s penis. She stuck the wing-bone from a bat into the trunk of a banana tree at the height of a man’s penis, an the man inadvertently impaled himself. Maddened by the pain and having guessed who had put the bone there, the man grabbed a bamboo knife and slashed open the woman’s genitals. The existence of two versions, one in which the gods act on the first humans and another in which it is the first woman who takes the initiative, correspond to the deep structure of the Baruya’s view of the world and the origin of things. According to the Baruya, women were the ones who invented bows and arrows, cultivated plants and who made the flutes, etc. But they used their creativity in a way that would have reduced the universe to chaos, for instance by holding their bow backwards and killing too much game. The men were therefore obliged to intervene and, by stealing the sacred flutes, the source of life, they brought about the order that still reigns in the world and which they continue to guarantee, as it were.The man has the preponderant role in making the foetus, as we have said. His sperm makes the child’s body, its bones and its flesh, and nourishes it. The mother appears as a passive vessel. Even the milk the young mother will give her child after its birth comes from the man, since it is a transformation of his sperm. When a young man and woman get married, it is customary for the couple to refrain from making love before the walls of the house, built for them by the men of the husband’s lineage, have been blackened by the smoke from the fire burning in the stone fireplace, made by the same men. For days, and sometimes weeks, the young man merely strokes his wife’s breasts and gives her his sperm to drink. This sperm is believed to nourish the young woman and make her strong. Some of it is believed to build up in her breasts and change into milk when she becomes pregnant and later nurses her child. Thereafter, each time she gives birth, her husband will once more give her his sperm to drink and will nourish her with the game he has killed so as to build up her strength, which has been sapped by the birth and the loss of blood that goes with it. Not only does the father play the more active of the human roles involved in making the child’s body. It is also he who connects the child with his own ancestors by giving it a name and prompting a soul, a spirit, to enter the child. This name has been carried by men and women of his clan from a time so distant that its memory has been lost. But what the man does know is that his children—sons and daughters—will be made of the same sperm and the same blood as he, and that he shares with his brothers and sisters the self-same sperm and the same blood, which came from their father. But it is only the men who are capable of transmitting this blood, since women do not have sperm. In the Baruya kinship system, the role of the father, as principal genitor of the child, nurturer of the foetus, giver of milk and of names, and transmitter of the soul, concords with a key component of this system: the fact that descent ties are traced exclusively through men, that their principle is strictly unilineal, patrilineal. This does not contradict the great importance the Baruya accord their maternal relatives. Mother’s sisters are like mothers for them, and they can always look to their maternal uncles for help, protection and indulgence. Living with the Baruya brought me to understand that all of the ingredients of kinship relations do not necessarily find expression in the body or in the representations of the body. Baruya kinship terminology is of the Iroquois type, which means that father’s brothers are all fathers for the child, and that their children are brothers and sisters. All mother’s sisters are mothers, and their children are brothers and sisters. Whereas father’s sisters’ children and mother’s brothers’ children are cross cousins. What the Baruya theory of conception tells us is that all of a man’s children share the same blood because they come from the same sperm. Therefore they cannot marry each other. And since all of this man’s brothers also share the same blood, because they too come from the same sperm, which they alone (and not their sisters) can transmit, all of the children of this man and his brothers are as brothers and sisters and cannot marry each other. The Baruya’s kinship terminology and their theory of conception thus correspond. But this does not hold for the mother’s side. On this side, too, Ego is faced with a group of people of both sexes whom he calls brothers or sisters. These are the children of his mother’s sisters. But they do not have the same blood as his mothers and her sisters, since they come from the sperm of their own fathers, who belong to distinct lineages, since the Baruya rule is that two brothers or two sisters never marry into the same lineage and that sons do not repeat their father’s marriage by taking a wife from their mother’s lineage. Combining the patrilineal descent principle and these (negative) marriage rules gives the following situation. I call brothers and sisters people on my mother’s side with whom I do not share the same sperm or the same blood and who, if they are the children of two sisters married to men from different patrilineages, do not even share the same sperm or the same blood with each other. I therefore call brothers and sisters people on my mother’s side whom I could marry—and who can marry each other. Three theoretical conclusions can be drawn from these facts: once again we have confirmation that kinship terminologies are independent of the descent principles at work in a society. Next, we see that the representations of conception are linked with the principles and forms of descent at work in a society and also act to regulate marriage, if marriage is prohibited, for example, between those who share the same sperm or the same blood, etc. Lastly, we see that the representations of conception do not say everything about the nature of the kinship relations in a society. However they do express certain aspects essential for understanding the meaning of a child’s social production and identity. We observe with the Baruya, as in Inuit society, that whatever role the man and the woman play in the making of the child, they do not suffice in themselves. Supernatural forces—Sun and Moon—intervene to do what humans cannot. And they do this for all Baruya children, whatever their sex or their clan. That is why the Baruya say they are sons and daughters of the Sun, whom they call Nouwme, “father,” in their invocations and their prayers. Therefore not all Baruya are children of the same sperm, of the same human father, but all are children of the same divine father, who fashioned them in their mother’s womb and gave them breath. But the breath is not the spirit-soul, which comes to reside in the body and leaves it momentarily at night during sleep, or definitively at the time of death. In the latter case the soul returns to the land of the dead, which is located in two places for the Baruya. Some souls go underground, where they live in villages that can be seen through a big crevasse that cuts deep into the mountain; the others go up into the stars, far from the everyday life of humans. Every human being thus has within himself something that does not die with him and which perhaps lived before him in other bodies and at other times. Where do these souls come from? The Baruya did not tell me. They only know that they come from the primal times, from the time of the first men and women, the wandjinia, the dream people. The souls were not made by men and women. Were they made? And by whom? At any rate not by Sun and Moon, for the first man and the first woman with their closed genitals were their contemporaries. Let us now look at the Buruya boys’ fate. Unlike their sisters, boys are twice born, begotten first by their father and mother, and engendered a second time by the adult men of the group, those who are married and/or initiated, who give them a second birth in secret initiations apart from the women and even in opposition to them. Around the age of nine, little boys are separated from their mother and sisters. This separation is brutal: The child is torn from his mother and loaded onto the back of a young fourth-stage initiate, usually one of his maternal kin, who runs quickly a hundred or so metres through facing lines of men, who lash the two bodies with thorny branches. The blood runs down their skin. At the end of this sprint, the child is deposited on the ground, and two or three blood-covered men threaten to shoot arrows into his legs and thighs. Sometimes they even do it. The terrified child then joins the other children, huddled against their “sponsors,” who soothes their wounds by smearing them with cooling yellow mud. For years the young initiate will not to be able to speak or to eat in front of this man, who, in the all-male world in which he will now live, acts as a surrogate mother to him. The maternal role, then, also deserts the women’s world to resurface in the world of men. The initiation cycle spans more than ten years, during which time the initiate will go through four stages. In the first stage he is still dressed partly like a boy and partly like a girl, and his buttocks are deliberately left bare so that he will not dare show himself in front of women. Then begins a long process designed to rid his body of everything that still has a female content, so as to purify him of all the pollutions that women bear in and on their bodies. Some foods are forbidden and others prescribed. He is not allowed to pronounce certain words. But above all, he discovers homosexual relations. He is forced to take the penis of the third- and fourth-stage adolescents into his mouth and to swallow their semen. And if he resists and takes too long, his neck is broken and the men then tell the mother that the child fell out of a tree pursuing an animal in the branches. But these first homosexual relations rapidly become a source of pleasure, and the new initiates seek them out. Inside the “men’s houses” couples form, bringing together for a time an older and a younger boy, the older boy having chosen the younger. A great deal of tenderness can be observed between them, as well as reserved and delicate gestures. There is room here for desire, eroticism and affection.4 First- and second-stage initiates are thus regularly nourished with the older boys’ sperm. These third-and fourth-stage initiates are young men who already fight alongside the married men but who have never had sexual relations with a woman, since they themselves are not yet married and still live in the kwalanga, the “men’s house.” Their sperm is therefore pure, free of the defilement entailed in sexual relations with women, since a flow of menstrual blood issues regularly from their vagina. So it is that from one generation of boys to the next, a flow of sperm free of all female pollution circulates and re-engenders them as even more masculine and stronger—and nourishes them. These gifts of sperm circulate in one direction only. Whereas marriage rests on the exchange of sisters between two men, an exchange which involves a wife- giver and a wife-taker, in the gifts of sperm, the takers (the young initiates) will not be able to give their sperm in turn to their givers when they reach adolescence. Givers are not takers. The takers incur a life-long debt to the older boys. It should also be said that masturbation is forbidden in Baruya culture. Your sperm does not belong to you. It belongs to others, and vice versa, the sperm of others belongs to you. But precisely who can give his sperm to a young initiate? Any unmarried young man who does not belong to the initiate’s lineage, for if he did, he would be committing a sort of homosexual incest. Furthermore, when a young man marries, because his penis has entered the mouth and vagina of a woman, he is forbidden to try to put it into the mouth of a boy who has just been separated from the women’s world. This would be committing the worst kind of violence and humiliation. Through these repeated ingestions of sperm, which transform his body into the body of a man, filled with purely male substances and forces, the boy is engendered a second time, no longer by his father, but by the group of young men who have been living for years apart from the women’s world and have already rid the boys of every trace of their mother. It is they, and not his father, who will reengender the boy and then bring him up. The father has practically nothing more to do with his upringing and disappears behind the Great Men, the great warriors, the great shamans, and especially behind the masters of the rituals, in short all the men who fulfil functions in the general interest and regularly visit the men’s house to teach the initiates the legendary history of their ancestors and the events that founded the world order, beginning with the famous theft of the flutes by the men. For, as I have said, the secret name of the flutes is associated at the same time with the vagina and with the pollywogs that became the first men and which resembled foetuses (Godelier 1986: 70, 145). It was in these flutes that the women’s reproductive powers were originally concealed. When the men stole the flutes, they separated the women from their powers and confiscated their use. The men now have these powers in their possession, but they know that the women still own them and that chaos would be unleashed anew if the men relaxed their control over the women, in other words, their dominion. That is why, generation after generation, boys must be initiated and men’s power reaffirmed. But this power is ambiguous, because it is based on the explicit denigration of women and on the secret knowledge of the existence of female powers that men can imitate and reroute but can never fully appropriate for themselves. That is why the Baruya’s most sacred objects, the kwaimatnie, come in pairs, the more powerful, the hotter of the two being the female kwaimatnie, something no woman must ever learn. During the many rituals that take the initiates from one stage to the next, the Sun is constantly invoked and present. Called upon by the master of the shamans at the beginning of the initiations, it draws close to the humans present and floods them with its light and its force. The masters of the initiations then mutter the secret name, kanaamakwe, each time they brandish their kwaimatnie in the direction of the Sun before striking the object on the chest of the initiates so as to penetrate them with the Sun’s power and light. After having pierced the noses of the new initiates, with which the Sun endowed their face when they were still a foetus in their mother’s womb, the masters of the initiations squeeze their elbows and their knees to strengthen the boys’ body. Finally they jerk both of their arms upward to make them grow faster and stronger. Now, the magic bundle they brandish at the Sun and with which they strike the initiate’s chest was a gift from the Sun himself to the ancestors of each clan, and the name kwaimatnie comes from kwala, “men” and yimatnie, which means “to make grow.” For it is without the women, but once again with the help of the Sun, that the men, as a group, re-engender their sons. Moreover the Baruya make a connection between the word yimatnie and nyimatnie, which means “foetus” or “novice.” We are therefore in presence of a sort of collective begetting, which is at the same time a cosmic event, since the Sun takes an active part, as does the surrounding forest. Indeed, one of the most secret rites that follows the piercing of the boys’ nose takes place deep in the forest, at the base of a tall, very straight tree whose trunk has been decorated with feathers and lengths of cowries similar to those worn by the men. The little boys are lined up facing the tree, which rises up into the sky, toward the Sun. Nearby stands another tree reputed for producing an abundance of thick white sap. The initiates’ sponsors gather this sap in their mouths and come back to deposit it on the boys’ lips. For the Baruya this sap is at once sperm and the milk of the tree, and by this gesture, a chain of life forces links the Sun to the tree, the tree to the young virgin men, and these to the young boys who have just been torn from their mother. During this time, these boys’ relationship with their mother and their sisters undergoes a thorough transformation. In the men’s world, they had already become foetuses, nourished this time by the sperm of young men who had not yet known a woman and had been fashioned anew by the Sun’s power, which entered their chest when the kwaimatnie struck them; now they have become older brothers for their sisters, including their older sisters. The world of men rises definitively above that of women. Genealogical ties are reshaped by power relations, the relations of domination that give initiated men authority over women, over all women, including the “Great Women,” those who have borne many living children, those who are hard workers, who cultivate big gardens and raise many pigs, and even those who are renowned shamans. The order between the sexes is a political-religious and a cosmic order. This social and cosmic order furthermore establishes an order between the sexes, a sexual order. And in building this social and cosmic order, male homosexuality is one of the means chosen by the Baruya to establish and legitimize the relations of power and force that are supposed to obtain between men and women, and between the generations. The Baruya’s homosexuality is thus what in the West would be called a “political-religious” practice, with a cosmic dimension, before being an erotic practice (which it is as well). Men are taught to be proud of having suffered in order to be initiated into secret knowledge that the women ignore, proud of having a new body, different from women’s bodies and stronger, proud of being designated to take on functions, responsibilities in the general interest of which women are incapable and from which they are excluded.5 It is this male image that is made visible to everyone - to men, to women, to the children of friendly and hostile tribes alike, with whom hostilities have been called off for the space of the ceremonies—by the tsimia, the big ceremonial house built for each initiation in a location somewhere between the villages. Each post of the tsimia stands for a new initiate. The posts are planted in the ground (all at the same time) by the initiates’ fathers at a signal from the masters of the initiations and the shamans. The fathers are lined up side-by-side, grouped by village and not by lineage, facing away from the circle they form and which outlines the place where the tsimia walls will be erected. A war cry rises from the throats of all of the men present when the fathers sink the post that represents their son. For the Baruya, these posts are “bones,” which, taken together, make the skeleton of the tsimia (which represents the “body” of the Baruya tribe, a body whose “skin” is provided by the women, who gather and transport the hundreds of bundles of thatch the men will use to make the roof). But women cannot enter the tsimia. At its centre stands a huge post that supports the edifice. It was sunk in the ground by the fourth-stage initiates. This post is the “ancestor” of the tribe and it is called “grandfather.” Before the roof is made, a dangerous animal, captured earlier, is thrown down from the top of the pole and smashes to the ground. Its body is then presented to the oldest man in the tribe, who will eat it and will then be expected to die before the next cycle of initiations. Time has come full circle, the cosmic and social order has been reproduced. At the close of these rites, which go on for days inside the tsimia, the old and new initiates appear outside and dance around the edifice for hours. The women applaud at the sight of them, proud to see their sons adorned with feathers, their body painted, their face discreetly concealed behind a quiver of arrows when they pass before them. The force that sustains this unequal social order, founded on the domination of one sex over the other, is not so much the violence -in all its forms, physical, social, psychological - that the men inflict on the women as it is the belief shared by both sexes that women are a constant source of danger, not only for men but for the social and cosmic order as a whole, and that this is due to their body, to the menstrual blood that flows from their vagina. The Baruya language has two words for blood: tawe, the blood that circulates in the bodies of people and game; and game, menstrual blood. Baruya men have an almost hysterical reaction when they talk about or when someone else talks to them about menstrual blood. And yet they know that this blood, when it flows for the first time from the body of an adolescent girl whom Moon has pierced, is the sign that she is now a woman and able to bear children. But like all of the fluids that flow from a woman’s body, this blood is a permanent threat to men’s strength, to their superiority. The menstrual blood produced by women’s bodies is the force that destroys the men’s own strength. In a sense it is the rival substance to their sperm, a kind of anti-sperm. The initiates are told that the man who stole the flutes had watched the women putting them away in a hut. When the women left, he went in, searched the hut and found the flutes hidden beneath a skirt soiled with menstrual blood. He took the flutes, played them and then put them back. When the women returned, one of them tried to play a flute, but no sound came out, and so she threw it down. The men picked up the flute and, ever since, the flutes have obeyed the men and sung for them. The Baruya’s fear of menstrual blood and vaginal fluids is so strong that, when they make love, the woman must not straddle the man, for the fluids from her vagina might run out onto his belly and sap his strength. She is also forbidden to step over the hearth where she cooks the family’s food, for fluids from her sex or impurities from her skirt might fall into the fire and mix with the food that will go into the man’s mouth. In a word, heterosexual relations are regarded as dangerous by nature, not only for men but for the reproduction of the universe and the conduct of society as well. And it is the woman who is the prime source of all these perils. Sexuality in all its forms must be brought under control if it is to aid in reproducing the social and cosmic order. And if this order is hard on women and subjects them to violence, it is in a way their own fault, due to their nature. Ultimately, inasmuch as they share these imaginary representations of men, women and life, Baruya women cannot help feeling at the same time victims of these acts of violence and responsible for their existence. Fundamentally, victims are guilty. And their only way out is to accept their fate in silence. These imaginary representations are not only mental concepts. For women the consequences are very real. Indeed there is a social, material and conceptual gulf between the two genders. Girls, because they are women and do not have sperm, do not inherit land from their ancestors. They do not have the right to own or use weapons and are thereby excluded from hunting, making war and using armed violence, which is an attribute of power. They do not have the right to produce “salt money” (but their husband or their brother gives them salt so that they can buy what they want). They do not control the fate of their daughters, even though their opinion counts heavily when their husband and his people discuss what lineage the girls will be exchanged with. Last of all, they are obviously excluded from owning and using kwaimatnie, and therefore forbidden direct access to the Sun and the gods, since it was their life-giving powers that were stolen and enclosed in the kwaimatnie that the Sun himself gave to the male ancestors of their lineage. At the end of this long analysis, which does not do justice to the richness of Baruya representations of conception, we would like to stress the fact that this theory describes two different processes. One concerns both girls and boys (until they reach the age of nine or ten). The other concerns only boys after this age and causes them to be re-engendered by the men in order to become men in their own right. The idea that sperm plays a twin role in making a child, thus making the father both the genitor and the nurturer (as well as the source of the milk the mother will give her baby when it is born), corresponds to the Baruya’s descent rule and legitimizes the fact that the children are appropriated by the father’s lineage in accordance with the patrilineal principle. The same goes for the name the father gives the baby and for the ancestor soul that re-embodies itself in the child. But the role played by the Sun in making a foetus into a human child expresses a distinct relationship between the descent and filiation principles, which are conveyed through the father and through the mother. It means that the child, whatever its sex and clan, belongs to the Baruya tribe and at the same time to the group of tribes that recognize the Sun as their common superhuman father and recognize the sperm of the human father as the primary origin of the child. The Sun here is simultaneously a cosmic power, a tribal god and (in so far as he is a god recognized by several tribes sharing the same origin) an “ethnic” god. But the primacy assigned to sperm is not based uniquely on the patrilineal descent principle that governs the kinship relations. It refers at the same time to the sperm of all of the young men who inseminate the boys without this time going through a woman’s womb. For the Baruya, sperm is a substance that is coverdetermined: It acts on behalf of kinship, but at the same time it serves another purpose: to construct and to legitimize the men’s claim, both collective and individual, to represent society and to govern it on their own. Sperm, in this case, is therefore not merely an “argument” for appropriating the children born of legitimate sexual unions and assigning them to a particular kin group. It is also the argument alleged by one part of society, the men, for dominating the rest of the society - the women and children. It legitimizes the general domination, namely political and religious, of one part of society by another. That is the object of the opposition between sperm and menstrual blood, of the positive overdetermination of one and the negative underdetermination of the other. The human body thereby finds itself at the intersection of kinship relations and political-religious relations, marked by all manner of everyday or ritual power, exercised in public and in private life. Yet another remark. In Baruya society, what we would call the political-religious domain, in other words the sphere of those practices intended to affect society as a whole, encompassing and transcending the differences created between individuals by the kin group they belong to and their distinct places of residence, this almost exclusively male-dominated domain is constituted outside and beyond kinship relations. It is organized around the project to re-engender men through men, an act that at the same time denies, supersedes and imitates that which is at the heart of kinship relations: the begetting of a child by a man and a woman. Without being the same as kinship, the political- religious domain is constructed within the domain of kinship by transposing elements of kinship into another ritual sphere and then eliminating everything these relations owe to women. The case of the Trobriand Islanders The example of the Trobrianders, who live on a chain of islands to the southwest of New Guinea, is probably the best known in all of anthropological literature. Their fame is due primarily to the nature of some of their institutions, but also to the remarkable analyses and publications of an anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, who spent several years of his life with them.6 He chose to devote his attention to three Trobriand institutions: (1) their kinship system, which is matrilineal, and the representations of the process of begetting children associated with it; (2) their political-ritual system, which—rare for Melanesia—rested on a distinction between “chiefly” lineages (at the head of hamlets, villages or districts) occupying different functions and ranks, and the rest of the population; and, finally (3) the participation of these chiefs and other important men in the Kula, the vast network of ceremonial exchanges covering hundreds of miles and involving ten or so societies (often with different languages and cultures).7 But let us turn to what interests us here, namely, the ideas the Trobriand Islanders’ had about child conception before the arrival of missionaries and other representatives of the Western world (who immediately set about combating these ideas so out of tune with scientific knowledge and the principles of Christianity). We will base our discussion on the information gathered personally by Bronislaw Malinowski and on studies by a string of brilliant researchers who, starting in the 196os, did their fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands and in other islands in the same part of the world. This work has both completed and corrected Malinowski’s analyses and conclusions on child conception as well as on the two other institutions he had worked on: chiefdoms and the Kula (cf. Damon 1990; Munn 1986; Weiner 1976). The Trobriand kinship system has a matrilineal descent rule. A married couple’s children belong to the lineage of the mother and the mother’s brother. A father and a son therefore do not belong to the same clan and do not have the same totem. All of the lineages in the island are divided into four matriclans, whose ancestors emerged from their subterranean dwelling place in the form of four brother-sister couples. All Trobrianders are descendants of these four female ancestors through the women. Residence after marriage is virilocal, though. When a woman marries, she goes to live with her husband, and their children will be raised by him and will continue to live with him, with the exception of the oldest son. At puberty, this son will go to live with his maternal uncle, who lives on the lands of his own matriline, which controls their use. This boy will be his uncle’s successor. The village headman is usually the eldest man in the matrilineage, whose ancestors are believed to have emerged from underground and been the first to occupy these lands. How is a child conceived according to the Trobrianders? Not through sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but by the encounter and mingling of a spirit-child (waiwaia) and a woman’s menstrual blood. These spirit-children are spirits of the dead (baloma) that live on Tuma, a little island off Kiriwina, and who from time to time are gripped by the desire to be reborn in the body of one of their descendants. In effect, the dead are immortal and live a pleasant existence on their island under the authority of a god, Topileta, who is their “chief.” When they grow old, they recover their youth, as was the case for humankind before emerging from their primal subterranean dwelling place. A soul who desires to come back to life in human form thus changes into a spirit- child and floats across the water to the island of Kiriwina. There it must make its way to the body of a clanswoman and enter it either through her head or through her vagina. But the spirit-child cannot find its way alone. The spirit of the woman’s mother or that of another maternal kinsman, sometimes even that of the woman’s father, transports it and introduces it into the body of the woman, who soon finds herself pregnant. When the spirit-child enters by way of the head, the woman’s blood goes to her head and as it descends carries the spirit to her uterus. The spirit-child usually enters by way of the vagina, however, and becomes a foetus when it mingles directly with the menstrual blood that fills the womb.8 All of Malinowski’s informants agreed that (1) all spirits of the dead recover their youth periodically; (2) all children are reincarnated spirits of the dead; (3) the child has no memory of the life led by its ancestor either on earth or after death in the island of Tuma; (4) the spirits that reincarnate return to the body of a woman of their clan and their subclan; (5) and lastly, the decision to be reincarnated is made by the spirits and not by humans, it belongs to the dead and not to the living. The appearance of a new human being is thus the outcome of a process that takes place entirely between the spirit world and the woman’s body. Two kinds of spirits play an active role: the spirit of a deceased ancestor and the spirit of someone living, both from the same clan and who collaborate to get a clanswoman with child. The woman is entirely passive throughout the process. No man is involved, and the woman’s husband, though he contributes to making the child, does not do so as a genitor. The woman is the sole genetrix of her child. Malinowski of course questioned the Trobrianders on many occasions about what they saw as the role of sperm; this is all the more interesting since, in the Trobriand Islands, people have sexual relations at an early age and lead an intense premarital sex life. Invariably the answer was that it is not enough to make love to make a child. It is the spirits who bring the children during the night (Malinowski 1927a: 62). Sperm and vaginal fluids come from the kidneys. Testicles are an “ornament” of the male sex. The penis and the vulva have two functions: pleasure and excretion. It should be added that for the Trobriand Islanders, a woman should not have a baby before getting married. A baby needs to have a tama, a “father.” What then, for the baby, is the man who has married the mother and has sexual relations with her? Malinowski’s answer came as a bombshell. This man, the mother’s husband, is obviously the child’s father (tama), but he is a “purely social” father. Whereas the child is of the same substance, the same blood (dala) as its mother, “between the father and the child, there is no bond of union whatever” (Ibid., 12). Malinowski stresses that the word tama “must take its definition, not from the English dictionary, but from the facts of native life described in these page” (Ibid.15-16), For the child and its clan, the father is a tama kava, an “outsider.” But this “outsider” behaves like the most affectionate of fathers. Malinowski and the observers who followed him all stress the tender care and the affection fathers lavish on their children. The man children fear is not their father but their kadagu, their mother’s brother (ibid.: 17). In fact the father tries to retain his sons by giving them land and the means to participate in exchanges, including the Kula. In short, in a society where kinship relations are governed by a matrilineal descent rule, the fact that children are not engendered by the father but by the mother alone, the fact that they do not share any substantial or spiritual link with their father but are of the same blood as their mother and her brother, and the fact that they re-embody one of their maternal ancestors, all correspond perfectly to the logic of their kinship system. Ignorance of the father’s biological role is not a sign of inferior intellectual development, mental deficiency or lack of knowledge. It is part of the beliefs that play a positive active role in organizing a society and reproducing its structures. In 1929 Malinowski writes that, In 1916 [he] was still interested in the question “Is this state of ignorance primitive, is it simply the absence of knowledge due to insufficient observation and inference or is it a secondary phenomenon, due to an obscuring of the primitive knowledge by superimposed animistic ideas? Now this problem and problems of this type have become meaningless to me.” (Malinowski 1929: xxiii). And elsewhere he warns: “in future we should have neither affirmations nor denials, in an empty wholesale verbal fashion of native ‘ignorance’ or ‘knowledge,’ but instead, full concrete descriptions of what they know, how they interpret it, and how it is all connected with their conduct and their institutions” (ibid.: xxviii). The example of the Trobriand Islanders convinced Malinowski that humans did not need to know or recognize the role of sperm in making children in order to develop kinship relations and forms of family in which men fulfil their role as “fathers,” protecting and loving their children, caring for and cherishing them. He saw the invention of the father as the consequence of the invention of marriage, which attached to a married man the children his wife brought into the world (cf. Malinowski 1927b: 253-80; 1932: xix-xliv). Here Malinowski was taking a stand in a debate that had been raging since the last third of the nineteenth century, when Spencer and Gillen discovered that Australian Aboriginal peoples attributed the birth of children to a spirit- child, which lived in the vicinity of the sacred sites belonging to the husband’s kin group and which entered a woman’s body. For these societies, too, sperm did not ‘make’ the baby. It must be said that, at the time, Australian Aborigines were regarded as specimens of the most primitive state of humanity, still living in the first stages of savagery, in which humans had just emerged from their animal-like condition. For Victorian evolutionism, humanity emerged from its animal state when it put an end to the sexual promiscuity that had formerly prevailed and invented kinship. From this perspective, since, at this stage of ignorance, the only thing that was certain was that children came out of the woman’s womb, the first form of kinship could follow no other rule than to trace descent uniquely through women. Matrilineal systems were therefore the first to develop, and with them, Mutterrecht (Bachofen: 1861). But men still had no status. This came with the invention of the father. But then other systems came into being, patrilineal this time, leaving behind them on the path of progress the matrilineal systems, now mere attestations and relics of a bygone stage of evolution. Thirty years later, Leach revived the debate with his famous essay on Virgin Birth (1969; 1968). Leach had two criticisms of Malinowski. First, he reproached everyone who, from Frazer to Malinowski, took their informants’ claims at face value, for not thinking that they could know more or something else than what they chose to tell the anthropologist. In other words, they could not not know what they claimed not to know or what they denied. But, in a certain sense, that was not the problem. It was, according to Leach, the fact that anthropologists had not seen that the informants’ statements corresponded to the ideological position they were obliged to hold regarding the “structural place” occupied by a child in their society. In short, despite the grand declarations that deliberately exaggerated his differences with Malinowski, Leach entertained more or less the same opinions, but he couched them in the language of his time. Instead of “culture,” he used the word “ideology,” and instead of ties between the culture and the institutions, he spoke of “dogmas” connected with the position of individuals and groups in the social structure. Whether or not Leach’s theses were new, they had a very positive theoretical impact and sparked the publication of numerous articles and books as well as new fieldwork. Fairly rapidly, thanks especially to Annette Weiner, who revisited the same places Malinowski had worked in, but also thanks to Suzan Montague (1993; 1971), who worked in Kaduwinga, an island near Kiriwina, Malinowski’s picture of the representations of conception in the Trobriand Islands was to be completed, but also amended. For Malinowski, two of the Trobrianders’ assertions posed a problem. The fact that a young woman had to be no longer a virgin in order to have children, and the fact that—they stressed—children could look only like their father, never their mother, whereas they had no substance in common with their father. To say that a child looks like its mother is a serious insult for the mother and for the child, for it is impossible. To say that a boy looks like his sisters is to insinuate that they have made love, that they committed incest. People explained to Malinowski that the father “coagulates” the foetus, gives it a form (kuli). They also told him that if a woman’s sexual organ was not open, the “spirits realized this and did not give her children” (Malinowski 1927: 47ff). Of course it was not her husband’s penis that opened her vagina, since girls begin having sexual relations well before they marry. But it was indeed the penis of a man. In short, barring unusual circumstances,9 there is need of a man’s penis for a woman to become a mother. But she does not become a mother through the sperm the man deposits in her womb. she becomes a mother through the intervention of spirits, which discover that she has been opened and send her a spirit-child. But this spirit-child, mingled with the woman’s menstrual blood, is not yet a human child. It is only a foetus, a runny blob. How does it acquire, inside its mother’s womb, the form it presents at birth and a face that makes it look like its father? The answer was supplied years later by Annette Weiner (1978; 1979; 1988). What Malinowski omitted to say—either because he had not been told or because he had been told but had not really understood—was that, as soon as the woman tells her husband she is pregnant, he multiplies his sexual relations with her. His penis strikes, hammers on, the shapeless foetal mass and shapes it, giving it a form that makes it resemble its father. The ejaculate participates in this undertaking and further serves to nourish the foetus. In a word, the picture was changing. Although the man’s sperm had no role in the child’s “conception,” it was indispensable if the woman was to give birth to a child endowed with a human form and not to a shapeless foetus, and to a child that looked like its “father” as well. The following diagram shows the different phases of conception and intrauterine development. Sexual relations and male sperm, which in Malinowski’s understanding were believed to have no role in making a child, were, in fact, in the eyes of the Trobriand Islanders, necessary if the foetus conceived by the woman and her ancestral sprits was to become a human child, a child whose facial features would resemble those of a man, its father.10 In short, in the Trobriand Islands, too, it is necessary to make love in order to have children. But what happens next has nothing in common with what Europeans think, having derived their ideas from Christian tradition or the study of biology. Malinowski was therefore right to say that, in the Trobriand Islands, sexual relations and sperm have nothing to do with conceiving a child, but he was wrong to claim that for the Trobrianders sexual relations had nothing to do with making a child.11 For, while they do not contribute to making the foetus, they are indispensable for fashioning the foetus to look like a human child. In the final analysis, a child is always a gift from the spirits; in other parts of the world, in Polynesia for instance, it would be a gift from the gods, or in the West, a gift from God. So we see that, in the Trobriand Islands, the woman and the man, the mother and the father, each make a distinct but complementary contribution to their children’s identity. The mother gives them her blood and her flesh, their inner identity. And, through the blood received from its mother, each child is connected to the uninterrupted flow of blood that comes from the ancestral woman who emerged from the underworld and, together with her brother, founded the child’s clan. The father gives the child its external identity, according to Annette Weiner’s expression (1978: 182). He gives it a face, a name, body ornaments and, if the child is a boy, the right to use part of his lands. But the father also nourishes the child, first in its mother’s womb and then by working hard in his yam gardens to feed his wife and his children—but also his sisters, who have married out of his clan. Later on the sons will make gardens for their father, and he himself will make a garden for each of his daughters when she marries. Finally, he will encourage his sons, who belong to their mother’s clan, to take a wife in his own clan. The blood of women and the ancestors reincarnated in their bodies thus defines the relationship between the people belonging to the different lineages of the same clan, while all of the gifts and the acts by which fathers “nourish” (kipai), shape and mould (kuli) their children form ties between people belonging to different clans. The father nourishes his wife and children by placing at their disposal his labour and all of the magic inherited from his ancestors, which give him plentiful yam crops and success in his expeditions to distant islands, etc. For, while men do not store up menstrual blood in their bodies, they do store up knowledge and magical powers (meguwa in their bellies. Using this knowledge, they communicate with the spirits (baloma) of their ancestors and in turn receive the power to nourish others—or on the contrary to kill them with sorcery or drive them to starvation by casting a spell on their gardens. Interestingly, it is through their father, who is not from the same clan as they, more than through their mother’s brother, that men gain access to the world of political relations and the Kula. If we want to understand the connections between the body, kinship and powers in the Trobriand Islands, we must therefore explore their political-ritual universe. This universe is a hierarchical world: hierarchy between the chiefly lineages with their hereditary ranks (guyau) and commoner lineages; hierarchy among the chiefs between those who wield power and influence over a hamlet (tumila), over a village (ralu) made up of several hamlets, or over a district formed of several villages. Each hamlet, village and district is under the authority of the eldest man of the clan, whose mythical ancestors are supposed to have emerged from or settled in this place. Sometimes another brother and the oldest son of his sister—who will succeed him—live nearby. All of his other brothers live with their father, and his married sisters live with their husbands. Alternatively, he is surrounded by men from other lineages to whom he has granted the right to use part of his lineage lands and who are therefore indebted to him. He is all the more influential because it is he who invokes his ancestors when performing, for himself and for those living on his lands, the rites to ensure successful crops of the yams and other solid foods with which they nourish their families. This is why the representative of the hamlet’s founding lineage is entitled to a share of all of the resources that the other lineages grow on his lands—yams, betel nuts, pigs, etc. These resources he places in his storehouses and periodically redistributes them on the occasion of events involving the whole community (rituals and dances that accompany harvests, building houses or yam silos, making canoes, preparing a trading or war expedition, etc.). And since it is the chief s privilege to take several wives, four times a year he is presented with a share of the produce from the gardens of his affines—fathers-in-law, brothers-in-law, maternal uncles and other members of each wife’s lineage. The chief is thus, as Sahlins (1963) wrote about Trobriand chiefs, the glorious brother-in-law, glorified by a whole community. But he is also, as Leach suggested, like a father who gathers in, feeds and grants the protection of his magical powers to the lineages to which his clan gave the right to live and to reproduce on its lands. Leach’s suggestion was adopted by Mark Mosko, who, in an important article (1995), attempted to rethink chieftainship in the Trobriand Islands as the co-creation by a chief and those who follow and serve him of a relationship analogous to that between a father and his children, whom he nourishes and shapes in his image. The author’s demonstration is almost convincing, but he carried it too far and ultimately neglected the interplay of authority relations within the clans subject to the matrilineal principle and the interplay of the brother-sister relationship as placed in the service of each clan’s alliance policy. In the end, it is in the body that the reason for each person’s place (men and women) in the process of begetting children and in the political-ritual relations that organize the reproduction of the clans and of society as a whole can be found. According to the Trobrianders, women’s bodies are soft and runny on the inside. Men’s bodies are hard and solid (kasai) on the outside. Through their work and their magic, men produce solid food (kasai) that keeps their bodies alive and hardens those of the women. But men’s bodies are too hard to carry children, and women’s bodies are too soft to shape them. Only the man’s penis, when it is hard, can, by repeated acts of intercourse, give the shapeless foetal mass a form (Montague 1993). But women, who are passive when the spirit of an ancestor desiring to live again enters their body, assume the most active role in ensuring the afterlife of deceased members of their lineage. It is the women who organize the large-scale funeral rituals (sagali) that will allow their dead brother or sister, or son or daughter, to leave the human world and take their place in Tuma alongside the ancestors of their lineage. In order to do this, the women must redistribute to everyone (individuals and lineages) who was connected with the deceased during his or her life an enormous amount of female wealth—skirts made of red leaves and bundles of banana fronds (doba: skirts; manuga: banana leaves)—which the women amass over their adult life, either through their own production or purchased with the yams their fathers, husbands and brothers give them. It is thus women, acting in their capacity as sisters, mothers or daughters, who, by distributing their own valuables, enable the deceased of their lineage to live once more in Tuma and allow the living, whose ties were interrupted by death, to renew them through these exchanges. Women are the only ones able to “de-conceive” and to ensure those they conceived a new life. And since for Trobrianders death draws all mourners into a sort of “living death,” it is the women who restart the wheels of social life. In so doing, they exercise a real power in society,12 one that Malinowski had already underscored heavily and which Annette Weiner described in detail (Weiner 1988): In the Trobriand Islands, we find a matrilineal society, where descent, kinship, and all social relations are reckoned by the mother only, and where women have a considerable share in tribal life, in which they take the leading part in certain economic, ceremonial, and magical activities. This influences very deeply the erotic life as well as the institution of marriage. (Malinowski 1927: 11-12). We will end the analysis of this case by a comparison with our two earlier analyses of what a child is for a society, that of the Inuit and that of the Baruya. In all three cases, the scenario of child conception entails: The presence—active (Inuit, Baruya) or passive (Trobriand)—of a supernatural power that lives far removed from human society but has placed humanity under its protection. The intervention of ancestors, of the deceased who are close and known (Inuit) or remote (Baruya, Trobriand), who want to come back to life (Baruya, Trobriand, Inuit) or whom humans want to bring back to life in a child (Inuit). The child has (Inuit) or does not have (Baruya, Trobriand) a memory of the deeds and gestures of the person reincarnated in him or her. The roles of the woman and the man in the conception process are, in all events, in accord with the descent principle, and ground the children’s appropriation by one or the other of the two sides of the family - the father’s (Baruya), the mother’s (Trobriand), or both in the case of a cognatic system (Inuit). In the latter case, the man’s sperm mingles with the woman’s menstrual blood to produce the body of the foetus and in the end that of the child that issues from its mother’s womb. In the case of the patrilineal system, it is the sperm that makes the foetal skeleton and flesh and nothing is said about the mother’s blood, especially not about her menstrual blood, regarded as destroying men’s strength, like an anti- sperm. In the case of the matrilineal system, nothing is said about the man’s sperm, and the woman’s menstrual blood moves to the fore. In two out of three cases, sperm also nourishes the foetus, and the father, even if he is not the child’s genitor (Trobriand), is a nurturing father who begins nourishing the foetus before its birth as a child. In all three cases, the husband nourishes the mother and the child with strong foods—game for the Inuit, game and tubers for the Baruya, yams and other ‘solid’ foods for the Trobrianders. In all of these cases, human labour is not enough to make a child, which is always the result of cooperation between the invisible world of the gods and the ancestors, and the visible world of men and women. All three societies recognize the possibility of births stemming from the intervention of gods or other supernatural entities, without the help of humans. The fact that, for the Trobrianders and for Australian Aboriginal peoples, children exist even before they are begotten by their parents makes us wonder whether this vision of life might exist outside of Oceania. In fact, one can actually find a great number of examples, especially in Africa. We have chosen to present the case of the Nzema as an example. The Nzema of Southern Ghana The Nzema of southern Ghana are a section of the greater Akan people (Grottanelli 1961). Nzema society is divided into seven matrilineal clans (abusua), but residence is patrilocal, two principles we already encountered in the Trobriand Islands. Villages and small towns are under the authority of ranked chiefs. For the Nzema, children are deceased persons who wanted to live a new life in the body of a child. The dead live underground in a place called Ebolo, which lies on the other side of a subterranean river that the dead cross by paying a few coins to a boatman, who ferries them to the other shore. There they are welcomed by all of their deceased fellow clansmen, who take them to their chief, to whom the dead must render a detailed account of the life they led on earth. Afterwards begins a life very similar to the previous one, but more pleasant. The deceased eat, drink, go walking. They enjoy their death. The dead exist in the form of a soul (ngomenle) but also have a body of sorts (funli), which is not the body (ngonane) they had when they were alive. Some of the dead decide to return to earth to live another life, but far from their relatives and friends for fear of being recognized. In this case, their body once more dons its previous form. Others want to be reincarnated in a child. In this case, the spirit of the deceased changes into a sort of “grub,” which is the body of a spirit- child. The spirit-child then takes up residence in the uterus of a woman, usually but not always a fellow clan member. The human child that will be born will belong to this woman’s clan and not to that of her husband. Once inside the woman’s womb, the spirit-child turns into a foetus as a result of the sexual relations between the father and the mother. With her menstrual blood, the woman will produce the child’s flesh and bones. With his sperm, the man will produce the child’s blood. The man’s blood carries a life force (mora), which, if it is “accepted” by the life force contained in the woman’s blood, will give the gestating child the ability to move and later to breathe. Without this “acceptance” by the woman’s blood, the child will not be conceived. At birth, the child receives two names: one given by the father and the other a soul-name (ekela) which indicates the day of the week the child was born and connects it to the gods, in particular the great god Nyamenle. This name will not survive the person, just as the life force carried in his or her blood will disappear at death. This name will return to the gods, while the soul will set out on the journey to Ebolo, taking with it the funli body. The deceased’s bones are then returned by the paternal kin to the maternal clan. This clan organizes the funeral rites, performs the rituals that dispatch the deceased to the land of the dead and settles the problems entailed in the inheritance of the deceased’s goods, the transfer of his functions, his titles, and so on. As we see, in this matrilineal society, the father’s role in kinship relations, in the definition of the children’s identity, in the phases of their life, and so forth, is very important and is expressed in the theories of child conception in a number of ways. The blood that flows through the child’s body and the life-giving breath also come from the father’s sperm. The name carried by the child was chosen by the father. The qualities identified in the child also come from the father, from the mora carried in his blood. The father surrounds the child with his care and his spirit, and protects it so that, it is said, if a child is separated from its father, it will not grow. In effect, the child nourished by its father must observe all of the father’s food taboos and seek the protection of the gods worshipped by the father as he respects these taboos. The example of the Nzema, who are matrilineal but whose residence is patrilocal and where the father’s social role is extremely important, concords with the Trobriander example. In both cases, the fathers give their children a name, assets, and protection and affection. In the case of the Trobrianders, the father’s role is to shape the foetus and to nourish it with his sperm, but not to make its substance. In the case of the Nzema, the man’s sperm makes the child’s blood and its breath. Here, too, sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is necessary for there to be a child, but it is not enough. Other actors come into the picture, and once again these are ancestors and gods. The Nzema case presents two specific features which must be stressed. The spirit-child that lives in the land of the dead is not safe from malevolent aggressions and influences on the part of the gods and evil spirits (asongu). This will manifest itself after the child is born (it has no memory of these events) by various symptoms, including diarrhoea and vomiting, which will be treated by prayers, potions and magical charms. But sometimes that is not enough. For example, in the case where the children in a family die one after the other, a diviner is asked to discover which ancestor or deceased clansman was reincarnated in these children who died or fell seriously ill and what he or she wants. When the diviner has found the identity of the reincarnated soul and the reasons for his or her anger, he tells the parents and offers a sacrifice to the angry spirit. Finally, he gives the parents a series of prescriptions and—of course—expects a reward for his services.13 Next is a final example of a society in which the descent rule is also matrilineal, as among the Trobrianders and the Nzema, but where the father’s social importance is even greater than in these two societies, and where the mother no longer shares any bodily substance with the child she bears, which belongs to her matrilineage. The Maenge of New Britain The society of the Maenge, who live in the eastern part of the South Pacific island of New Britain (cf. Panoff 1976), is divided into two exogamous moieties each of which is divided into exogamous clans and subclans. The clans and subclans are geographically dispersed, and their members live in places where their ancestors emerged. Neither the moieties nor the clans function as true social groups. They do not have chiefs or leaders to represent them and they operate merely as classification categories. The true political, economic and ceremonial units are the subclans, whose members live in the same village or in one of the hamlets that compose a village. These descent groups share rights in the lands adjoining the village. They possess a common treasure of valuables, shell money, stone axe blades, etc., whose management is entrusted to one of their Big Men. And they act as a whole in various circumstances: planting ceremonial gardens, performing rites concerning the land, and especially going to war. Each village or hamlet is under the authority of a Big Man, who in principle belongs to the founding matrilineage or one of its subclans. This man is called maga tamana (“village father”). Among the Maenge, polygamy is widespread, so that the children of a man who has several wives belong to different matrilineages. Unlike the Trobriand residence rule, here residence after marriage is not necessarily virilocal. A third of new couples live with the wife’s people, a third with the husband’s family, and the rest live in the couple’s natal village. Within matrilineages and villages, there is vigorous competition among male members of the same descent group for recognition both as the representative of their group and as the “village father.” The village father is not necessarily the oldest man in his lineage. And it is not necessarily the nephew who succeeds his maternal uncle. This is because the “village father” usually does everything in his power to ensure that it is his eldest son, or at least one of his sons, and therefore someone from another matrilineage, who succeeds him. Of the twenty-nine successions analyzed by Michel Panoff, fifteen featured a nephew who had succeeded his maternal uncle, and fourteen a son who had succeeded his father. All of these details together with the words ‘village father’ point to the existence, in Maenge society, of a second kinship principle that this time classifies people on the basis of their shared descent from a common male ancestor, or from several brothers by the same father, even though, through their mother, they belonged to different matrilines. These kin groups have a name, and the term for them, malo tumana, translates as “that which is wrapped in the bark strip that encircles a man’s loins,” a metaphor for the man’s penis. Michel Panoff translates this by an Old French legal expression “relative by the rod,” as opposed to “relative by the belly,” in other words uterine kinship. Malo tumana is an institution that encompasses: Children of the same father but different mothers. Children of two or several full brothers, but not half-brothers. Children of men from the two preceding groups. Beyond these groups it is considered that the blood of these men’s children is too mixed. It is worth noting that children of the same father and the same mother, full-blooded siblings, are not included in the malo tumana, nor are half-siblings of the same mother, which clearly distinguishes the malo tumana from a matrilineage. it is expected that all persons belonging to the same malo tumana will demonstrate solidarity in all sorts of contexts, such as trading expeditions, war, etc. This solidarity is called piu, which means “to bind or tie.” it is not based on a shared interest of which it would be the sublimated face, as in rights in the same piece of land. it is founded on individuals sharing the same male blood, which forbids them marrying each other, even if the fact of belonging to two different moieties would make it possible. it is therefore founded on shared descent through men, in other words on the implementation of a principle of patrifiliation. What is interesting here is that the coexistence of the two principles—patrifiliation and matrilineal descent reckoning—is expressed in the way the Maenge represent the conception of a child. For the Maenge, it is the father’s sperm, and it alone, that makes the child’s body, that turns into its blood, its flesh and its bones, and endows it with the ability to move and breathe. The woman shares no substance with her child, but she holds it in her uterus and gives it an inner “soul” (kamu e pel), which will take up residence in the blood transmitted by the father. The Maenge believe that every person has two souls, an inner soul and an outer double (kamu e soali. The inner soul permeates the body’s substance and gives it its strength and beauty. The outer soul is a sort of double self, normally invisible, which completely envelops the human body, hugging its curves and features. Both souls can leave the body in various circumstances—at night during sleep, or during the strenuous physical ordeals undergone by boys and girls during their initiations and, of course, after death, when both abandon the cadaver that has begun to decompose. At this time, the two souls, still conjoined, change into a “ghost” (soare), which, after several days and diverse rites, leaves its village where it still mingled with the living and sets out for the submarine village of the dead from which the clan ancestors originally emerged.14 With them, the deceased take the souls of the taros and other cultivated plants that the members of their lineage gave as an offering to appease any evil spirits that might attack. Whereas for the matrilineal virilocal Trobrianders, male sperm had no part in making the child but shaped it, whereas for the matrilineal patrilocal Nzema, sperm makes the foetus’ blood and imparts breath, for the Maenge, sperm makes the child’s whole body; but it is the mother who provides an inner soul and (probably) its outer form, which leaves the body of the deceased and, still attached to the inner soul, sets out for the land of the dead. But a father’s relations with his children are not limited to providing them with a body. He also gives them his affection and protection. He gives them shell money and, to his sons, tracts of his lands (which are lands of his own matrilineage, to which his children do not belong). He also transmits to them pieces of his ritual knowledge. And he makes a heavy contribution to the expenses involved in organizing their initiations. His brother-in-law, the children’s maternal uncle, also contributes, but less. The father brings the greatest share when it comes time to assemble the payment each of his sons will have to make in order to get married. As in the Trobriand Islands, a man usually encourages his sons (or at least his eldest son) to marry in his own matrilineage, to choose one of his ‘sister’s’ daughters. Here, too, the mother’s brother makes a contribution, but again it is less. Yet a man is not allowed to train his own son for war, for he might hurt him or be hurt, and for all concerned this would be tantamount to attacking their own blood. It is therefore the men of the child’s matrilineage who will teach him to use weapons and to kill. It is with them that the son will work the big gardens cultivated for the religious ceremonies, and with them that he will manage the lands held in common. This institution, which groups people on the basis of their maternal ties, is called galiou, “shield”; it is the opposite and the complement of malo tumana. Bearing in mind this dual social organization, we can now understand both the fathers’ attitudes toward their children but also the fact that the leader of each village is called the “village father” (maga tumana), a term borrowed from the universe of kinship and used to designate a political-ritual relationship. In effect, the “father” of a village is much more than the leader of a local clan segment. He wields his authority over all of the other lineages living on his lands and which he feeds and protects through the rites he performs on behalf of everyone. A man does not become a Big Man until in the first place he has managed to organize and finance, from his own resources and those of the fellow members of his matrilineage willing to help, the initiation rites designed for his own children. Another challenge he must face if he wants to show his influence and his wealth (for every ceremony demands the sacrifice of pigs and the distribution of shares of the meat together with shell money and other valuables) is the building and the upkeep of a men’s house. He usually names this house after his eldest son. Furthermore, the maga tamana has the privilege of organizing for his (male or female) firstborn a complicated cycle of costly ceremonies (alangapaga) that begins with the birth of the child and ends with his or her marriage. These ceremonies are designed to ‘lift up’ the person of this child, to raise his or her name higher than that of all the other children born in the village at the same time. With the Menge we are looking at a matrilineal society that made the principle of patrifiliation the basis of a whole series of practices necessary to the society’s reproduction. The coexistence of these two principles, which in part pull in opposite directions—sons succeeding their father and/or nephews succeeding their maternal uncle—creates a permanent tension, but one that does not abolish the ultimate pre-eminence of the matrilineal principle. The predominant role of sperm, which corresponds to the social patrifiliation principle, is complementary to the mother’s contribution of the inner soul and the child’s outer form. Last of all, it is to the land of the mother’s ancestors that a soul returns after death, to live a life without suffering or labour: the maternal paradise. A final remark. The Maenge once again provide a good example of recourse to the vocabulary and representations of kinship relations—in the present case the figure of the “father”—to designate a person exercising political-ritual functions that go far beyond the strict domain of kinship. The relations of affection, protection and sharing connected with kinship in the context of the family and the household are thus projected onto other social relations, which are conceived in their image, transformed by and wrapped in the vocabulary of kinship. But here too, political relations are neither the extension of kinship relations nor analogous to them. Here as elsewhere, kinship is not the ultimate basis of society. The Khumbo of Nepal Up to this point we have assumed that, in a given society, there is only one system for representing the process of child conception and only one dogma. In reality, many societies have several coexisting systems, which do not necessarily concur or which agree on some points and disagree on others. In still other societies, we discover systems that have combined several traditions stemming from periods and historical facts located at a greater or lesser distance in the past. These systems imprint themselves in the body unbeknown to the child (and often unbeknown to the child’s parents, who have no memory of these facts). We will begin the discussion of these historical syncretisms by citing the case of the Khumbo, a Tibetan-speaking group of pastoral agriculturalists living in the heart of the Nepalese Himalayas, in the “hidden valley” of Arun at the foot of mount Makalu (Diemberger 1993, 1998). This society emerged from the encounter and association of several clans that came from Tibet at different epochs. While the clans still exist, their social role has disappeared behind the now-more-important fact of belonging to the same territorial community, which lives in Sepa under the protection of their mountain deities and of the mountains which are themselves gods, sacred beings. For centuries the Khumbo have lived at the periphery of the space administered by the Tibetan state as well as on the fringes of the zones of influence of the large Buddhist monasteries. Their society has thus retained certain pre-Buddhist religious beliefs characteristic of the time of the first Tibetan kings. Two kinds of priests preside over worship: lhaven, married priests who serve the clan gods and the territorial deities; and lamas, who belong to the Nyimmapa Buddhist tradition and who also are married. They are the Khumbo’s ‘great men’. Their ritual functions and their knowledge raise them above the other men who head the big households. A few women, known as lhakama, “she who allows the gods to speak,” also play a large role. These women undergo possession by the gods and the spirits of the dead, and are subjected to terrifying experiences when they confront devils from the impure part of the universe. They act as oracles and give voice to that which everyone would like to hide, hence their power.15 The notion of impurity plays an important role in Khumbo society. The birth of a child is an impure event, which harks back to the primordial incest between the son of the Earth mother who, upon being born, immediately tried to return to his mother’s womb. And therefore humans, who were supposed to be immortal, are now mortal. For the Khumbo, the father is the one who rids the mother and child of the birth impurity by giving the child a name, which makes it a member of his clan, and then by presenting it to the mountain gods as being their child as well.16 Khumbo kinship relations are governed by a patrilineal descent rule. People belong to their father’s clan, which is exogamous. Residence after marriage is usually, but does not have to be, patrivirilocal. Sons are forbidden to marry a woman from their mother’s clan. Every generation is obliged to marry into new families. How is making a child seen in this universe? The child’s conception begins with sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, who will become its father and its mother. The woman’s vagina is regarded as a red flower that blooms every month and closes once again if no sperm has entered her in the ten to twelve days following her menses. When sperm enters this flower, it closes and, as soon as the woman’s blood mixes with the sperm, an embryo begins to develop in her womb. The man’s sperm makes the child’s bones and brain, and that is why the child belongs to its father’s clan. In fact, the word for “clan” is the same as that for “bones.”17 The bones are the hard part of the human body, transmitted from one generation to the next by the men (and not by the women), since the bones make the sperm and the sperm makes the bones. The child is attached by its bones to a “bone line,” which connects it to the male clan deity (which is thus present in the child). This god is attached to the clan and is worshiped by all members of this clan. The deity’s name is associated with a sacred mountain in Tibet, which was the home of the clan ancestors before they migrated. But today these ancestral clan gods all live together in the mountains of Beyul Khenbalung, their new abode. They have become the gods and ancestors of the new community formed at the conclusion of the various migrations. The woman’s blood gives the child its flesh and its own blood. Through its blood the child is connected to its mother and to its mother’s mother, etc. Whereas bones distinguish and separate the clans, the women’s blood circulates among the clans and brings them together. For the Khumbo, women’s blood is positive, since it is the source of the flesh, the blood and the shape of the body of everyone. But their menstrual blood also bars women from approaching the sacred weapons, which are kept in every house, near the altar facing the mountains and dedicated to Dabla, the god of war and defender of the territory. During the woman’s pregnancy, the couple does not stop having sexual relations, quite the contrary, for sperm is believed to nourish the foetus and add to the food eaten by the mother. Later the woman will feed her baby with the milk from her breasts, considered to be full of grain, which changes into milk. But the man’s sperm and the woman’s blood are not enough to make a child. It is still lacking a soul—or rather two souls. Here is where we will see the bodily mark of the historical encounter between a pre-Buddhist religion and a branch of Buddhism. The first soul (la) is a life force that connects the child to all of nature and to the surrounding mountains. If this principle leaves the body and departs, or if it is stolen by devils, it can be brought back to the body by means of specific rituals. It is this soul that gives the person his or her energy and breath. When the person dies, this soul leaves the body for good and takes up residence in the sacred mountains of Khenbalung. Priests’ souls dwell near the summits; the other souls at the base. These mountains are the “owners of the land,” the “masters of the territory.” For they have a soul (la-ri) which provides the land and the Khumbo community with their energy. In addition to this first soul, which connects each Khumbo to the sacred mountains, there is the namsche, the “consciousness,” which in the Buddhist tradition is the organ of the (illusory) perception every person has of the world and of the self. It is the organ of the actions that will keep the individual a prisoner of the cycle of reincarnations, of the samsara in which, from one reincarnation to the next, all living beings have already been the fathers and mothers of each other. This “consciousness-soul” detaches itself from the inter-space of the reincarnation cycles (bardo) and enters the woman’s vagina when she makes love. If the namsche is drawn to the mother, the new being will be a boy; if it is drawn to the father, it will be a girl. When a person dies, the namsche leaves the body and, propelled by the nature of its past actions (karma), is soon reincarnated in another living being.18 In short, sperm and blood connect the child with the clan of its fathers and with those of its mother, its mother’s mother, etc. One of these two souls is connected with the deities and the ancestors that protect its community; the other is linked to the universe of Buddhism, to which the Khumbo also belong. This double affiliation explains the two kinds of priests who preside over worship and stand on either side of the altars: the lhaven, whose name is reminiscent of the lha-bon, the priests of pre-Buddhist Tibet, and the lama. Below is a diagram of the process of conception as seen by the Khumbo. Once again we are confronted with the same fundamental fact. The parents of a Khumbo child do not suffice to produce the whole child, to make a human child. More powerful spiritual agents must intervene: ancestors, deities and, permeating the whole configuration, the invisible world of the Buddhist cycle of reincarnations. The child is not only included in a network of kin relations and groups (its paternal clan, etc.), but it is also closely connected with realities that transcend the boundaries of these relations and of the division of the society into clans and so forth, which address each person as a member of the same territorial community that protects them and which all must reproduce. At the same time, all members of this community belong to a religion that does not recognize boundaries between clans and communities, but instead is addressed to all human beings who desire to free themselves of the world of illusion in which they live and, through enlightenment, like the Buddha, end the cycle of reincarnations and enter nirvana. To the north, in another valley that was a part of Tibet for centuries, live the Kharta, a group with whom the Khumbo trade and occasionally marry. We learn a great deal from a comparison between the Kharta and the Khumbo. The Kharta kin system and terminology are roughly the same as those of the Khumbo. But there are some deep-seated differences between them. The Kharta no longer have named clans. People define themselves with respect to their family and their village. The terms “bone” and “flesh” designate the person’s paternal lineage and their maternal ties. The Khumbo clan deity (pholha) has become a family god, and the mountain gods have been “Buddhified”19 For the Khumbo, who have been living on the edge of the Tibetan state for centuries, the changes never reached this magnitude, and this is attested to once again by the bodies and souls of their children. But Buddhism did not try to drive out the old gods, as other religions did and continue to do in their endeavour to convert the whole of humanity to their faith, to their “true” god.20 For Buddhism, the gods are part of the illusion that humans entertain about the world and themselves. Buddhism does not try to expel them because they are among the illusions that are dispelled as the person advances along the path of “illumination.” We now come to the second type of situation, that in which two or more models of the process of child conception exist side by side in the same society and are more or less incompatible with each other. The different models do not appear, as in the case of the Khumbo, as a native model plus another one imported into or imposed on the local society from outside. In the two cases discussed below, we are dealing with distinct models which developed in the same society and which express, by their very existence and differences, the views of two social groups standing in an unequal relationship with each other, one being dominant and the other subordinate, in a word: engaged in power relations that express and imprint themselves in the bodies of the children. The Telefolmin of New Guinea The first case is that of the Telefolmin (Jorgensen 1988) a group of intensive horticulturalists and hunters living in the New Guinea Highlands near the headwaters of the Sepik river. The Telefolmin have two models of conception: an “official” model shared by both the men and the women, and a “secret” model known to the women and which partially contradicts the “official” version. Their gardening and hunting activities disperse the families around the villages, which serve as a home base. These villages are strongly endogamous and are organized around a big men’s house, which is at the same time the place where the relics are kept—these are the bones of male ancestors that only the men are allowed to venerate. The ancestor cult is marked by a series of initiations for the boys, who are split into two moieties that act as two ritual spheres: the “Taro” moiety and the “Arrow” moiety. The Taro moiety rites concern life-giving powers: the powers to grow good crops in the gardens, to raise pigs, to feed people; its colour is white. The rites of the Arrow moiety concern death-dealing powers: the powers to kill, and to be a successful hunter and warrior; its colour is red. Dan Jorgensen, who worked among the Telefolmin, stressed the difficulties he had collecting information on the way children are made there. The men considered it a disgusting and unworthy topic of conversation, something to ask women about because it is their affair, whereas men’s business is the domain of religion and esoteric rituals, and the governance of society. At long last, the men agreed, for friendship’s sake, to give him the following account. Children are made by combining “penis water” and “vaginal fluids,” which meet and mingle in the woman’s womb when a man and a woman make love. The men did not make a difference between the man’s and the woman’s contribution. The sperm mixes with the vaginal fluids and the mixture makes the baby’s body. But the foetus is not made at one go. One must make love often so as to accumulate sperm and the woman’s fluids. Once the woman realizes she is pregnant, the couple must stop making love in order not to make twins. But the foetus is not yet a child. It still needs a soul and a mind, and a shape that will distinguish it from other people. All of that is tied to the presence in the body of sinik, a component of the human being, the origin of which the Telefolmin admitted ignorance. They said that, as a baby grows, it becomes capable of understanding and talking. That is because the sinik is growing inside him. As for a child looking like its father or its mother or someone else, no one really had an explanation. This male version of procreation fits their kinship system, which is fundamentally cognatic and makes no reference to the existence of clans, lineages, etc. People belong to different kindreds, but there is no visible inclination toward ties with the father’s or the mother’s side. The Telefolmin stress the care given a child, in the form of feeding, raising and protecting it, rather than the circumstances surrounding its birth. The great hunters are like “fathers” to their village because they feed everyone with the game they bring home. But none of this explained why women retired to a hut, either to wait out their menstrual periods or to give birth, and why the men regarded menstrual blood as a great danger for themselves. And so Dan Jorgensen decided to ask the women and, to his great surprise, they showed no repugnance or reluctance to talk about these matters. Indeed the women knew the version the men had given Dan. They agreed with the idea that the foetus is formed from the mixture of sperm and their vaginal fluids. But they diverged from the men on one point: the role of menstrual blood, of uterine blood (nok ipak), a subject on which the men had remained silent. For the women, it is this blood that makes the child’s bones. The sperm and the vaginal fluids have an equal part in making the child’s blood, but not its bones. As we see, this representation is in total opposition to that of the Khumbo, and it is very unusual for New Guinea. While the men’s representations, for whom the man’s and the woman’s contributions are equivalent and complementary, fit the thoroughly undifferentiated character of the kinship system, where did the women’s representations come from? What was at stake? To understand better, we need to look at the men’s world and the rituals they are responsible for and which are closed to women. One of the aims of these rituals is to slow the gradual drift of the universe toward nothingness. And the rites that permit this entail the manipulation of the bones of the most prominent male ancestors of each village, which are kept as relics inside the spirit houses. Here we in fact discover that, according to the women, the sacred relics that lie at the heart of the male rituals—from which, I repeat, they are systematically excluded—come from the very substance that the men abhor most: menstrual blood. The women’s theory thus overspills the sphere of kinship relations and the domestic world. It asserts that women are present at the very heart of the political-ritual sphere. Once again, as we saw in the case of the Baruya, the men’s powers appear as powers they appropriated from the women, who are their primal and permanent source, thus sentencing them to be passive onlookers of the actions performed by the men in order to act on the cosmos and reproduce their society. Whereas the men do not claim any priority in the conception of children and accept the idea that the women play a role equal to theirs, the women, on the other hand, claim a priority that gives them virtually, mentally, a central position in the secret rites performed by the men. In so doing they reject the disjunction between the spheres of kinship and politics, and contest their relegation to the sphere of domestic life. Jorgensen was later to learn from the men that menstrual blood, which in public prompts their disgust and their fear of women, is secretly used to “reengender,” without the help of women, the boys whom they have separated from their mother in order to initiate them. The boys’ faces are smeared with yellow clay, whose secret name is ‘menstrual blood’, and which contains some blood from a woman who was menstruating at the time the rituals were about to begin. This is also the blood of Afek, the Old Woman, the primordial woman who made her brother the first man. She cut down his penis, which was too long, tried it out in her own vagina to see if it was the right length for copulating, and after this founding act of incest, told her brother the secrets of the initiations, of hunting and of growing taro, and then taught him to decorate his body for his initiation. Ultimately it is thanks to Old Woman, then, that men dominate women, for, in the beginning Afek gave them her bones, which they keep secretly in a cult house located in the centre of the country in the village of Telefolip,21 the most sacred place of all. Knowing this, it will come as less of a surprise that it was women who, in Telefolmin in 1978 and 1979, played such an important role in the destruction of the relics and the abolition of the male cults encouraged by some Protestant preachers announcing Christ’s return and the revival of humankind. It should be quite clear that the men’s model is no more “true” than the women’s—or vice versa. Each of these models expresses the different and unequal position of the two sexes in the society; each is simultaneously the expression of this inequality and a means of imposing it (for the men) or of mentally refusing it while submitting in practice (for the women). The second example of a society with two coexisting models of procreation is that of the Kingdom of Tonga. The kingdom is composed of sixty-nine islands and, together with Hawaii and Tahiti, was one of the most stratified societies in Polynesia (cf. Douaire-Marsaudon 1998). There was an absolute separation between the masses of tua, commoners, and the eiki, those endowed with titles and ranks. A distinction was made among the eiki between the toa, the “little chiefs,” or plebian chiefs, and the eiki sii, whose ancestors had received their title from the Tu’i Tonga, the representative of the royal line or high-ranking nobles. Toa means “brave” and goes back to the time when warfare was endemic and feats on the battlefield and physical strength raised a commoner above the masses and earned him a title - but a title that could be taken away from him or his descendants. It was his mana that had distinguished him, and his mana could leave him. True nobles, on the other hand, the sindi eiki, those who are “chiefs in their body,” who derived their rank from their proximity to the royal lines, possessed inborn mana; it was consubstantial to them and attested to their divine essence. Everyone with a title had authority over a portion of the territory and its inhabitants. But this authority was always delegated, and emanated ultimately from the person of the paramount chief, the Tu’i Tonga. In the past, a title was transmitted either adelphically, from older to younger brother, with the title returning to the eldest son of the eldest line, or patrilineally, from father to son, as has become the case in the line of the Tu’i Tonga. A chief was therefore the head of a kainga, a group composed of kin but also of clients and protégés residing on the same land. The term kainga has several meanings. it designates first of all a person’s kindred, all relatives on both the father’s and the mother’s sides. it also designates the territorial group made up of people who are related or have been allowed to live on the land ruled by a chief and are under his authority. Sexual relations—and even more, marriage—between members of the same kainga were strictly forbidden. The group was therefore exogamous. Members of a kainga shared the same bodily substances if they were related, and all, related or not, ate the same products of the land baked in the same oven. Now, for Tongans, the land was fonua, a word that also designates the womb, the place where the child receives its blood. The fact of sharing the same food as the other members of a kainga meant that those who were not originally related became kin.22 All members of a kainga owed tribute to their chief in the form of products and services, the fatongia. When the Europeans arrived, the term kainga designated a sort of “seigniorial domain,” on which the kainga of the commoners were gathered around those of the noble families. Their chiefs were called tamai, “fathers,” and had almost absolute power over the possessions and the life of all members of their kainga. Every year, all of these chiefs presented the Tu’i Tonga with the first fruits of all of the crops of the kingdom in the course of a huge cosmic-political ritual called inasi. For the Tu’i Tonga, the whole kingdom was his kainga, of which he was the paramount chief and the nurturing father. Finally, the Tu’i Tonga himself presented his sister, the Tu’i Tonga Fafine, with a share of these first fruits, made up of the finest specimens, thereby recognizing her superior status, since she was even closer to the gods than he was. In effect, in Tonga, as in Samoa and other parts of Polynesia, the sister outranks the brother, regardless of their respective ages, and elder outranks younger.23 As a consequence, lines descending from sisters outrank lines descending from brothers, and lines descending from older siblings outrank lines descending from younger siblings. A person belongs to a local group, a kainga, either by their father or by their mother, and membership of this group gives them the right to the use of its land and its resources. However, the strongly virilocal residence pattern gives local groups a strongly patrilineal bias, whereas the kinship system as reflected in its terminology and its structure is cognatic. With these sociological indications in mind, we will now look at the two theories of procreation found in Tonga before the Europeans arrived and introduced Christianity. According to the first, and probably oldest, theory, the father makes the child’s bones with his sperm, which mixes with the woman’s menstrual blood to form a clot. The woman’s blood makes the child’s flesh and its blood. And the clot becomes a foetus. Then a soul, which is a gift from the ancestors or the gods to the living, takes possession of the foetus. In this model, the father and the mother are the genitors, but their action alone is not enough to make the child. A child is always a gift from the ancestors and the gods. At the beginning of the twentieth century (despite a century of Christianization) the hair of the newborn child was still called “the hair of the god.” And when a person dies, their bones retain something of the deceased’s essence. It should be added that the female substances—saliva, blood and the mysterious “water of life,” vaiola24—are believed to be endowed with procreative capacities capable of giving (or restoring) life. Many myths feature women who have become pregnant after having been penetrated by the sun’s rays or by the wind, or by water, all natural elements suffused with divine power, mana. But a second model existed in the former culture of Tonga, according to which the child’s substance, its flesh, blood, bones, skin, hair, etc., came from the mother.25 The man’s sperm had only one role: to stop up the menstrual blood in the woman’s uterus. To this end, a clot forms which turns into an embryo through the intervention of the mana of the gods or of the Tu’i Tonga.26 In this version, the father disappears as genitor. He is merely the mother’s sexual partner. His role is to prime the woman to be fecundated by a god or by a man-god, the Tu’i Tonga. Like the gods, the Tu’i Tonga impregnates the woman with his desubstantified seed, a fecundating breath, a sperm pneumatikos, as Francoise Douaire-Marsaudon termed it (1998: 142) This second model is clearly a transformation of the first, by virtue of combining two complementary operations. The woman’s role in procreation, already important in the first model, is even greater here, while the man’s role disappears and is replaced by the fecundating power of the Tu’i Tonga. The woman’s blood now makes the child’s entire substance. However, in Tonga, a woman transmits not only her blood, but her rank as well. Thus in the old kingdom of Tonga the quality of being a noble, of being a “chief in the body,” was transmitted only by women. The child of a high-ranking noble man and a female commoner was a commoner. The child of a commoner and an aristocratic woman was considered to be an aristocrat. This model is thus a reworking of the first, but while it uses the traditional representations of the woman’s role in conception, it is not, as one might think, in order to exalt the woman’s procreative powers, but to completely exclude ordinary men from the process and to exalt even more the power of the mana of the paramount eiki and the members of the royal lines. The origin of the second model seems to be linked to the profound social and ideological changes that occurred in the Tongan political system in the wake of attempts—semi-successful and always challenged—on the part of one chiefly line, the one that would take the name-title of Tu’i Tonga, to raise itself definitively above the other royal lines. It was in this royal line moreover that the transmission of the paramount title would cease to be adelphic and pass in direct line from father to eldest son. At the same time, too, the gap between the social standing of nobles and that of commoners widened. At the outset, commoners, who were members of younger branches of kainga that had lost track of their old genealogical ties with the chiefly families, became less and less relatives and more and more subjects, over whom the nobles and the Tu’i Tonga had right of life and death. Closer to the ancestors and therefore closer to the gods, the chiefly families claimed to have a different origin and a different destiny than the common people. By identifying himself as the one who impregnates all of the women in the kingdom (without actually having sexual intercourse with them) and as the one who fertilizes all of the lands (without actually working them), the Tu’i Tonga became the ‘father’ of all Tongans, their common ancestor, who were connected to the gods through him. Deprived of their own ancestors, the commoners were thus also deprived of survival in human form after death. Their spirit left their corpse and turned into an insect in danger of being swallowed by an animal or a god.27 For in Tonga, the gods ate people. By this reasoning, it was the exclusive privilege of the chiefs (and sometimes the bravest warriors) to eat human flesh, for to eat another human was considered to be the way to prevent them surviving and becoming an ancestor. It was to annihilate them completely. To eat another person was the surest sign of power. Already having the gods as ancestors, having the right to have several wives, and to eat human beings, Tongan aristocrats had, after this life and such an exceptional destiny, the perspective of being the only ones to have access after death to Pulotu, the Tongan “paradise.” In short, the presence of two models of conception in Tonga reflects transformations of the (mental) universe of representations, ideological transformations, that were part of the process of the emergence of a dominant “class” or “caste,” which concentrated in its membership all of the major political and religious functions, controlled access of the rest of the population to both the land and the gods, and claimed right of life and death over all who were not noble. As the functions and ranks of the eldest lines progressively separated them from the younger lines, the kinship relations between the chiefly families and the rest of the population gave way to relations between masters and subjects. As this tribal aristocracy concentrated rights in the land, the labour, the services and finally the life of the rest of the population, these powers separated it definitively from other human beings and raised its members higher, bringing them closer to the gods so that they ultimately came to claim them as their direct ancestors. This is why the Tu’i Tonga Fafine, the sister of the Tu’i Tonga, had to marry her brother and unite with him as the gods do among themselves, for there was no blood in her own society that was equal to hers; the only alternative was to marry the paramount chief of another society, far away, in the Fiji Islands. The example of Tonga shows us once again that political-ritual relations go far beyond the sphere of kinship, while at the same time using the images and values connected with this domain for their own representation. After all, is not the paramount chief, the Tu’i Tonga, at the same time both the chief and the “father” of all Tongans, the tamai, just as the chief of a small Maenge village is also called “father” (tamai? In Tonga, as in New Britain, thousands of kilometres away, we see societies with Austronesian languages and cultures where, following very ancient patterns, the notions of father and chief are conjoined. This was not the case for the New Guinea Highland societies with non-Austronesian languages and cultures that belong to a much older population stock than the Austronesian-speaking groups. The Baruya do not have chiefs, they have Great Men, and the “fathers” are no one’s subjects. To conclude, we will now leave the societies of Africa and Oceania and pay a visit to two great civilizations: Europe, fashioned by Christianity, and China, where ancestor worship has been an essential aspect of the both religious and state workings for centuries. In Europe, Christian theologians have represented the sexual union of a man and a woman united by the sacrament of marriage as forming one flesh, una caro, which they transmit to their children. But here too, the union of a man and a woman are not enough to make a child. What they make is a foetus, which needs a soul in order to become a child. It is God who introduces this soul while the child is in the womb. Apparently we are not so far from the Tu’i Tonga man-god, whose spermatic breath fecundates all of the women of his kingdom. And yet, as we will see when we visit China, the difference is radical. From Chinese Antiquity up to the twenty-first century, one of the fundamental institutions of society and the state has been ancestor worship. Even the onslaught of the Red Guards was unable to eradicate it. The rites are celebrated in the family and the lineage on the house altar, which holds the tablets of the male ancestors, each accompanied by his wife’s tablets, going back four generations. These rites reflect the way the Chinese represent the individual, his birth and his death, the central idea being that the ancestors are reborn in their descendants every five generations. For the Chinese, a person has two souls, a body-soul, whose presence is indicated by the breathing that shows a person is alive; and a breath-soul, which, unlike the body-soul, does not disappear at the time of death but subsists for several generations before being born again. At the time of death, while the body-soul disappears into the ground, the breath-soul takes up residence in the tablet that will henceforth represent the deceased and will be placed, in accordance with his rank, on the home altar. This tablet, on which are marked the deceased’s name and a few salient details of his life, accompanies the body to the grave side and is then brought back to the family altar, now containing the disembodied soul of the deceased. Four generations later, this tablet will be either buried or burned, and the soul of the deceased will be reincarnated in one of his descendants, ideally the son of his great-great grandson (Granet 1993: 86-7).28 Here the incompatibility between the Christian and Chinese religions becomes evident. For Christians, each soul is unique and is a gift from God. But the soul that was introduced into the body before birth will be immediately defiled by the original sin committed by Adam and Eve, the ancestors of humanity, and this sin is transmitted from one generation to the next by the carnal union of a man and a woman. It is therefore the Christian’s duty to live in such a way that he will be able to erase the sin that marked his birth and which he will confront after death when he is called before the throne of God. The idea that a person’s soul could be the reincarnation of another person, of an ancestor, is for Christian theologians a heretical idea in so far as it denies God’s systematic intervention in the “animation” of bodies. This allows us to understand why Christianity, wherever it has been present, has always fought with all its might against ancestral religions that entailed the idea of reincarnation (from Roman Antiquity, with the veneration of the manes, the ancestors and the house gods, lares, to the ancestor cults encountered in Africa, Asia or Oceania). 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The Gift: The Form and Reason for exchange in archaic societies. Translated by Halls, W. D. New York/London: W.W. Norton. Montague, Susan. 1971. “Trobriand kinship and the virgin birth controversy.” Man 6(3): 353-68. ———. 1993. “The Trobriand gender identity.” Mankind 14: 33-45. Mosko, Mark, S. 1995. “Rethinking Trobriand chieftainship.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1(4): 763-85. Munn, Nancy. 1986. The Fame of Gawa: A symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panoff, Michel. 1968. “The notion of double self among the Maenge.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 77(3): 275-95. ———. 1976. “Patrifiliation as ideology and practice in a matrilineal society.” Ethnology 15(2): 175-88. Pi-chen, Liu. 2004. “Les Mtiu, femmes, chamanes, genre, parente, chamanisme et pouvoir des femmes chez les Kavalan de Taiwan (1895-2000).” Unpublished doctoral thesis (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris). Rogers, Garth. 1977. “The Father’s Sister is Black: A Consideration of Female Rank and Powers in Tonga.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 86 (2): 157-182. Sahlins, Marshall. 1963. “Poor man, rich man, Big man and chief: Political types in Melanesia and Polynesia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5: 285-303. Weiner, Annette. 1976. Women of Value, Men of Renown. Austin: University of Texas Press. Weiner, Annette. 1978. “The reproductive model in Trobriand society.” Mankind 2: 175-86. ———. 1979. “Trobriand kinship from another view. The reproductive power of women and men.” Man 14(110.2): 328-48. ———. 1988. The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. ___________________ * We are very grateful to Verso Books for giving us the permission to publish this version of Chapter seven (Fifth component 1), The metamorphosis of kinship, Verso (forthcoming 2012). 1. During one of the rituals before the initiates enter the big ceremonial house, the tsimia, all of the fires burning in the villages were extinguished and the ‘first fire’ was lit in the tsimia by striking sparks from two flintstones. These flintstones are among the sacred clan objects held by the master of the initiations and the shamans, whose ancestor received them as a gift from the Sun (together with the magic to make them work). In everyday life, the Baruya make fire by friction and not by striking. 2. According to certain myths known by all men and women, Moon is the wife of Sun. But in the esoteric stories the master of the shamans tells apprentice shamans, Moon is Sun’s younger brother. 3. For the Baruya, menstrual blood means just the opposite of its significance for the Kavalan of Taiwan. The Kavalan are an Austronesian-speaking, matrilineal and matrilocal society. The women own the land, the family assets and the children. As shamans, they have the monopoly on access to Muzumazu, the mother goddess of all the Kavalan and source of fertility. Menstrual blood has no negative connotations and comes from Muzumazu. In this society, men are considered to be unstable and lazy as well as destroyers of life because they hunt game and heads. Young men can take a wife only after having brought back an enemy head, which signifies that they now have the capacity to procreate. Finally, men are regarded as human beings to be “domesticated” by women and are exchanged between matrilines (cf. Liu Pi-chen 2004). 4. Cf. Gilbert Herdt’s work on the Sambia and ritualized homosexuality in Melanesia. 5. Note the ambiguity: incapable because they are excluded, or excluded because they are incapable? For the Baruya the second formulation is obviously the correct one. 6. Malinowski was born in a region of Poland that was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had been considered an Austrian subject during the Second World War and was placed under house arrest in Papua New Guinea, then a British colony, for the duration of the conflict. 7. These exchanges take the form of gifts and counter-gifts of valuables, armbands, shell necklaces and polished stone axes, which circulate in opposite directions. The aim is to attract, through giving, and to retain for a few years one of the finest objects in circulation on the Kula roads and to add one’s name to those who have already owned the object and whose names are henceforth attached to it. Those who are successful at this game (which held such fascination for Mauss) see their fame spread throughout the region and even to places they have never visited. And this fame achieved outside their own society is added to the prestige they already enjoy within it. For information on the Kula, see Malinowski (1922), Mauss (1925), and Godelier (1996). Concerning chiefdoms, see Malinowski (1935). 8. Malinowski notes that, in the Trobriand Islands, there are several very different representations of these spirit-children. For some they resemble a sort of little mouse, for others a tiny child, an homunculus. 9. There is a myth which tells that Bolutukwa, mother of the legendary hero Tudara, became pregnant when she shut herself up in a cave on the seashore under a stalactite that dripped water drop after drop, and thus pierced her hymen. 10. It would be interesting to compare the Trobrianders’ representations with those of the Baruya. We see that, in each case, the man nourishes the foetus in the woman’s womb. In both societies, the foetus needs to be given a human form. For the Baruya this is done by the Sun, for the Trobriand Islanders it is the husband who does this by repeated intercourse during the pregnancy. In Trobriand culture, the flesh, the bones and the skin of the foetus are made from the woman’s blood, while for the Baruya these are made from the man’s sperm. And in both societies the spirit that imparts life to this matter is that of an ancestor. 11. Cf. Malinowski (1927: 12): “The idea that it is solely and exclusively the mother who builds up the child’s body, while the man does not in any way contribute to its production, is the most important factor of the social organization of the Trobrianders’. 12. Weiner: “Nothing is so dramatic as a woman standing at a Sagali surrounded by thousands of bundles. Nor can anything be more impressive than watching the deportment of women as they attend to the distribution. When women walk onto the center to throw down their wealth, they carry themselves with a pride characteristic as that of any Melanesian Big Man” (Weiner 1976: 118). 13. In many West African societies one finds the idea that the birth of a child means ‘the return of an ancestor’, and that the identity of this ancestor is initially unknown by the child’s parents (and of course by the child itself, who has no memory of its life in the land of the dead). But, as among the Nzema, the successive deaths of infants, miscarriages, etc., lead people to try to identify the ancestor and offer him or her propitiatory sacrifices. Among the Mossi, the process by which an ancestor “comes back” to one of his or her descendants is called segre. What the deceased transmits to the child is a breath, a life principle (siga), which leaves the nostrils at the person’s death and wanders in the bush before returning to live anew in the body of one of his or her descendants. The soul of the deceased (kilima) is believed to depart and go to live in the ancestors’ village, in a place called Pilimpiku. When a child is born, the father - or the man in the lineage who is qualified to make sacrifices on the ancestors’ altar - goes to a sorcerer and asks him to identify the ancestor who has come back to life in the child. The diviner identifies the ancestor, whose lineage name the child will carry thereafter. The child then receives another, personal name (yure). The many childhood illnesses or deaths are explained, according to the Mossi, by the fact that two ancestors are fighting to come back in the same child. Doris Bonnet’s list of the ancestors who can come back in a newborn child concords with the patrilineal character and the Omaha nomenclature of their kinship system. The most frequent incarnations are the child’s father’s father and the father’s brother, who is also regarded as Ego’s father, and so on. Finally, it is interesting to note that, among the Mossi, what is reincarnated in a child is not the ancestor’s soul but his or her breath, which imparts life to one of his or her descendants (cf. Bonnet 1981). 14. Cf. M. Panoff, “The notion of double self among the Maenge,” Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 77, no. 3 (1968), pp. 275-95. The “land of the dead” lies on the other side of a first river, called “Sorrow,” and is guarded by a hideous supernatural being, Kavavaleka, who forces the dead souls to lick an infected, oozing sore that covers one of his legs if they wish to cross to the other side. Those souls that refuse are sent away and become the “bad/evil dead” doomed for all eternity to wander the earth, where they take pleasure in assaulting the living. Those souls that cross the river are welcomed by a god, Notu, who washes them and rids them of whatever dirty malodorous remnants of their outer double may still cling to their inner self. The deceased thus becomes ‘like a beautiful light’, and it is then that the god Noti takes him or her across a second river, called “Oblivion” - as in Lethe, the river of the ancient Greeks. There, on the other side, he or she is welcomed by the deceased members of the matridan. The soul is now rid of all earthly ties, and ready to begin a blissful life free of labour or suffering of any kind. The human being once again becomes what he was in the beginning: immortal. 15. These women’s functions associate them with a Tantric tradition founded in the twelfth century by a Tibetan woman, certain components of which can be found in Khumbo culture. 16. On the birth of their first child, girl or boy, its parents are no longer called by their name but by the name of the child. 17. The term meaning “clan” is rus (bone), a widely spread word in central Asia. In his Elementary Structures of Kinship, Claude Levi-Strauss alluded to the existence of “relatives by the bone” and “relatives by the blood” in these societies. More recently, “bone” relatives and the concept of rii have been the object of new research, among which the particularly enlightening study by Nancy E. Levine on the Nyinba of Nepal (1981). 18. According to the famous Book of the Dead, which the Khumbo, like all other Tibetans, read at funerals (cf. Fremantle and Trungpa 1975: 84). 19. The contrast between the Khumbo and the Kharta harks back to a process that began in central Tibet well before the thirteenth century. The formation of the old kingdom of Tibet had already weakened the clan confederations and replaced them with a new military and civil administration, dividing the society into 4 rti (horns), each of which was split into 8 districts. But the clans continued to exist, even if their functions had been redefined by the new social structures that served as a power base and an instrument of a new hereditary aristocracy and the royalty. By the twelfth century, with the recognition of Buddhism as the official religion and the decline of the royal family, a new social order was created, featuring the emergence of large religious centres and monasteries, which became the new sites of political and religious power. The clans and clan names began to disappear. People were increasingly defined by their place of birth and residence, and by their affiliation with one or another form of Buddhism and a given religious centre. The patrilineal descent rule and genealogical memory became the marks of priestly or aristocratic families As Diemberger writes: With the 13th century, the idea of the reincarnation of a conscious principle independent of kinship became the conceptual basis for thinking the reincarnation of political-religious figures, the tulku, lines of hierophants the most famous of which is the Dalai Lama. This transpired at the time when Buddhism came to structure society. Then, generally speaking, clan names yielded to place names and names of religious communities of belonging as indicators of identity” (Diemberger 1993: 281). 20. In various passages of his work, Malinowski mentions the Trobrianders’ exasperation with the preaching of the Protestant and Catholic missionaries, who criticized their sexual practices and their beliefs about the way babies are made. Here is what he says: “The whole Christian morality is strongly associated with the institution of a patrilineal and patriarchal family with the father as progenitor and master of the household. In short the religion, whose dogmatic essence is based on the sacredness of the Father to son relationships and where the moral stand or fall with a strong patriarchal family, most obviously proceeds by making the paternal relation strong and firm, by first showing that it has a natural foundation. Thus I discovered that the natives had been somewhat exasperated by having preached at them what seems to them an absurdity, and by finding me, so ‘unmissionary’ as a rule, engaged in the same futile argument” (Malinowski 1927: 59). 21. Concerning Afek, see Godelier (1996), and Craig and Hyndman (1990). 22. Food and feeding others played an important role in constructing Tongan social identity. It must also be remembered that in Tonga, women did not traditionally work the land and did not usually do the cooking. These were male tasks. The women devoted a large part of their time to the production of big mats made of beaten bark, tapas, which were distributed or exchanged on all ceremonial occasions. The men thus had a very important nurturing role. It was they who grew the yams and prepared the ground for the cuttings. But it was the earth that made the cutting into a tuber. The earth thus acted like the women. In the Tongan language, womb, land and grave are all the same word, fonua. And it is on the maternal relatives’ land that the newborn child’s umbilical cord is buried. It is in this sense that non-relatives who live together and regularly eat the products of the same land end up sharing the same substances and becoming quasi-relatives, between whom marriage is forbidden. In Tonga, the fact of sharing or not sharing the same substances made people relatives or subjects (cf. Douaire-Marsaudon 1995). 23. In a kainga, the “father,” tamai, wielded and transmitted authority over the land and the people on it. The father’s sister, mehekitonga, played a crucial role in the rites of passage. She was believed to control the fertility of her brother’s wife, whom she could make barren at a whim. She also controlled all transactions concerning her ancestral lands and the marriages of her brother’s children. 24. Perhaps the amniotic fluid. The chiefs used to bathe in ponds also called vaiola. Today this is the name of the hospital in the kingdom’s capital city. 25. This version was collected and discussed by the Tongan historian and philosopher Futa Helu-Aite (1975: 63; 1978: 195-208) and by F. Douaire-Marsaudon (1998: 140; cf. Rogers 1977: 157-82). 26. The ancestor of the Tu’i Tonga, the god Tangaloa, is also called Eitumatupua. Aita = god, tupua = ancestorhood. The god Tangaloa is thus the ancestor par excellence, Aitu. 27. Certain accounts collected by Europeans at the start of the nineteenth century show that not all commoners shared this aristocratic representation. 28. Granet is referring to aristocratic traditions dating to the so-called "feudal" period, i.e. before the first Chinese Empire (221 BC).

The hierarchical relation This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Michael Houseman. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.1.012 TRANSLATION The hierarchical relation A particular ideology or a general model? Michael HOUSEMAN, École Practique des Hautes Études Translated by Eléonore Rimbault The hierarchical relationship introduced by Louis Dumont has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Drawing on Dumont’s own remarks, this text sets out to present the hierarchical model in a systematic fashion. After dealing with a number of definitional issues (the notions of encompassment, value, levels, ideology, etc.), it highlights the theoretical originality of this model and considers some of the questions it raises: What possible forms can it take? How does it relate to empirical facts? What mental processes does it presuppose? Keywords: Louis Dumont, hierarchy, hierarchical relationship, encompassment, representations I believe that hierarchy is not, essentially, a chain of super-imposed commands, nor even a chain of beings of decreasing dignity, nor yet a taxonomic tree, but a relation that can succinctly be called “the encompassing of the contrary.” (Dumont 1980: 239) The currently emerging debate on the idea of hierarchy encounters from the start an all too frequent problem in the social sciences, and in particular in anthropology, [252]version of the principle of hierarchynamely, that of propositions which, in spite of their theoretical implications, have not been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. My aim here is to address this problem. The principle of hierarchical relationship was introduced by Louis Dumont in 1966 by an innovative analysis drawing both on Talcott Parsons’ ideas on structural affinities between subsystems of the social system, and on the organizational features of Indian castes. Yet this idea has not been met with the substantial debate one might have expected, and has encountered numerous resistances—among which the strongest has certainly been the tendency to reduce hierarchy to a particular form of social stratification. It is therefore difficult to assess the relevance of this principle without scrutinizing it further, so as to assess its advantages and limitations. Either the notion has little validity, which requires demonstration, or it possesses merits and virtues, in which case they should be put to use. Neither of these two possibilities have been pursued thus far.1 Some may argue that in the absence of a more precise and expanded formulation, this principle remains difficult to use. In this perspective, it is regrettable that, aside from a few pages of a Postface entirely devoted to it, the hierarchical relationship has yet to have been presented in a systematic fashion, and has thus remained the implicit generalization of a comparative sociology based on Indian material. The necessity of such a presentation as a stage prior to any discussion justifies the internal organization of the following pages. Drawing on Dumont’s remarks, I will first try to specify what, exactly, a hierarchical model might be. Then, by considering some of its aspects—and some of the questions it raises—more closely, I will foreground its originality. * The principle of hierarchy as put forward by Dumont essentially rests on the following proposition: most of the time, if not always, the terms of a given opposition are related in different ways to the whole they compose; it follows that any relationship that distinguishes between them is inseparable from a reference to the whole that orders them with respect to each other. It is nevertheless useful, for the sake of clarity, to discriminate between two versions of this principle. The first, which I will call the “restricted” version, specifies the nature of this difference: one of the terms is identical to the whole, and as a consequence, encompasses the other term, its contrary. This is a “hierarchical opposition” proper. The other version of the principle, which I will call the “general” version, and of which hierarchical opposition is but a special case, does not specify the nature of this difference; it simply calls attention to its existence and draws consequences from this, among which the most important is the taking into account of differences of value. Let us consider these two versions in order. [253]The restricted version of the principle of hierarchy proposes that just as a distinctive opposition (positing a relationship of contrariety between two terms) is recognized, a hiearchical opposition (defined as an encompassing-encompassed relationship between these terms) should be recognized as well. As an example, Dumont invites us to consider sexual differentiation as presented in the Biblical narrative, that is, the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. In this case, Adam is two things at once, and the relationship between him and Eve is consequently dual: on the one hand, as a prototype of the human species’ male individuals, Adam is opposed to Eve; on the other, as the original representative of this species from which Eve was extracted, he encompasses her. The English word “man,” by signifying both the category of male human beings and that of human beings in general, has a similar bivalence. In both of these examples, one mythical, the other linguistic, we can distinguish two levels: on a higher level, there is unity, on a lower level, distinction. These two relations taken together—i.e., the conjunction of identity and contrariety—constitute the hierarchical relationship. Thus, hierarchical ordering does not derive directly from the intrinsic qualities of the entities concerned, but from the interrelation of the categories these entities represent. More specifically, it refers to a relation between a whole (or a set) and one element of this whole (or set) where: the element [e.g.: Eve, “woman”] belongs to the set and is in this sense consubstantial or identical with it; at the same time, the element is distinct from the set or stands in opposition to it. This is what I mean by the expression “the encompassing of the contrary.” (Dumont 1980: 240) Easily lending itself to formalization (e.g., Euler diagrams), the hierarchical relation not only constitutes a clarifying alternative to the simple binary opposition, but also provides a powerful and rigorous tool for intercultural comparison. In order to better appreciate these two benefits of hierarchy, one must consider the general version of this principle. The general version of the principle of hierarchy proposes that most oppositions, if not all, have a hierarchical aspect. To the extent that the terms of an opposition do not stand in the same relationship with respect to the whole they comprise, their differentiation is inseparable from a reference to this whole that orders one in relation to the other. And it is this reference to a totality, which, by ordering these elements, establishes a difference of value between them. Hence, the relative value of a pair of terms, determined by their relation to the whole of which they are a part, is inherent in their distinction; it … cannot be dissociated from their distinction as if there were, on the one side, an idea of simple polarity, and on the other, a value that would be superadded to it. (Dumont 1980: 243–44) The classical problem of lateral symbolism (the preeminence of the right hand) may serve to illustrate the usefulness of this principle. As a rule, this question has been approached by assuming a symmetry between the two hands, such that one goes about accounting for the preeminence of one hand over the other by linking the left-right dichotomy to other oppositions that are deemed homologous (man/[254]woman, day/night, tribal moieties, etc.). The perspective offered here sheds a new light on this question. The terms left and right cannot be defined in and of themselves, but necessarily refer to a whole, the body, which defines and organizes these terms, and to which they relate differently. In any situation therefore, it is clear that hands cannot be equal: “The implicit reference to the whole of our body has as its necessary consequence the preeminence of one of the hands over the other” (Dumont 1980: 243). Hence the preeminence of the right hand turns out to be a false problem, at least to a certain extent. It is a problem which arises when one forgets to refer to a totality, and when an unfounded separation between facts (such as a presumed symmetry) and values (a specified asymmetry) is introduced. This separation is illegitimate: hands, Dumont notes, are different in value and nature at the same time. The preeminence of one over the other is therefore not contingent but necessary. The same is most probably true of other oppositions raised in relation to the right-left couple.2 Recognizing the hierarchical aspect of oppositions does not, of course, resolve the problem of their explanation. For instance, one still needs to account for why the right hand is generally favored over the left, although not always. But it does give us a more realistic framework to work with: “by substituting an asymmetrical or ordered opposition for a symmetrical or equi-statutory opposition that does not exist, we are drawing closer to the thought we are studying” (Dumont 1979: 811). Considering values forces us to take into account specific situations, particular points of view, and it introduces a new rigor in the study of the relationship between cultural elements. Indeed, a hierarchical account of oppositions requires us to distinguish between the situations and contexts in which these oppositions arise. Some more classical approaches, in particular those that seek to carry out binary classifications, may of course take such situations into account. However, most often, by introducing an artificial separation between the facts (or ideas) and the way they interact within a system of values, they tend to generalize the relations they establish without contextual reference. The construction of tables of equivalence that frequently accompanies such efforts exemplifies this mode of reasoning. In short, the distinction of situations ceases to be considered as pertinent at the moment we pass from elements to the set as a whole, as though each situation were in itself independent of the “mentality” as a whole, though it should be evident that the very distinction of situations depends on the mentality in question. (Dumont 1979: 808) By contrast, in a hierarchical perspective, given that the relative value of a couple of terms, which is seen as constitutive of their distinction, relates to specific situations, defining the context is crucial to assess both particular oppositions and the way they relate to each other. In this manner, a hierarchical perspective forces us to differentiate situations both with regard to their nature and to their relative importance in relation to the [255]system of cultural representations of which they are a part. What should one understand, then, by situation? The value of a series of terms, it has been previously noted, derives from their relation to the totality they constitute. If we further assert that distinguishing between situations requires an attention to values as well, it is because doing so involves distinguishing between different totalities. In this way, paying systematic attention to situations or contexts entails making a distinction between the different ordered sub-sets, or, more exactly, the sub-systems that compose a system of cultural representations. Dumont calls these sub-systems “levels,” and he calls the sum of levels or sub-systems that comprise a given system of cultural ideas and values (he speaks of “value-ideas” [idées-valeurs]) an “ideology” (Dumont 1979: 808). Here, a new problem arises: how can such sub-systems (or levels) be delineated? The principle of hierarchy itself provides an answer: by changes, or, more precisely, reversals of value. By definition, a symmetrical opposition may be reversed at will: its reversal produces nothing. On the contrary, the reversal of an asymmetrical opposition is significant, for the reversed opposition is not the same as the initial opposition. If the reversed opposition is encountered in the same whole in which the direct opposition was present, it is evidence of a change of level. (Dumont 1979: 811) Value reversals—for instance when the left is favored over the right, when “woman” is presented as encompassing “man” rather than the opposite, etc.—occur in situations or contexts associated with identifiable levels or sub-systems within an ideology. Taking the existence of such sub-systems into account as an essential feature of an ideology allows us to give a simple structural explanation for these inversions that might otherwise—considering the trouble they introduce in interpretive attempts based on binary classification—be brushed aside. Nevertheless, we have yet to determine how these sub-systems or levels are organized among themselves. Dumont’s hypothesis is implicit in his two-fold use of the word “level,” which he adopts to designate both the different dimensions of a given hierarchical opposition (identity and contrariety), and the different sub-systems in which this opposition and its reversal arise. The unitary integration of these subsystems, as well as their distinction, follow a hierarchical ordering: one level is contained in another according to the principle of encompassment of the contrary (hierarchy in the restricted sense). Thus, the elements of a sub-system are distinguished in terms of value with respect to the totality this sub-system represents, and furthermore, the sub-systems themselves are also distinguished in value with respect to the totality of which they form a part, that is, ultimately, the ideology as a whole. When dealing with an opposition between a pair of terms, it is thus important, while taking into account a relation of superiority/inferiority between them, to also specify the ideological level at which this hierarchical relation itself is situated. One tribal moiety, for instance, may be represented as superior to the other in some situations, and inferior in others; this is because their interrelationship pertains to two different levels or sub-systems, themselves hierarchically ordered within a system of representation according to the principle of encompassment and not just by virtue of being attributed different ranks. [256]Note, finally, that in the light of this hypothesis, the presence of a plurality of sub-systems or levels (indexed by value reversals) is a quality inherent to the organization of ideological systems. Indeed, a given hierarchical opposition, a relation of superiority/inferiority between two terms, “cannot be true from one end of experience to the other (only artificial hierarchies make this claim), for this would be to deny the hierarchical dimension itself, which requires situations to be distinguished by value” (Dumont 1980: 244). Value differences sustained by the hierarchical principle are thus not unilateral but “bidimensional”: the occurrence of a hierarchical relation between a pair of terms in itself implies its reversal—i.e., the realization of an ordering that is both “contrary” to the first and encompassed by it (and therefore subordinated to it). In this way, The reversal is built-in: the moment the second function [that of the inferior term of the couple] is defined, it entails the reversal for the situations belonging to it. That is to say, hierarchy is bidimensional, it bears not only the entities considered but also on the corresponding situation, and this bidimensionality entails the reversal (ibid.: 225) We can now see that underlying this first overview of the “restricted” and “generalized” versions of the principle of hierarchy is a particular overall understanding of ideological systems which includes the encompassing-encompassed relationship, a taking into account of value differences, the bidimensional nature of superior/ inferior relations, and so forth. This view nonetheless remains implicit to a great extent. To make it more explicit, let us look further into the nature of a general model based on the hierarchical principle. * Hierarchy is considered here to be a general principle governing the organization of ideological systems. The latter relate not to the world, but to representations of the world. It seems unlikely, however, that the global structure of these systems is present as such, as a kind of road map to the ideology concerned, in the minds of each of its actors. Thus, in the perspective considered here, systems of representation founded on the principle of hierarchy do not reproduce the thinking of particular participants. Rather, they are interpretations constructed by observers to account for the ordered, collective integration of such thinking—an integration (and hence, the relevance of these interpretations) which is attested by the systematic quality revealed in the study of social phenomena. The use of these constructions is primarily analytical: they provide structural models allowing for accounts of such phenomena as integrated into overall arrangements determined by a limited number of principles. From this point of view, hierarchy is hardly unique: other principles, such as those of dialectics or structuralism, allow for the elaboration of other types of models. Dumont himself noted on several occasions the formal homology existing between hierarchy and dialectic, that consists in there being two levels, one of which transcends the other. But this is their only common feature. Indeed, whereas for dialectics the distinctive opposition between a pair of terms is a relation of contradiction, for hierarchy it is a relation of complementarity. While the former stems from a substantialist conceptualization and primarily deals with the terms themselves and their logical relations with another, the latter is grounded in structural [257]thought and is concerned with the “universe of discourse” formed by these terms and the internal relations that constitute it. Indeed, it is in light of this difference that we can understand the two-dimensional character of hierarchical oppositions. It is because the hierarchical relation establishes a relation of complementarity, not contradiction, that a superior/inferior relationship between a pair of term can encompass its opposite, entailing an inversion of these values. Such an inversion does not neutralize the relation between the elements concerned, but, on the contrary, enriches the discursive universe they comprise. Contrasting these two principles from the point of view of the dynamics they bring into play only reinforces this fundamental divergence: If we try to imagine a diachronic aspect, a process, corresponding to [complementarity], it will be differentiation, by which what was our “universe of discourse,” supposed to be at first unified, splits into two [complementary] opposites. Contradiction on the contrary has been used as a principle of process of development in time. (Dumont 1971: 77) Hierarchy and dialectic are mirror images; they are, in this sense, true opposites: [D]ifferentiation does not change the global setting, given once and for all; in a hierarchical schema the parts that nest one side the other may increase in number without changing the law.The Hegelian schema based on the contradiction works quite differently. By the negation and the negation of the negation, a totality without precedent can be produced synthetically. In fact, in Hegel’s thought the deepest motive is to produce … a totality from a substance. In the hierarchical schema, in the contrary, the totality preexists and there is no substance. (Dumont 1980: 243) These remarks allow us to emphasize, in passing, how important it is to distinguish between hierarchy and social stratification. While the latter denotes a relation of unilateral subordination between elements, hierarchy denotes a bidimensional (implicitly reversible) subordination between them that is based on a reference to a totality. In this manner, stratification and simple subordination, on the one hand, and hierarchy, on the other, represent inverse perspectives: in one, the sum of particular inferior/superior relations, taken as primary units, are aggregated to form a whole, whereas in the other, a differential reference to this whole determines the constitution of the relations between the elements it assembles. At the same time, the hierarchical principle contrasts sharply with the underlying principle of the French structuralist approach: Now, while in binary opposition the distinctive opposition used in its pure form both atomizes the data and renders it uniform, the hierarchical distinction unifies the data by welding together two dimensions of distinction—between levels and within a single level. (Dumont 1979: 813) Developing this idea further, we may say that according to the hierarchical model, the ideological system, far from being monolithic is, on the contrary, both composite and contextual: its integration depends not on a commutative logic, based on permutation and analogy, and applied to homogeneous entities, but to an oriented logic, that of asymmetrical encompassment, which preserves the heterogeneity of the elements it [258]brings together. In short, the hierarchical principle differs from the structuralist perspective in that it takes the complex nature of cultural phenomena into consideration. Indeed, recognizing hierarchy is to place oneself in the field of complexity that lies to either side of structuralism’s implicit assumption, which is that the whole can be reduced to the sum of the relations between its constitutive parts. With the restricted version of the principle of hierarchy, that is, the hierarchical opposition per se, the whole is taken as equal to one of its parts; in the general version of this principle, it is held to be more than their sum. Now, it is precisely this complex quality of the hierarchical model that underlies the integrative capacity of the systems it determines. Thus hierarchy produces, by definition, configurations that cannot be exhausted by their taxonomic interpretation. The latter, which systematically results in inconsistencies—“among men, there are men and women” is such an example—is necessarily partial. In other words, the principle of hierarchy acts not so much to register observable differences, but rather to establish relevant distinctions by incorporating them into global schemes—wholes—that cannot be reduced to simple classificatory principles. In sum, the hierarchical relation, as a source of complexity, generates structure. We will come back to this, but let us note here that, by virtue of this complexity, a hierarchical model is also radically different from the normative models advanced by British structural functionalism: contrarily to the latter, a model based on the principle of hierarchy cannot define unilateral rules of organization based on the absolute value of particular concepts (e.g., unilineal descent, exogamy, etc.). In the perspective outlined here, not only does a given value-idea (concerning, for instance, group membership, residence, matrimonial prescription or proscription, etc.) encompass its “contrary,” but it is also integrated with the latter in a relationship of subordination which can similarly encompass its own reversal. What sets hierarchical models apart from those founded on dialectics or (French or British) structuralism, that is, that which distinguishes the hierarchical opposition from contradiction, simple binary opposition, or unilateral subordination is its dependence on a reference to a whole. The hierarchical model rests on this holistic proposition: the integration of a system (or a relationship) is determined primarily by its incorporation in a larger system. Now, this raises a new problem: what about the system of cultural representations as a whole, the ideology itself? If we take the above-mentioned proposition seriously, an ideology’s integration requires that it also must be incorporated in a totality of a higher order. And for the latter to be truly ultimate, it must remain, at least in part, inaccessible. In other words, it must exceed or transcend ordinary experience. Thus, if the hierarchical relation depends on a holistic principle, this principle in turn requires a logical legitimation of a transcendental order. To partake of an ideology is to recognize a relation to a transcendental whole which, following the hierarchical scheme, at once encompasses the social order per se and, at another level, is distinct from it. This ultimate reference, in that it is presupposed by the very coherence of the ideological system, permeates it and animates it in its most minute details. This is surely how we must understand what Dumont calls the cardinal value of an ideology. Based on the preceding comparisons, we may conclude that an ideological model based on the principle of hierarchy can be identified as having three interdependent characteristics: (1) refusing to separate ideas from values, and consequently [259]requiring an attention to contexts and situations, it is made up of elements (valueideas) connected by relations of bidimensional subordination (hierarchical oppositions) whose constitutive aspects are complementary; (2) by combining different levels, and combining identity and contrariety both within a hierarchical opposition and between the latter and its implicit reversal, it engenders complex configurations and sub-systems, that is, ones that cannot be reduced to simple classificatory schemes (e.g., taxonomies) or unilateral normative rules; (3) positing a holistic perspective, it makes a transcendental reference, that is, the recognition of a relation with something inaccessible (ancestors, spirits, deities, God, etc.) a necessary condition for the cohesion of these sub-systems and for the integration of the ideology as a whole. * Having outlined the hierarchical model, it should be clear that it raises a host of questions. I will now try to provide some answers, considering first the diversity and the significance of the hierarchical relation, and then the relationship between the hierarchical model and empirical facts. Finally, I will consider how the model might be justified on the level of the mental processes it supposes. Our first problem has to do with the possible diversity of hierarchical arrangements and, more generally, the overall organization of an ideology. Since Dumont asserts that most oppositions have a hierarchical dimension, we should wonder how many distinct types of hierarchical relations can exist. Considering another of Dumont’s affirmations, that hierarchy is essentially the presence of an “encompassing of the contrary” (Dumont 1980: 239), we may also ask: how many kinds of “encompassing of the contrary” can be distinguished, and how are these different types aggregated? Let us first consider two of these types of hierarchical relations. One, which I call the “extensive” type, is the hierarchical opposition per se (the case of the word “man,” for instance), that is, the case in which the extension of a set or category includes, at another level, its anti-extension (“woman”). The other, which I will call the “anti-extensive” type, is simply the reverse: the case of a set or category whose anti-extension contains, at a different level, the set or category itself. The distinction between the initiated and the uninitiated mediated by male initiation rites provides an especially rich example of the latter type. At one level, this dichotomy corresponds to the masculine/feminine opposition, where the (feminine) category of the uninitiated includes male individuals (boys) as well as female ones (women and girls). At a different level and similarly, it corresponds to the opposition between adults and children where the category of the uninitiated (children) includes both adults (women) and children (boys and girls). From a dynamic perspective, this second type of hierarchy is a development of the first: while the hierarchical opposition properly speaking underlies—as it does in the Genesis narrative—the emergence of a duality from a singularity, in this case a duality, the initiated/uninitiated opposition, gives rise to a tripartite division that distinguishes between individuals having undergone initiation, those having yet to undergo it, and those who will never undergo it. And this three-fold distinction in turn leads to the emergence of a new dichotomy between, on one hand, persons naturally destined to undergo initiation and, on the other, those who, by their very nature, are excluded from it. This of course is but a confirmation, in cultural terms, [260]of the biological sexual difference, and, in that respect, initiation does not create new categories. Rather, it imposes a (culturally) reconfigured way of understanding preexisting (natural) ones. Indeed, by incorporating a distinction between the sexes, as well as that between adults and children into a unitary hierarchical scheme, it institutes these discriminations. In other words, by combining the categories of age and sex in a hierarchical relationship, it orients the taxonomic interpretations that can be elaborated with regards to them, thereby legitimating the emergence of genuinely new ideological propositions, such as: “among male individuals, some (initiated men) are more masculine than others (uninitiated men, boys),” “among adults, some (women, uninitiated men) are less adult than others (initiated men),” “among children, some (boys) are more childlike than others (girls),” and so forth. From a synchronic point of view, the two types of hierarchies described above can be combined in what we might call a “modular” hierarchical relation: a hierarchical relationship than encompasses its own reversal. Such is the case of the left/ right opposition where one of the hands, the one that usually dominates, is subordinated to the other in situations that are associated to specific functions of the latter. We thus arrive at the definition of three elementary hierarchical configurations. They all include, in different ways, two elements or value-ideas: (1) the hierarchical opposition proper, which is an “extensive” hierarchy (that can be extended recursively through the addition of supplementary terms where A encompasses B, B encompasses C, etc.); (2) the inverse of this opposition, that is, an “anti-extensive” hierarchy; and (3) a “modular” hierarchy which is a possible aggregation of form (1) and (2), with specific properties (e.g., reversal) (see Figure 1). Figure 1. This typology leads to the following hypothesis: an ideology’s structure, though it may vary from one case to the next, is always founded on an articulation of these three modes of elementary hierarchical relation. Some features of the Biblical narrative of the Genesis illustrate such an articulation. In Figure 2, the story of the Genesis appears as a series of hierarchically ordered separations or differentiations, where various elements (sky, earth, man, etc.) are simultaneously arranged [261]at different levels so as to form sub-systems which encompass each other (e.g., creation/procreation). The “cardinal value” of this ideology, the divine, intervenes as a recurrent reference, underlying at once the constitution of these different subsystems and their overall cohesion. As the example suggests, from the perspective I have laid out, the hierarchical organization of a system of representations does not correspond to a fixed ordering of interrelations into a set layering of levels. Rather, it corresponds to an “open” articulation of hierarchical relations whose global integration is based, in the end, on an ultimate reference (the cardinal value) which, to a variable extent, is common to all of them.3 Figure 2. [262]A second problem concerns the limits of the hierarchical model and, in connection with this, what we might call its general symbolic productivity. If we state that most oppositions have a hierarchical dimension, does “most,” in this case, correspond to an empirical assessment? A theoretical necessity? In other words, is the presence or absence of hierarchical relations determined by particular conditions? By specific classes of phenomena? Even if we accept (Dumont [1980] 2013) that any opposition is implicitly hierarchical—that the recognition of difference is ipso facto discriminatory, that distinction and equality are antithetical—this does not mean that hierarchy is similarly relevant everywhere and at all times. Thus Dumont notes, on several occasions, that modern ideology seems to work against an awareness of hierarchical relations. It remains to be elucidated whether there exists domains or conditions of knowledge in which hierarchy is systematically favored, and others where it is systematically minimized or concealed. The development of the hierarchical principle itself suggests a possible answer to this question: while this model was inspired by a classificatory system of social categories (Indian castes), it does not generally fit well with indigenous systems of classification of natural species. Might this be an invariant for which totemism—in which natural distinctions provide templates for thinking about social differentiation—would be the exception that proves the rule? The hypothesis entertained here is that in a given system of cultural representations, hierarchy is privileged to order elements considered to be specifically human. Resorting or not resorting to hierarchical configurations draws as it were the boundary between a properly human world, Society or Culture, and the rest, Nature. For instance, by incorporating age and gender differences into a hierarchical scheme, initiation culturalizes or humanizes these discriminations. Having thereby become the legitimate objects of social determination, they are radically distinguished from analogous differences visible in the animal world. If we accept this hypothesis, modern ideology, which minimizes hierarchy, does not move towards a humanization of the natural world; on the contrary, it aims towards a naturalization of the human world, all the way to the ultimate limit imposed by the individual subject, raised to the rank of cardinal value.4 Now, by proceeding in this way, modern society is confronted with a paradox: it strives to deny that which allows it to define itself. As a result, a determination of the social sphere can only be accomplished either by valorizing contradictions explicitly, or by hierarchical relations expressed in the absence of hierarchy, that is, as skewed relations of equality. Pushed to its extreme, this tendency leads to the totalitarian double-talk described by George Orwell: “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” “ignorance is strength,” the Ministry of Truth tells us in 1984; “All animals are equal,” affirms the pig-dictator of Animal farm, “but some are more equal than others.”[263] * Until now, the hierarchical model has been envisaged essentially in relation to systems of representations. Now, I would like to consider briefly the connection between this ideological model and empirical forms of social organization. Indeed, the principle of hierarchy may offer an original solution to the current anthropological dilemma regarding the relationship between ideology and observable social reality. The most common approach to this problem was developed on the basis of African material by British structuralists. It posits a direct link between ideological models and social forms. Ideology defines a number of clear-cut structural principles governing norms of organization; those principles, expressed by (morally connoted) juridical rules concerning, in particular, group composition (recruitment criteria, rights and duties of group members, etc.), are deemed to determine actual social forms. The most important limitation to this otherwise fruitful approach is its presentation of an idealized image of the social morphology, which, all too often, conceals the variations of actual behavior: direct observation reveals significant divergences between the structural model which foregrounds ideology and the empirical reality it is supposed to account for.5 The other attempt to solve this problem is the outcome of the disillusion which emerged in particular when the first approach was confronted with Papua New Guinea societies that seemed to present an even wider gap between theory and practice. In this alternative perspective, the link between ideology and social form is held to be minimal if not non-existent. In short, it stipulates that society or at least some societies are intrinsically disordered; they are, as the expression has it, “loosely structured.” In such cases, an overall ideological model is held to be largely irrelevant; empirical facts, deemed elusive to structural analysis, are to be accounted for with models of individual decision-making based on the circumstantial intervention of factors external to social organization itself such as ecological, demographic, or war-related conditions. Very schematically, we could say that anthropological research is faced with the following problem: either it accepts a structural model that does not entirely account for the facts, or it takes these facts into account, but in the absence of such a model. A structural model of the hierarchical type, by postulating an indirect relationship between ideology and social forms, provides a possible solution to this dilemma. In such a model, structural principles, which relate to value-ideas in hierarchical relationships, do not define unilateral normative rules. As we have seen, not only does a given organizational principle encompass its opposite (or is encompassed by it), but furthermore, the relationship of subordination between these two “complementary” principles is implicitly reversible. The preeminence of one or the other will depend on the context. From an abstract point of view concerned with the system of representations itself, defining organizational principles in terms of general situations favoring their [264]respective preeminence is fairly straight-forward; this is what allows for the elaboration of “ideal” indigenous models entailing absolute organizational prescriptions. However, from an empirical point of view that attempts to define particular, concrete situations with regards to the relative preeminence of these principles, the task is more complicated. Such a definition, which invariably involves circumstances specific to each case being considered, is necessarily more ambiguous. Of course it may happen that the evaluation of all participants concur, in which case the situation will be determined automatically, so to speak. However, more frequently, this determination emerges out of the confrontation of divergent evaluations, whose resolution—a “consensus” of value judgments (often imperfect)—is mediated through transactions (of words, of goods, etc.) among the actors involved. Either way, in both cases, the choice is the same: either one or the other of the principles of a “complementary” pair of principles will be applied; which one it is will depend on the definition of the situation the participants arrive at. Therefore, at the empirical level, the actualization of a hierarchical model, because it requires a contextual evaluation to determine the preeminence of the principles it incorporates, relies on particular choices. It is the aggregation of such particular choices that constitutes the social forms one can empirically observe; in turn, these forms provide a contextual reference which is of great importance in the determination of subsequent choices. The relation between ideology and social forms, thus meditated by particular choices, does not, however, lead to an inherently disordered social organization. This is because the value-ideas organizational principles point to, but also the contextual situations that correspond to their relative preeminence, are hierarchically ordered among themselves. Consequently, for every situation considered, the majority of choices will point in one of the directions possible. Thus, (statistical) norms of organization are effectively realized; ideal models are indeed justified (both by anthropologists and by those they study) by the existence of these overall regularities. However, there remains a minority of choices, concealed by these idealized constructions, that run counter to these norms. The model proposed here also accounts for these; they also contribute, just like normative choices, to the ongoing elaboration of social structure. In this manner, the hierarchical model takes into account the existence of (statistical) norms of organization, the elaboration of indigenous ideal models, and incorporates all actual behaviors—including those that run counter to these norms and models—into a structural analysis. Thus it solves the (false) problem of the disjunction between ideology and empirical facts. By doing so, it eliminates the unsatisfying notion of “loosely structured” societies. The model proposed here is not less structural because it is not reducible to unilateral prescriptions, nor are the hierarchical configurations described above less classificatory because they cannot be reduced to taxonomies. However, it may be better indicated to qualify this model as “structuring” rather than “structural”: it does not describe a form of organization, rather—and this might be a superior level of explanation—it describes the conditions that determine the emergence of this form. Therefore it would be useless to attempt to draw from it generalizable rules of behavior: these are necessarily either contradictory (incorporating the encompassing of a contrary), or false (considering only one level). However, when combined [265]with knowledge of the diverse factors that can intervene in individual choices, it can help determine, and thereby explain certain overall systems of behavior. Earlier we saw how, in the case of initiation, hierarchy intervenes not to define categories of age and sex in a univocal fashion, but rather to orient thinking about them. Likewise, hierarchy intervenes here not by defining, in an absolute fashion, a set of norms for action, but by structuring behavior in reference to these norms. In the case of initiation, this results in a “system of thought” whose emerging properties cannot be deduced from the categories themselves: “among adults, some (initiated men) are more adult than others (women, non-initiated men).” The same is surely true of social systems.6 * Now that we have considered the usefulness of a hierarchical model for the analysis of representations as for that of empirical facts, we must, finally, question the admissibility of this model at the level of cognition. We may ask ourselves: what do we have to assume about mental processes in order to affirm the relevance of an ideological system based on the hierarchical model? The more substantial these prerequisites are, the less relevant the model will be: the economy of the ideological constructions it proposes would be contradicted by the weight of the presuppositions regarding the mental processes it requires. A possible answer to this question, offered as an hypothesis, consists in only admitting one thing: thought is discriminatory, it inherently establishes superior/ inferior relations. This amounts to assuming that, by virtue of certain imperatives and criteria, some of which may be of a non-conceptual order, the mind effectively differentiates at once in value and in nature. Along with this assumption, which does not seem unreasonable (it matches what we know about the process of socialization for instance), we must also add the observation that an individual can make value judgments that are logically incompatible; he or she can affirm, at different moments and in different situations that A>B and B

Descola: Beyond nature and culture: The traffic of souls Publisher’s note: This article is chapter 14 of the forthcoming translation by Janet Lloyd © by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published 2013. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637. The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London. Originally published as Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2005) © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2005. We are very grateful to The University of Chicago Press for permission to publish this chapter. Beyond nature and culture The traffic of souls Philippe Descola, Collège de France Translated by Janet Lloyd   Between identification, a means of specifying the properties of existing beings, and relations, a means of specifying the general form of the links between those beings, two kinds of connection are possible. Either the plasticity of a relational schema makes it possible for it to structure interactions in a variety of ontologies, which will then present a family likeness despite the heterogeneity of their essential principles; or, alternatively, one of the modes of identification is able to accommodate several distinct relational schemas and this introduces into an ontological configuration widely distributed in space (a cultural region, for example) the kind of concrete diversity of customs and norms from which ethnologists and historians love to draw their material. The second case is what we shall now be considering. However, the combinations made possible by the conjunction of a mode of identification and a relational mode are too numerous for us to consider them all in a systematic and detailed fashion, especially since some of them turn out not to be possible for reasons of logical incompatibility, as we shall soon see. So let us limit ourselves to considering the variations of ethos that various relational schemas imprint upon one particular mode of identification: this will be animism. The demonstration will certainly not be complete, but it will at least provide the beginnings of a proof that anthropology can always hope to find when it enters into some detail in a comparative study of a number of cases. As Mauss, mobilizing John Stuart Mill in his support, declared, “a well made experiment is enough to demonstrate a law” (Mauss 1950: 391). If I have chosen animism for this experiment, that is because, in one of its geographical variants, it raises an exemplary problem in the interpretation of the question before us. Whatever theoretical line they take, all the specialists on the Indians of Amazonia sketch in an ethnographic picture of the societies that they study in which the features of the animist ontology are easily recognizable. However, that is no longer the case when it comes to describing a specific style of social philosophy that is valid for the whole of Amazonia. Here, total disagreement reigns, with each anthropologist tending to project on to other peoples of the region the values and practices that he or she has observed in one particular ethnographic context. Ever since Lévi-Strauss, in one of his earliest articles, drew a parallel between inter-tribal trading and warfare in the lowlands of South America, it has become common to say that the paradigmatic relationship in this region is one of exchange: men exchange marriageable women (the model being a swap of sisters), goods (often identical ones) and the dead (in vendettas and warfare); women exchange among themselves plant cuttings, foodstuffs and tamed animals; chieftains exchange the right to polygamy in return for a duty to be generous; hunters exchange offerings to the animals that they hunt in exchange for their meat. In short, everything seems to circulate in an unending round of reciprocity (Lévi-Strauss 1943). More recently, as we have seen, some anthropologists have laid the emphasis on an altruistic variant of exchange, defining Amazonian sociability as a mutual production of persons amid generous conviviality, while others have, on the contrary, insisted on the cannibalistic dimension of the incorporation of others, as a typical mode of interaction. Should we accept, along with Viveiros de Castro, that “generalized predation” is “the prototypical modality of Relationship in Amerindian cosmologies” (Viveiros de Castro 2002: 164), or should we believe Overing and her disciples, who regard an intimacy based on sharing as the dominant feature of the Amazonian socius? Is the ethical horizon of these populations a fair exchange between partners of equal status, an ideal “togetherness” irrigated by mutual help and gifts? Or is it a bellicose seizure of others? The self-evident answer is that all these relational modes are certainly present, but distributed in different collectives.1 Predators and prey I shall seek an illustration of what predation may amount to once it becomes a dominant relational schema by turning to a people that has gradually become familiar to my readers. Until they were “pacified” by missionaries between 1950 and 1970, the various Jivaro tribes were reputed to be of a bellicose disposition and seemingly anarchic in their collective life. Their ceaseless wars were a source of perplexity to observers and a motive for anathema. Yet they did not indicate any disintegration of the social fabric or an irrepressible propensity for violence. On the contrary, they constituted the principal mechanism for structuring individual destinies and links of solidarity and also the most visible expression of one key value: namely, the obligation to acquire from others the individuals, substances and principles of identity that were reputed to be necessary for the perpetuation of the self. Headhunting among the Jivaro tribes—the Shuar, the Achuar, the Huambisa and the Aguaruna—and likewise the unending vendettas between members of the same tribe were, in effect, expressions of one and the same need to compensate for every death within a kindred group by capturing real or virtual persons from close or more distant neighbours. Shrinking the heads of enemies made it possible, by means of a long and complex ritual, to strip the dead person of his original identity in order to transfer that identity to the murderer’s local group, where it would become the principle for the production of a child yet to be born. By dint of shrinking the head, which preserved the dead man’s physiognomy and, along with it, his individuality, the victorious warrior captured a virgin identity that would allow his kin to multiply without incurring the obligations inherent to a marriage alliance. Consequently, the enemies who were beheaded had to be neither too close nor too distant since they provided an identity that was culturally usable yet at the same time perceived as different: they were invariably Jivaros, but were selected from a neighbouring tribe that spoke a different dialect and with which no relationship of kinship had been established in the recent past. Vendetta warfare did not involve capturing heads, but the principle that governed it was nevertheless identical. Whatever the vengeful motives involved in order to spark off an armed confrontation between two kindred groups, the assassination of an enemy belonging to the same tribe in effect often led to the seizure of his wives and young children. The wives took their place alongside the victor’s earlier wives, while the young children were adopted and treated by him as his own offspring. Thus, even if the capture of the women and children of neighbouring local groups was never an explicit and sufficient reason for undertaking a vendetta, it was in many cases an expected or even hoped-for outcome. For the victorious warrior, the advantages gained were twofold: the death of his enemy was regarded as payment for a real or imagined slight and, at the same time, he enlarged his domestic group without incurring the obligations of reciprocity upon which a marriage alliance was founded. To be sure, both headhunting and vendettas were likely to lead to reprisals, but these were obviously not sought for as such and efforts would be made to avoid their consequences. The violent and reciprocal appropriation of others within the Jivaro group was thus the product of a rejection of pacific exchange, not a deliberately engineered result of an exchange of human lives in the course of a bellicose interaction.2 Furthermore, both vendettas and head-hunting were carried out against persons that the Jivaro classified as affines even if, in actual fact, the enemies killed in the fighting might be consanguineous or, on the contrary, have no genealogical link with the murderer. A few words about social organization will help to explain this identification of enemies with relatives by marriage. The traditional Jivaro habitat is widely dispersed, with each house belonging to a single, very often polygamous family, and constituting an autonomous, political and economic unit separated from neighbours by distances that it takes between a few hours and one or two days to cover, either on foot or by canoe. Here and there, though, one comes across larger local groups comprising ten to fifteen houses strung out along a river, the members of which are more closely linked by consanguineous kinship and marriage alliances. The latter follow the rule of union between bilateral cross cousins. Now, like other Amazonian societies of the same type, these small endogamous networks tend to regard themselves as ideal consanguineous communities, for the links of affinity within them are in practice obliterated as a result of manipulations of the kinship terminology. These tend to divide affinity and consanguinity between the sexes in such a way that an exclusively masculine affinity is matched by a marriage alliance based on paradoxically consanguineous unions.3 By dissociating affinity from actual marriage, the Jivaros give themselves the means to convert it into a logical operator for thinking through relations with the outside world, as can be seen, for example, in the practice of transforming into affines consanguineous relatives if these reside outside the endogamous network. The local group’s Utopian closure on itself in effect presupposes a symmetrical opposite: namely an affinity that is clearly objectivised, given that it is free from any consanguineous contamination. Although relations outside the endogamous network are usually hostile, they are graduated according to the scale of social distance or relative otherness. This finds expression in the form of a schematization that is increasingly marked by the affinity relationship the further one moves away from the focal point where it effectively orientates the marriage alliances. Internal wars usually break out following conflicts between local neighbouring groups over some real or supposed infringement of the rules of marriage alliance. When a quarrel breaks out within the endogamous network over matters linked with rights over women, payment of compensation and the mediation of a great warrior generally suffice to prevent the outbreak of a vendetta between close kin. If an amicable arrangement proves impossible, it is usually because the guilty party or the victim of the infraction comes from another endogamous network. For endogamous closure is an ideal. In fact, though, thanks to a strict application of the principle of uxorilocality a variable percentage of exogamous unions always make it possible to introduce into a local group men who are natives of a neighbouring network. These foreign sons-in-law find themselves in a difficult situation to the extent that affinity instituted by alliance with distant kin is far looser than the more fundamental affinity instituted by a prescriptive exchange. So when a serious incident occurs, the transplanted in-law naturally enough tends to flee and seek help and protection among his direct consanguines. Through marriage alliances, each local group thus maintains a tenuous network of links of affinity with adjacent groups that may serve as the basis of a temporary coalition or, on the contrary, provide the pretext for a factional confrontation. In short, in these conflicts between neighbours, the enemies are unequivocally identified as real affines, who are sometimes described collectively as “givers of women.” In contrast to a vendetta, inter-tribal warfare has as its sole objective the capture of heads from neighbouring Jivaro tribes in order to celebrate the tsantsa ritual. The difference between “ordinary” Amazonian trophy-heads and the shrunken Jivaro heads is that the former rapidly lose any traces of a specific physiognomy, whereas the latter—for a while, at least—perpetuate the unique representation of a face. That is the sole objective of extracting the skull, desiccating the tissues and modelling the features so as to obtain a resemblance of the victim. When the tsantsa is produced, its role is that of an easily transportable condensed identity. However, the tsantsa is not a miniature effigy of a particular person, but a formal expression of a purely existential individuality indicated by no matter what facial distinctive trait, provided the head is that of a nonrelated Jivaro. For the Jivaros, an individual identity is contained not so much by the physical features of the head, but by certain social attributes of the persona: a name, speech, the memory of shared experiences and face-paintings. In order to be used in the ritual, the tsantsa must therefore be relieved of any referential residues that might remain to prevent it from embodying a generic Jivaro identity: it is never called by the patronym, if indeed that is even known, of the one whose head has been taken; its face is carefully blackened to obliterate the memory of the patterns painted on it; and finally all its orifices are sewn up, thereby consigning the sense organs to an eternal phenomenal amnesia. The depersonalization of the tsantsa renders it suitable for a rite the discontinuous phases of which extend over rather more than a year. In the rite, the tsantsa functions as a logical operator—both as a term and as a relationship—in a series of permutations between terms and relations that are themselves affected by variable values. First called “profile,” then “soft thing,” the head either simultaneously or consecutively occupies different positions, from the point of view of gender and kinship, in a series of univocal or reciprocal relationships, which may be either antagonistic or complementary, with the killer, his kin and affines of both sexes and a number of other ceremonial groups. By the time this topological ballet is completed, the tsantsa has played every role in a symbolic procreation: non-parent, giver of women, taker of women, wife and finally embryo. The very real fruit of this simulated alliance—a child to be born within the murderer’s kindred group—is thus perfectly consanguineous without being incestuous. As a virtual existence obtained from strangers, the child owes his procreation to the staging of an ideal affinity, the only kind truly satisfactory for the Jivaros, because free of any obligation of reciprocity: this is, in short an affinity without affines. Seen from this point of view, this inter-tribal war is really indistinguishable from the intra-tribal warfare of which it constitutes a logical, or even historical extension. For repeated confrontations between coalitions of different blocks of local networks can only consolidate antagonistic regional identities, thereby contributing to the continuous process of tribal differentiation that is necessary for the perpetuation of head-hunting. Between stealing women and children from potential affines who have been excluded from the kinship community and stealing identities that will produce children from non-kin with whom one simulates an ideal affinity, the difference is one of degree, not of nature. Whether waged against close enemies or distant ones, Jivaro warfare is the motor for the fabrication of collective identities. In a society without chiefs, without villages and without lineages, it renders possible a temporary coagulation of factions, a renewal of solidarities that have slackened as the result of such a dispersed habitat, and a stimulation of the social link brought about by the federating sensation of sharing a common enemy. It is through that warfare that groups of relatives acquire their substance and the principles for their renewal, by means of poaching persons and identities, all of them rare and precious, from affines either real or symbolic, who are treated as prey. To be sure, armed clashes are not permanent, but in everyone’s mind warfare is always present. At any moment a smouldering conflict is ready to burst into flame, providing the main topic of conversation and orienting the political dynamic of alliances and the interplay between factions. In a society in which the word for “peace” is unknown and the only collective rituals are those that announce or conclude the exercise of collective violence, warfare is by no means an unfortunate accident: it is the very stuff of social life. Likewise, it is through warfare that individual masculine identities are forged. As soon as boys reach adolescence, they are pressed to enter into contact with an arutam spirit, in the course of a visionary trance induced by severe fasting and continuous absorption of green tobacco juice and other hallucinogenic liquids. This terrifying experience enables the adolescent to establish a personal and secret relationship with the ghost of a deceased Jivaro warrior who will pass on to him his strength and protection. Arutam first appears in a frightening guise—a glowing head jerking from side to side, a couple of intertwined giant anacondas, or a gigantic harpy-eagle—which noisily disintegrates as soon as it is touched, then returns in human form in order to deliver a message of assistance. The young man will from then on identify with his arutam, in particular by painting his face with red dye in a design that recalls the monstrous figure in which the spirit first revealed itself to him. The immediate effect of this identification is an irrepressible desire to manifest the bravery unleashed upon him by his encounter with his protector-spirit, by plunging wildly into warfare. However, the quest for arutam needs to be regularly renewed, for the power that a man obtains from it disappears every time he takes part in a victorious expedition or kills an enemy. It then leaves him defenceless. Since the physical survival of a warrior is subjectively dependent on his ability to restore his skill at killing, the mechanism of the acquisition and subsequent loss of arutam thus contributes to a kind of uncontrollable increase in his individual propensity to accomplish his destiny in the exercise of violence. The predatory attitude that the Jivaros manifest in their relations with others, the need that they feel constantly to incorporate the bodies and identities of their neighbours in order to persist in being themselves, even while being partly determined by that which they capture and assimilate, and their stubborn rejection of any freely accepted reciprocity: all these are traits that reappear in their relations with non-humans. In this domain, the Jivaros set a higher value on their violent appropriation of substances and fluids than on the free play of their circulation. Yet, as we saw at the beginning of this book, many plants and animals are regarded as persons who share some of the ontological attributes of the humans with whom they are linked by relations of consanguinity and alliance. However, non-humans are not integrated into a network of exchange with humans and they are allowed nothing in exchange when their lives are taken. To be sure, the Jivaro hunters do address anent incantations to the game that they hunt, to the spirit-masters of the animals and to the prototypes of each species, so as to establish with them a relationship of connivance: hunting is regarded as an expression of the complicity between relatives through marriage alliances, in which the ultimate end, the killing, is masked by ludic formulae. Hunting anent are absolutely explicit in this respect: the animals are always described as brother-in-law with whom one communicates in the slightly jokey tone of forced affability that is usual in such a relationship; and sometimes the sisters of the hunted animal are even referred to as potential wives for the hunter. But treating one’s prey as an affine is really nothing but a deceit designed to disguise the basically inegalitarian nature of the relationship between the men and their animal victims. The point is to allay the mistrust of the animals so that they will not elude the hunter’s darts or make him pay for his cannibalistic intentions. As in many societies in which hunting plays a predominant role, it is not unknown for excesses to be punished. If one kills more game than is needed, one risks a snakebite or a fatal accident in the forest. But in such a case, this is purely revenge on the part of the animals—or rather their master-spirit and protector—and is designed to punish a hunter’s hubris; there is no question of it being a process of voluntary exchange founded on parity between the two parties. Even relations with plants are not free from this predatory ideology, so one should not see it as a simple rationalization of the productive destruction that characterizes any form of hunting. Manioc, the main foodstuff for the Jivaros and the most common plant in their immediate environment, is reputed to suck in through its leaves the blood of those who brush by them, but it mainly attacks the women who cultivate it and also their young children. It is a threat that is not taken lightly and the death of a baby is often attributed to anaemia provoked by manioc vampirism. Consequently, the women have to sing special anent incantations to this plant, in an attempt to switch its thirst for blood toward other, undesirable, visitors to the garden. The women treat the manioc as a child, but one who will eventually be eaten by those who have raised it. Meanwhile, the manioc is itself a child that seeks to bring about the death of human children whose sole nourishment for several years is, precisely, constituted by a kind of manioc porridge. Beneath its benign appearance, gardening in truth implies a mortal competition between the human and the non-human young. For the women, it is a matter of reproducing and raising young plants, whose flesh the humans will consume, meanwhile taking care to prevent the manioc plant from retaliating by consuming the blood of the human young who come into contact with it. The capture of real or virtual persons from close or distant enemies, the furtive seizure of game and the cunning warfare against the cannibalistic manioc thus all, in different domains, express an identical rejection of exchange in relations with others. This predatory tension is what structures the relations that the Jivaros maintain with a whole mass of subjects of many different kinds, in that it integrates their experience of the world in many domains ordinarily distinguished by the misleading analyses of dualism and it is applied, without distinction, to both humans and non-humans, to both kinship relationships and to techniques of subsistence, and to both territorial organization and ritual. One property of relational schemas is to embrace vast areas of practice without discriminating between terms according to their ontological status or the situations in which they relate to one another. These schemas are thus at the source of the stylistic effect perceived by an observer of a “culture” that is different from his own. It is an ineffable and perhaps illusory feeling, but it can be traced back to the thematic patterns of behaviour that feeds the stereotypes that every group of humans adopts toward its neighbours. This example presents an opportunity to return to consider the way in which an ethos comes to be incorporated as a way of acting according to behavioural principles that are, however, never made explicit. For the schema of predation upon affines is not regarded by the Jivaros as an explicitly transmitted norm. Given that the concepts of predation and affines are not expressed by any words in their language, their tendency to behave toward others in this way is something very internalized that has become implanted, as time has passed, ever since their earliest days and has been constructed not so much through the assimilation of a system of “collective representations” as by successive inductions based on constant observation of the conduct of adults. There are plenty of opportunities for children to be alerted to the behaviour patterns that they sense: the differences in the way that various persons are treated, the interminable discussions about the ongoing vendettas in which the shifting cartography of intimacies and alliances can be sensed, the commentaries that punctuate hunting stories or that accompany the cutting-up of the game, participation in ceremonies that are still mysterious but in which contrastive blocks of oppositions emerge, some heavy-handed joke or even an anodyne remark that remains imprinted on the mind: all these play their part in supplying reference points, prompting automatic responses, infiltrating attitudes, in short, instilling the confidence necessary to enter as an actor into the world into which one has been born. Among the Jivaros, as elsewhere, this process is fuelled by affective responses, through apprenticeship and the reinforcement of models of interrelations and interaction that occur in the first instance on the occasion of events that are remarkable because of the emotions that they arouse. This applies to warfare, of course, with all its attendant mourning and victories. It also applies to the relations of lethal complicity with hunted animals that are forged by the handling of corpses that are still warm and the excitement of the first experiences of tracking and killing one’s prey. And, for people who know nothing of “natural deaths,” it applies to the obsession with shamanistic aggression to which, from time to time, physical accidents or misfortunes testify. Here, predation upon others is not just a synthetic norm of behaviour or some anthropological idea: at an early age, Jivaro children are bound to come into contact with it both physically and mentally. By experiencing the pain of a loss and a desire for revenge, the excitement of triumph and the pleasures of resentment, every Jivaro learns to cultivate all these identifications and antagonisms that an ethnographer then dutifully logs. There are now so many rich and detailed ethnographical works that interpret the logic behind the actions of this or that ethnic group in the lowlands of South America according to the schema of generalized predation, that the case of the Jivaros no longer seems exceptional. Among the most striking examples are the Juruna and the Arawete of the Xingu valley, the Parakana of the Tocantins valley, the Mundurucu of the Tapajos valley, the Piraha of the Madeira valley, the Wari’ of Rondonia, the Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela and, further south, the Nivacle of the Gran Chaco.4 All these peoples confer the position of an intentionalsubject upon a large number of members of the cosmos. These thus find themselves in a situation of formal equality at the ontological level, while the relations between them are, on the contrary, defined in effect by a circumstantial asymmetry, with each of these humans and non-human subjects striving to incorporate the substance and identity of others, in permanent denial of any reciprocity. A similar situation is not unknown in North America, as is testified by, among others, the Sioux of the Plains and the Chippewa of the South-Western edge of the Great Lakes.5 Other cases are also to be found, for instance among the Kasua of the Mount Bosavi region of New Guinea and the Iban of Sarawak.6 However, these seem more rare, although it is hard to say whether the apparently greater concentration of predatory animism in the Americas results from particular features of the continent’s development in isolation from the rest of the world or simply from the greater attention that ethnographers studying autochthonous peoples there pay to certain details of their relations with plants and animals. The symmetry of obligations We need not look far afield to find a perfect counter-example to the Jivaros. Whereas the latter do all that they can to escape the obligations of exchange, the Tukanos of Colombian Amazonia on the contrary strive to respect such obligations meticulously in all their interactions with other inhabitants of the cosmos.7 Yet these two ethnic groups, each of which is composed of several tribes, do share many characteristics in common. In the first place, they are relatively close spatially, separated by no more than five hundred kilometres which, given the scale of Amazonia, is a mere nothing. The environments in which they live are also similar: they are dominated by the equatorial rainforest. Here, there are, to be sure, certain local differences in the availability of certain resources, but this imposes the same kinds of ecological constraints upon both groups. The Tukanos and the Jivaros have responded in similar fashion to these constraints. In both cases, they are dispersed in residential units of relatively small numbers of people; their itinerant slash-and-burn horticulture consists mainly of manioc (sweet in the one case, bitter in the other); they acquire their proteins by means of a combination of hunting and fishing, hunting being more important for the Jivaros, fishing for the Tukanos. And, finally, the way they see their environment is altogether similar: both categorize humans, plants and animals as “people” (masa, in the Tukano languages) or as “persons” (aents in the Jivaro languages) all of whom possess an analogous interiority. This makes it possible for most of the species to lead the same kind of social and ceremonial life, despite the differences in their physicalities. It is on this basis that humans can maintain with plants, animals and the spirits that protect them individual relations governed by a code of behaviour similar to that which prevails among the Indians themselves. Both the Jivaros and the Tukanos unquestionably belong to the ontological regime of animism. But the principles and values that guide their relations with others could not be more different. The Desana, one of the sixteen tribes that make up the Tukano group, offer a good starting point for an examination of those differences, for an ethnographic study of them has provided Reichel-Dolmatoff with the material for the “thermodynamic” model of the cosmos mentioned at the start of this book, with which many societies in the Amazonian north-west are now credited (see, for example, Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, 1996). According to this model, the universe was created by Father Sun, an omnipotent and infinitely distant being for whom the actual daily sun is, as it were, a delegate to this world. The fertilizing energy that emanates from Father Sun animates the entire cosmos and, through this cycle of fertilization, gestation and growth, of humans, animals and plants, ensures their vital continuity. It is likewise the source of other cyclical phenomena such as the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, the alternating seasons, the variations in nutritional resources and periodical recurrences in human physiology. However, the quantity of energy produced by Sun is finite and is deployed in an immense closed circuit that encompasses the entire biosphere. In order to avoid entropic losses, exchanges of energy between the various occupants and regions of the world therefore have to be organized in such a way that the quantities of the energy that humans extract can subsequently be re-injected into the circuit. For example, when a Desana hunts and kills an animal, a portion of the potential of the local fauna is cut off and is transferred into the human domain when that game becomes food. It is therefore necessary to ensure that the needs for human subsistence do not endanger the good circulation of the flows of energy between the different sectors of the world. And it is the responsibility of the Desana to keep a watch on the situation and compensate for the losses that are caused by what they take from non-humans. The most common means to achieve this result is sexual abstinence. By checking his carnal desires, a hunter effects a retention and accumulation of sexual energy that can then rejoin the general stock of fertilizing power that is in circulation in the universe and thereby benefit the reproduction of hunted animals. This balance can also take more direct forms. For the Desana, the relation between the hunter and his prey is above all of an erotic nature: in the Desana language, “to hunt” is rendered as “to make love to the animals” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971: 220). So men try to win the favours of their prey by means of love philtres, aphrodisiac perfumes, and seductive invocations. Charmed by these ploys, the animals fearlessly allow themselves to be approached and even visit men in their dreams or day-dreams, in order to copulate with them; and this reproductive operation helps to multiply the members of the species to which the animals belong. Although the Jivaros and the Tukanos conceive of their relations with animals as being governed by relations of affinity, the content that they ascribe to those relations could not be more different. Whereas the Jivaro hunter treats his prey as a brother-in-law who is potentially hostile and to whom nothing is owed, the Desana hunter treats it as a spouse whose line of descent he is fertilizing. Even more direct is the principal process of energy feedback. Human souls are traded against animals that can be hunted. After his death a Desana generally enters the “Milk House,” a region of the cosmos conceived as a kind of uterine paradise. In contrast, the souls of those who have not respected the exogamous prescriptions go off to great underground or underwater houses where the Vaí-mahsë live. These are the spirits that govern the destinies of hunted animals and fish. There the human souls become animals, as a kind of enforced compensation from those who have not respected the rules of exchange between humans. But this is not the most common mechanism for the renewal of the fauna. The most common operation is the responsibility of shamans. These periodically pay visits to the Vaí-mahsë in the course of trances brought on by narcotic drugs, in order to negotiate a provision of forest animals for the members of their communities to hunt. Every animal thus made available for hunting must be compensated for by the soul of a dead human that will change into an animal of the same species, destined to be included in the stock of animals amassed by the animals’ master. The humans destined to become animals after their deaths usually come from neighbouring groups but are selected by a consensus. It is said that shamans from the various Tukano tribes meet in the house of the Vaí-mahsë to decide together who, among the members of their respective collectivities, will have to die to ensure that hunting continues to be good. Negotiations for a future exchange of souls in return for game, arranged in an amicable fashion by the shamans of several tribes, thus precede the exchange of souls that each shaman negotiates with the animals’ spirit-master. The negotiation that the shaman conducts with the Vaí-mahsë aims to bring about a scrupulous equivalence between the objects involved in the transaction. Once the two parties have reached agreement, the shaman enters the house where the animals are kept, suspended from the rafters like quarters of meat in cold storage. He then shakes one of the posts to dislodge the hunk of game that he fancies for his group. But if he shakes the beams too roughly and detaches more animals than the agreed quantity, a new bout of bargaining is required in order to achieve parity. In this way, humans and animals enjoy an equal status in the living community’s access to energy; both groups help to maintain a balanced flow of it, and their functions are reversible in this quest for a perfect balance, based on strictly equal transfers. The freely accepted obligation of mutual dependence is equally central to the non-human communities. So the spirit-master of the terrestrial animals and that of the fish regularly visit each other for festivals and dances accompanied by all their families. These are opportunities to exchange women and to render one another’s respective communities fecund. As can be seen, egalitarian exchange is at the heart of the relations that the Desana weave with non-humans; its demands colour all their actions affecting the environment. It is true that certain aspects of Reichel-DolmatofFs proposed model of the Tukano cosmology have prompted disagreement, in particular the correctness of translating the Desana notion of boga (“current”) by the thermodynamic concept of a closed circuit of a finite quantity of energy. Another Tukano specialist has recently proposed an alternative model, based on his study of the Makuna, in which recyclable energy is replaced by an open-ended flow of “spiritual” forces, which sometimes increase and sometimes decrease (Cayón 2002). According to Luis Cayón, every tribal territory of the Tukano group is animated by a particular essence regarded as one of the manifestations of the mythical hero Yurupari, whom all of them recognize. This essence resides concretely in the musical instruments that are used in the periodic Yurupari rite but are ordinarily deposited in some stream or river. The essence thus travels through the rivers of all the territories and thereby, through the interconnections of the hydrographic network, mingles with the essences from other tribal groups. On the occasion of the Yurupari ceremony, which all the tribes celebrate at the same time, the forces of fertility circulating in the rivers reach a high level of concentration and bring fecundity to the forest, to the rivers and streams and to the non-human inhabitants of the cosmos. So, for the Makuna, vital power comes not from Father Sun but from the submerged instruments of Yurupari: since the quantity of energy carried in the rivers fluctuates depending on the rainfall, it falls to humans to divide it up in a balanced fashion, thereby allowing non-humans to benefit from it. In this undertaking, a crucial role is played by the specialists of ritual, for it is they who are responsible for fertilizing the non-human occupants of the territory in the course of a ceremony known as “the healing of the world” (ümüãri wãnōre). It is also up to them to go and negotiate with the Master of the animals for the more than usual quantity of game required for organizing a great collective festival. This they obtain in exchange for offerings of coca and tobacco that the Master immediately converts into fertile power for the animals. Ordinary men, too, take an active part in encouraging animal life. As may be remembered, it is a Makuna hunter’s duty to send the spirit of a slaughtered animal back to the house of its species so that it can be reborn there. They manage this by dint of an incantation that they chant silently before eating any game. In this incantation they retrace the mythical origin of the particular species that they are about to eat. It is a symbolical way of reconstituting its collective genesis in such a way as, practically, to reconstitute the essence of an individual that has temporarily been taken away from its fellows (Århem 1996; Cayón 2002: 206). It is even said that, thanks to this process, two new subjects of an animal species are born for each animal killed, an increment for which Reichel-Dolmatoff’s homeostatic model makes no allowance. The exchange made with non-humans thus takes the form of an obligation on the part of the Makuna to regenerate those that they destroy. It is a way for the animals to perpetuate themselves and for the humans to continue to feed on them. In short, even though Cayón and Reichel-Dolmatoff diverge as to ethnographic details, they are certainly in agreement on the fact that parity in the exchanges made between the Tukanos and their non-human neighbours is indispensable for the survival of the world. As Cayón remarks, “the fact that reciprocity is the axis of the system is beyond question” (Cayón 2002). The social organization of the eastern Tukanos is governed by the same principle of reciprocal dependence as that which rules their relations with animals. The traditional form taken by the habitat is that of a large house for several families that make up an agnatic descent group, known as a maloca in the Spanish of this region. The physical and symbolic reproduction of the local communities results from matrimonial exchanges and the distribution of ritual functions within a group composed of at least sixteen exogamous units (which I have been calling “tribes,” for the sake of convenience) (Jackson 1983, especially Ch. V). But that term is not really appropriate. It is true that each of those exogamous units is characterized by a distinct language and a specific name (Desana, Makuna, Tatuyo, Barasana, and so on); each claims descent from its own founding hero; and each holds the privilege of making and using certain types of ritual objects. However, each unit also observes a strict rule of exogamy that stipulates that it should obtain its wives from groups that speak a different Tukano language, or even from groups that speak Arawak or Carib. Furthermore, at present, none of these “tribes” occupy a continuous territory. A maloca is composed of men who communicate together in the language of their own linguistic group, and of women who come from several adjacent linguistic groups, who continue to speak their own languages, for multilingualism is general throughout this region. Clearly, each of the exogamous linguistic groups does not form matrimonial alliances with all the other sixteen, in the first place because there are certain pairs of linguistic groups between which unions are prohibited (phratries); and secondly because marriages are usually arranged with neighbouring groups: the Desana with the Pira-Tapuya, the Bara and the Tuyuka, for example, and the Barasana with the Tatuyo and the Tuyuka. Matrimonial exchange thus makes it possible to structure the whole inter-tribal system, since the women identify both with their husbands’ groups and with the group in which they themselves were born. In this way, they serve as intermediaries between clearly differentiated local units, ensuring that they all become integrated. This close complementarity of different linguistic groups is reinforced by the idea that each possesses its own economic specialization (hunting, fishing, or horticulture), which complements those of the others, even if all of them are polyvalent in the techniques of subsistence. Thus the Desana regard themselves as “hunters” and, for preference, they marry women from the Pira-Tapuya unit, which is classified as a tribe of fishermen. Furthermore, each of the units engaged in such exchanges is associated with one sex in particular, depending on the nature of its specialization. Thus the Desana “hunters” consider the Pira-Tapuya “fishermen” as a whole as a feminine element, while regarding themselves, collectively, as a masculine unit (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971: 17-18). As well as linguistic exogamy, there are other factors that combine to create solidarity between the peoples of North-West Amazonia, welding them into an inclusive regional organization. One factor is mythology, which unites all these linguistic groups in a common origin and assigns to each of them a territory and a place set in a hierarchical order according to the site and order of their appearance in the cosmogony. This is related in stories the structure of which is common to them all. It describes a series of episodes in a mythical journey to the sources of the rivers made by a group of primordial anacondas that halted at various sites characterized by a chaos of rocks and rapids. In each of these sites, one of the anacondas emerged from the waters and a portion of its body was transformed into a group of human ancestors each of whom then gave birth to one of the numerous patrilineages that compose each linguistic group. This process of progressive and itinerant segmentation is often represented as a canoe journey that produced all the successive ancestors of the descent groups of the various Tukano “tribes.” The most prestigious in the symbolic hierarchy are those who were the first to land in the lower reaches of the hydrographic network. Moreover, all the Tukano linguistic groups (and a few non-Tukano ones too) celebrate the cult of Yurupari in the course of a series of ceremonies during which masculine initiations take place; but the principal objective of these is to renew contact with the founding heroes and the ideal norms of existence that they established long ago (S. Hugh-Jones 1979). Every time a maloca organizes one of these ceremonies, members of the various neighbouring “tribes” are invited, along with their musical instruments that contain the Yurupari essence of their own particular descent groups. This complementarity of linguistic groups in a rite commemorating the aetiology of the totality that encompasses them all reaffirms the vigour of the intrinsic links that unite them. The regional division of crafts likewise confers upon each “tribe” a reputation of excellence and hence exclusivity thanks to their production of a kind of object necessary in the daily lives of all of them. Canoes come from the Bara, cassava presses from the Tuyuka, basketry sieves from the Desana, drug-pipettes from the Tatuyo, stools from the Tukanos, and so on. This specialization engenders a system of artificial rarity that is very common in Amazonia and that encourages a generalized circulation of artefacts that accentuates the sense of a voluntary mutual dependency. Finally, these links of mutual dependency are strengthened by the systematic practice of paying long visits to one another, visits that sometimes last for several weeks, and by regular drinking festivals during which the invited affines offer their hosts vast quantities of smoked meat and fish, just as the latter will to the former on a subsequent similar occasion. These systematic exchanges of food and hospitality between residential units that are totally autonomous where their subsistence is concerned help to strengthen sociability and a sense of belonging to a single group. Despite the diversity of their languages, each maloca, each descent group, each Tukano linguistic group thus feels it is an element within a meta-system and that it owes its material and symbolic survival to regular exchanges with the others who are part of the whole system. As in their relations with animals, it is the logic of parity in compensation that governs relations between humans here. No doubt the eastern Tukanos and their neighbours in the Amazonian NorthWest have carried to a degree seldom attained elsewhere their obsession with maintaining a close network of relations of equitable exchanges with the many kinds of persons that compose their world. Although it may elsewhere assume a slightly less systematic form, the constant attention paid to maintaining a balanced reciprocity of transfers as a cardinal schema of action, is by no means rare in the animism archipelago. Good examples of similar behaviour are found in the Guianas, in particular among the Wayapi and the Akuriyo and, on a wider scale, by the kind of confederation that is formed by the indigenous peoples of the upper Xingu, which is similar in many respects to the regional system of the Amazonian North-West.8 The hunting peoples of the Siberian forest provide another illustration. As Hamayon observes, here “the very act of hunting, of killing game . . . is governed by a logic of marriage alliances . . . modelled on behaviour toward a human partner.” In fact the two relationships are two of a kind, to the extent that “the hunting system [is] analogous to the matrimonial system” (Hamayon 1990: 374). The same principles of equivalence seem to be at work among the Moi peoples of the high forests of central Vietnam: here, the Reungao establish extremely formal alliances with the spirits of animals, plants and meteorological phenomena, some of which are characterized by obligations analogous to those that stem from kinship links and association pacts between humans (Kemlin 1999: 165- 283). In all these cases human and non-human “others” are treated as “alteregos” with whom it is only possible to live amicably if an agreement of egalitarian exchange is scrupulously observed. The togetherness of sharing Our second counter-example is likewise situated no more than a few hundred kilometres away from the Jivaros, but this time to the south: the Campas form a pluri-ethnic community in which generosity, solidarity and the predominance of common welfare over the interests of individual parties have been elevated to the rank of a supreme canon of behaviour that is far superior to the rules of equal and complementary exchange that the Tukanos like to respect. “Campa” is the generic name given to a cluster of tribes that speak Arawak languages in the upper central Amazonia of Peru—the Ashaninka, the Matsiguenga and the Nomatsiguenga—who, together with the Piro and the Amuesha (or Yanesha) make up the sub-Andean Arawak group. All of them live in a foothill equatorial forest similar to that of the Jivaros, in the valleys of the Urubamba and the Perene. Moreover, they are all diversified producers living in dispersed small autonomous local communities that combine swidden horticulture with fishing, hunting, and gathering. Finally, the Campas all agree on the fact that animals, plants, and the spirits that protect the former or embody them are social beings, endowed with an interiority and faculties of understanding similar to those of humans. All these persons with different appearances are primarily distinguished by their detachable bodies, which are assimilated to cushma, the long cotton tunics traditionally worn by the Indians of this region. But despite all these resemblances, a greater distance than that which separates the Campa ethos from the Jivaro ethos could not be imagined. The cosmologies of the Campas tribes are all organized according to the same dualist principle that divides human societies, animals and spirits into two distinct and mutually antagonistic ontological domains.9 One domain possesses a positive value and includes all the entities that share a common essence: namely, the Campas tribes and some of the forest tribes that surround them (in particular the Cashibo and the Shipibo-Conibo, who speak Panoan languages), the deities of the heavens (Sun and his father, Moon), the master-spirits of hunted animals and the animals themselves. The other domain is totally negative and is defined by its radical difference from the first one. It encompasses all humans who come from the Andes, whether Indians or Whites, sorcerer-animals and their masters, who are bad spirits. Most of the hunted species and their masters stem from a race of good spirits whom the Campas call “our people” or “our fellows” (ashaninka) and who are reputed to be well disposed toward the Indians. These live on the periphery of the known world, immediately above or below the terrestrial strata, along the margins of the territory and on the mountain peaks. They have a human appearance that is invisible to the Campas and so, when visiting, they adopt the form of lightning, thunder or various animal species. Some of them control important resources. Otters, grey herons, and egrets are the masters of fish and ensure that these swim back up the rivers every year in the spawning season so that the Campas can fish for them in the shallow waters of the dry season. The swallow-tailed kite is the father of edible insects: the shaman pays regular visits to its wife to ask her to allow her children—who are regarded as the shaman’s brothers—to accompany him so that humans can feed on them. Most of the birds that the Campas hunt are themselves embodiments of good spirits. Their slaughter is only an illusion; after the hunter has asked the bird for its clothing, out of compassion for him it deliberately presents its carnal envelope to his arrows, at the same time preserving its immaterial interiority, which is immediately reincarnated in an identical body or else resumes its invisible human appearance. The bird thus suffers no damage and its act of benevolence requires no reciprocation except, perhaps, a feeling of gratitude. Certain very common species of game birds, in particular toucans, penelopes and hoccos, are not reincarnations of spirits but instead are protected by them. And those good spirits offer them freely to the humans, for them to hunt. The reason for this generosity is the fact that the good spirits, their animal transformations and the species that they control are all identical to humans at the ontological level. The Campas regard them as close kin, and the gift of their bodies is seen simply as evidence of the dutiful generosity that people of the same kin owe one another. The solidarity that such a link presupposes is expressed in exemplary fashion when the good spirits associated with hunting descend, in their invisible form, among the humans so as to dance and sing with them. In so doing, they are not seeking compensation for any services rendered, but simply wish to show their affectionate closeness and their desire to share in a conviviality that is free from any obligations. The status of the mistress of peccaries makes it possible to contrast this dutiful generosity with the imperative of exchange that characterizes hunting in the Tukano groups; among the Campas, this is a feminine entity, described as a generic sister, who keeps the peccaries in an enclosure at the top of a mountain.10 From time to time a shaman comes to intercede with her, asking her to part with one member of her herd. She then tugs out a tuft of bristles from the back of one of the animals and blows it away so that it will eventually produce many more peccaries, which she will then send down to the humans, for them to hunt. This is an action of pure benevolence. It certainly creates certain moral obligations for the hunters. In particular, they must make sure that they kill the peccaries with a single arrow shot, so as not to cause them to suffer. However, unlike among the Tukanos, no compensation is demanded. The same goes for fishing: the fish, filled with pity, allow themselves to be caught on the fisherman’s hook and line, after he has repeatedly and sadly mumbled, “My bag is empty, my bag is empty” (Rojas Zolezzi 1994: 205). The good spirits have no sexual activity. This is a feature that sets them firmly apart from the usual figures of the masters of game in Amazonia and the animist world in general. Among the Tukanos, the spirit-masters of animals are characterized by their superabundance of sexual energy and, as we have seen, they send their protégés to copulate, in dreams, with the hunters, a ploy that is perfectly understandable, given that the spirits are responsible for the reproduction of the animal species. To that end, they need the assistance from the reproductive powers of humans who, for their part, are happy to oblige in exchange for the vital force that they absorb when they consume the animals. The good animal spirits of the Campas are quite different. Although they exist as two sexes, they reproduce without coitus. In their human reincarnation they are said to possess atrophied genital organs and their women give birth by parthenogenesis, simply by shaking out their tunics. Furthermore, also in contrast to a Tukano hunter who seeks to win the favours of the animals by making himself attractive to them with charms and perfumes that enhance his erotic attraction, the Campas men endeavour to purify themselves as completely as possible before setting out on a hunting expedition. They expunge all residual signs of their sexual relations with women, in particular any defilement left by contact, even of an indirect nature, with menstrual blood. The horror that the good spirits feel for anything that draws attention to the physiology of reproduction and its cycles, their disgust at the uncontrollable desires and the flow of the substances necessary for existence indicate clearly that the relations between humans and these entities that supply them with game have nothing to do with the exchange and recycling of fertilizing energy and principles of individuation that characterize such relations in the Amazonian North-West. The bodies that the good Campas spirits deliver up to the hunters are nothing but carnal envelopes stripped of any subjectivity or principles of animation, and this manifestation of generosity in no way affects the perennial integrity of these beings that are forever unaffected by the contingences of organic life. Nevertheless, this Campa world is not without negative aspects. It teems with evil spirits that live in close proximity to the humans and are a constant danger to them. These are known as kamari and they assume as many different forms as the good spirits do. Most of them have monstrously large sexual attributes. Some have a gigantic penis that causes the deaths of the women and men whom they violate, while others take the forms of attractive incubuses and succubae that beat their partners to death after coitus. Moreover, many evil spirits adopt animal forms that may be permanent, as in the cases of insects, bats, or felines, which the Campas are careful not to approach or kill. Others, though, are transient: these are species that are normally edible—toucans, monkeys, birds—whose outward appearances the kamari adopt and then, if the humans laugh at them, transform themselves into incubuses or succubae. Evil spirits of the class known as peári sometimes even take on the disguise of some ordinary hunted animal which, if it is killed and eaten, causes those who consume it to die. In all such cases, the human victim then becomes an evil spirit of the same kind as the one that attacked him or, worse still, changes into a White. Finally, kamari may be masters of sorcery, which they use to harm the Indians. Shamans then do their best to cure the latter with potions and by rubbing them with medicinal herbs. The Campas’ relations with non-humans are not confined to accepting the benefits of food that the spirit-masters of animals lavish upon them, for at the same time a cohort of evil spirits preys upon the Campas and may slip into the skins of even the animals with the most inoffensive appearances. On the one hand, hunters receive the gift of meat that they ask for, without offering anything in exchange; on the other, they themselves are hunted, powerless to avert their own fate as game. However, it would be mistaken to interpret this reversal as a sign that predation or exchange might be recovering their rights. For that to be the case, the Campas would either have to be the active instigators of this violent alienation, which they are not, (for they are its victims and try by every means to protect themselves from it), or else the persecutions that they suffer would have to be regarded as a compensation to which they consent in exchange for the game that they are given (which is clearly not the case). The good spirits and the evil spirits, the Campas, and the people of the Andes, the generous provisions of meat and the animals that have become sorcerers are all divided into two hermetically sealed ontological domains that are in perpetual conflict. One domain is ruled by the constantly reaffirmed values of sharing and solidarity; the other, which is the agent for the evil that every lucid mind can detect in the world, embodies a cruel and senseless otherness that nothing can moderate. No system of relations between humans can be ruled exclusively by a logic of gift; and the Campas are no exception to that rule. The altruism and prodigality that the good animal spirits manifest when they offer their bodily remains are less manifest in the rules that govern symmetrical exchange in the system of Dravidian kinship or intertribal bartering than they are in the ethos that is characteristic of daily life in which trust, generosity and a horror of constraints predominate. The Campas have carried to extreme lengths their desire to eliminate dissent and otherness in their community, by reducing to a minimum the differences between the individuals that are indispensable if a relationship, be it reciprocal or predatory, is to be established. This point has been emphasized in particular by ethnographers of the Matsiguenga. Writing about them, France-Marie Renard-Casevitz notes that they manifest “a constant concern to reduce oppositions between the self and others that might affect the entire social field.” Meanwhile, Dan Rosengren observes that, among them, “sharing is highly valued . . . and almost imperative” and that “emphasis is put upon harmony and social balance, as positive values to strive for” (Renard-Casevitz 1985: 88; Rosengren 1987: 63-64, 161). The Campas are famous for their heavy reproof of internal violence, for it is a source of lasting animosities and a factor that undermines social cohesion. This is illustrated by the oral jousts between Matsinguenga men forced apart by some disagreement, in which verbal provocations and offers of peace alternate. They are brought to an end when one of the protagonists, deciding to turn his aggression upon himself, starts to beat himself repeatedly and is immediately imitated by his opponent. Violent or mean individuals and those who indulge in scandalous behaviour become the subjects of public disapproval. This is first expressed by a woman, who mentions the facts but without naming the culprit; then, if the reprehensible behaviour continues, other women gradually join in the denunciation. If the situation drags on, a quarantine is imposed and the individual who has deliberately cut himself off from the network of solidarities is ignored, as if he were invisible, by the entire community. If all these measures fail, the woman who initiated the complaint has no option but to commit suicide so that her death will wipe out the separation and the disorder that her accusations have created (Renard-Casevitz 1985: 88). The principle of generosity reputed to govern the behaviour of game animals is expressed as it were in reverse, in that all positive attempts that are not followed by the desired results are interpreted as an indication of a personal failure caused by an untimely initiative that has placed someone else in a situation in which he is forced to stand apart from me in response to my intention. The Amuesha have given a particularly clear form to this philosophy of sharing and harmonious conviviality, for they, like Aristotle, consider that love is the source and principle of the existence of all things. They distinguish between two forms of love: muereñets means the giving of oneself in the creation of life and is characteristic of the attitude of the deities and religious leaders in an asymmetrical relationship; meanwhile, morrenteñets denotes the mutual love that is indispensable for all sociability and is expressed by a constant uncalculating generosity that is exempt from any expectation of reciprocation (Santos-Granero 1991: 201-205, 295-6). This is a far cry from a constructed and negotiated distinction that makes it possible to regard “others” as a term in a reciprocal relationship, as the Tukanos do, or as prey that is necessary for one’s own reproduction, as the Jivaros do. The model of the behaviour most favoured by the Amuesha and likewise the Campas seems, rather, to be the relationship between parents and their children, in which you unstintingly give affection, care, and protection to those who depend upon you. Obviously, it is within local communities, in kindred groups welded together by mutual aid and daily interactions that the schema of generosity and sharing is most clearly manifest, both in the precepts taught to children and also in the customary practice of one and all. However, a disturbing parallel is detectable within the vaster group of sub-Andean Arawak tribes. These maintain two different kinds of relationships with two kinds of non-human groups: on the one hand the gift-giving animals that donate food to humans; and, on the other, the evil spirits that practice predation. In parallel, their relationships with two antagonistic networks of humans also stand in marked contrast to each other. The fact is that these people of the foothills have never ceased to engage in warfare along their Andean frontier, even as they reject it within their own midst, where they favour a system of regional interactions and alliances, mostly founded upon the trading that takes place between linguistically linked ethnic communities that share the same concept of civic virtues and social concord. The interethnic complementarity of the products exchanged is reminiscent of the craft-specializations of the Amazonian North-West: the Shipibo are renowned for their painted fabrics, the Matsiguenga for their bows and arrows, the Piro for their canoes, the Nomatsiguenga for their fine cottons, while the Amuesha and the Ashaninka produce not only much sought-after ornaments but also salt. The links developed through the circulation of material goods cement this mosaic and reinforce the sense of belonging to a community federated by common values. Nothing could provide a better illustration of this than what the explorer Olivier Ordinaire has called “the moral Decalogue,” a ritual litany that was recited whenever two members of different Campas tribes met and that enumerated the reciprocal duties that they owed each other on account of their belonging to the same community (Ordinaire 1892: 144-145). Fernando Santos suggests that condemnation of endo-warfare is characteristic of a pan-Arawak ethos, and that may be so (Santos-Granero 2002: 44-47, except for the Guajiros, however, who engage in permanent vendettas). But in the case of the Arawak of Peru, internal peace was matched by a remarkable ability to see off external enemies, by mobilizing the Campas tribes in large military coalitions along with some of their Pano allies. This exo-warfare was purely defensive, its purpose being to defend their territorial integrity against the attempts to annex land on the part of all kinds of invaders from the Andes. These range from the Inca armies of the early sixteenth century to the columns of Maoist guerrillas of the present day and include the forces that the viceroy of Peru and subsequently the young Peruvian Republic dispatched, without success, into the foothills forests, to subdue these intractable Indians to the sovereignty of the central authorities. So it is hardly surprising that the puna runa, the “highland peoples,” just like the evil spirits and their animal incarnations, should have been seen as perfect embodiments of an otherness that was as radical as it was harmful, for ontologically they were all identical since they all proceeded from the same mythological origin. Incas, Spaniards and hostile animals all had to be opposed and confined to the margins of the Campa territory: their negativity had to be expelled from a Campa land ofhomogeneous togetherness. Here, the perpetuation of an ideal of closeness without indebtedness or calculated expectations comes at a price: namely, respect for rules of exchange and complementarity between honourable neighbours whose help may be needed to prevent the Campas from being wiped out by other neighbours who treat them as prey. The Campas are by no means the only representatives of the archipelago of animism to have sought to put this ideal into practice, and some have done so more successfully than they have. Thousands of kilometres away from the Peruvian rainforest, the northern Algonquins present an example of a people that engages in similar relations with both humans and non-humans but does so free from the threat of predation and likewise of the constraints of exchange that make it possible to face up to such predation.11 In the early pages of this book, we saw that the Cree and the Ojibwa groups regard the subarctic region, despite the seemingly strict limitations that it imposes on human life, as a benevolent environment that is inhabited by entities that are attentive to the needs of humans. It is always out of a feeling of generosity that a hunted animal delivers itself up to the hunter. Moved by compassion for humans in the grip of hunger, it presents him with its carnal envelope, as a gift, without expecting any compensation. That manifestation of generosity is of no consequence since, as among the Campas, the animal’s soul is soon reincorporated in an individual of the same species, always providing that its corpse receives the appropriate ritual treatment. Relations between humans obey an identical schema. Warfare was banned between the bands of Montagnais, Naskapi, Cree, and Ojibwa, and the sharing of all possessions and resources was an absolutely imperative rule, especially among the co-residents of small winter hunting camps.12 As Emmanuel Désveaux writes in his study of the Ojibwa of northern Ontario, “the sociological horizon of the Indians knows nothing of otherness” (Désveaux 1988: 264). A similar attitude prevails further north, among the Inuit, as it also does far away, among the Chewong of Malaysia and the Buid of the Philippines (Rasmussen 1929; Howell 1989 [1984]; Gibson 1986). As for the disinterested trust, the spirit of liberality and the commitment to sharing that Bird-David attributes to the Nayaka and the Pygmies and that she considers to be typical features of the relationship that hunter-gatherers weave between themselves and their environment both human and nonhuman, we should recognize that these amount to far more than a possible correlation with a particular mode of subsistence. For they denote a general schema for the treatment of others to which animist ontologies offer a special point of anchorage, whatever other techniques they employ to make the most of their environment. The ethos of collectives The prevalence of a relational schema in a collective leads its members to adopt typical behaviour patterns, the repetition and frequency of which are such that ethnographers who observe and interpret them feel justified in describing them overall as normative “values” that orientate social life. The need for sharing among the Matsiguenga and the Ojibwa, the bellicose spirit of the Jivaros and the obligation of exchange among the Tukanos all provide examples. But no relationship is absolutely predominant for, all together, they constitute the panoply of methods at the disposal of humans for organizing their interactions with other occupants of the world. To return to the example of the Jivaros, it would be absurd to claim that everything in their daily existence stems from violent incorporation. The schema of predatory assimilation constitutes, rather, a moral horizon that orientates many fields of practice, each of which reflects it in its own way. It tolerates and encompasses other relational schemas that are elsewhere preponderant but here are relegated to particular niches which, however, are always under threat from insidious contamination by the dominant schema and the influence that this exerts. Thus, the Jivaro kinship system, which is of the Dravidian type, is founded on the ideal model of an exchange of sisters between cross-cousins. This form of union, which is, in practice, very common, establishes and perpetuates within localized kindred groups an island of reciprocity and solidarity between real affines; and this is probably indispensable for the development of a predatory attitude toward more distant affines, whether these be real, potential or ideal. It indeed seems likely that the generalized hostility toward all that lies more than one day’s march away necessarily engenders, in reaction, a central kernel in which symmetrical exchange makes it possible to count on a relative security. However, the fall-out rate from the system is considerable: brothers may become deadly enemies if they become rivals for the same potential spouses or if they feel slighted when, in accordance with the levirate rule, the widows of one of them are distributed among the deceased’s brothers. Similarly, a son-in-law may attack his father-in-law if the latter refuses to let him marry the sister of his first wife. In such cases, murders and seizures of women are not uncommon. Despite all the measures taken to minimize the fracturing effect of affinity at the heart of a local network, the possibility of this is always present, as a fermenting agent of dissension capable of blowing sky-high the fragile balance of reciprocity between the closest members of a kindred group. Fair exchange is thus formally present in the logic of the Jivaro alliance system, but it remains peripheral to the Jivaro ethos. Conversely, predation is not absent from the Tukano groups, even if warfare between them has long since disappeared, possibly as the result of a deliberate choice to favour pacific exchanges instead. We know, at any rate, that the Tukanos used to draw a clear distinction between on the one hand raids to procure wives from linguistic groups with which wives were not normally exchanged and, on the other, murderous more long-distance expeditions. The first type of raid seems to have been quite common. Generally, no bloodshed occurred and the raid was assimilated to a hunting expedition and considered as a possible alternative to ordinary exogamous exchanges. In most cases these abductions were subsequently regularized through negotiation between the two parties, and this could then lead to the establishment of a cycle of matrimonial alliances of the classic type. Exchange would thus recover its primacy following an occasional act of predation (C. Hugh-Jones 1979: 223; Århem 1981: 160). Although very rare, the murder of a man in a distant Tukano tribe constituted a far more drastic form of violence in that it affected the procreative power of another group and thus caused a loss harmful to the whole system. However, unlike in Jivaro head-hunting, this gratuitous destruction cannot be assimilated to an act of predation since it implied no gain of energy or genetic power for the murderer’s group. For this reason, a warrior who was “a killer of a man” (masa sĩari masa was regarded as the very most negative figure in any possible interaction between Tukanos (C. Hugh-Jones 1979: 64). As can be imagined, the Tukanos’ relations to non-humans are likewise not exempt from a predatory dimension. Emphasizing this aspect, Århem even chose to describe what he called the eco-cosmology of the Makuna as a world envisaged from the point of view of a hunter, that is to say as a network of eaters and eaten (Århem 1996).13 He defines the limits of the system by two poles: at one extreme, the supreme predators (jaguars, anacondas, certain other rapacious species, and Yurupari spirits), which feed on all living beings and are not prey for any of them; and, at the other extreme, edible plants, the very lowest level in the food chain. Between these two poles lie most of the organisms whose fate is to be at once predators and prey. That is, in particular, the case of humans, whose souls, when they die, are captured (literally “consumed”) by the spirit-founders of their clan, so that they can be reborn in another form. Such formulations are hardly unexpected since all animist cosmologies seem to derive their functional principles from the model of the food chain, regardless of the nature of their most favoured relational schema. Even Århem admits that these relations between the eaters and the eaten are regarded by the Makuna as exchanges, not as acts of predation: “In this cosmic society, where all mortal beings are ontological ‘equals,’ humans and animals are bound by a pact of reciprocity. . . . The relationship between the human hunter and his prey is thus construed as an exchange, modelled on the relationship among affines” (Århem 1996: 191-192).14 The subordination of predation to exchange could find no better expression. Finally, regarding the Campas, one just needs to recall that the gift schema only occupies a dominant position at the heart of human and non-human kindred groups because it is set against a background of predation from which they can protect themselves only by maintaining a system of exchanges with neighbours identical to themselves. * The three cases studied in this chapter prompt a more general interpretation of the nature of what I have called a “collective.” Even if such an entity acquires part of its apparent homogeneity from the mode of ontological identification that characterizes it, that is not enough to differentiate it from other entities that are similar to it in this respect. So the limits of a collective are above all defined by the prevalence within it of a specific relational schema. But the resulting unit does not necessarily tally with the customary divisions into ethnic groups, tribes, linguistic groups, etc. The example of the Jivaros will serve to illustrate this point. The way in which I have been describing them up till now might suggest that, despite internal dialectal and cultural differences, they constitute an altogether separate group. However, some of their southern neighbours, such as the Shapra and the Candoshi, share with them not only the schema of predatory appropriation but also the institutions associated with it, and do so despite differences in language and in many features of their social organization and their material culture (Surrallés 2003). On their eastern frontiers, in contrast, the Jivaros maintain enduring relations of commercial exchange and sometimes intermarriage with communities speaking the Quichua language, the sacha runa, even though the Quichua do not share the Jivaro predatory ethos (see Whitten 1976). At first sight, the scale of contrasts between the forest Quichuas and the Jivaros seems neither greater nor less great than that which differentiates between the Jivaros and the Candoshi or the Shapra. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to treat the latter two peoples as if they were part of a “Jivaroid” continuum, whereas the Quichuas, despite many resemblances, have attained a higher level of differentiation. This is borne out by the customary behaviour of the interested parties. Although the Jivaros may “Quichuarize” themselves in a peaceful fashion through marriage, and vice-versa, such an incorporation is always prompted by an individual initiative. In contrast, the Candoshi and the Shapra maintain with the Jivaros a collective relationship of essential otherness that is sufficiently close for them to be included in the code of head-hunting and abduction of women, whether as victims or as aggressors. The Shapra and the Candoshi are thus essential players in the constitution of the Jivaro “self,” whereas the Quichuas, for their part, offer the alternative of “becoming different” to all those tempted by a change of identity. The unification of a mosaic of peoples through the sharing of a dominant relational schema is even clearer in the interethnic cluster of the Amazonian North-West. We should bear in mind that the flows of reciprocity peculiar to this region include not only the eastern Tukanos but also Arawak groups (Baniwa, Wakuenai, Tariana, Bare, Kabiyeri, and Yukuna), a Carib group (the Carijona), and the Maku, hunter-gatherers speaking an independent language who trade game in exchange for the products cultivated by the riverside communities of sedentary horticulturists. It is true that linguistic exogamy is limited to the Tukano tribes, with the exception of the Cubeo, who dispense with it. But all the components of the meta-system subscribe to the same conviction: namely, that the harmony of the cosmos can only be maintained by dint of a constant and balanced exchange of goods, principles of individuation and reproductive elements between the various communities of humans and non-humans that inhabit it. As for the various Arawak peoples of the Peruvian foothills, I hardly need to repeat that they know they belong to the same network of solidarities, structured by their shared values of generosity, egalitarianism and openness toward others—values that are all the more cherished and respected because, in every way, they stand in opposition to the negative attributes ascribed to the Andean invaders. In short, it is not so much linguistic limits, the perimeter of a commercial network, or even the homogeneity of modes of life that mark out the contours of a collective. Rather, it is a way of schematizing the experience shared by a more or less vast collection of individuals, a group that may well present internal variations—of languages, institutions, and practices—that are sufficiently marked for one to consider it, on a different scale, as a transformational group composed of separate units. Even if it cannot be a complete substitute for the habitual categories—culture, civilization, ethnic or linguistic group, social milieu, and so on—which may well remain useful in other analytical contexts, such a definition at least makes it possible to avoid the snags of essentialism and to sidestep the almost automatic tendency to apprehend the particularities of human groups on the basis of the characteristics to which they themselves draw attention in order to distinguish themselves from their close neighbours. This way of proceeding is the reverse of that which Benedict adopts in order to reveal her “patterns” of culture; instead of casting one’s eye over a group with pre-assigned limits, to which one ascribes an abstract and transcendent unity that is a mysterious source of regularity in behaviour-patterns and representations, it is better to seek out a field covered by certain schemas that bring together the practices of collectives of very variable sizes and natures, the frontiers between which are not fixed by custom or by law but simply reflect the breaks that separate them from other ways of being present in the world. Stripped of any functional or purposive dimension (such as a desire for togetherness) that notion of a collective is also somewhat different from Latour’s definition of one: namely, a specific association of humans and non-humans as put together or “collected” within a network at a particular given moment and in a particular given place. Likewise, for me, a collective is a group combining entities of many kinds. But it is not, strictly speaking, one organized as a network whose frontiers—inexistent in effect if one decides to include all their ramifications—can only be drawn by the analyst’s arbitrary decision to limit his field of study to data that he is in a position to take into account. If, instead, one recognizes that the limits of any collective are co-extensive with the area of influence of this or that schema of practices, then its definition will depend above all on the manner in which the humans in it organize their experience, in particular in their relations with non-humans.15 The task traditionally assigned to anthropology, namely to set in order and compare the discouraging multiplicity of circumstances in this world, will in this way perhaps be rendered less difficult, providing grounds for hope for those who persist in believing in the worth of such a mission and a sign of encouragement for those who wish to devote themselves to the task. References Albert, Bruce. 1985. “Temps du sang, temps des cendres: Représentation de la maladie, système rituel et espace politique chez les Yanomami du Sud-Est (Amazonie brésilienne).” PhD dissertation, Paris-X Nanterre. Århem, Kaj. 1981. 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Os povos do Alto Xingu: História e cultura. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ. Freeman, Derek. 1979. “Severed heads that germinate.” In Fantasy and symbol: Studies in anthropological interpretation, edited by R. H. Hook, 233–246. London and New York: Academic Press. Gibson, Thomas. 1986. Sacrifice and sharing in the Philippine highlands: Religion and society among the Buid of Mindoro. London: The Athlone Press. Gonçalves, Marco Antonio. 2001. O mundo inacabado: Açao e criaçao em uma cosmologia amazônica. Etnografia pirahä. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ. Grenand, Pierre. 1980. Introduction à l’étude de l’univers wayäpi: Ethno-écologie des Indiens du Haut-Oyapock (Guyane française). Paris: S.E.L.A.F./C.N.R.S. Hallowell, Alfred I. (1960) 1976. “Ojibwa ontology, behavior and worldview.” In Contributions to anthropology: Selected papers of A. Irving Hallowell, edited by Raymond D. Fogelson, 357–390. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamayon, Roberte. 1990. La chasse à l’âme. Esquisse d’une théorie du chamanisme sibérien. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Howell, Signe (1984) 1989. Society and cosmos: Chewong of peninsular Malaysia. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Hugh-Jones, Christine. 1979. From the Milk River: Spatial and temporal processes in northwest Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hugh-Jones, Stephen. 1979. The palm and the pleiades: Initiation and cosmology in northwest Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Jean. 1983. The fish people: Linguistic exogamy and Tukanoan identity in the northwest Amazon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jara, Fabiola. 1991. El camino del kumu: Ecologia y ritual entre los Akuriyó de Surinam. Utrecht: ISOR. Kemlin, Emile. 1999. Les Reungao: rites agraires, songes et alliances. Une société proto-indochinoise du Viêt Nam au début du XXe siècle. Textes réunis et présentés par Pierre Le Roux. Paris: Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (coll. Réimpressions, no. 11). Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1943. “Guerre et commerce chez les Indiens d’Amérique du Sud.” Renaissance 1: 122–139. Lima, Tânia Stolze. 1996. “O dois e seu multiplo: Reflexöes sobre o perspectivismo em uma cosmologie tupi.” Mana 2 (2): 21–47. Menget, Patrick. 1993. “Notas sobre as cabeças mundurucu.” In Amazônia: Etnologia e história indigena, edited by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 311–321. Sào Paolo: NHII-USP/FAPESP. Mauss, Marcel. 1950. Sociologie et anthropologie. Précédé d’une introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss par Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: P.U.F. Ordinaire, Olivier. 1892. Du Pacifique à l’Atlantique par les Andes péruviennes et l’Amazone. Paris: Plon, Nourrit et Cie. Rasmussen, Karl. 1929. Intellectual culture of the Iglulik Eskimos. Copenhagen: Glyldendaske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag. Reichel-Dolmatof, Gerardo. 1971. Amazonian cosmos: The sexual and religious symbolism of the Tukano Indians. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. The forest within: The worldview of the Tukano Amazonian Indians. Dartington: Themis Books. Renard-Casevitz, France-Marie. 1985. “Guerre, violence et identité à partir des sociétés du piémont amazonien des Andes centrales.” Cahiers Orstom (série Sciences humaines) 21 (1): 81–98. ———. 1991. Le Banquet masqué: Une mythologie de l’étranger chez les Indiens Matziguenga. Paris: Lierre and Coudrier. Ritzenthaler, Robert E. 1978. “Southwestern Chippewa.” In Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 15, edited by B.G. Trigger, 743–759. Washington: Smithsonian Institute. Rivière, Peter. 2001. “A predaçào, a reciprocidade e o caso das Guianas.” Mana 7 (1): 31–54. Rojas Zolezzi, Enrique. 1994. Los Ashaninka, un pueblo tras el bosque: Contribucíon a la etnología de los Campa de la Selva Central Peruana. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Rosengren, Dan. 1987. In the eyes of the beholder: Leadership and the social construction of power and dominance among the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon. Göteborg: Göteborgs Etnografiska Museum. Santos-Granero, Fernando. 1991. The power of love: The moral use of knowledge among the Amuesha of central Peru. London: Athlone Press. ———. 2000. “The sisyphus syndrome or the struggle for conviviality in Native Amazonia.” In The anthropology of love and anger: The aesthetics of conviviality in native Amazonia, edited by Joanna Overing and Alan Passes, 268–287. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2002. “The Arawakan matrix: Ethos, language and history in native South America.” In Comparative Arawakan histories: Rethinking language, family and culture area in Amazonia, edited by Jonathan D. Hill and Fernando Santos-Granero, 25–50. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Sterpin, Adriana. 1993. “La chasse aux scalps chez les Nivacle du Gran Chaco.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 79: 33–66. Surrallés, Alexandre. 2003. Au coeur du sens : Perception, affectivité, action chez les Candoshi. Paris: Editions du C.N.R.S. Fondation de la M.S.H. Taylor, Anne Christine. 1983. “The marriage alliance and its structural variations in Jivaroan societies.” Social Science Information 22 (3): 331–353. ———. 1985. “L’art de la réduction.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 71: 159–173. ———. 1993. “Les bons ennemis et les mauvais parents: Le traitement de l’alliance dans les rituels de chasse aux têtes des Shuar (Jivaro) de l’Equateur.” In Les Complexités de l’alliance, edited by Elisabeth Copet-Rougier and Françoise Héritier-Augé, 73–105. Paris: Editions des Archives contemporaines. Varese, Stefano. 2002 [1973]. Salt of the mountain. Translated by Susan Giersbach Rascon. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. Vilaça, Aparecida. 1992. Comendo como gente: formas do cannibalismo wan. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1986. Araweté: Os deuses canibais. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar/ANPOCS. ———. 2002. A inconstância da alma selvagem, e outros ensaios de antropologa. Säo Paolo: Cosac and Naify. Weiss, Gerald. 1975. Campa cosmology: The world of a forest tribe in South America. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Whitten, Norman E. 1976. Sacha Runa: Ethnicity and adaptation of Ecuadorian jungle Quichua. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ___________________ 1. That is why it is pointless to oppose, as some do, two approaches to Amazonian sociability that are irreconcilable: on the one hand, that of the “hawk” camp, the partisans of ontological predation, led by Viveiros de Castro and myself, on the other, the “dove” camp, which defends the aesthetic of conviviality, led by Overing (Santos-Granero 2000). For I, for my part, have never suggested that predation is the only way of treating “others” in Amazonia. 2. This presentation of Jivaro head-hunting is inspired by the works of Taylor (1985, 1993). For a more detailed analysis of Jivaro forms of warfare, see Descola (1993). 3. The mechanisms most commonly employed to this end are the assimilation of cross-sibling relationships and relationships of conjugality, the affinization of masculine consanguines by men, the consanguinization of affines of both sexes by women, the obliteration of affinity between co-residents of opposite sexes in the same generation and its accentuation in alternate generations. On this subject, see Taylor (1983). 4. On the Jurana, see Lima (1996); on the Arawete, see Viveiros de Castro (1986); on the Parakana, see Fausto (2001); on the Mundurucu, see Menget (1993); on the Pirahä, see Gonçalves (2001); on the Wari’, see Vilaça (1992); on the Yanomami, see Albert (1985); on the Nivacle, see Sterpin (1993). 5. On the Sioux, see Brown (1997) and Désveaux (1997); on the Chippewa, see Ritzenthaler (1978). 6. On the Kasua, see Brunois (2001); on the Iban, see Freeman (1979). 7. These are the eastern Tukanos (Desana, Makuna, Tatuyo, Barasana, etc.) who, together with the western Tukanos (Coreguaje, Siona, Secoya, Mai Huna, etc.) make up the Tukano linguistic family. When used from here on, the term “Tukano” will apply exclusively to the entire group of eastern Tukanos. 8. On the Wayapi, see Grenand (1980); on the Akuriyo, see Jara (1991); on the Upper Xingu, see Franchetto and Heckenberger (2001). 9. My sources on the Ashaninka are Weiss (1975), Rojas Zolezzi (1994), and Varese (1973); on the Matsiguenga, Renard-Casevitz (1985, 1991), Baer (1994), and Rosengren (1987). 10. According to Weiss (1975: 264), this figure is feminine, but Rojas (and Elick) present it as masculine, as is the Master of the Cervidae (Rojas Zolezzi 1994: 180, n24). 11. Admittedly, the obsession with predation is not totally absent among the northern Algonquin groups. Here it is represented by Windigo (or Wiitiko), a cannibalistic monster in human form that terrorizes the Indians. However, unlike the evil Ashaninka spirits, who are said to be responsible for very concrete evils, in the anecdotes that tell of encounters with the Windigo, the latter is always overcome by the humans (Désveaux 1988: 261-265). 12. According to Hallowell, the sharing of one’s possessions is one of the “supreme values” of the Ojibwa culture (1976 [1960]: 385). 13. When he emphasizes the predatory aspect of the Makuna cosmology, Århem implicitly distances himself from the “exchange” interpretation that I had produced of the Tukano model in an earlier publication that he cites but does not openly criticize (Descola 1992). The point did not pass unnoticed by Peter Rivière, who declared himself in agreement with Århem on the fact that, contrary to what I had suggested when I opposed the Jivaros to the Tukanos from the point of view of their relational schemas with others, Amazonian cosmologies are transformations of one fundamental model in which predation and exchange are closely combined (Rivière 2001). Neither Århem nor Rivière seems to have noticed that in my view the predominance of predation or of exchange in a collective by no means excludes expression of the other schema which, however, is subordinate to the dominant one. 14. To dissipate any ambiguity, he adds, “Men supply the Spirit-owners of the animals with ‘spirit-foods’ (coca, snuff, and burning bees wax). In return, the Spirits allocate game animals and fish to human beings” (Århem 1996: 191-192). 15. This notion of a collective is closer, in its extension if not in its meaning, to what Boltanski and Thevenot have called “cities,” that is to say social models founded on conventions that are shared by sub-groups of individuals within industrial societies and that allow these to set up differentiated common worlds (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006 [1991]). “Cities” resemble collectives that are identifiable from their combination of dominant schemas of identification and relations; in the very midst of the categorical entities of classic sociology (classes, sexes, income levels, professions, political opinions), “cities” carve out contrasting forms of coexistence and social links (the “ideal city,” “the domestic city,” “the city of opinions,” etc.), which blur the conventional frontiers between groups and redistribute the criteria for drawing distinctions.

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Joking relations This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Jane Guyer. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.2.022 Translation Translator’s preface An introduction to “Joking relations” by Marcel Mauss Jane I. GUYER, Johns Hopkins University   A few months ago, HAU’s Editor, Giovanni da Col, invited me to translate Marcel Mauss’ “Parentés à plaisanteries,” which, although having canonical status in the history of anthropology, had never been translated into English. The invitation arose out of my own suggestion that I translate another short piece from the Année Sociologique group by Paul Fauconnet. From friendship with Karen Fields while she was re-translating The elementary forms of religious life in the 1990s, and then by working on a paper for a recent collection in Social Anthropology on debt (Vol. 20, #4, 2012), I was becoming increasingly aware of the difficulties that can arise from the gaps and possible misconstruals or personal interpretations in the translations, especially of the Durkheim school. I will work on the Fauconnet translation later. For now, I present this translation of Mauss’ classic analysis of joking relations, undertaken at the request of the editors. I greatly appreciate their confidence that I could do it justice Several challenges in translating Mauss’ article bear explicit indication to the reader, for historical as well as possible conceptual and technical interest. The title The only slight nuance over convention that I have made is to render parentés as “relations,” thereby retaining the plural form of the original and of the conventional English “relationships,” while also moving the English meaning somewhat closer to the kinship implied by parentés without importing the abstraction that the singular “kinship” brings. Both of the title’s terms could have been rendered otherwise. Plaisanteries evokes a more verbal interaction, like “bantering” or “teasing” rather than “joking,” especially as the latter is used in American English where it comprises practical jokes and gestures, both big and small, as in “joking around.” Mauss derived “joking,” however, directly from English—from Lowie’s ethnography of the Crow Indians—and does include many instances of what might colloquially be referred to as “horseplay.” I have found the following allusion: “joking with her (wife of a fellow clansman), even of an obscene character, was freely indulged in” (Lowie 1912: 187). Parentés à plaisanteries and “joking relationships” quickly became the accepted translations of each other. A. R. RadcliffeBrown’s (1940) article entitled “On joking relationships” uses La parenté à plaisanteries for the title of French abstract, and also the plural les parentés à plaisanteries in the text. He refers explicitly to Mauss’ piece as a “brief theoretical discussion” of phenomena on which they had already exchanged ideas. I have yet to discover whether Mauss himself created the French term. Henri Labouret published an article under this title very soon after (with parenté in the singular), in 1929, but I have not found a previous allusion. Other concepts The sense of an as-yet unstable analytical vocabulary is mentioned in the text itself, particularly on the concept of alliés, which much of the following literature in English might have rendered as “affines.” It seems clear, as with parenté, that Mauss was working with the implications of what L. H. Morgan had called “kinship societies,” where all relationships can be thought of in kin or affinal terms. I have retained “allies” and “alliances” in most places, since Mauss generally specifies the kin categories at issue while explicitly wanting alliance to be a more encompassing term. In his own article on joking relationships, Radcliffe-Brown, like Mauss, keeps the concept of alliance open to non-kin possibilities through the use of “consociation.” It is worth noting that up to today scholars are finding the latitude beyond kinship, in the narrow sense, useful in applying the findings and theorizations about “joking relations” to other associational dynamics. One recent example is Trevor Marchand’s (2003) work on interethnic and master-laborer relations among the masons who build and repair the buildings of Djenne, Mali. More difficult, and worth an entire theoretical discussion, is the translation of fait: generally rendered in English as “fact,” as in the concept of the “total social fact” from Durkheimian theory. It is clear that current disciplinary English, especially in the wake of Mary Poovey’s (1998) work on the epistemology of the modern fact, and of the movement of “phenomenon” from its strict etymology in “that which appears” into a philosophy of experience (phenomenology), would employ several different terms where Mauss uses fait: finding, fact, practice, construct, phenomenon. The slippage between fait and “fact” is the retention in fait of the traces of their common etymology in the Latin facere (to do, make, or drive), hence that it is a construct rather than an external given (which would give donnée in French and “data” in English). The reader of the French has in mind that a fait has a human creative process behind it: either from the world or the researcher. Having seen how French philosopher Bruno Karsenti (1994) uses the concept of phenomenon in his critical appreciation of the “total social fact,” I have chosen to render fait in slightly varied terms, each according to context. The English discussion of the concept of the total social fact focuses more on the “total” and “social” than on the meaning of “fact” (see Karen Sykes 2005), but “fact” would benefit from closer attention. Smaller points (1) Mauss uses the concept of étiquette quite frequently. Since English has imported this word (like bouquet) to give an elite or refined character to the behavior at issue, I have used “ceremonial” in contexts where it is a practice, and “formality” where it is an abstract characteristic. (2) Where Mauss uses tabou, especially with respect to the mother-inlaw, I have used the conventional disciplinary term in English of “avoidance.” (3) Radcliffe-Brown: Mauss refers to him as “Brown,” which was his birth name. Hyphenation was added later, but we have included it throughout the translation, for the sake of clarity. (4) Mauss refers to all other scholars by the honorific M(onsieur), as in M. Lowie. This is confusing in modern English so they have been eliminated. General Undertaking this small work has reminded me of the enormous intellectual and artisanal efforts on which accurate theoretical thought depends. Karen Fields’ (1995) spontaneous retranslation of Émile Durkheim’s The elementary forms of religious life came to mind. In searching for le mot juste, I have depended on the very detailed French-English dictionary I received as a high school student in 1961. The concise Oxford French dictionary (edition of 1958, compiled by Chevalley and Chevalley) was largely “concise” only in that the print was very small. The authors were still devoted to “warn students and translators against innumerable pitfalls by the use of printed indications and short cautions” (Chevalley and Chevalley 1958: vi). To meet this imperative, the entries for faire and fait take up almost three columns. First published in 1934 (so fairly near to the time of Mauss’ article), the 1958 edition has a brilliant introduction about how languages change, not only in the content of the vocabulary and the correspondences from one language to another, but also in “the force and colour of . . . words, especially when used in the figurative sense . . . languages are like houses; they must be lived in—from attic to basement—before they can be called ours . . . (one also needs) a taste for words as words; an instinct of divination” (ibid.: vi). All reprints from 1934 onwards included “corrections” responding to this approach. We are all beneficiaries of this extraordinary work. References Chevalley, Abel and Marguerite Chevally. 1958. French-English section of The concise Oxford French dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1995. The elementary forms of religious life. Translated by Karen Fields. New York: The Free Press. Karsenti, Bruno. 1994. Le fait social total. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Labouret, M. H. 1929. “La parenté à plaisanterie en Afrique occidentale.” Africa 2: 244–53. Lowie, Robert. 1912. Social Life of the Crow Indians. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. IX, Part II. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Marchand, Trevor H. J. 2003. “Bozo-Dogon bantering: Policing access to Djenne’s building trade with jests and spells. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 14 (2): 47–63. Poovey, Mary. 1998. A history of the modern fact. Problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1940. “On joking relationships.” Africa 13 (3): 195–210 Sykes, Karen. 2005. Arguing with anthropology. An introduction to critical theories of the gift. London: Routledge.     Jane I. GUYER is the George Armstrong Kelly Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The Johns Hopkins University. Publications from her own field research in Nigeria and Cameroon include a series of articles and edited collections on household and livelihood, the political economy and ecology of cultivation systems, wealth and the management of money. Monographs include An African niche economy (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), and Marginal gains: Monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2004). She has contributed to the revival of interest in the anthropology of money and economy more broadly through articles such as “Prophecy and the near future” (American Ethnologist, 2007), “Terms of debate versus words in circulation: Some rhetorics of the crisis” (In Handbook of economic anthropology, Edward Elgar, 2012) and “Soft currencies, cash economies, new monies: Past and present” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012). Works directly engaging with the Année Sociologique school include the paper on the Essay on the gift referenced in the reference section, an article on “obligation” (Social Anthropology, 2012), and a forthcoming encyclopedia entry, “L’Année Sociologique” (In Theory and culture in social anthropology, Sage). Department of AnthropologyThe Johns Hopkins University404G Macaulay Hall3400 North Charles StreetBaltimore, MD 21218USAjguyer@jhu.edu   This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Marcel Mauss and Jane Guyer. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.2.023 Translation Joking relations Marcel MAUSS Translated from the French by Jane I. Guyer                   Translator’s Abstract: This article brings together published ethnographic evidence from North America, Melanesia, Australia, and Africa to define a type of “relationship”—usually, but not exclusively, of kinship and affinity—which allows joking, teasing, and even insult and bullying in societies where respectful address is otherwise important. These practices are specific to certain peoples, but widespread and strikingly similar enough to merit close attention as a general human phenomenon. They also resemble practices in our own societies in instances where people escape from excessive formality into play. They are not, however, reducible to social psychological motivation. The relationships designated as “joking relations” are often between particular kin, affines, and marriageable categories in prescriptive marriage systems. Seen in this way, they also pattern with formalized avoidance—for example, between a man and his mother-in-law, and with the broader system of exchange and hierarchy, even approaching the drama and contest of the agonistic gift exchange of the potlatch kind. Indeed, there are ceremonial, aesthetic, and religious aspects to joking relations. The ethnography, and their authors’ first interpretations, suggest that joking relations are systematically designated within social and kinship systems, where they define occasions and expressive forms for displaying particular dimensions of who one is. Keywords: Joking, relationality, kinship and marriage, avoidance, social drama, potlatch This question connects to the whole set that we have been posing for many years: exchanges and hierarchies between members of clans and families amongst themselves and with those of allied families and clans: a social phenomenon altogether human. Its study will render visible, on the one hand, one of the origins of moral realities that are still striking from our own folklore, and also one of the origins of less widely distributed, more developed phenomena: rivalries between kin and allied groups, in the potlatch in particular.1 I On this subject, let us consider some African tribes (Bantu). Mlle. [Lilias] Homburger, while mentioning the very numerous ceremonial expressions in black, Bantu and Nigritian areas, has very specifically reminded us of the meaning of the word hlonipa, in Zulu: “to be ashamed of.” In reality, the exact translation of this term into French is not possible; but the Greek word (in Greek in the text), and the verb (in Greek in the text) have very much the same sense: at one and the same time shame, respect, modesty and fear, especially religious fear, in English awe. Among those that inspire these sentiments are relations of one sex to the other, of mother-in-law to son-in-law, of father-in-law to daughter-in-law, to the older brother, and to the chief amongst the Zulu: similarly, and in addition, to the mother’s brother2 amongst the Ba-Thonga. The reasons for these deferences are fundamental; very certainly, they give expression to a certain number of relationships, above all religious, economic, and juridical, in the interior of the family or allied groups. We previously proposed, in 1914, at the Ethnographic Congress of Neuchâtel, an interpretation of mother-inlaw avoidance from this information, and in particular, from Zulu and Thonga documents. These latter, which we owe to [Henri Alexandre] Junod, show that mother-in-law avoidance gradually diminishes in proportion to the discharge of the lobola, the husband’s bridal payments; the mother-in-law, in this case anyway, is a kind of consecrated creditor.3 But these relations have their opposites, which, meanwhile of the same kind, by their same nature and function, are able, like an antithesis to a thesis, to serve towards the explanation of the genre in its entirety. In the face of (in Greek in the text), there is the (in Greek in the text);4 in the face of respect there is insult and breach of manners, there is bullying and ease; in the face of boundless duty without counterpart, there can be unlimited rights, even without reciprocity, in certain cases. The populations improperly termed primitive, the people referred to as primitive, in reality a very great number of classes and people amongst our own, still in our own day, do not use moderation in their politeness nor their rudeness. We ourselves have known such states of excessive daring and insolence towards some people; excessive timidity, embarrassment, and absolute constraint towards others. But there seems to exist a type of moral, religious, and economic phenomena, grouping quite numerous human institutions, at least at a certain degree of development,5 that correspond to this description. [Robert] Lowie, and after him, [Paul] Radin have proposed to give to them the name of joking relationships, parentés à plaisanteries, a name well chosen. It is towards this kind of phenomenon that we would like to display an extended interest; if only for encouraging new observations as long as these are still possible. The same as relations of respect, joking relations are quite well indicated by Junod amongst the Ba-Thonga. Unfortunately, this author has not pushed the study of excessive familiarity very far, and the definition of allied kin who are submitted to these practices is poorly specified, except for cases that concern: the mother’s brother and sister’s son relationship; and that of the husband with the junior sisters of his wife (so possible wives for him).6 Radcliffe-Brown has devoted a whole work to this position of the sister’s son and his rights with regard to his maternal uncle in Bantu and Hottentot areas. We are certain that ties affording rights of abuse are very widespread and also generalized to many relationships in Bantu areas; they classify together quite well those people to whom one is owing (particularly one’s wife’s father) and people from whom one is owed. But our research is neither sufficiently extended nor sufficiently broadened in this ethnographic province, where the observers may also have overlooked many factual aspects. The two groups of societies where these customs are most in evidence, and which have been the best studied, are those of the American Prairie and those of the islands of Melanesia. It is amongst the Crow Indians that Lowie had the merit of identifying, naming, and specifying joking relations for the first time. He recorded them there first of all between “sons of fathers” (that is between clan brothers); then, amongst the Crow and Blackfeet, between the group of brothers-in-law and that of sisters-in-law (that is between permitted husbands and permitted wives); amongst these latter the language is extremely licentious, even in public and even before kinsmen. He then discovered the same practices amongst the Hidatsa between sons of the brothers of fathers (who are not clan brothers; the clan being here, as is normal in Sioux country, traced in the female line). Amongst the Hidatsa, like the Crow, joking relations carry not only this right to rudeness, but further give an authority of censorship: through their joking, they exert a true moral surveillance of one over the other. The “myth of origin” of the institution amongst the Crow even reduces it to this purely ethical theme.7 Since then, Lowie has recorded these relations amongst the Comanche, but not the Shoshone, who are meanwhile their racebrethren; amongst the Creek, and the Assiniboine. No doubt that this “trait” of “civilization” is very characteristic of this region. It is also in a Sioux tribe, the Winnebago, that Radin encountered the most developed form and has studied it the best.8 In principle, a man is extremely reserved and polite with everyone of his own kin and affines. To the contrary, he never ceases to make fun of the following kin and affines: children of fathers’ brothers and mothers’ brothers (that is, cross cousins, permitted husbands and wives), mothers’ brothers, sistersand brothers-in law.9 “He does it” (sharp teasing) “each time he has the chance to do so, without the other being able to take offense.” In general and practically, this teasing hardly lasts longer than the time it takes to enter into the matter at hand; and it is reciprocal. And Radin notes with subtlety that one of their reasons for being could have been “that they procure a respite from the constant formality that impedes relations of ease and comfort with all close kin.” Religious respect is in fact compensated by the secular insolence between people of the same generation who are united by quasi-matrimonial ties. It remains only the maternal uncle, whose singular position is best marked in Melanesia. The American observers have been very struck by the singularity of these practices. They have a vast field to work and have hardly emerged from it. They have slightly exaggerated the originality and almost given up offering an explanation of these phenomena. Radin limits himself to remarking how all these relations are either in the female line among the Winnebago, or between people having reciprocal matrimonial rights over one another. Lowie, as for him, has at least worked at comparison. Under the title, equally apposite, of “privileged familiarity,” he brings them together with Melanesian data; but he believes these to be less typical. In our own sense, however, these are equally clear, and even further, they lead us toward the explanation. [W. H. R.] Rivers had seen the great importance of these relations, in particular in the Banks Islands. He studied at length the institution of the poroporo, which is clearly in evidence there. Kin are classified into people who poroporo each other and those who do not poroporo. Practical jokes, inflicted penalties, license in language and gesture contrast with the correctness towards other kin. The husband of the father’s sister is one of these favorite targets, with regard to whom they employ altogether special language. Poroporo relations are almost the same as for the Winnebago: people of the same generation in the clan into which one marries, plus the junior brothers and the maternal uncle or, rather, the maternal uncles (since we are here, like with the Sioux, in a classificatory kinship system). The only difference concerns the brother’s wife whom one can only poroporo a little (in this case it is a question of kin in practice and no longer of kin by right). Rivers recorded the same institutions in the Torres Islands. [Charles Elliot] Fox, instructed moreover by Rivers to whom he had conveyed the findings, described this complex (ensemble) of contrasting institutions for San Cristobal (archipelago in the East Solomon Islands). Serious prohibitions weigh on all sisters and on the senior brother—a normal state of affairs in Melanesia—and also—abnormally—on cross cousins.10 To these taboos are opposed the excesses and liberties that hold for nephew and maternal uncle with respect to each other.; the nephew having the right, extraordinary but normal, of being, in spite of his age, the prescribed intermediary in the matrimonial negotiations of his uncle—since he can address him and, being from their clan, he can also approach the kin of the girl. The father’s sister has an equally remarkable position vis-à-vis her nephew; she is very free with him. These institutions have long been known in New Caledonia. Father [Paul Woodbury] Lambert has well described, like all the previous authors, taboos toward the sister, so obvious and important that they have served as the point of departure for a whole theory, for another observer, [J. J.] Atkinson; the senior brother and the father-in-law are less respected, but incomparably more than elsewhere. In this regard, Father Lambert has well shown what extraordinary rights to plunder, what extravagant bullying are allowed between cross cousins, each by the other: the bengam or pe bengam. A sort of perpetual contract unites them and trains them in absolute privileges of one over the other, where rivalries are born and grow, where endless teasing marks the license that each has with respect to the other, their intimacy and their boundless contestations. The mother’s brother and sister’s son treat each other in the same way;11 but, differently from the people of the Banks Islands and the rest of Melanesia, Fiji included, the sister’s son has fewer rights than the uncle of the same line. II It is a little early to give an explanation of these rules. These matters are relatively poorly known and not numerous; but it is possible to indicate what route to take to search for plausible justifications. First of all, these institutions have one very clear function. Radin could see it. They express an emotional state that is psychologically defined: the need to relax tensions; a live-and-let-live that gives respite from deportment that is too stiff. A rhythm is established whereby contrary states of heart succeed one another without danger. The reserve of daily life looks for a counter-state and finds it in indecency and rudeness. We ourselves still have this kind of sudden change of mood: soldiers escaping from standing at arms; pupils needling each other in the schoolyard; gentlemen releasing themselves in the smoking room from overlong courtesies towards the women. But this is no place for commenting too long. This psychology and this ethic explain the possibility alone of these phenomena; only the consideration of diverse social structures, practices and collective representations can reveal the real cause. One could say that within a social group there is a certain constant dose of respect and disrespect, of which the members of the group are capable, portioned out unequally upon the diverse members of this group. But then—particularly within politico-domestic groups, whose linked segments constitute the tribes to which we have referred—we need to see why certain relations are, so to say, sacred and certain others are so profane that vulgarity and baseness govern reciprocal attitudes. It is clear that we should not search for a single cause for these phenomena. It is in the nature of each domestic relationship and in its function that we must find a reason for such disparate and diverse operations. It is insufficient to say that it is natural, for example, that a soldier would avenge being fed up with the punishments of the corporal; there has to be an army and a military hierarchy for this to be possible. Similarly, it is due to the constitution of the family group itself that certain relations are protected by the code of manners and others are the natural object of injustices and insults, or at least are the victims of license of bad taste. Finally, if these diverse practices and sentiments, if these impulses of domestic structure express its hierarchies, it is because they correspond to the collective representation that these domestic groups make of themselves and that each member applies to their own share of it. It is on the basis of a sort of ranking of religious and moral values that the prominent people of the family, the clan and allied clans are classified. It is by following this ranking that these diverse and successive attitudes are distributed across time and person. One could direct research and observation along the following paths. The ceremonies and interdictions that circumscribe certain relations are beginning to be sufficiently studied, even if not sufficiently understood. Most of them have multiple causes. For example, the mother-in-law is obviously, at one and the same time: a woman of the forbidden generation within the marriageable phratry or in the allied and marriageable clan; she is also the person who, in the case of male descendants who are more or less recognized, is the sister of one’s father and through whose shared blood with his wife one has direct connection; she is the “old” person with whom one communicates unduly through her daughter and of whom the sight can “age the son-in-law”; she is the inexorable creator of the “sexual field” that the man cultivates; the owner of the blood of the children who will be born from the marriage; she symbolizes the dangers of the feminine principle, those of the foreign blood of the wife of which she is the creator, and one transfers to her the avoidances, that one takes vis-à-vis one’s own wife only at the time of the marriage, menstruation, war, or great expiatory periods. She is the constant object of a number of sentiments concentrated together and all relating, as we see, to her defined position with respect to the son-in-law.12 In the same way one can classify joking relations, but one by one and in each society. We can even be surprised that they lend themselves so well to grouping into kinds, and that comparable similarities can be found so far apart, governed by similar structures. Most of these relations are those between allies, to address the vulgar expressions; since we would like better to say just allies and not speak only of kinship in these cases. Among the tribes of the American prairie as in those of Melanesia, it is above all people of the same age, groups of brothersand sisters-inlaw, potential spouses, who exchange familiarities corresponding to the possibility of sexual relations; this licensed behavior is as natural as the taboos that protect the women of the clan, mothers and sisters and daughters of these women descending in the female line, are more serious; especially in the case of brothers-in-law, obligations are complicated by military service and by those that result from sister exchange and the rights that keep the brother-in-law devoted to protection of his sister (theme of the story of Blue-Beard). Of practices that are still tenacious with us between Valentines, those that are operate between young men and maids of honor during the wedding season, offer quite well an idea of these customs that regulate collective contractual relations between groups of potential brothers-in-law: opposition and solidarity intermixed and alternating, which is normal above all in areas of classificatory kinship. [Arthur Maurice] Hocart has already noted these institutions amongst the Ba-Thonga, and this characteristic of brothers-in-law, “gods” to each other. This expression “god” marks moreover not only a religious quality, but a moral quality that also belongs to the gods: superiority of rights: for example the rights on the goods of bengam cousins in New Caledonia, or the sister’s son in Fiji, in New Caledonia to on those of one’s uncle among the BaThonga. Rivers and Hocart have already likened poroporo relations and the system of abuses that they entail to the well-known and even classic Fijian institutions of the Fijian vasu and to the regular plunder of the maternal uncle by his nephew, in particular in noble and royal families where the vasu serves, one says, to collect tribute. For this institution and tauvu kinship, Hocart has even proposed an explanation, one that has not had the success it merits. He starts from the observation of Junod concerning the sister’s son [treated as if he were a] chief. He shows that the sister’s son is clearly considered in Fiji a vu, a god by his uncle and he stands by this. We may be permitted to add a hypothesis to this notation. We should consider not only the jural position, but the mythical position that every individual has in the clan. Well, this can be a reason why the nephew could thus be superior to his uncle. In all societies, as in the American North-West, [where] people believe in the reincarnation13 of the ancestors in a set order; in this system, the sister’s son (whether descent is traced in the male or female line has little relevance14 ), belonging by the spirit that he incarnates to the generation of the father of his uncle, has all the authority over him. He is “chief” for him, as the Ba-Thonga say. Similarly, in some systems (very clearly among the Ba-Thonga) the individual of the third generation has exactly the same position as the one of the first and one of the fifth, and since in certain other systems (Ashanti,15 Chinese dynasties16) due to the crossing of two descent lines, it is the individual of the fifth generation who reincarnates his great-great-grandfather, we can understand how a child might have authority over a kinsman of a generation just prior to his own but subsequent to those of the ancestors that he reincarnates. The proof is that it suffices for the number of generations and reincarnations to have another point of origin that, to the contrary, the maternal uncle would have superior rights to his nephew, which is the New Caledonian case.17 We can add that, in certain cases, the maternal uncle is also the one to whom one owes one’s wife, the father-in-law, as Radcliffe-Brown notes for numerous Bantu peoples, among the Hottentots and in the Tonga Islands. Let us bring in the other interpretation of Radcliffe-Brown: the maternal uncle being the male representative of the female principle, from the mother’s blood, “male mother” as the Ba-Tonga vigorously insist, then “mother who is male” would be exact also, as a translation, and would explain why he is ordinarily ranked below and not above the nephew. These then are several causes which would suffice, each in its own way, but which have almost everywhere functioned more or less simultaneously, and one understands, for example, that the avoidance of the mother should have been compensated by a sort of systematic profanation of her brother. In any case, it is clear that joking relations correspond to reciprocal rights and that, generally, when these rights are unequal, it is to a religious inequality that this corresponds. Even more, we are clearly here at the doorstep of practices known under the name of potlatch. We know that these practices are identifiable by their agonistic character, by the competitive generosity of the contests: of force, grandiosity, challenges on the occasion of insult, and at the same time by hospitalities. But in these institutions of respectful relations and joking relations, which are simpler institutions, in these exchanges of obligations and exchanges of teasing, which are very visible in the Banks Islands’ poroporo, we can see the roots of these obligatory rivalries. Moreover, the poroporo exists alongside the potlatch in Melanesia, like a matrix from which the newborn is not yet detached. In addition, potlatches are attached, at least in Melanesia and North America, to diverse degrees of kinship, and diverse alliances and sponsorships. So it is these, then, at least in this case, that should enter into the general category of customs of respect and bullying between people of the same generation within clans and across allied clans, and consequently between people of alternate generations representing yet other generations of ancestors. We see here the bridge that joins the institutions of the potlatch, so infinitely developed and the rougher, simpler institutions where the avoidances and manners exist alongside and oppose themselves to insults and disrespect. There we have a first conclusion of its logical history. We can also grasp a good number of already established types of bullying. In particular, let us note certain functional similarities within these likenesses of “persecution” so widespread in the American North-West and likewise on the Prairie. The customs converge in composing a kind of declaration of who one is. They can be likened, then, to very large systems of moral phenomena. They allow us even to entertain these practices as a way of studying certain of the most widespread of customs.18 When we consider them along with their opposites, when we compare formal manners with familiarity, respect with ridicule, authority with scorn, and when we see how they are distributed among different persons and different social groups, we understand better their justifications. These researches also have an evident linguistic interest. Dignity and crudeness of language are important elements in these practices. It is not only forbidden subjects that they address, but forbidden words that they deploy. The manners of language and class (classes by age and by birth) become comprehensible when one studies why, and vis-à-vis whom, people violate them systematically. Finally, these works could clarify, if we pushed them further, the nature and function of important aesthetic elements, naturally mixed, as everywhere, with the moral elements of social life. Besides, obscenities, satirical songs, insults towards men, mocking representations of certain sacred beings, are at the source of the performance; just as the respects shown to men, the gods, and the heroes, nourish the lyrical, the epic, the tragic. Translator’s note on references The following is a list of the works that are likely to have been the ones from which Marcel Mauss drew for his analysis. There is no reference section in the original text, so for works mentioned there but lacking a bibliographical reference in our reconstituted list, this is because we have not been able to find them in time for inclusion. The sources on which Mauss drew are likely to be from the same corpus as those he mobilized for the “Essay on the gift,” which was published only one year previously (1925) to the first presentation of “Joking relations” (1926). The review section of the 1923/24 edition (published 1925) of L’Année Sociologique offers a source from which we can know for certain which works he was familiar with. The correspondences could be traced more exactly by examining these sources, Mauss’s reviews, and the current text. As a major organizer and contributor to the book and article review section of the journal L’Année Sociologique, under the supervision of his uncle, Émile Durkheim, Mauss probably saw dozens of titles every year. He himself regularly wrote reviews. Between 1912 and 1925, there was a long hiatus in publication, due to World War I, the loss of junior colleagues in the conflict, and the death of Durkheim himself in 1917. Mauss took up leadership of the newly constituted series for its first edition of the “New series” in 1925 (for the year 1923/24). The first edition after suspension contains a eulogy to the dead of the group, along with an account of what each had been working on. The famous “Essay on the gift” follows, as the lead article of this edition. The final section is devoted to reviews. It appears to summarize work that had been read for the journal during the hiatus, and it clearly aims to reinsert the AS school into the ongoing scholarship of the time. It runs to 800 pages, and includes reviews of 219 named works, plus some bibliographical notices, written by a total of 1,059 authors named alphabetically in a page-referenced list. By a rough estimation, I think that Mauss himself wrote possibly up to half of the pages of these review articles or with colleagues.19 He reviewed very detailed ethnographies as well as theoretical works, written in English and German as well as French. The “Essay on the gift” and the present article on joking relations clearly draw on his extraordinarily broad reading. Works starred in this list were either reviewed in the journal (1925 edition), or other, less ethnographic, works by the same author were reviewed. The others are the most logical sources, by date of publication. Where the date is much later, this represents the presently most available edition of that work. —Trans. References Atkinson, J. J. 1903. “The natives of New Caledonia.” Folklore 14 (3): 243–59. *Brown, A. R. [Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.] 1924. “The mother’s brother in South Africa.” South African Journal of Science 21: 542–55. Davy, Georges. 1922. La foi jurée: Étude sociologique du problème du contrat: La formation du lien contractuel. Paris: Librarie Félix Alcan. Fox, Charles Elliot and Frederic Henry Drew. (1915) 1922. “Beliefs and tales of San Cristobal.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 45: 131–228. Granet, Marcel. 1926 Danses et légendes de la Chine ancienne. Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France20. Hocart, A. M. 1915. “Chieftanship and the sister’s son in the Pacific.” American Anthropologist 17 (4): 631–46. Howitt, Alfred William. 1904. The native tribes of South-East Australia. London: Macmillan. Junod, Henri Alexandre. (1912) 1924. The life of a South African tribe. 2 Vols. London: Macmillan. Lambert, Father Paul Woodbury. 1900. Mœurs et superstitions des Néo-Calédoniens. Nouméa: Nouvelle Imprimerie Nouméenne Leenhardt, Maurice. 1979. Do Kamo: Person and myth in the Melanesian world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. *Lowie, Robert. 1912. Social life of the Crow Indians. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. IX, Part II. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Mauss, Marcel. 1925. “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétes archaïques.” L’Année Sociologique, nouvelle série, 1 (1923–24): 30–186. Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1871. Systems of consaguinity and affinity in the human family. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institute. ———. 1877. Ancient society. New York: Henry Holt and Co. *Radin, Paul. 1923. The Winnebago Tribe. Washington D.C.: American Bureau of Ethnology. *Rattray, Robert Sutherland. 1923. Ashanti. Oxford: Clarendon Press. *Rivers, W. H. R. 1914. The history of Melanesian society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spencer, Baldwin and Francis James Gillen. (1899) 1904. The native tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan. Thurnwald, Richard. (1921) 1926. “Banaro Society.” Memoirs of the American Anthropological Society 3: 251–391. Parentés à plaisanteries Résumé de la traductrice : Cet article rassemble des faits ethnographiques provenant de publications portant sur l’Amérique du Nord, la Mélanésie, l’Australie et l’Afrique, pour définir un type de « relation » (généralement mais pas exclusivement d’ordre de la parenté et de l’affinité) qui autorise à plaisanter, taquiner, et même insulter ou intimider, ce dans les sociétés où l’adresse respectueuse est autrement importante. Ces pratiques sont spécifiques à certains peuples, mais répandues et étonnamment assez similaires pour mériter une attention particulière en tant que phénomène humain en général. Elles se rapprochent aussi de pratiques dans nos propres sociétés comme lorsque les gens échappent par le jeu à un formalisme excessif. Elles ne sont cependant pas réductibles à une motivation psychologique sociale. Les relations désignées comme « parentés à plaisanterie » sont souvent entre parents, affins, ou ceux épousables dans les systèmes de mariage de type prescriptif. Vu sous cet angle, elles modèlent aussi l’évitement formalisé (comme par exemple entre un homme et sa belle-mère), et l’ensemble du système d’échange et de hiérarchie, s’approchant même du drame et de la compétition propre à l’échange agonistique du type potlatch. En effet, il existe des aspects cérémoniels, esthétiques, et religieux des parentés à plaisanterie. Les ethnographies, et les premières interprétations de leurs auteurs, suggèrent que les relations à plaisanterie sont systématiquement désignées au sein des systèmes sociaux et de parenté, où elles définissent des occasions et des formes d’expression pour afficher des dimensions particulières de qui l’on est. Marcel MAUSS (1872–1950) was Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France. A central member of the Année Sociologique, the founder of l’Institute Français de Sociologie and l’Institut d’Ethnologie, and a politically active socialist, Mauss’ oeuvre has had a tremendous impact on anthropology and political activism throughout the twentieth century and, indeed, up until the present day. Among his more famous works (translated into English) are: The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies ([1922] 1990, Routledge); Outline of a general theory of magic (with Henri Hubert [1902] 2001, Routledge); Primitive classification (with Émile Durkheim [1902] 1963, University of Chicago Press); and Sacrifice: Its nature and function (with Henri Hubert, [1898] 1964, University of Chicago Press). ___________________ Editor’s note: This essay is a translation of Mauss, Marcel. 1928. “Parentés à plaisanteries.” Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études. Section of Religious Sciences. Paris: Texts of a communication presented at the French Institute of Anthropology in 1926. We are grateful to Jane Guyer for her detailed translation. 1. On these rivalries between kin, see Rapport de l’école des hautes études (1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1913, etc. . . . 1919, 1920, 1921). [Georges] Davy (La foie jurée, passim) and I have elucidated the question of these transmissions, hierarchies, and rivalries between kin and allies but only with respect to the potlatch and these contractual systems in the American Northwest and in Melanesia. Meanwhile, these phenomena, however important they be, are far from being the only ones or the only typical ones. Those with which we are concerned here are equally so. All, moreover, are part off a vaster genre of institutions that we have proposed, many times (cf. Mauss 1925), that we call: systems of total prestations. In these systems, a group of men, ranked or not, owe to a certain number of other men, kin or allies, occupying a symmetrical or superior position, equal or inferior, or different due to sex, a whole series of both material and moral prestations (services, women, men, military support, ritual foods, honors, etc.) and the whole series of what one man can do for another. Generally these total prestations are accomplished from clan to clan, from age class to age class, from generation to generation, from one allied grouping to another. [Alfred William] Howitt (1904: 756–79) has given a good description of food exchanges of this kind in a considerable number of Australian tribes of the South East. Generally these prestations are made within groups, from one group to another, following the rank of individuals: physical, jural, and moral, very precisely determined, for example, by date of birth, and well displayed, for example, by placing in the campsite, by debts of food, etc. People will perhaps be surprised by these last remarks. They will believe that we are definitively abandoning the theories of L. H. Morgan (Systems of consanguinity and affinity; Ancient society, etc.) and those that they lend to [Émile] Durkheim on primitive communism, and the confusion of the individual within the community. There is nothing contradictory there. Societies, even those supposed to be deprived of the sense of the rights and duties of the individual, in fact give the individual an altogether precise position: to the right or left in the camp-site; the first or second in ceremonies, meals, etc. This is proof that the individual matters, but it is also proof that he matters exclusively as a socially determined being. Meanwhile, it does remain that Morgan and Durkheim, in the end, have exaggerated the internal formlessness of the clan and, as Malinowski makes me remark, have given insufficient space to the idea of reciprocity.* 2. On this relation between the mother’s brother and the nephew = son-in-law, see Radcliffe-Brown (1924: 542–45). Radcliffe-Brown has seen these institutions function in the Tonga Islands and in Bantu Africa; he has even made one of the comparisons that we make further on. But the exclusive aim of Radcliffe-Brown is to explain the relationship of the uncle to his sister’s son in these societies. We are perfectly satisfied to accept the interpretation that he gave to it (ibid.: 550), and its attachment to the lobola (payment for the fiancée and wife). We do not accept the hypothesis that this is sufficient to explain the position of the maternal uncle. 3. The progressive attenuation of the avoidance of the mother-in-law is attested equally among the Ba-Ila; mother-in-law avoidance is more a practice of the engaged couple, and partially ceases at the moment of the giving of the hoe at the moment of marriage. That this taboo has its origin in a sort of contract between the son-in-law and his wife’s mother, entering into effect as soon as there is sexual contract or the promise of a contract, is clearly evident in the practices of a tribe of the Nilotic group, the Lango. The taboo is observed even in the case of clandestine sexual relations. Often these come to be known by the mother of the girl, simply by virtue of the fact that the lovers avoid her. Furthermore, in the case of a successful hunt, he should deposit one share of the kill in the granary of this kind of mother-in-law. 4. This is Mauss’ original phrasing. We have been unable to track down the specific text— and thus the actual Greek terms—Mauss is referencing here. If any readers are familiar with Lilias Homburger’s work on Bantu linguistics and might know what text to consult, please do inform the editors at HAU. A list of Homburger’s published work can be found in the Bantu Online Bibliography, http://goto.glocalnet.net/jfmaho/bob.pdf. —Ed. 5. In fact the system of total prestations, which includes the system of joking relations, does not seem to be developed in Australia in the sense that we are following; respect is more the rule. The only example of joking that I have found attached to precise kin relations is not very important; and is found only in only one tribe, the Wakelbura; it concerns only a child, an only child; they give him the name of “little finger” ( = the fifth finger; the Wakelbura call their children by the order of birth, according to the number of the fingers). Muirhead specifies that “this joking is only permitted towards the boy and while he is small, and only for the children of brothers and sisters through the mother. The wider kin do not join in this teasing” (Howitt 1904: 748). In general there seems only to be developed: the system of avoidances, most of the time absolute or almost so, and linguistic indirection, if not by etiquette, vis-à-vis the older or younger sister, in accordance with the kinship systems, and vis-à-vis the motherand father-inlaw. Avoidances developed here before joking. In any case, the two latter are clearly tied to the system of total prestations, which is itself strongly emphasized. Example: Arunta: etiquette tied to the gift of hair (Spencer and Gillen [1899] 1904: 465); Urabunna: linked to the giving of food to the father-in-law (ibid.: 610). Among the Unmatjera, Kaitish, and Arunta, food seen by the father-in-law becomes taboo. “There has been equilla tunma (projection) of his odour onto it.” Among the Warramunga there is giving of food but no taboo. Among the Binbinga, the Anula, the Mara, Spencer and Gillen establish the existence of a taboo but not of language, but of the face of the father-in-law; while intelligently remarking: “This trait altogether constant in gifts of food to the father-in-law could be associated in its origin, with the idea of a sort of payment for the wife.” Following [J. R. van] Ossenbruggen, we have given another interpretation of these practices (Mauss 1925: 57). We see in which direction we must search to explain part of the etiquette. But a complete demonstration would fall outside our subject. And these indications serve only to reposition joking with a more general framework. 6. Joking with the wife of the maternal uncle, who will become the wife of the nephew on her widowhood, etc. 7. The custom is founded on the final phrase “No, I will not kill him, my joking relations would make fun of me.” 8. Even the name of the custom is borrowed from the Winnebago language. “If they permit a liberty with respect to someone who doesn’t belong to one of the preceding categories, this person asks :“what joking relationship have I got with you?” 9. Radin was a little perplexed by his notion of the mother’s clan. But when kinship is reckoned by groups, when it is classificatory, whether in the male or female line, marriage between cross-cousins is always permitted, save for an explicable exception. 10. The reason for this rather rare taboo is probably the following: the people of San Cristobal, above all those of the Bauro district, very probably and quite recently have changed their kinship system, and as a consequence, their terminology. In the past, one had to marry a cross-cousin (son of the mother’s brother against daughter of the father’s sister). Then for diverse reasons they moved to forbid this marriage rule. Marriage on San Cristobal being absolutely normless and unregulated, they told Fox “We marry the mau (daughter of the father’s sister) because we cannot marry the naho (her mother).” The cause of this deregulation is the marked gerontocracy of this little island. It means that one does not marry a father’s sister’s daughter, a person of one’s own generation, but a person in the generation below one’s own. As a result of this marriage becoming the rule, cross-cousins are precisely forbidden, exactly like brothers and sisters. The custom is the same in the districts of Pariginia and Arodi; and the same on Kahua. 11. [Maurice] Leenhardt will speak in detail of practices of this kind that he observed in New Caledonia. And we know that these details will be important. 12. We resume here a study of mother-in-law avoidance, in Australia and Bantu Africa, a study that we reserve ourselves to develop elsewhere. 13. We have returned very many times, in our work cited above, to this question of reincarnations; it is amongst those designated that prestations operate; they often work in the guise of living representatives of the ancestors; these latter figuring in dances, appearing in possession, noted by names, titles, and personal names. 14. As long as the second generation intervenes for one part, and for reasons that would take too long to explain, this obliges them, in this reckoning, to leap one generation. 15. The finest practice of this type that I know is the one that [Robert Sutherland] Rattray (1923: 38, 39) noted among the Ashanti: When he asked if one could marry a greatgreat-grand-daughter, “they replied by an exclamation of horror and that ‘it’s a red light for us.’ This is further proved by the name of the great-grand-son and all those of his generation. This name is nana n’ ka” so (‘grandson don’t touch my ear’). A simple touch by a great-grandson or a great-grand-niece on the ear of their great-grandfather is said to cause his immediate death.” The great-grandson is a sort of dangerous and living “double.” 16. This is a theme that [Marcel] Granet (Danses et légendes de la Chine ancienne, passim) has extensively developed in numerous places with respect to these stories and genealogies of the Chinese dynastic mythologies. 17. This position of the individual of a previous generation becoming superior to an individual of the generation of his father (mother’s brother and father’s brother), by virtue of being a classificatory “grandfather” in classification has been noticed among the Banaro of New Guinea by [Richard] Thurnwald. In the English edition of his work, he calls this kind of kin, the “goblin grandchild”; he likens this kin relation to the tauvu kin of Fiji. 18. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, to whom I showed a first version of this work, indicated a certain number of ideas to me on this subject, and very important practices that he is keeping for publication. 19. See: Guyer, Jane I. 2010. “The true gift: Thoughts on L’Année Sociologique edition of 1923/4.” Mauss Vivant: the Living Mauss. Revue du M.A.U.S.S. 36: 238–53. —Trans. 20. Granet’s Danses et légendes de la Chine ancienne (1926) was dedicated to Mauss, so it was possibly read in manuscript form. —Trans. * Erratum: Changes to the translation, first to correct a mistranslation from Mauss’ original phrasing in French “système des prestations totales” (first sentence of the second paragraph in Footnote 1), and second to rephrase the wording of the last paragraph in Footnote 1, have been made on May 12, 2014 at 14:28 GMT. (Original release date: September 16, 2013 at 14:03 GMT.) —Author (Jane I. Guyer).  

Godelier: Begetting extraordinary humans This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Maurice Godelier. Begetting extraordinary humans* Maurice Godelier, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales   Incest, cannibalism, right of life and death over others: the dominant are sometimes distinguished from the dominated by what they do (what is forbidden the others to do) and sometimes by what they eat. Power differentiates bodies. The Kako of Gabon The Kako of Gabon are a striking example of such differentiation. In this society divided into exogamous patrilineal clans, where a person was forbidden to marry with a member of the clans of his four grandparents as well as anyone from his kindred within a distance of four generations (Omaha-type prohibitions), the basic social unit was the village under the authority of a chief. Hunting, warfare, agriculture and the production of weapons and iron tools were the main activities of this society for which blood was the prime substance, the basis of the human being. For the Kako (Copet-Rougier 1998), blood makes everything: flesh, blood, bones, breath. Blood is an ingredient of even the soul, and it goes with it back to the village of the dead. But the soul is introduced into the foetal body only toward the end of the pregnancy, and this is done as a gift from the spirits to humans. The soul leaves the body shortly before death and wanders in the bush in the form of an animal. At this point it can be killed and, in this event, turns into a spirit that wanders among the nature spirits for all eternity. If it is not killed, it reaches the village of the death. Two fluids actually coexist in a human body—male or female—and keep it alive; these are: blood, a male fluid, and water, a female fluid that tempers the blood’s heat and strength. The blood and water descend from the head along parallel paths and meet in the man’s testicles or the woman’s lower back. There they mix with fats, which thicken them and make them into male and female sperm. In order to make a child, the man and woman unite sexually. The “female sperm” facilitates the entry of the male sperm, which makes its way to a place where it encounters menstrual blood. The foetus is formed from these “pieces of blood.” During the pregnancy, the couple makes love in order to nourish the foetus, the man with his sperm and the woman with what she eats. The child’s sex is determined as soon as the man’s and the woman’s blood-sperm meet. If the man’s blood is stronger than the woman’s, the child will be a boy, if the contrary, the child will be a girl. Sex is thus transmitted in two gendered, parallel and exclusive lines. Men always beget men, and women, women. From the first sexual encounter, too, the blood of the father and that of the mother (who themselves result from the mixing of their own father’s and mother’s blood) combine into a single blood, which will give the child its very own substantial identity. As the child is supposed to be made ‘in equal parts’ from its father’s and its mother’s blood, this blood contains the cognatic relations that link each individual to all of his or her ascendants.1 But the bloods that mingle in the child do not have the same weight. Women’s blood is much lighter. Beyond the fourth generation, all traces of uterine blood have disappeared and only the stronger agnatic blood subsists. These representations correspond to the Kako’s patrilineal descent principle. Men keep their clan’s blood forever, women lose it. At the same time, because each person contains the four grandparents’ bloods and since the uterine bloods disappear after four generations, it becomes possible once more to contract marriages with these clans in the fifth generation. These representations of blood thus also correspond to the Omaha character of their kinship system, to the prohibition on marrying in the four clans of the grandparents and in one’s own kindred. But why is women’s blood of a lighter colour and weight and why does it disappear after a few generations? It is because women do not fight or hunt and are banned from consuming the meat and blood of “cruel animals,” whose blood is like that of men, and they are even more strictly excluded from eating human flesh. Since, for the great hunters and warriors, humans are the game of choice, the “meat” par excellence. But in order for a man to have the right to eat human flesh, he must have killed many men. Those having fought, killed and eaten human flesh were called “the cruel ones” and they ‘held the village’, whose chief could be nothing other than a great hunter, a great warrior and a great eater of human flesh. Humans, the prime game, are one of the cruel animals, even the cruelest of all. The trail of blood thus traces a continuity between the human and the animal states. Each time an animal or a man was killed and eaten, the same rite, simbo, was performed so as to ward off the victim’s vengeance. His flesh and blood were consumed, while the fat (the female part of the body) was carefully conserved. Only the ‘very great’ men, those who ‘held’ the village, had the right to keep human fat. This fat was used ritually to coat the iron lode from which the smiths extracted the iron they used to make weapons, tools and “dowry money”, the iron objects that formed part of the bridewealth.2 Women and children are excluded from eating the flesh of all cruel animals and of humans. For all other game and domestic animals, additional taboos (mkire, from mkiyo, “blood”) also apply. These taboos concern the heart, head, sexual organs, gizzard, in short everything associated in Kako representations with the organs and substances connected with sex and the reproduction of life. When it comes to children, boys’ bodies are going to be little by little made different from girls’ bodies. A father will perform rites to gradually lift the prohibitions preventing his son from eating certain animals, until one day when he has become a hunter and warrior and has killed many men and animals, the young man receives from the Tumba—the Great Men—the right to eat real “meat,” human flesh. He is now considered to be a complete man, with heavy, thick, hot and powerful blood. The complete man thus possesses power within and by means of his body. His body is the incarnation of power—physical strength; political, military and economic power; and the power to make dowry money and to exchange it for wives. The reproduction of society thus appears to lie entirely in the hands of these cruel men. And blood symbolizes the unity of this society, since the Kako are formally forbidden to eat not only a relative but any member of their tribe. A tribe is the same blood shared.3 And yet the power is not entirely in the men’s hands. In this society, where, owing to the Omaha character of the kinship terminology, sisters are designated by their brothers and regarded as their “daughters,” women have a great deal of spiritual (and therefore social) power, which stems from the brother-sister relationship. For marriage does not separate women from their patriclan, and when they die they are buried beside their brother on their clan lands. And among the sisters, the eldest enjoy an exceptional status. They have pre-eminence over their brothers’ wives. Like the father’s sister in Tonga, the mehekitanga, they ritually ensure the fecundity of their sisters-in-law. But they can also cast an evil spell on them and deprive their brothers of descendants, thus endangering the continuation of their own clan. They dispose of other rites to ensure the fertility of their brothers’ fields. And it is especially they who are called upon when a village is founded. They perform the rite that ensures that the spirits of the place will look favourably on the humans there. This rite must be renewed each year at the start of the dry season, and it is supposed to “bind” people together, to bring harmony and to renew the ties between the living and the dead. Last of all, women also play a role in the two activities that are the source of the men’s strength and their privilege: hunting and warfare. In the past, when the men set out for war or to go hunting, the eldest sisters would lie across the trail and all the men had to step across them too ensure a successful outcome. Women thus had a real social and spiritual power. And they wielded it from time to time by refusing to perform the rites for the start of the dry season, thus threatening the village with famine. In this event, discord became entrenched, accusations of sorcery flourished, the village chief’s authority was threatened. In short, although their lighter blood fated them to submission to male power, women not only provided another clan with children and ensured its continuity, through their ritual activities and privileged access to the ancestors, they also contributed to ensuring that their own clan would enjoy equilibrium, concord and longevity.4 Women gave their blood to the other clans so that they might reproduce themselves. But they kept their spiritual powers for their own clan, which were enabled to reproduce by the blood of women from other clans. There was one law for all: “You must not cross blood.” You must never eat a member of your own tribe. The Kako example clearly shows how the body, the gendered body differentiated by its sex, is vested with power relations—political, religious but also economic—and witnesses to and implements them. The Paici of New Caledonia Comparable to the Kako example, but differing on a crucial point, endocannibalism on the part of chiefs, as in the case of the Paici of New Caledonia, also highlights the social and symbolic importance of differentiating, through kin ties and food, the body of chiefs from the bodies of those who follow and obey them. The Paici are particularly interesting because, as is often the case in New Caledonia, the chief has been brought in from outside, “from the bush,” and he must then be made into a native and, furthermore, must be made into an ancestor in his own lifetime. How to make a native and an ancestor of an outsider so that he may become your legitimate chief: this was the problem facing the Paici each time internal power struggles for the succession to chiefdom drove the clan elders to seek a new chief outside their group. A Kanak chiefdom is a political-military organization led by a group of older, high-ranking (ukai) men grouped around a central figure, pwi ukai, who wield their authority over a majority of commoners called gens petits’ (small people) or servants (Bensa and Goromido 1998). The high-ranking men who surround the chief—and manifest, in highly coded forms, their respect and support—are called his “fathers” (caa) and “grandfathers” (ao). The chief alone embodies and manifests the might of the territorial group. The chief and the prominent figures are considered as “older brothers,” while the commoners and their lineages are regarded as “younger brothers and sisters.” Certain lineages provide the chief s household with meat and fish, help in the fields, etc. They are called “servants” but also hold rights in the land and customary functions. The divisions are a function of the order in which groups and people arrived on a territory and, for individuals, of birth order in their lineages and clans. The first occupants of a site are considered to be the “masters of the land,” and all first born of these clans and families are, like them, ukai because they are closer to the ancestors and the origin of the sites. Each patrilineal lineage carries the name of a dwelling site, a “mound” founded by its ancestors, a name that is also a title borne by the descendants. From the standpoint of wealth and exchanges, there is no basic distinction between nobles and commoners. it is the title-names that make the difference. These title-names are ranked. However, while the ranking of the titles is quite stable and shows little variation over time, the same is not true of the title-holders. Title-names are lost and won, and the lineages and clans, long established or newcomers to a territory, are in permanent competition to conserve their status or to acquire a more prestigious one. Even the chief is not considered to automatically inherit his father’s title and position, nor is he supposed to leave them to his son. in all circumstances, the chief must be chosen by the masters of the land, who will lend him their support. As Alban Bensa stresses, the genealogical vocabulary used to speak of the chief can lead one to think that chiefdom is hereditary, but this kinship vocabulary “is only a veneer.” How do kinship and the representations of how a human is made function in Paici society? Their kinship system is based on clans and lineages organized by a patrilineal descent rule, but in which maternal kin play an extremely important role. The Paici assimilate sperm to blood, and two coexisting theories ascribe different roles to this male substance and therefore a different role to the father in making the child.5 According to one of these theories, the man’s blood-sperm mixes with the mother’s blood, which plays a preponderant role in making the foetus. According to the other, the man’s blood-sperm stops the menstrual blood from running out of the womb and in this case it becomes a foetus. in the second theory, the mother’s role and the debt to the maternal kin are even greater than in the first. This explains the extreme importance of the mother’s brother in Kanak societies. it is he who, through the medium of his sister and her spiritual powers, transmits their blood, flesh, bones and skin to his nephews and nieces. The maternal uncle also gives the child its soul, which comes from the ancestors who live in a place under the sea. The soul takes up residence in the body of the foetus and gives it breath and life. It is from its father’s lineage and from its father himself that the child receives a clan name, a lineage name, rights in the land and sites to live on. The child also receives its ancestors’ spiritual force (tee) through the agnatic line. This force is present in certain plants, animals and rocks, which are specific to a clan. Leenhardt called these supports of ancestral power “totems.” Throughout their life, the child’s maternal uncles will make repeated propitiatory acts and sacrifices to win their nephews and nieces health, strength and success in their endeavours. When a person dies, the paternal kin return the body to the maternal side. The soul remains in the vicinity of the deceased’s home until the end of the mourning period. The uterine kin of the deceased then conduct rites by which they accompany the soul they transmitted to the entrance of the under-sea country of the dead. When the body has decomposed, a second funeral is held, and the deceased’s maternal uncles come and lay the bones of the deceased in the cemetery of the paternal kin. These bones become relics and draw down and concentrate all of the ancestors’ spiritual power, which constantly radiates from funeral sites and mounds. From this time on, the deceased’s maternal kin no longer have access to the resting place of their nieces’ and nephews’ skulls and bones. How, in a society which lays such emphasis on the ancestors’ power, on the exceptional status of the elder lineages and on the eldest children in all lineages, precisely because they are closer to the ancestors, closer to the relics, to the old mounds, etc., I repeat, how in such a society, when a chief has died or been ousted and the clans are unable to agree on a local successor, will they go about making an ancestor of the outsider they have brought in to be this successor? This outsider is henceforth cut off from his natal group and is no longer surrounded by his agnatic or his uterine kin. The clans that receive him will give him a clan name and affiliation. This affiliation will link him with the oldest mound-name in their territory. They will also provide him, like maternal kin, with a new body full of health and force. In short, the body of the chief will be re-made both ritually and physically, so that he may be inserted into the lineage of the chiefdom’s most prestigious ancestors. The “prominent” families who will be his support-system and his advisors will become his “fathers and grandfathers” (coo ao), and one of the terms used to address him, “older big brother” is the same as the one used to designate the paternal great-grandfather. The chief thus becomes at the same time their son, their grandson, their older brother and their greatgrandfather; he becomes both an ascendant and a descendant of those who chose him. In order to provide the chief with a new body produced on site this time, he is fed with special food. He is served yams considered as very “old.” Periodically he is served the flesh of a high-ranking man from his adoptive lineage. Before the sacrifice, a mourning ceremony had already been held for the victim, in which the person making the sacrifice had asked the future victim’s maternal uncles to reclaim their share, namely: his soul. Only the chief could eat this meat designed to make him strong. The sacrificial victim’s heart and liver, the seats of life in Paici culture, were offered to the “war stone,” inhabited by the spirit of an ancestor who had been a great warrior and a great eater of human flesh, to which was regularly served up pieces of slain enemies. It therefore goes without saying that the lineage providing the chief with a victim had considerable political weight. No decision could be taken without it. The chief’s flesh was also their flesh. They acted in a way as maternal relatives of the chief, while he played the role of container and them of contained. Because of this, the victims became ancestors in his body and in turn made him an ancestor. But the chief was also allowed (and even obliged) to eat the flesh of one of his “father’s sisters”—sisters of his real father or those of his “fathers” in the sense of political backers. His fathers, therefore, instead of exchanging their sisters for wives and widening their network of alliances, devoted certain sisters to making the most important man of the chiefdom, its chief, even more powerful. Having become an autochthon through endocannibalism, the chief could then perform his tasks to the full measure: destroy enemies, put them to flight or massacre them, take their women and children for adoption or exchange, eat the bodies of enemy warriors in order to annihilate them by depriving them of the means of becoming protecting ancestors for their own group and hiding their bones so that they might not be used as relics and draw down the strength of their ancestors. Ultimately, the chief, made by others and raised by them above themselves, was nothing without his caa ma ao, his support-system. When this chief died, the problem of his succession arose again, and his formers supporters, as masters of the land and local elders, could recover the title to bestow on one of their own. But the internecine conflicts could be such that, even before his death, a chief’s legitimacy could be contested by some of those who had supported him. In this event, instead of waiting to be exiled or killed, he could offer himself in sacrifice in order to force the warring factions to put an end to their conflicts and oblige them to go on living together: in short, sacrifice himself in order to save the chiefdom. The day of the sacrifice, the chief walks to the ceremonial hut decked in his costume and his weapons, which he hands over to the man who is to carry out the sacrifice. The latter smashes his skull with a blow of his club. Before burying the body in the clan cemetery, the man charged with the sacrifice removes the liver, which is then cooked. Part is then symbolically shared out and eaten, and the rest is offered to the ancestors whose blessing is sought. This offering was designated by the same name as the gifts (pwd) made to the maternal uncles, who were present when the chief was killed and were given a gift, as was the sacrificer. By sacrificing himself, by offering his life and his flesh to be consumed, the chief was supposed to restore peace to the chiefdom. Thereafter it was impossible for those who had been fighting and wanting to separate to do so. The chief’s sacrifice had sealed a new social covenant. But it had also made his sons outsiders once again. His family was therefore forced into exile, together with those of the chief’s most ardent supporters who had attached themselves to him. The title reverted to the masters of the land, who had originally conferred it on the sacrificed chief. The cycle could now begin all over. There was, then, nothing hereditary about this power, which nevertheless could be established only in the name of the ancestors and was compelled to make an ancestor during his lifetime of someone who had no former descent ties with the living and the dead whom he governed.6 The Tu’i Tonga, a living man-god Let us come back from the ancestor-man living among humans that is the Kanak chief to the living man-god that is the Tu’i Tonga. According to mythology, his divine essence comes from the fact that his ancestor was twice begotten: once when a human woman united with a god and once when his divine father brought him back to life after the other gods, his brothers, jealous of his looks, had killed and devoured him. The myth tells that one of the great gods fell in love with a chief’s daughter and got her with child. The god went back up into the sky and sent down to the mother a piece of land and a yam to feed the child, whom he named Aho’eitu (the dawn god, the ‘new’ god). When he grew up, Aho’eitu asked his mother who his father was, and having been told he was a god who lived in the sky, he decided to join him. When he got there, the father presented him to his other sons, his divine brothers. The brothers, jealous of his looks, killed him and threw his head into a bush and ate his body. The father discovered the infamy and ordered his sons to find the head of Aho’eitu, which he placed in a wooden bowl, and then to vomit up the remains of their brother into the bowl. Then he restored Aho’eitu to life and sent him back down to earth, giving him the office and title of Tu’i Tonga, and he ordered his other sons to help their brother govern without ever laying claim to his office (Douaire-Marsaudon 1998: 152-7). Let us review the steps in this double birth, which changed Aho’eitu into Tu’i Tonga, a unique individual at the same time human and divine, who became the paramount chief and god after a series of initiatic ordeals. First, his birth, the result of copulation between a human woman and a god who fertilized her by his power, his mana. Then his growth, facilitated by a twofold food, divine through the yam and the land that his father sent, and earthly through his mother, who nourished him. Moreover his good looks are a sign of the mana that inhabits him, and it is this beauty that provokes the jealousy of the gods, his brothers. The brothers devour him, which fits with the fate of mortals who, in Polynesia, were always in danger of being devoured by the gods or by the chiefs. The father obliges his sons to vomit their brother’s remains into a kava bowl. in Tonga, saliva and vomit are life-restoring substances. His human body thus becomes a divine body since it now possesses his divine brothers’ life-force, their saliva. Then Aho’eitu returns to earth, having undergone a double birth, one on earth, the other in the sky. The myth ends by presenting as a divine decree that the Tu’i Tonga, last-born of the Great God’s sons, will reign over the earth and that none of his brothers must ever attempt to govern in his stead or to take away his title. Now this is exactly the policy followed by the line of the Tu’i Tonga, when it broke with the adelphic mode of succession that had been the rule in the royal lines and brought in a patrilineal mode of transmission, from father to son, thus creating a “dynasty.” It is understandable, in this case, that, born directly from the fertilization of his distant mythic ancestor by a god, the Tu’i Tonga claimed to be the great, the unique fertilizer not only of all of the women in his kingdom, but of the land and its crops, as a result of the land and the yam given by a god to the woman he had fertilized so that she might nourish their child. Invented in the context of the Tu’i Tonga’s court, the myth had all of the qualities ascribed to the discourse of dominant castes or classes. It aggrandized and divinized in the imaginary the members of this caste, which legitimized in their own eyes and in the eyes of those under them the forms of domination they wielded over the rest of the population. After the example of the Kanak twice-born ancestor-man, born the first time in the same way as other humans and the second time in a mystical and symbolic way through endocannibalism, and the example of the man-god, also twice born, but both times in a “spiritual” manner, the first on earth and the second in the sky, being eaten and reborn through the mana of a god, his father, we find ourselves in the presence of two cases where some “men” set themselves apart from and raise themselves above humans by having been conceived several times. Ultimately the others exist only as fragments of themselves, fragments to which the gods give life and from which they can take it back. De-conception of the Mekeo chiefs of Papua New Guinea With our final example, that of the Mekeo chiefs, we have the opposite case. Instead of being twice-conceived, in order to attain their divine essence and manifest it to one and all, the Mekeo chiefs must be twice-de-conceived (Mosko 1983a, 1983b, 1992). The Mekeo are an Austronesian-speaking group that live along the Biaru river, which empties into the sea in the middle of the Gulf of Papua. Their society was divided into two exogamous moieties, which were in turn split into two patricians. Each person was supposed to marry within the tribe but into the other moiety. Furthermore, a man could not marry a woman from his mother’s clan. He could not repeat his father’s marriage. He would therefore marry a woman from the alternate clan in the other moiety, thus marrying a second-degree cross cousin (see diagram). In the Mekeo society, the political-ritual functions belong to the hereditary chiefs of the four clans and are distributed according to the rule of both opposing and complementary moieties (Mosko 2005).7 There were thus four chiefs: one for war, one for peace, as well as a “war sorcerer” and a “peace sorcerer.” The war chief led the warriors into battle and carried out all the rites that had to do with killing. He was assisted by the “war sorcerer,” who possessed the powers to magically sap the enemy’s strength. in intertribal fights, the death of a Mekeo warrior was repaid by the death of an enemy warrior. There was also a reciprocal “exchange” of male blood between the groups. Men made ready for war by “closing” their body through fasting and sexual abstinence, to make them strong, swift and impenetrable to enemy war magic. War and sex were incompatible. The peace chief had an equally fundamental role within the tribe. He presided over the de-conception ceremonies for the deceased during funeral rites and festivities. He was aided by the “peace sorcerer,” who ensured that the Mekeo rules of marriage and clan exogamy were respected. He also saw to it that everyone cooperated with the “peace chief” to carry out correctly the reciprocal exchanges of special-food gifts between the deceased’s paternal and maternal kin. Before trying to analyze what it means to de-conceive someone for the Mekeo, we need first to know how the person was conceived. Every person belongs to a moiety and to a specific clan, and people from different clans, and from different moieties, are therefore from different “bloods,” agnatic bloods, since Mekeo descent reckoning is patrilineal. For two people to marry, they must be from “different” bloods. They conceive a child when they unite sexually and their sexual “bloods”—the man’s sperm and the woman’s womb blood—mix in equal proportions in the woman’s uterus.8 The mixing of the father’s and the mother’s blood inaugurates the life of the foetus, its conception.9 At the same time as this act mingles the two bloods and makes them one, it transmits this blood to the child. The man’s sperm-blood is believed to coagulate and solidify the woman’s liquid, shapeless menstrual blood. It shapes the foetus and then nourishes it. For this to happen, the couple increases their rate of sexual intercourse for the first three months of the pregnancy. During this time, the future mother is fed with huge quantities of boiled plants in order to increase the amount of ‘blood’ in her womb and make the foetus grow. From this moment on, the woman ceases to work in order not to cause the blood to leave her womb. After the first three months of the pregnancy, the man refrains from all sexual relations, so as to “close” his body back up and again be ready for war. The abstinence will last until the child is weaned, around a year and a half after its birth. For the Mekeo, parents and children are thought to share the same blood, and this blood stems in particular from the fact that they have shared the same cooked foods, for they believe that cooked food makes blood and raw food separates bloods. since marriages are repeated from one generation to the next, alternating between the two clans of the other moiety, the Mekeo see themselves, with regard to the other tribes, as having “a single blood.” But when it comes to their representations of themselves within the tribe, they see each other as being of different bloods, and it is on this condition, they say, that they can marry each other. When the men of one clan marry, they receive the blood of other clans, whereas their sisters and daughters give the other clans part of their blood. The Mekeo say that the clans “open themselves” to others by exchanging their women, and the tribe thus reproduces itself through the reciprocal exchange of female blood between the two moieties and the four clans. The women are a clan’s “skin,” the part of its body turned toward the outside. When a couple marries, the representatives of the four clans are present, and the ceremony begins with the de-conception of the bodies of the future spouses, which rids them of two of the four bloods they carry in them. The de-conception rite is celebrated by the “peace chief” and his assistant, the “peace sorcerer.” It consists in exchanges of valuables—lengths of cowry shells, necklaces of dogs’ teeth, bird-of-paradise feathers, raw pork from domestic pigs. The clan of the groom’s father (A1) gives a certain number of valuables and an amount of raw pork to the clan of the bride’s father (B1), and the groom’s mother’s clan (B2) gives the same amount of valuables to the bride’s mother’s clan (A2). The two clans (Bi and A2) that receive these gifts in turn present their givers with raw pork. To give raw rather than cooked meat is to deny or reject the existence of kin relations between givers and receivers that go through the married couple. This exchange is called ifa kekapaisa (to manipulate the blood). By “manipulating” their bloods, the relatives affirm symbolically and fictively that they are not relatives. Thus, in the reciprocal exchange of raw pork, the clan of the groom’s father (A1) de-conceives the former of the blood of his father’s mother (B1), which is precisely the blood of the bride’s father’s clan (B1). Alternatively, the bride’s clan (B1) de-conceives her of the blood of her father’s mother (A1), which is precisely the clan of the groom’s father. When clans A2 (the groom’s mother’s clan) and B2 (the bride’s mother’s clan) exchange pork, they thereby de-conceive the future spouses of the blood of their mothers’ mothers (A2, B2). At the close of these de-conceptions, each spouse has only the blood of their two grandfathers. They are rid of the blood of their future spouse’s clan, which they also carried, and are now free to marry. Through these “manipulations” of their blood, they are reborn as new social persons. This transformation is indicated by the word used to designate the de-conception of the newlyweds: engama, which also means “conception.” Nevertheless, these manipulations, which simultaneously de-conceive and ‘re-conceive’ the people involved, are considered by all parties as a “fiction.” And the newlyweds often behave toward their new affines as though they were still “a single blood.” For, in the Mekeo’s thinking, a person’s “true” “de-conception” occurs when they die. The funeral rites and festivities are the most important social institution in Mekeo culture, and their performance is extremely complex. The “peace chief of the deceased’s clan gives, on behalf of the mourning clan, a quantity of various raw foods to the chiefs of the two clans in the other moiety”. Those who helped collect these foods are: members of the deceased’s clan, but also all of the children that the women of these clans have given to the two clans of the other moiety. The clan chiefs who receive these gifts redistribute them to those clansmen whose mothers are not from the deceased’s clan and to the children of the clanswomen married into the clan of the other moiety which is not that of the deceased. The mourners give three categories of food: tubers from the deceased’s garden, which provided part of his blood; meat of game and wild pig; and pork from domestic pigs. These two kinds of meat—bush meat and village meat—represent the deceased’s flesh and blood, and his fellow clansmen may not eat of this meat at any cost: it would be tantamount to autocannibalism. The wild meat has been smoked. It is dry and represents “male” blood; while the domestic pork is “female” blood. These meats represent the bloods of the deceased’s two grandmothers: his father’s mother and his mother’s mother, two bloods that the feast givers “return” to the clans that have given them women. The clans that give these meats are thus rid of the foreign bloods that entered into the process of conceiving their members. By the same token, the clans that receive and eat these meats reappropriate the bloods they have lost over the previous generations by giving their women to the other clans so that they might provide them with descendants. What had been partially or fictitiously done at the time of the marriage is brought to fulfilment at the time of death. In the end, all clan members are once again connected by a single, “strictly” male blood. The clans that had “opened themselves” to others in order to conceive, “close back upon themselves” by de-conceiving their members. New alliance ties can be created, non-relatives can once again become relatives. The (apparent) contradiction between clan exogamy and tribe exogamy is resolved. All Mekeo are a single blood, which is divided into four different bloods, and so on. But this “ordinary” de-conception of commoners, which happens only when they die, is not the same as the “extraordinary” de-conception practised among the chiefs during their lifetime. They perform this de-conception at each installation of new “sons of Akaisa,” the god that gave the Mekeo ancestors everything: fire, domestic plants, game, their own daughters, and who vested the ancestors of the hereditary chiefs with the political-ritual offices that their descendants still hold. But they also do this each time a funeral is celebrated by the ‘peace chief’, in so far as this chief must at this time also perform his own de-conception and that of the other chiefs. He does this by giving them portions of sacred food, ikufuka. These portions of ikufuka (which can be translated as “magic-power mountain”) are composed of the whole carcass of a dog and certain special parts of the skin and certain organs of a pig. This sacred meat can and must be eaten by the commoners, but in no event by the chiefs. The latter redistribute their own share of the ikufuka to their fellow clansmen but do not eat any. That would be tantamount to eating the flesh of the god Akaisa, and eating their own flesh, since all chiefs descend from the sons of this god, who were born at the beginning of time, without a mother, without female blood in their bodies. In short, by de-conceiving themselves while they are still living, the chiefs purge themselves of that which came from their mother. They detach this part which made them androgynous beings, and with it all of the attendant social relations, and in so doing recover their ancestral, divine and purely male essence. Chiefs thus are reborn during their lifetime, without the mediation of women to bring them into the world and, in the process, recover the primal condition enjoyed by humans at a time when there were only men who never died and who, when they grew old, shed their skin like snakes and became young once again. It was in those times that Foikale, chief of the first men, who had always lived underground and had no wives, emerged and appeared in the garden of the god Akaisa. The god gave him a warm welcome and told him to go fetch his companions. These first men did not know how to hunt, or work the land and did not drink water. Later, Akaisa gave them fire, the edible plants, meat and his own daughters so that they might have sexual intercourse and procreate. Akaisa then lived among his protégés in the guise of a young boy, who soon made the humans jealous because of the game that ran into his nets and which he shared generously with everyone. One day the men beat him and drove him away. In revenge, Akaisa drove the men, through his magic, to kill each other. Death had made its appearance. Three times Akaisa drove them to fight each other, and three times he brought them back to life. At last, he sent the men down to earth after having distributed to certain of them the four political-religious offices, which have since become hereditary. At the same time he sent down the chiefs’ wives, whom he had made pregnant, and it was the firstborn sons of these women who were later to hold the offices and titles. According to another myth, Akaisa challenged his young brother Tsabini to kill his mother and eat her, telling him that he had already killed his own and that they were going to share her. Tsabini discovered that he had been tricked by Akaisa, who had substituted a pig for his mother. He killed Akaisa’s son. Akaisa carried his son’s corpse to the top of a mountain and laid it on a platform for the bones to dry. But each night, his son’s bones changed into game animals. So Akaisa called together the Mekeo’s ancestors and told them to catch the game and to organize a funeral feast for his son. He showed them how to do this and gave the chiefs the pieces of the boy’s body changed into game to be distributed to all the members of their clans but without eating any themselves. It is these founding myths that assert the chiefs’ divine essence and which the peace chiefs and the other clan chiefs reactivate each time a Mekeo dies and his clan performs the (ordinary) de-conception of the deceased. In contrast to the Kanak chief or the great Tu’i Tonga, who become a human-ancestor or a man-god by eating human flesh and thus raising themselves higher, here we are dealing with chiefs who assert their divine essence and their legitimate right to govern others by detaching from their body every female ingredient that might subsist there and having others consume it. It is by reducing themselves that they raise themselves. In the West we are familiar with another god who shared his flesh and his blood with his followers, and who is said to have been born of a human woman who had conceived him without having had sexual relations with her earthly spouse. For Christ is a god, son of another god and of the Holy Spirit. A god without a heavenly mother, a purely male god conceived of a woman who had never had intercourse with the man she married, Joseph. A god born immaculate of an virgin herself born of an “immaculate conception.” But whether one is a man made god (Tu’i Tonga) or a god made man, whether one “raises oneself up” by eating others or by giving oneself to be eaten by others, this exceptional human or superhuman being then must prove that he is entitled to veneration and to the submission of ordinary humans by providing them with abundance, health, strength, in short, life; or on the contrary by depriving them of strength, health and life by annihilating them by his wrath. He will have to either give life or take it away in order to manifest his divine essence and power. References Bensa, Alban and Antonie Goromido. 1998. “Contraintes par corps: ordre politique et violences dans les sociétés kanak d’autrefois,” in Le Corps humain. Supplicié, possédé, cannibalise, edited by M. Godelier and M. Panoff, 169-97. Copet-Rougier, Elisabeth. 1998. “Tu ne traverseras pas le sang. Corps, parenté et pouvoirs chez les Kako du Cameroun,” in Le Corps humain. Supplicié, possédé, cannibalise, edited by M. Godelier and M. Panoff, 87-108. Amsterdam, Archives Contemporaines. Douaire-Marsaudon, Françoise. 1998. “Le Meurtre cannibale ou la production d’un homme-dieu. Théories des substances et construction hiérarchique en Polynésie,” Le Corps humain. Supplicié, possédé, cannibalise, edited by M. Godelier and M. Panoff, 137-67. Amsterdam, Archives Contemporaines. Mosko, Mark. 1983a. “Conception, de-conception and social structure in Bush Mekeo culture,” Mankind 14: 24-32. ———. 1983b. Quadripartite structures, categories, relations and homologies in Bush Mekeo culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1992. “Motherless sons. ‘Divine kings’ and ‘partible persons’ in Melanesia and Polynesia.” Man 27: 697-717. ———. 2005. “Peace, war, sex and sorcery: Non-linear analogical transformation in the early escalation of North Mekeo sorcery and chiefly practice.” In On the order of chaos: Social anthropology and science of chaos, edited by M. Mosko and F. Damon, 166-205. New York: Berghahn. Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Salomon, Christine. 2000. Savoirs et pouvoirs therapeutiques kanaks. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ___________________ * We are very grateful to Verso Books for giving us the permission to publish this version of Chapter eight (Fifth component 2), The metamorphosis of kinship, Verso (forthcoming 2012). 1. It should be remembered that cognatic relations are present in all kinship systems, even though they may not be named. 2. Warriors cut off the enemy heads, for the head is the source of blood, strength and life. By eating the bodies, they made sure they could not become ancestors, protectors of their descendants. The enemy blood and fat became tools for the Kako’s material and social reproduction by thickening their blood and ensuring the continuity of the patrilineal clans (dowry) and enabling them to augment their means of production (tools) and destruction (weapons). 3. “The blood of the body, of sperm, of the foetus, blood souls, blood-thirsty spirits and blood-drinking warriors: it is around this essential notion that representations, discourses and practices are elaborated. Whether we are talking about the body, procreation, the kinship system, animal categories, cannibalism, sorcery or leadership, we must follow the blood trail if we want to understand both the symbolic and ideological logics, and the orders and disorders of social life” (Copet-Rougier 1998: 89). 4. Elisabeth Copet-Rougier notes a very important fact, which is that for women “the brother is not really like their father,” and at this point the terminology they use “switches to the Hawaiian type” (1998: 97). 5. Maurice Leenhardt’s thesis, which says that the role of the Kanak father is merely to fortify because sperm plays no role in conceiving the child, is not sustained by later ethnological studies. But the existence of two conceptions of the role of sperm, one of which sees it as a plug, points in this direction. The debate is open and has been renewed by the publication of Christine Salomon-Nekiriai’s work, which criticizes certain aspects of Alban Bensa’s analyses. It is up to the Kanaks and to those working with them to reconstruct their traditions and to take a stand (cf. Salomon 2000: 43). 6. Alban Bensa rightly draws a parallel between the example of the Kanak chiefdom and the great Melanesian chiefdoms of the Fiji islands, with which, as we have seen, the Tongan aristocracy intermarried. in Fiji the chief was also an outsider, a heavenly god received by the people of the land where he was supposed to have appeared one day. in order to become one of them, this foreign chief had to drink kava made from a plant that had grown atop the corpse of a local child. Later, the chief would lead his warriors to raid human victims beyond his borders and share their flesh with them (cf. Sahlins 1985: 75, 97-8). 7. The Mekeo were “pacified” in 1890 by William MacGregor at a time when Papua was still a British colony. Between 1890 and 1940, eighty per cent of the population died from a series of diseases introduced by the Europeans and for which the Mekeo had no immunity. With the end of war and these mass deaths, initially blamed on the peace sorcerers, internal strife and accusations of sorcery multiplied. The role of the peace sorcerers became increasingly important. Representatives elected by the Kairuku regional administration replaced the war chiefs and at the same time the Mekeo were converted to Christianity by French Catholic priests. 8. The word for “womb,” ma, is also the word for “mother.” 9. Engama, in the Mekeo language, means “beginning” and “conception.”

Durkheim’s herbarium This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Bjørn Thomassen. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.044 INTRODUCTION Durkheim’s herbarium Situating Arnold van Gennep’s review of Émile Durkheim’s The elementary forms of the religious life Bjørn THOMASSEN, Roskilde University This introductory article situates Arnold van Gennep’s review of Émile Durkheim’s The elementary forms of the religious life. It does so by relating the review to van Gennep’s much-neglected endeavor to establish methodological foundations for the emerging social sciences in the early twentieth century, in open contrast to Durkheim and the Durkhemian school of anthropology and sociology. It also contextualizes the review by revisiting earlier publications where van Gennep decisively went up against Durkheim’s approach to religion and society. The article finally suggests that Arnold van Gennep must be considered a founding figure of ethnographic theory, of relevance still today. Keywords: Arnold van Gennep, Émile Durkheim, religion (theory of), ritual, ethnographic theory, history of social science Having no feel for life, no feel for biology or ethnography,he transforms living phenomena and beings (vivants) intoscientifically desiccated plants arranged as in a herbarium. What could possibly justify a translation and reprint of a review written by Arnold van Gennep more than a century ago? A review, moreover, of one of the most debated books in the history of the social sciences—Durkheim’s The elementary forms of the religious life (EFRL from now on)? Has not everything been said that needs to be said? Alas, no. When Durkheim published EFRL in 1912, it received both acclaim and criticism. In terms of reception, the book went through its own unsurprising but highly problematic “division of labour”: sociologists would generally gloss over the long [568]and descriptive ethnographic parts on Aboriginal Australian myth and ritual (the main part of the book) and jump straight to the overall conclusions. At this level, it was widely agreed that Durkheim had contributed a decisive statement about the origin and nature of religion, and about society as such. EFRL is without rivalry the most quoted and used work in the sociology of religion ever—and it figures as a core reading in any university course still today. Anthropologists and area specialists were more critical. Even Radcliffe-Brown, the proto-Durkhemian among English anthropologists, found that the ethnographic parts were based on a series of misinterpretations, and wrote so in a letter to Mauss (Kuper 1988: 177). Yet he still celebrated the theoretical edifice and domesticated Durkheim’s functionalism for future generations. With time, the book established itself as the foundational text for both the anthropology and sociology of religion. Subsequent critiques of Durkheim’s position (and there are many) have never questioned EFRL’s status as a “classic,” the mature masterpiece of the founding father of our social sciences. Arnold van Gennep’s review occupies a singular position in these early debates about religion and society. He had himself published on totemism and on the Australian material, and had a detailed knowledge of Durkheim’s sources. At this level his critique is categorical. However, the ethnographic weakness cannot be detached from the general view of religion and society that Durkheim presented in EFRL. Indeed, the most crucial aspect of the review concerns the “sociological” part, the general theory. Van Gennep says quite simply that there is no theory whatsoever. What Durkheim presents is nothing but a “metaphysical” abstraction, a “scholastic” thought-experiment, an invention of a desk-scholar. If van Gennep is right, we have for more than a century been discussing a theory which never existed. It is worth contemplating. Van Gennep’s review not only forces us to question EFRL’s status as a classic. It also raises questions that, far from belonging to the footnotes of intellectual history, relate to foundational questions of the What, How, and Why of ethnographic theory. To appreciate this deeper relevance, it is necessary to briefly contextualize the review, and say something about the man who wrote it. Situating Arnold van Gennep Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957) is one of the least recognized and understood anthropologists still today. He became known outside smaller circles of European folklorists only after 1960, when Rites of passage (originally published in 1909) was translated into English. Van Gennep had died three years before, in the midst of general oblivion. Rites of passage is a powerful book, and became an instant success—with half a century of delay. Upon its reading, key figures such as Leach, Needham, and Evans-Pritchard expressed sincere wonder as to why van Gennep had not been held in higher regard within French anthropology. Leach (1968: 522) concluded that van Gennep’s approach to ritual had proven much more fertile than that of Durkheim. How could someone write such a book without ever holding a position at a French university? Needham (1967: xi) even called the general disregard of van Gennep “an academic disgrace.” Needham had gained some insight into van Gennep’s universe, as he translated The semi-scholars into English in 1967. [569]Besides the 1975 translation of van Gennep’s review of EFRL (see Pickering 1975: 205–8),1 no further work has since been translated into English, so Matthew Carey’s updated translation in this issue is the first translation of a van Gennep text in nearly half a century. The semi-scholars is a prose-style ironic account of academic specialization and the farcical but tragic loss of both commonsense and ultimate purpose in the pursuit of gay science. Needham understood that the book somehow reflected van Gennep’s own experience with institutionalized academia. He also intuited that van Gennep must somehow have been “kept away” from the academic world of Paris, but never ventured further into the issue. Arnold van Gennep is today well known among European folklorists (Belmont [1974] 1979; Senn 1974), but he has remained a puzzle for anthropologists. And sociologists quite simply don’t know him. History commits strange injustices. Van Gennep is one of the most prolific writers and well-read social scientists in modern European intellectual history. His encyclopedic knowledge was second to none. His review activities were amazingly prolific and wide ranging. Between 1905 and 1949 he published 250 review articles just for Mercure de France, the journal where his review of EFRL appeared in January 1913. Since he would typically review three to five books together in each “chronique” for Mercure, we are dealing with more than a thousand books reviewed—in this one journal alone, and he published for many others. In 1908 van Gennep had himself founded La Revue des Études Ethnographiques et Sociologiques, in which he would publish regularly while functioning as Directeur and administrator. This journal, albeit short-lived, could well be seen as a potential competitor to L’Année Sociologique, founded by Durkheim in 1898. Van Gennep reviewed extensively because he had to: it added a bit to his income, which he put together via an array of freelance jobs, never receiving a salaried job in French academia. But he evidently enjoyed it as well, devouring with intense curiosity anything that was brought to his attention. His reviews dealt with literature across the social sciences in at least ten different languages, including French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and a handful of Slavic languages. He consulted all major journals in Europe and America, and contributed to many of them. In an article from 1927, discussing the use of the subconscious in the study of living languages, he stated mastering eighteen languages plus a number of their dialects (Belmont [1974] 1979: 7). It was van Gennep who translated some of the most important works into French (including Frazer and Westermarck, not to forget the eighteen volumes of Havelock Ellis’ series on sexual psychology). Already in this role of translator and transmitter of European anthropology, folklore, poetry, art, history, and psychology, van Gennep played a nonnegligible role for the French social sciences during the first half of the twentieth century.[570] Van Gennep was a meticulous but honest reviewer, always approaching the work under review with careful respect. His critical sense was sharp as a knife, but he would maintain an extremely sober and respectful tone when dealing with other people’s work. As the reader will probably appreciate, this was hardly the case with van Gennep’s review of EFRL. The review is bitingly sarcastic. While sprinkled with gentle doses of humor, van Gennep annihilates Durkheim’s entire enterprise. He thereby also debunks the epistemological and methodological foundations of the Durkhemian school. Why this uncompromising tone? To understand the stakes, we need to take a step back and consider van Gennep’s relationship to the Durkhemian school. Arnold van Gennep and the French social sciences In most encyclopedic entries, van Gennep is described as an “outsider” to the inner circles of French academia. This is somewhat true. Van Gennep never got a job offer in French academia. He was born outside France (although he came to France at the age of six with his mother), and as a young man he lived for a longer period in Russian Poland, before moving to Paris to study in 1901. It is also clear that van Gennep possessed a rebellious nature. At the same time, the “outsider story” simply does not add up. Van Gennep was, in his early career, extremely close to the inner circles of French academic life. His critique of Durkheim came from a vision he gained from within. And the critique took shape during the formative years of social science discipline formation. At the beginning of the century, van Gennep studied sciences religieuses with Léon Marillier at the École Pratique, in close contact with that cohort of young people later to become Durkheim’s collaborators, including Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Paul Fauconnet, and many others. Upon Marillier’s death in 1901, Mauss became van Gennep’s teacher and mentor. In 1903, Mauss proofread and commented upon van Gennep’s thesis on taboo and totemism in Madagascar. Van Gennep’s interests during the first decade of the century developed alongside those of the Durkheimians, including the classical topics of totemism, taboo, the origins and nature of religion, magic, classification systems, and the relationship between myth and ritual. The relation to Mauss seems to have been especially important, even profound. They were contemporaries, and their positions converged in important ways (for more detail, see Thomassen 2016, on which this and the following section draws). In the preface to his first book, Tabou et totémisme à Madagascar: Étude descriptive et théorique from 1904, van Gennep reserves the final thanks to “mon ami Marcel Mauss” (van Gennep 1904: 2). In 1906 van Gennep published his second book, Mythes et légendes d’Australie, in which he chose to openly expose the problems with Durkheim’s work. This is important to know: his 1913 review of EFRL was not a sudden impulse, but the culmination of a critical engagement that had started a decade before. Van Gennep’s discussion of Durkheim in his 1906 book goes straight to the heart of the latter’s position. Before 1906, Durkheim and Mauss had written several essays on religion referring to the Australian material. Van Gennep was not convinced. His critique started off from an issue which was then the object of endless debate: whether it was possible to establish which descent system was the “original one.” Referring to [571]the Australian material, Durkheim had argued that matrilineal descent could be considered the original mode of social organization, only that over time it had been replaced by patrilineal descent. Van Gennep argued back that in many Australian societies parallel systems coexist, and that a social scientist should refrain from speculating about “origins” in the absence of empirical evidence. He thereby uncovered the evolutionist stance that lurks behind Durkheim’s explanatory apparatus. Durkheim had wanted to cut off historical explanations from sociological science, but the moment he set out to theorize himself, he plunged into evolutionist speculation. Van Gennep therefore questions the adopted analytical procedure by which Durkheim posits the Arunta at a certain level or stage of “development,” allowing him an analytical short-cut to the question of “origins.” Whenever Durkheim recognizes a change, over time, or between groups (in kinship affiliations, for example), he systematically prevents any real account of such a transformation, relegating it simply to the “general needs of society” (van Gennep 1906: xxv). Durkheim presents no grounding epistemology to tell us what such a “society” is to be able to “have” such needs. Durkheim, says van Gennep, operates a peculiar kind of “métaphysique sociologique” (ibid.: xxiv). Positing a “metaphysical abstraction” at the core of his argument, he then artificially “animates” it (ibid.: xxv) by manipulating ethnographic data, and by granting “society” explanatory powers without ever accounting for the very nature of that “society” (the parallels to Gabriel Tarde’s earlier critiques of Durkheim are evident; see Thomassen 2012). As van Gennep says, rather provocatively, this means to resolve a problem without having even managed to pose it as a problem (1906: xxv). On those same fatal pages, van Gennep took one step further in his critique, pointing towards the dangerous political implications of Durkheim’s categorical collectivism: We have seen how Mr. Durkheim explains social modifications by the “needs of society” without indicating either the why or the where of those needs, and without justifying how exactly a “society,” however small, may have “needs” in the first place. It is by an identical process of animation that they speak to us of “the call of the fatherland,” or “the voice of the race.” Mr. Durkheim anthropomorphizes, even if this is what he pretends to defend himself from. (1906: xxxv, emphasis and inverted commas in the original, my translation) What a foolishly honest/honestly foolish thing to write in 1906! According to van Gennep, Durkheim’s sociology was not just flawed at the theoretical level; the entire epistemology onto which it built bore resemblances to other and much more serious political essentialisms that were showing their ugly face. Durkheim answered van Gennep’s critique with absolute silence; but he was evidently aware of it—and there can be no doubt that he discussed it with Mauss. Rites of passage In 1909 van Gennep published Rites de passage. This was a crucial moment in his life, as the writing of the book coincided with his decision in 1908 to quit his job [572]at the Ministry of Agriculture (where he had been head of translations) and dedicate himself wholeheartedly to writing and translating. Rites de passage was van Gennep’s most important book, resulting, in his own words, from nothing less than an “inner illumination.” It provided him with a conceptual frame that guided him for the rest of his life. It was Mauss (1910) who reviewed Rites de passage in L’Année, although Durkheim might have had some say as well. Mauss’ review was very negative, perhaps unsurprisingly after van Gennep’s attack on Durkheim in 1906. It was also a very unfair review, as it distorted the aims and intentions behind the book, showing no appreciation of the conceptual advance it actually presented. Van Gennep, however, was determined to carry forward his project. In 1910 he published La formation des légendes, his seventh book. It was followed up by two books in 1911 (one of which was later translated as The semi-scholars). Van Gennep had by then become deeply engaged with general epistemological and methodological issues. Prior to World War I he published a series of programmatic articles in which he started to formulate a methodological platform for the social sciences—an approach which he baptized as a “biological sociology,” and which differed from the Durkheimian school on all significant accounts. In his review of EFRL, van Gennep makes reference to Durkheim’s lack of a sense of “biology.” This is crucial, but we can only appreciate this comment if we understand that van Gennep’s insistence on biology was not an allusion to the authority and objectivity of natural science, but instead a stress on the importance of direct observation, and systematic gathering of data, leading, step by step, to theory building. Van Gennep wanted social scientists to deal with what he called living facts (“faits naissants,” e.g., facts in their “emergence”) rather than dead and abstract social facts, “external” to the individual, as Durkheim would have it. This is the pivotal contrast that animates the 1913 review. Van Gennep is not exposing just this or that aspect of Durkheim’s approach. He is saying that Durkheim’s social science has lost sight of human beings. EFRL represented a diametrical opposite to his own attempt to establish anthropology as a life science. Despite his productivity, van Gennep never passed the threshold into French academia. This certainly had a lot to do with his critique of Durkheim. Following failed candidatures at the Collège de France in 1907, 1909, and 1911, he decided to go abroad. In 1912 he was offered the first (and only) academic position he ever held, as chair in “Swiss ethnography” at the University of Neuchâtel. It was Henri Junod who made it possible. Junod had read Rites de passage and was deeply impressed by it. When EFRL was published, van Gennep was almost an outcast in French academia, already on the move to Switzerland, where he was about to set up his own school of anthropology. In Rites of passage van Gennep had argued for the centrality of ritual and ritual passages toward an energetic understanding of religious ritual and social processes. He had proposed a universal classification of rites. He had published a book on Australian myth and one on totemism. These should have been central discussions for anyone writing a book about such matters in 1912. Durkheim, however, disregarded van Gennep’s contributions altogether—on purpose, as van Gennep cannot help but remark in his review. He had little reason to be diplomatic.[573] Out of Durkheim’s herbarium, into the life sciences So why does it all matter? It matters because van Gennep’s review of EFRL is not only one of the most radical but perhaps also the very first of such critiques of Durkheim’s approach to society and religion—yet even critics of Durkheim have so far neglected it. Nobody then, and nobody since, would have been so uniquely positioned to assess the work in question. The critique has to be taken seriously. It matters because the review in question does not only throw critical light on the Durkhemian project; it equally throws light back on the life and much-neglected work of Arnold van Gennep. The review is not only about what van Gennep was against; it opens a window onto what he was struggling for. “Publish or perish,” the slogan goes, but it does not apply to van Gennep, who did indeed publish, and more than almost any social scientist in the twentieth century. And yet he almost nearly perished. Van Gennep was not just a prolific reader and writer. He had a project, and a larger vision of the social sciences that he tried to build up in the early decades of the twentieth century. Course syllabi on religion today often insert an excerpt from Rites of passage. In today’s standard approach, van Gennep is discussed as a supplement to Durkheim’s theory of ritual and religion: van Gennep offered a useful terminology for the study of ritual passages, whereas it was Durkheim and others who provided a theoretical framework. Van Gennep would have been seriously uneasy seeing his classification of rites represented as a supplement—or, worse, a parenthesis—to Durkheim’s sociology of religion. His entire work was an effort to overcome what he saw as the most serious defects of Durkhemian sociology. I am aware that Durkheim’s EFRL will stay on our reading lists for some time to come. But now that van Gennep’s review is finally available in English, we could at least start adding it to those reading lists—making it clear to ourselves and our students that his contribution to the study of religion and society was not an addition to Durkheim’s, but a genuine alternative. It matters, finally, because van Gennep’s vision for the social sciences was intimately related to the aim of this Maussian journal to inspire ethnographic theorization. While HAU takes its name from Mauss’ spirit of the gift, this “spirit” can in fact be traced back to van Gennep. In Rites of passage Van Gennep had largely anticipated Mauss’ most salient observations concerning gift giving. Chapter 3 in Rites of passage is almost entirely dedicated to ritualistic exchange of words, gestures, services, goods, slaves, and wives: exactly the aspects of exchange that Mauss systematically took up in his essay on the gift, and which Lévi-Strauss used as platform for his exchange theory. Certain “gifts” are obligatorily given, said van Gennep: the circulation of goods and objects serves to create continuous social bonds ([1909] 1960: 31). Gift giving is the “confirmation of a bond,” and “to accept a gift is to be bound to the giver” (ibid.: 29). Van Gennep then discusses, among others, the potlatch as one peculiar example, as he discusses gift-giving practices among warrior groups as a peace-instituting act; he further notes how incorporation rites are often tied to military, sexual, and political rights (ibid.: 35). This crucial conceptual discussion is entitled “Individuals and groups,” which precedes the six following chapters, which each deal with a cross-cultural examination of ritual passages as they pertain to the life cycle, from pregnancy to death. Van Gennep anticipated [574]Mauss’ insight that gift giving must be seen as a foundational principle at play in ritual phenomena, weaving together individuals and groups—neither of which can or should be reduced to each other. Common wisdom has for a century catalogued van Gennep as a talented ethnographer and folklorist, but ultimately an undisciplined figure lingering at the margins of the social sciences, and unfortunately without a theory. In Routledge’s Key thinkers, Karady (1987: 255) characteristically claimed that van Gennep’s approach was “essentially empirical with limited theoretical underpinning.” It is high time we turn conventional wisdom on its head. Arnold van Gennep was a daring thinker across disciplines exactly because he was an eminent ethnographer, a theorist with a passion for living facts in all their spirited materiality. He clearly must be ranked among the founding figures of ethnographic theory. References Belmont, Nicole. (1974) 1979. Arnold van Gennep: The creator of French ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Karady, Victor. 1987. “Arnold van Gennep.” In Key thinkers, past and present, edited by Jessica Kuper, 255–56. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kuper, Adam. 1988. The invention of primitive society. London: Routledge. Leach, Edmund 1968. “Ritual.” In International encyclopedia of the social sciences, Vol. 13, edited by David Sills, 520–26. New York: Macmillan. Mauss, Marcel. 1910. “[Review of Van Gennep’s Rites de passage].” L’Année Sociologique 11: 200–202. (Reprinted in Œuvres, I, : 553–55. Paris: Minuit, 1968.) Needham, Rodney. 1967. “Introduction.” In The semi-scholars, Arnold van Gennep, ix–xx. Translated by Rodney Needham. London: Routledge. Pickering, W.S.F (ed.). 1975. Durkheim on religion: A selection of readings with bibliographies and introductory remarks. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, pp. 205–8.[575] Senn, Harry A. 1974. “Arnold van Gennep: Structuralist and apologist for the study of folklore in France.” Folklore 85: 229–43. Thomassen Bjørn. 2012. “Durkheim between Gabriel Tarde and Arnold van Gennep: Founding moments of sociology and anthropology.” Social Anthropology 20: 231–49. ———. 2016. “The hidden battle that shaped the history of sociology: Arnold van Gennep contra Émile Durkheim.” Journal of Classical Sociology 16: 173–95. van Gennep, Arnold. 1904. Tabou et totémisme à Madagascar: Éétude descriptive et théorique. Paris: Leroux. ———. 1906. Mythes et légendes d’Australie: Études d’ethnographie et de sociologie. Paris: E. Guilmoto. ———. (1909) 1960. The rites of passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Contextualisation du compte-rendu critique de van Gennep au sujet des Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse d’Émile Durkheim Résumé : Cet article d’introduction contextualise le compte-rendu critique rédigé par van Gennep au sujet de l’ouvrage d’Émile Durkheim Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. L’article met en rapport ce compte-rendu et le projet bien souvent négligé qu’avait van Gennep d’établir les fondements méthodologiques des sciences sociales balbutiantes au début du 20e siècle ; un projet qui contrastait fortement avec l’école Durkheimienne de sociologie et d’anthropologie. Le compte-rendu est également placé en relation avec des publications plus anciennes de van Gennep où ils s’oppose explicitement à l’approche qu’adopte Durkheim dans l’étude de la religion et de la société. Enfin, cet article suggère qu’Arnold van Gennep devrait être considéré comme un fondateur toujours d’actualité de la théorie ethnographique. Bjørn THOMASSEN is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University. His work engages anthropological and social theory applied to a variety of social fields, including the study of political revolutions and social mobilization. He publishes in journals across the social sciences. Recent books include Italian modernities (coauthored with Rosario Forlenza; Palgrave, 2016); Breaking boundaries: Varieties of liminality (edited with Agnes Horvath and Harald Wydra; Berghahn, 2015); Liminality and the modern: Living through the in-between (Ashgate, 2014); and Global Rome: Changing faces of the Eternal City (edited with Isabella Clough Marinaro; Indiana University Press, 2014). Bjørn ThomassenDepartment of Social Sciences and BusinessUniversitetsvej 1Building 23.14000 RoskildeDenmarkbthomas@ruc.dk ___________________ 1. In the volume “Durkheim and Religion”, edited by Pickering (1975), a translation of van Gennep’s review was added under “Other authors” as an appendix. However, this volume failed to properly situate Arnold van Gennep’s wider contribution to the social sciences, and largely left the reader unequipped to engage the review and its background. In fact, the 1975 English translation of the review has received almost no attention in the literature.   This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Arnold van Gennep. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.044 TRANSLATION Review of É. Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse Arnold VAN GENNEP Translated from the French by Matthew Carey   Rigorous to a fault, Mr. Durkheim spares the reader not a single step in the formidable chain of reasoning that underpins his efforts to identify The elementary forms of the religious life; nor a single opportunity to discuss the minutiae of the ordering of his evidence. The volume is composed of two overlapping sections: the one theoretical and general; the other monographic. This latter, though most thorough, seems to me to be the weaker of the two. As I have myself, over the years, inspected the same documents as Mr. Durkheim, I consider myself entitled to declare their theoretical worth to be rather less than he seems to suppose. Indeed, he treats them in much the same manner as religious commentators treat their sacred texts, marshaling vast erudition to illuminate them, but never wondering whether three-quarters of the raw material is even trustworthy. I should like to hope this volume might attract a few new adepts to ethnography, but I fear that, like Mr. LÉvy-Bruhl’s book, it will only drive them away.1 Believe me when I say [577]that this is a dusty, bookish sort of ethnography, handled the way Greek and Latin texts are often handled in the misnamed German style. The surfeit of references to documents written by sundry informants, police officers, random colonists, obstreperous missionaries, and so forth, is simply futile, as there are entire pages of Mr. Durkheim’s book where the conscientious ethnographer is obliged to append a question mark to each line: “Really? How reliable is this informant? How reliable is the document and what does it actually say?” Andrew Lang and Father Schmidt lost their way in the Australian hornets’ nest and, lo, Mr. Durkheim hurtles after them. In ten years, his entire systematization of the Australian material will have been utterly rejected, along with the multiple generalizations constructed on the flimsiest foundation of ethnographic facts I have ever observed. The idea he has extracted from this ensemble of primitive man (relatively speaking; cf. the footnote to p. 11) and “simple” societies is simply misguided. The better one is acquainted with Australian societies, and the less one focuses on the development of their material culture and social organization, the more one remarks that they are very complex, very far from the simple or primitive, and indeed very evolved along their own lines. At this very moment, B. Spencer (whose complete material I have never had the opportunity to examine, having only seen summaries and analyses) is exploring northern Australia: is it likely that what his expedition uncovers will be simpler or more primitive. It will be clear to even the nonspecialist reader (unversed not merely in the Australian ethnography, but in ethnography more generally) that Mr. Durkheim plugs the gaps in the data with innumerable hypotheses, always ingenious, and always put forward with disconcerting sincerity. As soon as one rejects the least of these hypotheses, the rest of the edifice begins to crumble. This entire section, I fear, rather resembles the intellectual method of Lombroso, whose strength resides precisely in the vast number of articulating hypotheses, the practical inanity and logical deficiency of each of which deserves a book of its own. But let us not tarry with these inauspicious Australians, who have bamboozled many a thinker. The other section of Mr. Durkheim’s book is full of good, solid truths. Two grand theories dominate this section: a general theory of totemism and a general theory of religion. In both cases, the data marshaled reaches beyond Australia to attain the necessary comparative scope. In chapter V, we encounter a critique of various theories of totemism. It is simple, efficient, and correct. Chapter VI (origins of these beliefs), however, offers no real theory to speak of. For the mere assertion that “totemism is the religion, not of such and such animals or men or images, but of an anonymous and impersonal force, found in each of these beings but not to be confounded with any of them” (i.e., mana), cannot be described as a theory. What is more, this definition can only be applied to totemism’s substratum. In other words, it amounts to a reduction of totemism to fetishism and thus sidesteps all the very real difficulties of interpreting the detail and simultaneously sidesteps such questions as: Why so many different forms of totemism? Which is the real one? Etc. It opens, in short, a door to all sorts of new debates, but provides us with no definition that might illuminate the areas of darkness. A totem is a sort of force that has been individualized; it is quite unlike “fetishistic” or “impersonal” forces.[578] Mr. Durkheim’s statements regarding this impersonal force and dynamic primitive conceptions thereof may startle the reader; I think I have been sufficiently forthright in pointing out the weaknesses of Mr. Durkheim’s book to be believed when I say that here he is entirely correct. Primitive conceptions are fundamentally concerned with energy. As indeed are all religions: this difference lies in the names one gives to the forms and sources of energy, and the manner in which they are represented. The way in which Mr. Durkheim presents religion and its constitutive elements (ideas of the soul, spirits, or gods; religious prohibitions and taboos in negative forms of worship; sacrifice and mimetic, commemorative, and piacular rites in positive forms) is the direct product of his Australian analyses; he ceaselessly refers back to these tribes to demonstrate the “genesis” of such and such a tendency or religious institution. It is the shakiness of its foundations that makes the whole intellectual construction so fragile. What is more, Mr. Durkheim’s well-established personal proclivity for identifying and foregrounding the collective (or social) element leads him to neglect the generative role of particular individuals in creating certain institutions and beliefs, which I had myself underlined in Australian myths and legends, and which he willfully dismisses as nugatory. He painstakingly shows how the social aspect predominates in the different religious phenomena he investigates. I cannot, however, follow him when he states that “society is not an alogical being (être),” or indeed that it is a being at all. Whilst it is clear that in more primitive societies, social action is more insistent than individual action, the latter can always reassert itself. Mr. Durkheim’s dream is to endow society with a natural, or ideally even cosmic, reality subject to laws every bit as stringent as those governing physico-chemical reality; though he periodically draws upon biology, he is surely only referring to the lower orders of animalia. Is man one of these? An uncertainty begins to prey upon me. Mr. Durkheim has discovered unicellular organisms; can an Australian society, for it is Australians we are dealing with, really be a unicellular organism? I fear that Mr. Durkheim, for all his apparent concern for ethnographic facts, actually only has a feel for metaphysics and even more so for scholastics. For him, concepts and words have ultimate reality. Having no feel for life, no feel for biology or ethnography, he transforms living phenomena and beings (vivants) into scientifically desiccated plants arranged as in a herbarium. From there to outright denial of the reality of the individual and the dynamic part played by individuals in the evolution of civilizations is a short leap that Mr. Durkheim eagerly makes. Of course, in semicivilized societies, religion understood as a totality of beliefs and acts of a certain kind is the most “social” phenomenon there can be, for at that moment it encompasses law, science, everything. But it is for this very reason, and because the individual has progressively come to self-awareness and so become individualized, that human progress consists in the progressive secularization of all mental and practical activities, gradually disaggregating and destroying religion. I simply cannot see the point, nor even the possibility, of replacing religion by another, sociological imperative.   Arnold VAN GENNEP (1873–1957) was a French social scientist best known for his 1909 book, Rites of passage. ___________________ Editorial Note: This article is a translation of Arnold van Gennep’s “Review of É. Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse,” Mercure de France 101 (374) (January 16, 1913): 389–91; reprinted in Chroniques de folklore d’Arnold van Gennep, 1905–1949 (texts collected and introduced by J. M. Privat), 92–95, Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2001. 1. Lévy-Bruhl (Lucien), Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, Paris: F. Alcan, “Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine”/ “Travaux de l’Année sociologique” publiés sous la direction de M. E. Durkheim, 1910, 461 pp.  

de Martino: Crisis of presence and religious reintegration This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Tobia Farnetti and Charles Stewart. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) Translators’ preface: An introduction to “Crisis of presence and religious reintegration” by Ernesto de Martino Tobia Farnetti, University College London Charles Stewart, University College London   Ernesto de Martino’s body of work includes several books on magic (e.g., 1947, 1959), an impressive historical and comparative anthropological study of funeral lamentation (1958), and an ethnography of a South Italian spirit possession cult elaborated around the bite of the tarantula and involving the performance of the tarantella, a style of music and dance that became popular throughout Italy (1961; Lüdtke 2008). At the time of his death in 1965, at the age of fifty-seven, he was working on a study of apocalyptic movements, published posthumously with the title La fine delmondo (1977). Collections of his shorter writings have appeared in Italy, as have publications of his fieldnotes, correspondence, and even his reading notes (2005a). Few of these works have been translated, which is part of the reason why de Martino is not so well known in the English-speaking world. Perhaps the recent translation of his monograph on “tarantism,” The land of remorse (2005b), and the appearance of the first book-length study in English of his thought (Ferrari 2012), will initiate a new appreciation. To these efforts we now add de Martino’s account of one of his central and enduring ideas, the “crisis of presence.” De Martino’s publications combine social scientific methods and interrogatives with deep humanistic learning in philosophy, history, and literature. He illustrates his arguments about the “crisis of presence,” for example, with materials drawn from Greek tragedy, the Icelandic Poetic Edda, and ethnographic reports from Australia. Therein lies a great deal of de Martino’s appeal and power to inspire. What has impeded the easy transfer of his ideas into English, however, is his assumption that readers comprehend the philosophy of his mentor, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), and are familiar with Italian debates of the 1940s. Even if we mastered Croce’s thought—which we do not—there is not space here to explicate his complex philosophy of history properly. We can only indicate briefly that Croce insisted on presentism, the idea, in Collingwood’s words (1946: 202), that “all history is contemporary history.” History depends on the activation of the past in a present mind, in relation to contemporary concepts and interests. Historicity, for Croce, was human becoming according to the transcendental categories of aesthetics, logic, ethics, and economics. Hurricanes and earthquakes do not make history; people’s conceptions of such phenomena, and responses to them, do. The natural world does not possess the consciousness and reflectivity necessary to qualify as participating in history. Unfortunately, and embarrassingly from the point of view of anthropology, Croce also excluded “primitive” humans from history, as they did not respond to life rationally, but through resort to magic. In the article translated here, de Martino can be seen still struggling with his mentor’s ideas after his death. Although stating that “Croce was correct,” he nonetheless rejects Croce’s divide (taglio) between the human and non-human, but modifies the concept of the “divide” to apply to the internal risk within all humans. This is the threatening divide between presence and the loss of presence provoked by moments of crisis, which negate culture and thus humanity. De Martino’s grounding in Croce’s philosophy gives his article an unusual orientation and a perplexing vocabulary. This vocabulary may well alienate prospective readers, yet it actually produces striking formulations such as “the crisis of presence,” which offers a deep anthropological perspective on precarity (Saunders 1995). Another novel formulation is de Martino’s idea that in the crisis of presence individuals experience “dehistorification.” Since everything is historical, losing presence—being cut off from the synthesizing process of historical becoming—is equivalent to losing history, or losing society. The anguish accompanying the loss of presence may begin to be managed by an even greater removal from history through rituals that place one in a timeless metahistory; what Eliade termed “illo tempore,” the time before time—archetypal time. Like cauterizing a wound, the resort to ritual (or “religious reintegration”) exaggerates the initial crisis on the way to healing it. An unfortunate individual falling out of history is conscripted, through ritual, into a larger step out of history, which reopens the person to values, and enables the reacquisition of everyday historicity. De Martino wrote this article in 1956 and at moments it sets off functionalist warning bells. He seems to fall into the trap of asserting that individuals mechanistically restore themselves to the status quo ante of sanity by resort to rituals established precisely for this purpose. Yet, de Martino thinks within a historicist paradigm, which assumes dynamism rather than homeostasis. Crises arise from the stagnation and fixation of that dynamic power that ordinarily propels the individual toward the future. Such moments arise unpredictably, symptoms of the human condition, which Heidegger described as “thrownness.” The crisis of presence is a momentary failure of the Hegelian synthesis according to which the givens of the past and the present should become something novel in the future. Reintegration is not a return to a stable cultural norm, but an exercise in creative, even revolutionary, power akin to the invention of culture described by Wagner (1981). Rather than functionalism, de Martino’s work bears the influences of phenomenology and existentialism, schools of thought that long remained outside the anthropological purview, but which have begun to be embraced in the last two decades. The field of anthropology has thus moved in de Martino’s direction and it may well be that nearly a half century after his death we are in a better position to understand what he was saying. References Collingwood, Robin G. 1946. The idea of history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1947. Il mondo magico. Torino: Einaudi. [Primitive Maggie: The psychic power of shamans and sorcerers. Sydney, Australia: Bay Books, 1972.] ———. 1958. Morte e pianto rituale: dal lamento antico al pianto di Maria [Death and ritual mourning: From ancient lamentation to the Virgin’s lament]. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 1959. Sud e magia [The south and magic]. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 1961. La terrra del rimorso [The land of remorse]. Milano: Il Saggiatore. ———. 1977. La fine del mondo: Contributo all’ analisi delle apocalissi culturali [The end of the world: Contribution to the analysis of cultural apocalypses]. Edited by Clara Gallini. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 2005a. Scritti filosofici [Philosophical writings]. Edited by Roberto Pastina. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———. 2005b [1961]. The land of remorse: A study of southern Italian tarrantism. Translated by Dorothy Louise Zinn. Introduction by Vincent Crapanzano. London: Free Association Books. Ferrari, Fabrizio. 2012. Ernesto de Martino on religion: The crisis and the presence. Sheffield: Equinox. Liidtke, Karen. 2008. Dances with spiders: Crisis, celebrity and celebration in southern Italy. Oxford: Berghahn. Saunders, George. 1995. “The crisis of presence in Italian Pentecostal conversion.” American Ethnologist 22 (2): 324–40. Wagner, Roy. 1981. The invention of culture. Revised and expanded edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.   Tobia Farnetti is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. Charles Stewart is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. Translators’ note: We are grateful to the journal Aut Aut for permission to publish this translation of “Crisi della presenza e reintegrazione religiosa”, which originally appeared in Aut Aut 31 (1956): 17–38. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Ernesto de Martino. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) Crisis of presence and religious reintegration Ernesto de Martino Translated from the Italian by Tobia Farnetti and Charles Stewart   The second chapter of my book Il mondo magico (1947) contained the sketch of a general theory of magic as a demarcated historical world. Yet it also offered something more: an attempt to rethink and test Benedetto Croce’s historicism on historiographic1 forms of experience which lay outside his scope, namely the history of magical and religious life in so-called primitive cultures. Since then, as happens so often, new ideas have occurred, and above all, new and more contextually detailed historiographic materials have come to light, and these have both modified and corroborated that first sketch. It therefore seems an opportune moment to return to that discussion at the point where it was abandoned. The fundamental thesis of Il mondo magico—which in truth far exceeded the historical field of “magic” on which it made its first steps—is the crisis of presence, to which magical practices would offer cultural resolution. But in the formulation of ten years ago this concept of presence remained tangled in a serious contradiction—at least insofar as it pretended to assert itself as a concept of a precategorial unity of the person. The conquest of this unity would have constituted the dominant problem of the “epoch” of magic. This contradiction did not escape Croce who, in his essay, “Intorno al magismo come età storica” (1949) [“On magism as historical epoch”] observed: On the other hand, De Martino emphasizes the risk of losing oneself, a risk that threatens the acquired unity of the spirit as well as its special forms. These forms defend themselves against that risk, that is, they continuously overcome the negative moment of error, evil, the brutal, into the positive moment of truth, beauty, the good, and so on. To emphasize this would in effect separate the unity of the spirit from its forms with an impossible divide. The forms of the spirit are not added onto that unity, but they are the unity itself, and thus trying to consider those in themselves would leave that unity worse than inert, empty. The age of magic, then, could not create the unity of the spirit because, like all the other ages that we like to carve out of the unique and continuous course of history, the age of magic was the action of that unity, and its categories. (1949: 202) With different emphasis Enzo Paci writes: In fact, talk of a drama which, through risk, constructs a vision of the world means to consider all of the categories and the forms. If humans were exclusively part of nature they would not exist, because they would not feel threatened by demise into nothingness, losing the constitutive human relationship—the relation between practice and theory; economics and moral law; between acting and knowing; between action and conscience. The ever-threatening barbarity, Vico’s Lernaean Hydra, is really the loss of the categories that constitute humans in their historicity. Nature becomes, then, just as in the magical world, diabolical; disintegrator of humans and their historical civilization, which, as Vico observed, loses its laws, its moral as well as juridical form. (1950: 26) Critique of this sort is compelling even if—as I have just shown—Croce and Paci present it with different emphases. Croce was correct: the “divide” (il taglio) within human history is “impossible” insofar as one could never think of a unity in itself that forms a particular—or even dominant—historical problem; a unity unconcerned with how and from what it became unity, and which resolution it shares in.2 Human civilization and history are always reborn—today as in whatever more remote or archaic “then”—and thus they will be born in the future until the word “man” makes sense by virtue of the power of categorization according to determinate forms or values. Furthermore, cultural presence, that is, being-in-history (l’esserci nella storia), remains defined precisely by this categorizing energy. Nevertheless, within human history, the risk of a divide exists as madness shows. At the limits of madness stand exactly that inertia and void—the inertia and void of values; presence lost, as Croce noted. Since the relationship that establishes presence is the same relationship that makes culture possible, the risk of human history not existing takes shape as the risk of losing culture and receding without mitigation into nature. When such a risk rises up in a specific “critical” moment of historical existence, presence loses the power consciously to define it or overcome it, and it gets tangled up, entering into a profound existential contradiction with itself. Then presence enters into crisis precisely as presence, since its reality lies entirely in the act of defining or overcoming, according to values, the situations of its own history (this and nothing else is permissible to understand when one speaks of human ex-sistere).3 A radical risk arises then, a risk that is certainly not the loss of the mythical prior unity of the categories, but more the loss of the dynamic unity of the categories; the extinguishing of that energy of categorization according to values, which constitutes the reality itself of being-in-human-history—as Paci rightly pointed out. The psychic manifestations of the reality of this risk, and of the existential contradiction that characterizes it, are found in exemplary form in the very variable and empirical nosological classifications of psychiatry. Thus, because of its failure to go beyond a certain critical content, presence stands on the verge of further becoming, but in a suspended (inattuale) position. The reality of the world appears strange, mechanical, sordid, simulated, inconsistent, perverse, dead; and presence is felt as lost, dreamy, estranged from itself, and so forth. The madman is detached from the present, precisely because he cannot fully “be-there” (esserci in the present, being still anchored or polarized in an undecided critical moment of his own personal history, where the chance of any overcoming is reduced. Thus the person stands non-dialectically in presence; no longer as an instance of conscious awareness, or active memory, but as symptom. On the other hand, the unsurpassed content can assert itself by returning as uncontrollable psychic estrangement, dressed up in obsessions, phobias, and hallucinations, or even converted into certain organic behaviors that fall outside conscious control. Furthermore, when there is a risk that a particular critical content might not be surmounted, this content may enter presence as an obscure anguish of limits. It is as if critical content were asking for its “beyond”—that is some formal definition from the surpassing aspect of presence. Because this request remains unanswered, or without an adequate response, an unbridled allusive tension of content ensues, which can chaotically turn into anything, without, however, being able to exhaust the unrestrained allusive impulse (and it cannot do so because—for as long as the crisis lasts—the impulse is in itself inexhaustible, unable to find the formal, objectivizing, and qualifying definition of presence). Without doubt psychopaths attempt to employ specific techniques to defend themselves against the risk of their illness, but they fail because they are inadequate. Their inadequacy rests in the fact that they do not reestablish the spiritual dialectic. That is, they do not retake control of the psychic realities that are alienated, by reinserting them in the cultural circuit and redisclosing them to values. The “divide” (or trauma) persists, and with the divide, the illness. Among the inadequate responses—i.e., those not open to the world of values—one may take, for example, delusions of grandeur, in which the madman reacts to the extraordinary breadth of obscure callings deriving from the crisis by caricaturing himself proportionately. Thus the aggrandizement of self, characteristic of such deliriums, takes form. This is exaggeration instead of genius precisely because of the miserable feebleness of real values, and for the terrible cultural void that can be felt. Likewise, melancholic depression, with its monstrous sentiments of blame and abjection, contains an inadequate form of interpretive defense, which manifests itself precisely in these sentiments. This experience is certainly founded on a radical powerlessness of being-there, but so little open to values and history that it can sometimes take the form of a naturalistic cycle, that is, a periodic oscillation between depression and mania (the so-called manic-depressive psychosis). The limit case of inadequate defense is the blocked will of catatonic stupor when all possible contents become dangerous and every moment becomes hazardous for presence. Then one has the pathological reaction of psychic block, or the spasmodic attempt to make oneself the prisoner of a particular content. To maintain this imprisonment, all changes imposed from the outside are rejected up to the point of physical exhaustion, as in catalepsy, or repeatedly mirrored, as in echolalia or echomimicry. *** At the root of the radical crisis of presence lies the inability to put life (il vitale) into dialectic relationship with ethos and logos so that life, in this a-dialectical withdrawal, ceases to be a live and vital passion—which drives civilization and history—configuring itself instead as mere “suffering,” as impulsivity, parasitic representation, inexpiable guilt, and so on. This has been, if not noticed, at least glimpsed by some representatives of modern psychiatry. “The entire history of madness,” wrote Pierre Janet in 1889, “stems from the weakness of actual synthetic power, which is itself moral weakness and psychological misery. Genius, on the other hand, is a power of synthesis capable of forming new ideas, which no preexisting science could foresee: it is the highest degree of moral potency” (Janet 1889: 478). Here he talks of “moral potency”: and certainly this dialectical power, which transforms nature into culture, can truly be considered the fundamental human ethos. Animal vitality embraces and nourishes dialectical power in order to open it to singular, specific economic, political, juridical, moral, poetic, and scientific productions. Some psychoanalytic concepts—despite the distortion typical of this psychological school—can be taken, allusively at least, to indicate the same dialectical relationship. What Freud defines as libido (which he essentially considers in the form of sexual vitality) is, in reality, presence. It is the synthetic energy that overcomes situations according to distinct faculties of action. When Freud talks of the fixation of libido at a particular past stage, assigning to this fixation the possibility of neurotic regression, he confirms, within the frame of his theory, that mental illness is a critical content that has not been overcome, chosen and consciously defined by presence. Without doubt Freud, in conformity with the assumptions of his theory, gives decisive importance to the situation of the individual’s sexual life, which is ultimately the only crucial thing. Furthermore, he interprets fixation as a failed evolution of sexuality. Apart from this limitation, which is serious indeed, he nevertheless lets one catch a glimpse of the important concept of physical presence as energy that overcomes. Similarly the concept of complex suggests an undecided conflict in which presence has remained polarized, entering in existential contradiction with itself. Translation and sublimation hint at the retrieval and resolution of the conflict in a particular cultural “value”; and so on. But we find the most fitting precursor of the concept of crisis of presence not in modern psychology, but in Hegel, who on this matter has partly stated, and partly implied what is essential. What is here called “presence” corresponds to “self-feeling”4 in Hegel, which he defined as follows: The feeling totality, as individuality, is essentially this: distinguishing itself within itself, and awakening to the judgment within itself, in virtue of which it has particular feelings and stands as a subject in respect of these determinations of itself. The subject as such posits them within itself as its feelings. It is immersed in this particularity of sensations, and at the same time, through the ideality of the particular, in them it joins together with itself as a subjective unit. In this way it is self-feeling—and yet it is only in the particular feeling. (Hegel 2007: 114; § 407)5 Now, the subject as self-feeling can be susceptible to illness; that is “to the disease of remaining fast in a particularity of its self-feeling, unable to refine it to ideality and overcome it” (Hegel 2007: 114; § 408). Here the risk of presence is posed with utmost clarity as the impossibility of overcoming one of its particular contents—that is to define it according to distinct forms of cultural coherence. For Hegel the physical subject is the being-itself (il se stesso) as coherent or rational consciousness. The pathological subject is this being-itself as prisoner of a particular content: The fully furnished self of intellectual consciousness is the subject as an internally consistent consciousness, which orders and conducts itself in accordance with its individual position and its connection with the likewise internally ordered external world. But when it remains ensnared in a particular determinacy, it fails to assign that content the intelligible place and the subordinate position belonging to it in the individual world-system which a subject is. In this way the subject finds itself in the contradiction between its totality systematized in its consciousness, and the particular determinacy in that consciousness, which is not pliable and integrated into an overarching order. This is derangement. (Hegel 2007: 114–15; § 408) Obviously the limitations of the Hegelian self-feeling are the limitations and defects of Hegelian dialectics itself. The totality of the subject is not here the distinction of cultural forms, but still rational consciousness, understood as simple judgment in itself and as the referral of its feelings to itself: where it concerns the synthetic power through categories of action, or the unity-distinction of this faculty. However, aside from this limitation, Hegel understands with extraordinary acuity the substance of what I am calling “crisis of presence.” When Hegel states that the spirit is free and thus not susceptible to illness—while self-feeling can fall into a contradiction between its subjectivity, which in itself is free, and a particularity, which does not then become ideal but remains stuck in self-feeling—he is hinting at the idea that the spirit, that is the presence engaged in the categorization of cultural forms, is physical presence. On the other hand, the presence which does not push its contents over into the ideality of form is necessarily an ill presence, which is losing itself. When Hegel claims that the old metaphysical concept of spirit (spirito) as soul (anima) is in truth the idea of the spirit as susceptible to madness (for if the soul-substance should only exist as natural and fastened in existential finitude, this is indeed the concept of madness), he expresses, in the language of his system, the idea that being-there is the generative synthetic energy of cultural dialectic, and that when being-there is reduced to mere natural existence the catastrophe of cultural life, human freedom and history occurs: But in earlier metaphysics it was regarded as soul, as a thing; and only as a thing, i.e. as something natural and in being, is it liable to derangement, to the finitude lodged in it…. The mind that is determined as merely being, in so far as such being is un-dissolved in its consciousness, is diseased. (Hegel 2007: 115; § 408) The spirit as being which exists only partially, and that stands in consciousness without resolution, is presence fixated or entangled in one of its contents, and thus not present anymore. This is because going beyond its contents is the very definition of presence. Moreover, being without resolution signals content that remains unmediated and undefined by cultural values, and it fails to become determinable content, but returns as untamable symptom, as tyrannical extraneity. But there is more: madness as spirit becoming nature is precisely the risk of not being-there as presence, of not being-there in a human history, that is of receding onto the level of nature, where presence does not have a place. Here we reach the supreme existential alternatives: either healthy presence that opens itself up to the works and days of human culture; or ill presence that loses both itself and the world and plunges into madness. However, Hegel himself highlights in a passage of his Encyclopaedia (Hegel 2007: 114–30; § 408) that the disease attacking “self-feeling” does not arise without opposition and resistance on the part of the sick person, and that alienation is not an abstract loss of reason, but a contradiction within reason itself. That is, the crisis of presence is a crisis inasmuch as it is perceived as risk—even as the ultimate risk, the destruction of what is human. In fact, the ultimate risk of presence is accompanied—at least as far as presence resists it—by a total reaction, which is anguish. If we purge this idea of all irrelevant interpretations nourished by the abstractions of metaphysics—from cryptogamy6 with the immediacy of religious experience or even from moral inertia or latent morbidities—and if at the same time we refrain from falling into the easy empiricisms of psychopathology, we find that anguish is a reaction of presence in the face of the risk of not being able to overcome critical contents, and of feeling oneself headed for supreme abdication. In other words anguish is the risk of losing the very possibility of deploying the formal energy of being-there. Anguish signposts the attack on the very roots of human presence, the alienation of oneself from oneself, culture’s plunge into nature. Anguish underlines the risk of losing the distinction between subject and object, between thought and action, representation and judgment, vitality and morality—it is the scream of someone tottering on the edge of the abyss. It is because presence, in its radical crisis, can no longer make itself present to historical process, and is losing the ability of being the meaning and norm of this process, that anguish can correctly be interpreted as anguish at history, or better as anguish over not being-there in a human history. When it is maintained that anguish is never anguish over something, but over nothing, the proposition is acceptable, but only in the sense that here it is not the loss of this or that which is at stake, but the very possibility of the what as formal energy. Such loss or annihilation is not absolute nothingness, but the nothingness of presence. It is not not-being, but not-being-there—the destruction of cultural life and human history. This fundamental characteristic of anguish is occasionally visible in psychopathological treatises, despite their empiricism. “The sick person does not feel anguish at some thing, they are anguish, without awareness of either an object or a subject.” “The object is the ordered use of excitation, and the consciousness of the self is the necessary completion of the awareness of the object. However in the catastrophic laceration of anguish there is no object, and hence anguish is without content and definite awareness of the self.” “What the sick person undergoes is the laceration of the structure of the personality. One cannot even say that they are feeling anguish, they are anguish and become one with it in this unspeakable tumult in which subject and object disappear.” “Anguish is the ultimate danger, that is the approach of that final stage in which the organism cannot adapt to the environment, and it is threatened in its very existence.” These propositions by Kurt Goldstein (1929), though inadequate for their empiricism, find clarification and truth in the conception of anguish as a total reaction to the radical risk of the loss of presence. What indeed can the loss of distinction between subject and object mean, that immediate rise of anguish, that laceration in the structure of personality, that unutterable overthrowing that carries with it the essential risk of not being able to adapt to one’s surroundings? What can that feeling “in seine Existenz bedroth”7 mean if not the destruction of being-there in the sense we have clarified? Freud’s conception of anguish, on the other hand, is far less useful for orientation, entangled as it is with the dubious concepts of “libido” and “repression.”8 *** If this is the nature of the crisis of presence then what is its relation to religious experience, the domain of the sacred? In general two antagonistic positions are taken: either one denies that there could ever be an essential relation between the risk of pathological alienation and the sacred, or one passes—albeit with different temperaments, nuances and cautions—to the extreme opposite with the preposterous result of confounding religion with madness (rarely does anyone state this explicitly, but too often the distinction between the two rests solely on good intentions). The supporters of the first thesis—who often belong to a particular faith—point to the ethical and speculative values in which world religions are rich, and which in smaller measure are also found in more elementary religions. And it is easy for them to say that the madman is mad, while modern civilization was born from the “delirium” of Christ or the “epilepsy” of Paul. On the other hand, psychiatrists are naturally inclined to favor the connection between alienation and religious life, so frequently do they professionally encounter the “supernatural” and the “gods” among the mentally ill. Nonetheless, the connection is unclear. In reading the book of Georges Dumas on this topic, for example, one is left perplexed over the difference between the “pathological theogenesis” about which the author writes, and the ordinary theogenesis of the great civilizations of history (Dumas 1946).9 Actually there is a relationship between the risk of pathological alienation and religious life and not in the banal sense that “sometimes” or “accidentally” whoever is engaged in the experience of the sacred could “go out of his mind,” but really as a dialectical relationship between risk of crisis and religious techniques of reintegration; in the sense that through the mediation of such techniques recovery is facilitated and one’s operative powers are redisclosed according to forms and values, whose exercise the crisis had compromised. To illustrate the dialectical character of the relationship between pathological breakdown and religious life we can take for example a work which has had, in the last forty years or so, a notable influence in the areas of philosophy and history of religions: Rudolf Otto’s, The idea of the holy (1950). It is a theological work, yet nonetheless, for this very reason, it can offer some valuable insights. Obviously on one condition: that the problematic begins for us there where Otto considers that he has reached the edge of the known world, namely the vivid experience of the numinous that is present. The characteristic connotation, profoundly irrational, of this presence would be—according to Otto—the “radical other” (ganz Andere); whence the “blind horror” (blinde Entsetzen), the “demonic awe” (dämonische Scheu), which take hold of and subjugate the poor creature. Now this “radically other,” which unnerves whoever experiences it, is precisely the “radical” risk of not being-there; the alienation which threatens to set it in motion toward its exact pathological meaning, the catastrophe that presence must resist with all its powers. Profane (or ordinary) alterity is always relative, inserted into the formal circuit and qualified. But when it starts to become “eccentric,” isolated, and presence feels itself enmeshed in this tremendous temptation to abdicate, then that “radically” other also begins to appear, which can be interpreted as the terrifying signal of pathological alienation. Blinde Entsetzen is also eloquent: entsetzen has the double meaning of “to dispossess” and “to horrify.” What it means is that here is about to be consummated the loss, not of “this” or “that,” but of the very same formal energy of “which.” It is in fact from such radical dispossession that the characteristic horror that individuates crisis is born. However, the dialectical character of the relationship crisis-recovery in the experience of the sacred is illustrated very clearly by the expression dämonische Scheu. In fact, if the emphasis falls on Scheu one has something practically identical to a state of anxiety, to pathological blinde Entsetzen. However, if the accent falls on dämonische then recovery is already beginning to make inroads, even if in a very elementary way, and horror will no longer be “blind” if it at least can glimpse a demonic image, which is part of a mythico-religious cultural tradition organically inserted into the historical world in which one lives. Similar considerations may be made with regard to the other moment of the “numinous,” the fascinans, which is inseparable from the tremendum.10 The paradoxical character of this polarity does not constitute in the least a mysterious nexus—that one may only relive in its immediacy, or stimulate and suggest through the selection of fitting words—but it contains a transparent dialectic. That which in the crisis repels and subjugates, namely the tremendum of presence becoming alienated and lost, nonetheless attracts and calls into relationship, to recovery and to reintegration. This attraction, or irresistible call, is the fascinans of the “radically other.” In the limitation of religious experience that which calls is the numinous, but for critical thought that which calls is the alienation of presence asking for reintegration into human history. This characteristic dialecticity reveals the integral historicity of the hieropoetic11 process. The risk of losing human history takes place within human history itself, and it cannot have any hieropoetic meaning without this reference to the concrete. Now, to say “history” means, in the first place, to say “society,” that is—at least for human societies—a mode of collective organization for the technical domination of nature; in order for society to be disclosed to law and ethics, poetry and science. The measurement of real being-there in human history cannot leave out the first step of mediation, that is, the consideration of a socio-economic regime determined in a certain way. If the technical sphere is poor and elementary, if nature dwarfs it with its excessive power; and if retrospection is narrow and prospective consciousness of effective behaviors for the dominion over natural forces is limited; if in the interior of human society particular groups stand like “nature” in relation to certain others—that is lowered to a function which is merely technical and instrumental—then, for these very reasons, the limitation and fragility of presence as the free power to surmount situations arises, and the risk of radical alienation becomes huge. In this diffuse atmosphere of existential precariousness the process of becoming is punctuated by moments of crisis in which historicity “protrudes” (sporge) and presence risks not being-there. However, even here, the quantity, quality, and degree of risk in such moments, is not definable in a single way, for these matters are determined differently depending on the structure of the society. A people who live by hunting and gathering, and who have not gone beyond the fashioning of basic implements out of stone does not have the same crisis moments as a society founded on cultivation by the hoe, or one that practices pastoral nomadism, or one that might have come to variably combine these modes of primitive economy rising up to the invention of the plough and the cultivation of grains, or one which may have passed through the various stages of industrial evolution up to the invention of machinery. Even in such a society with profound social stratification moments of crisis are not articulated in the same way in each stratum of the hierarchical organization. Religious reintegration, however, is historical also in another sense because it takes very different forms even on the level of reintegration itself. In general, the hieropoetic process is to be interpreted as the choice of exemplary critical moments and as a technique—or system of techniques—for facing the risk of alienation and re-disclosing those formal powers which crisis threatens to paralyze. It is as if a part—in some given societies an enormous part—of the technical power of man were diverted from its use for the domination of natural forces by means of the economic organization of society and the manipulation of certain material or mental instruments, to find its application in the task of restoring an horizon to presence, and of preventing—in critical moments—the same fundamental power from which culture and human history come forth from being naturalized. The fundamental trait of religious reintegration is this technique of institutional de-historification. From the weave of becoming arises a series of critical moments, of exemplary character for the existential regime here in question. These are moments which, for various reasons, represent “passages” par excellence, during which one is particularly caught up in being-there, and precisely because of this they can cause an increased risk of radical alienation. These passages are dehistorified, that is, they are resolved—masked and protected—in the repetition of the identical; and in the end as if they were not new (or historical), but as if they were repeating an archetypal situation, which has already taken place in metahistory. In such guise, through the pious fraud of this “already” guaranteed on the level of metahistory, the “here” and the “now” of history is redisclosed, and presence regains—in varying degrees of awareness and cultural potential—the plenitude of its own formal horizons.12 Consider, by way of example, an important aspect of the myth of the “center” among the Achilpa, a totemic clan of the Aranda people (Central Australia). The Aranda are semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, and this means that for such a group, forced in its ancient migrations to cross, for their livelihood, new territories, the historical emergence of this crossing must acquire particular prominence. The crisis, which is directly documented ethnologically, here takes the form of a “territorial anxiety,” which has its corresponding pathology in specific forms of dromophobia (and possibly also of agoraphobia). The Achilpa myth clearly reflects the process of religious dehistorification. There is a center of the “world” where the task of shaping the territory was performed by the mythical ancestor according to a relation of repetition, in the sense that the territory constituted, for each of its temporary dwellings, a reiteration of the mythical center. During migrations from South to North, Achilpa groups carry the center of the world with them, represented by a pole, and at every stopping place they plant the pole and celebrate the ceremony, which repeats the myth. In this way, the historicity of the crossing gets concealed. The act of walking becomes permanence at the center, and meanwhile—within such dehistorification—truly disclosed. The myth narrates that when the post broke during the migration, and the ritual of reiteration of the archetypal center could no longer be performed, the Achilpa groups could no longer continue their peregrinations, and they let themselves fall to the ground, crowding together in anticipation of death.13 The analysis of the modus operandi of the technique of religious de-historification is of considerable interest. A ritual presence comes to be instituted, with a reiterative, impersonal, and dreamy character. Such a presence, in which everything tends to become stereotypical and traditional, is technically suited to both trigger descent (catabasi) toward psychic realities at risk of alienation, or to start the ascent (anabasi toward values. Ritual (or mythico-ritual) presence is thus to be understood as a presence that works under a regime of “saving” (risparmio), that tends to restore the balance that has started to tip toward failure. On the other hand, the ethics and rationality which, under the protection of such a regime, attain freedom, continually act on myth and ritual. They permeate them with their substance, humanize religions more and more and engrain values within techniques that raise the rite to cult, sacrifice, and prayer, and the demonic to the divine, and the myth to mental formations in which morality and law, poetry and science shine forth—to the point where values, having broken the technical mythico-ritual protection, begin to assert themselves in consciousness proper as such, in their human interiority and autonomy. Let us consider, for example, the lament as an important moment of funeral rituals in antiquity. Here the initial crisis appears in its grandeur: we find typically pathological manifestations, such as Gudhrun’s melancholic inaction before the corpse of Sigfried in the first lay of Gudhrun in the Eddas, or as the “fury” of Achilles in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, when Antilochus holds the hands of the hero for fear he might cut his throat with his sword [upon hearing the news of Patroclus’ death], or like the desperation of David at the death of Saul (“grabbing at his clothes he tore them off, and so did all those present”); and we also find the blinde Entsetzen before the corpse, and that dämonische Sheu which makes Apollo say in Euripides’ Alcestis: “But I, for fear pollution overtake me in the house, am leaving the shelter of this roof I love so well, for already I see death hard by.”14 But at the same time, at the other end of the process, we encounter the rhythmic cadence of ritual lamentation, in lament in the context of the cult of heroes, or in the Egyptian funeral lament that repeats for every deceased—who is an Osiris—the mythical lamentation of Isis and Nephthys. Finally, we encounter it in the religious complexity of the lamentations of Jeremiah. Furthermore, on Greek soil, already beyond ritual and myth, we come to the Homeric funeral lament (goos), the choral lament of tragedy (kommos), and lyric threnody (threnos).15 Moral, political and poetic values are then reached. The process that led from the dissipation of madness to the liberation of those values took place, in the ancient world, through the mediation of lament, as a recovery technique. “Get away from the graves!” warned Goethe, and the lament enables that with its own suitable techniques. It is worth lingering over the modus operandi of such technique. The chaotic planctus16 of the crisis is transformed into a ritual planctus in which alienated psychic realities (melancholic inaction, self-harming impulses, and the like) are rediscovered, retrieved, and concentrated in the hypnoid state of the ritual presence of lament. In such a state, these psychic realities are disciplined according to an anonymous and dreamy “measure”; in the “this-is-how-one-mourns” stereotype of tradition. At the same time one has mythical mastery over another psychic reality in alienation, the image of the corpse. At the most basic level such elaboration does not proceed beyond the ghoulishness of the deceased, and this moment is reflected in ritual in a series of techniques of separation, so that the deceased is appeased and does not return as a ghost, that is, as an unrelated psychic externality. The ritualized planctus is hence filled with meanings: it is necessary to show the extent of grief to the deceased; quench their thirst for blood and life; shout to scare them and convince them to leave for their new residence; disfigure one’s own appearance to escape their gaze; and so on. At a higher level, moral values are liberated. The same separating gestures can acquire moral value: mourning becomes the Homeric tribute owed to the deceased (geras thanonton); and the laceration of cheeks to the point of bloodshed (“ut sanguine ostenso inferis satisfacianf)17 is softened in the order (kosmos) restored by the living, as in Euripides’ Suppliants. “Come, you who join the mourners’ wail, come, O sympathetic band, to join the dance, which Hades honors; let the white nail be stained red, as it rends your cheeks, let your skin be streaked with gore; for honors rendered to the dead are an ornament (kosmos) to the living.”18 At an even higher and more complex level, which finds its expression in the religious life connected to the Osiris cycle, the generic “this-is-how-one-mourns” of the ritual dehistorification is transformed into the repetition of ritual: every deceased is an Osiris, having like him died and been resurrected, and every lamentation reiterates the mythical mourning of Isis and Nephthys. The whole technique of lamentation is directed toward the facilitation of the recovery of presence: hence a regulation for mourning is instituted—the Homeric leader of the dirge (exarchos gooio)—which periodizes the planctus in relatively regular intervals, and reshapes it in emotive refrains, so that between refrains the necessary horizon for the inauguration of the rhythmic discourse of authentic lamentation can be restored to presence. The emotive refrains are divided between leader and chorus, or even ceded by the leader to the chorus, establishing a collective assistance in overcoming the most hazardous critical moments. Finally, for the rhythmic logos of lamentation, particular precautions are also effective for disclosing presence, that is the repetition of gestural, literary, and melodic stereotypes set by tradition. This ritual logos is, then, a protected discourse, that allows one to reach—to the extent to which one is able—the personal “variation,” the reemergence of the historical situation, the resolution of “dying” into “this death” and of “mourning” into “this mourning of mine”; the redisclosure of the ethos of memories and sentiments, and sometimes even a glimmer of poetry. In the aforementioned first lay of Gudhrun the scene of the lamentation appears in the reelaboration of the epic, and hence already far beyond its real ritual form with all its mythical moments. Yet, the technical function of ritual is still apparent. Beside the corpse of the murdered king, Gudhrun lies still, dry-eyed, stiffened in a sort of melancholic inaction or stupefied lethargy: Then did Guthrun think to die, / When she by Sigurth sorrowing sat; / Tears she had not, nor wrung her hands, / Nor ever wailed, as other women. / To her the warriors wise there came, / Longing her heavy woe to lighten; / Grieving could not Guthrun weep, / So sad her heart, it seemed, would break. (Bellows 1926: 412, st. 1–2) In vain the princes’ noble wives try to induce her into lamentation each narrating her own misfortunes. Gudhrun stubbornly refuses to enter into the ritual event that would mediate recovery, and remains trapped in her melancholic inaction. Then Gullrond commands the unveiling of the king’s corpse, and sets the traditional cushion for the lamentation beneath her knees: The shroud she lifted from Sigurth, laying / his well-loved head on the knees of his wife: / “look on thy loved one, and lay thy lips / to his as if yet the hero lived…” (Bellows 1926: 415, st. 12) Gudhrun pulls herself together, and breaks the painful spell of her “polarization,” and comes alive to the task of overcoming the situation; but such recovery is accomplished through the mediation of ritual, that is by undertaking a series of traditional gestures and behaviors; by following, that is, what “one does” when “one needs” to lament the dead: “Once alone did Guthrun look; / his hair all clotted with blood beheld, / the blinded eyes that once shone bright, / the hero’s breast that the blade had pierced. / Then Guthrun bent, on her pillow bowed, / her hair was loosened, her cheek was hot, / and the tears like raindrops downward ran…” (Bellows 1926: 415–16, st. 13–14) Gudhrun’s planctus is not an isolated crisis, for it is progressively disciplined in the stereotypical patterns of ritual and the meanings of myth (although such meanings are lost in the mythical reelaboration of the Edda). Within the protective safeguards of the ritualized and mythicized planctus, Gudhrun will finally be reborn into the ethos of memories and sentiments, and attempt to widen in the rhythmic discourse of lamentation her own sorrow which becomes human once again: “So was my Sigurth o’er Gjuki’s sons / as the spear-leek grown above the grass, / or the jewel bright borne on the band, / the precious stone that princes wear. / To the leader of men I loftier seemed / and higher than all of Herjan’s maids; / as little now as the leaf I am / on the willow hanging; my hero is dead.” (Bellows 1926: 416–17, st. 17–18) In this technical framework of ancient ritual lamentation a number of further “comfortable” operations become possible, such as allowing a professional mourner to lead the lamentation or its repetition according to a ritual calendar, so that there is a day or even an hour for mourning, potentially leaving one free in the intervals from any demands. This produces a concentration of mourning in the corresponding ritual presence, which can be invoked or suspended as needed. On the other hand the repetition of the lamentation in successive moments permits another technical opportunity, to face the psychic realities in alienation not only in their “protected” form, but also in successively reduced doses, divided according to the phases of the ritual calendar. *** Let us go back now, for a moment, to the starting point of this discussion, that is to IImondo magico. Evidently magic as well, like religion, is a reintegrative technique grounded upon dehistorification, and the only difference is in the degree of awareness with which “values” are rediscovered, reenacting themselves in the experience of the sacred. Where this awareness is minimal, and the technique acquires predominant control subjectively, we find magic. Where, on the other hand, the ascent toward ethos and logos reshapes deeply the initial risk of alienation, it is rightly established linguistic custom to use the word “religion.” So, for example, the demonic terror of the dead, and the ritual techniques aimed at separating the dead from the living, constitute a technical-magical moment, for here the risk of crisis is still very close to its immediacy, and the ritual of separation can be—only through bold dialectic extrapolation by the historian-interpreted as the first glimmer of that ethos which finds its truth in Goethe’s: “Get away from the graves!” If, on the other hand, in ritual, moments pertinent to the “dear memory” of the deceased, to the cult of this memory, to the recurring need of regaining energy and comfort from their deeds (think of Foscolo’s “hence shall we draw the auspices” (Foscolo [1962] 2002: 24, 11. 181–2), become prominent, then the designation of religious experience seems to be more appropriate. Beyond this difference in degree it is not possible to introduce any other difference between magic and religion, and any form of magic, however elementary or unrefined, is dialectically open to values. Furthermore, any “religious” experience, however elevated and complex, has its own technical-magical moment, or mythical-ritualistic moment, within which reintegration becomes viable. Hence “Christian” ethos, poetry, art, and philosophy take place within the great myth of Christ and the solemn ritual of the breaking of the bread, and they have been delivered to civilization and history under the aegis of the great dehistorifying technique, of the dramatic “regime of saving,” according to which the good news has already been announced once, and the becoming of history can be periodically solved in the ritual reenactment and repetition of the sacrifice of the human-God, so that the promised Kingdom already begins—every time—in the ritual. This line of thought allows us to rediscover the truth of another point stressed by Croce regarding my book of ten years or so ago: namely that the sorcerer as “redeemer” is in the end “on the same level as the redeemed” and “struggles in the same sick and blind vitality that, by twisting about on the bed, for a moment escapes the pain” (Croce 1949: 203).19 This observation is acceptable insofar as, in my book, the dialectic sense of the relationship between “magical” techniques and “openness toward values” was missing, and there was a tendency to consider such techniques as intrinsically and independently salvific, even if only in their own historic world. It is now clear that magico-religious techniques do not save if they do not open to values, if they cannot be historiographically reconstructed as economic moments that aid ascent:20 it is likewise true that in mental illness there are technical attempts to defend oneself, which simulate magic or religion, but which are not one or the other, precisely because the ascent is incomplete, and the “divide” (or trauma) that makes them sick remains. References Bellows, Henry Adams, trans. 1926. The Poetic Edda: Translated from the Icelandic with an introduction and notes. New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation. Birnbaum, Karl. 1920. Psychopathologische Dokumente [Psychopathogical documents]. Berlin: Springer. Boutonier, Juliette. 1949. L’angoisse [Anguish]. Paris: PUF. Croce, Benedetto. 1949. “Intorno al magismo come età storica” [“On magism as an historical epoch”]. In Filosofia e Storiografia [Philosophy and Historiography], 193–208. Bari: Laterza. de Martino, Ernesto. 1947. Il mondo magico, Torino: Einaudi. [Primitive magic: The psychic power of shamans and sorcerers. Sydney, Australia: Bay Books, 1972.] ———. 1951–52. “Angoscia territoriale e riscatto culturale nel mito Acilpa delle origini” [“Territorial anguish and cultural resolution in the Achilpa myth of origins”]. Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 23: 51ff. ———. 1953–54. “Fenomenologia religiosa e storicismo assoluto” [“Religious phenomenology and absolute historicism”]. Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 24–5: 1–25. Dumas, Georges. 1946. Le surnaturel et les dieux d’après les maladies mentales: Essai de théogénie pathologique [The supernatural and the gods in mental illness: An essay in pathological theogenesis]. Paris: PUF. Euripides. 1920. The Alcestis of Euripides. Translated by E. P. Coleridge. London: Chiswick Press. ———. 1938. The suppliants. In The complete Greek drama, edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O’Neill, Jr., Volume 1. Translated by E. P. Coleridge. New York: Random House. Foscolo, Ugo. (1807) 1962. Dei sepolcri. In Opere di Ugo Foscolo, edited by Mario Puppo. Milano: Ugo Mursia. [Sepulchers. 2002. Translated by Peter Burian. Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 4 (1): 17–30. http://litimag.oxfordjournals.org/content/4/1/17.full.pdf] Freud, Sigmund. 1907. “Zwangshandlung und Religionsübung.” Zeitschrift für Religionspsychologie 1: 4–12. [“Obsessive actions and religious practices.” Standard Edition 9. London: Hogarth, 1953, 115–28.] ———. 1913. Totem und Tabu. Leipzig: Heller. [“Totem and taboo.” Standard Edition 13, London: Hogarth, 1955.] Goldstein, Kurt. 1929. ‘Zum Problem der Angst’ [“On the problem of angst”]. Allgemeine ärtzliche Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie und psychische Hygiene 2 (7): 409–437. Hegel, G. W. F. (1830) 2007. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Translated by W. Wallace and A. V. Miller. Revisions and Commentary by M. J. Inwood. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Janet, Pierre. 1889. L’automatisme psychologique [Psychological automatism]. Paris: Alcan. ———. 1926. De l’angoisse à l’extase [From anguish to ecstasy]. Vol. 1. Paris: Alcan. ———. 1930. De l’angoisse à l’extase. Vol. II. Paris: Alcan. Jung, Carl Gustav. 1942. Psychologie und Relgion. Zurich: Rascher. [Psychology and religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938.] Moses, Josiah. 1906. Pathological aspects of religions. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press. Murisier, E. 1909. Les maladies du sentiment religieux [Illnesses of religious sentiment]. Paris: Alcan. Nilsson, Martin. 1951. “Der Ursprung der Tragödie” [“The origin of tragedy”]. In Opuscula Selecta. Lund: Gleerup. Oesterreich, T. K. 1922. Die Besessenheit Langensalza, Germany: Wendt and Klauwell. [Possession, demoniacal and other: Among primitive races, in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. Translated by D. Ibberson. London: Kegan Paul, 1930]. Otto, Rudolf. (1917) 1950. The idea of the holy. Translated by John W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paci, Enzo. 1950. Ilnulla e ilproblema dell’uomo [Nothingness and the problem of man]. Torino: Taylor. Rank, Otto. 1919. Psychoanalytische Beiträge zur Mithenforschung [Psychoanalytic contributions to research on myth]. Berlin: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. Reik, Theodor. 1928. Probleme der Religionspsychologie, I: Das Ritual. Vienna: Internationale Pyschoanalytischer Verlag. [The psychological problems of religion: Ritual. Translated by Douglas Bryan. New York: Farrar Strauss and Co., 1946.] Reiner, Eugen. 1938. Die Rituelle Totenklage der Griechen [The ritual death laments of the Greeks]. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Schneider, Kurt. 1929. Die extatischen Erlebnisse der Mystiker und Psychopathen [The ecstatic experiences of mystics and psychopaths]. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Storch, Alfred. 1930. “Die Welt der beginnenden Schizophrenie und die archaische Welt” [“The world of onset schizophrenia and the archaic world”]. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 127 (1): 799–810.   Ernesto de Martino (1908–1965) completed his doctorate at the University of Naples in 1932 with a thesis in the history of religions on ancient Greek ritual. Influenced by the thought of Antonio Gramsci and Carlo Levi, he held positions in the socialist and communist parties until his resignation in the mid-1950s. His political concern for the subaltern led him to undertake ethnographic research in south Italy, resulting in his “southern trilogy”: Sud e magia, Morte e pianto rituale, and La terra del rimorso. At his death he was working on a study of apocalyptic movements, eventually published as the 700 page tome, La fine del mondo. ___________________ 1. Since any given culture is the result of historical coming into being, its study was defined as historicism by Croce. “Historiography” for de Martino here is equivalent to “ethnography.” This usage, repeated in the last paragraph of the article, reveals de Martino’s thoroughgoing historicism.—Trans. 2. An allusion to Hegel’s dialectic, de Martino here conceptualizes the unity of the human being itself as the result of a synthesis between opposing forces.—Trans. 3. The word “exist,” from the Latin roots ex-, “out” and sistere, “to stand,” etymologically means “to stand forth, emerge.”—Trans. 4. A reference to Hegel’s idea of Selbstgefühl deployed in the passage cited below. It refers to the unity of the subject/individual at a level above the registration of different sensations, yet below the level of consciousness: a precognitive unification of sensations.—Trans. 5. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Science, Pt. 3, Philosophy of Mind, § 407. Translated from the German by W. Wallace and A. V. Miller (2007: 114).—Trans. 6. A de Martino solecism, apparently meaning a hidden bond or linkage.—Trans. 7. Having one’s existence threatened.—Trans. 8. For an overview of the different conceptions of anguish in modern psychiatry (and in existentialism) see Boutonier (1949). 9. By way of example, consider the following passage: “It is because the gods of our illnesses are most often personal that they are limited in omniscience, action and ubiquity. For this same reason they are not so much spiritual agents as counterparts of the ill person and to the degree that they are nothing other than private gods these ill persons are not to be conflated with the faithful followers of a religion” (Dumas 1946: 321). Now the history of religions, especially primitive religions, knows a great number of strictly private and personal numinous entities with limited powers (one thinks of the nagual and of certain forms of the tijurunga). This does not allow one, however, within the respective historical contexts, to speak of “pathological theogenesis.” If, however, we take the word “private” in this passage of Dumas as meaning “not immediately open to the shared values of the given historical context” then one obtains a valid criterion for discriminating between “pathological” and “ordinary theogenesis.” For specialist works on the psychopathology of religion over the past fifty years, see: Murisier (1909); Moses (1906); Birnbaum (1920); Oesterreich (1922); Schneider (1929); Storch (1930); and Janet (1926, 1930). To this list should be added these works from a psychoanalytical perspective: Freud (1907, 1913); Reik (1928); and Rank (1919). For the Zurich school: Jung (1942). 10. A reference to Otto’s description of the numinous as “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.”—Trans. 11. A neologism meaning “sacred-making.”—Trans. 12. For the discussion of this thesis in polemical dialogue with the “phenomenology of religion” of G. van der Leeuw, see de Martino (1953–54). 13. For the demonstration of this thesis and the relevant documentation see de Martino (1951–52). 14. Ll. 22ff. Apollo is speaking about the impending murder of Alcestis by her husband Admetus. E. P. Coleridge translation of the Ancient Greek (Euripides 1920).—Trans. 15. On these relations see Reiner (1938). In particular, for the relation between funerary ritual lamentation and tragedy, see Nilsson (1951: 61ff.). 16. The Latin word for mourning, which includes acts of self-injury such as beating the breast or tearing one’s hair in addition to wailing.—Trans. 17. A reference to the Latin author Varro who reported this as a funerary practice. Cp. Leviticus 19, 28: “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead.”—Trans. 18. Euripides (1938), Suppliants, 11. 71–79. Translated from Ancient Greek by E. P. Coleridge. —Trans. 19. A reference to Dante, Purgatorio, VI, 150–51.—Trans. 20. Also regarding “rediscovered” truths, Omodeo [Adolfo Omodeo, Italian historian and teacher of de Martino at the University of Naples] was right when, in a letter written during the drafting of IImondo magico, he observed that “logically the history of magic does not exist, for history can be made of the positive and not the negative; and magic is a power which we relinquish in the journey of reason, indeed because it is revealed to be inadequate and noncreative.” Back then I did not consider such admonition, and rather in Ilmondo magico I carelessly argued with Omodeo on this point (1947: 192). Truly a history of magical techniques as such would not have any human sense and if in Il mondo magico it seemed that such sense existed, that was due to the values that those techniques opened and to the extent to which they opened them, as emphasized by Paci.

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The relative native This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Martin Holbraad. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.3.033 TRANSLATION Turning a corner Preamble for “The relative native” by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Martin HOLBRAAD, University College London   In his own preamble to the original Portuguese version of “The relative native” (2002), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains that the article’s aim is to elaborate “metatheoretically” upon his earlier arguments regarding the cosmology of Amazonian animism, published in Portuguese in 1996 and in English in 1998—the now classic JRAI article “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism” expanded upon in his Cambridge lecture-series of the same year, titled “Cos-mological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere,” which is now available as Volume 1 of HAUs Masterclass Series (2012). Viveiros de Castro’s move to extract metatheoretical implications from his theory of perspectivism in Amazonia recalls Roy Wagner’s claim that The invention of culture (1981) sets forth the “epistem-ology” (1981: xv) that corresponds to his earlier ethnographic presentation of the role of invention in Daribi social life in Habu (1973; see also Strathern 1980—the mediating term in a Wagner-Strathern-Viveiros metatheoretical triptych). Certainly, each of these “moves to meta” can be seen as exercises in anthropological “recursion” (Corsin Jimenez, in press; Holbraad 2013). For example, where Wagner Melanesianizes anthropology by taking Daribi manners of invention as an ethnographic template from which to reinvent the activity of anthropology itself, namely as a manner of invention also (and note the virtuously double circularity of the recursion), Viveiros de Castro’s equivalent attempt to Amazonianize anthropology in the present article consists in adopting for anthropology the core tenet of Amazonian perspectivism, namely, the idea that differences between “perspectives” are to be seen in ontological rather than epistemological terms. In Amerindian cosmologies, Viveiros de Castro writes in the earlier ethnological article, different species do not see the same thing (or “world”) in different ways, but rather “see in the same way … different things [or ‘worlds’]” (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 478). Similarly in anthropology, runs the metatheoretical argument elaborated here, the difference between anthropological analyst and ethnographic subject lies not in the different perspectives each may take upon the world (their respective “world-views” or even “cultures”) but rather in the ways in which either of them may come to define what may count as a world, along with its various constituents, in the first place. For Amazonians and anthropologists alike, then, difference pertains to the ontological question of what things are or indeed could be, rather than how they might be differentially “represented,” “known” (or at least “believed”), or for that matter “constructed.” So in this sense, anthropologists, again like Amazonians, may best be conceived as multinaturalists. If nature is meant to designate what there is and cultures are the different ways in which this can be seen, then Viveiros de Castro’s anthropology is one that multiplies natures rather than cultures (hence also the deep affinity of this vision of anthropology with Bruno Latour’s parallel argument about the ontological pluralization of nature in the practice of science—e.g., Latour 1993). So Viveiros de Castro brings Wagner’s assault on the nature/culture matrix of anthropological thinking full circle. If Wagner recasts the idea of culture as the manner in which the world invents itself (culture does as nature is, one might say), Viveiros de Castro recasts the idea of nature as the manner in which people conceive it (nature is as culture does it), provided “conception” here is understood in sharp contrast to representation, as an irreducibly ontological operation—establishing this point, and drawing out its consequences for the practice of anthropology, is one of the prime tasks of the article. If there is any asymmetry at all in these complementary operations it lies in the fact that, by working at the reversible “nature = culture” equation from its “nature” end—the end of what things are and what they could be—Viveiros de Castro’s argument brings the question of ontology to the very center of anthropologists’ metatheoretical deliberation. Indeed, in view of the current furor about the so-called “ontological turn” in anthropology,1 one way to read the article that follows is as just that: the moment when anthropology turned the ontological corner. References Corsin Jimenez, Alberto. In press. “The right to infrastructure: A prototype for open source urbanism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Holbraad, Martin 2013. “Scoping recursivity: A comment on Franklin and Napier.” Cambridge Anthropology 31 (2): 123–27. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. London: Prentice-Hall. Scott, Michael W. 2013. “The anthropology of ontology (religious science?).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (4): 859–72. Strathern, Marilyn. 1980. “No nature, no culture: The Hagen case.” In Nature, culture and gender, edited by Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, 174222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 4 (3): 46988. ———. 2002. “O nativo relativo.” Mana 8 (1): 113–48. ———. 2012. “Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere: Four lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, February-March 1998.” HAU: Masterclass Series 1: 45–168. Wagner, Roy. 1972. Habu: The innovation of meaning in Daribi religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1981. The invention of culture. Revised and expanded edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.   Martin HOLBRAAD teaches Social Anthropology at University College London where he codirects the Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture Research Group (CROC). He conducts ethnographic fieldwork on religion and socialism in Cuba and is the author of Truth in motion: The recursive anthropology of Cuban divination (Chicago, 2012). ___________________ 1. See Scott (2013) for a recent review of the literature on the anthropology of ontology.   This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.3.032 TRANSLATION The relative native Eduardo VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federai do Rio de Janeiro Translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sauma and Martin Holbraad The human being, such as we imagine him, does not exist. —Nelson Rodrigues Ground rules1 The “anthropologist” is a person whose discourse concerns the discourse of a “native.” The native need not be overly savage, traditionalist nor, indeed, native to the place where the anthropologist finds him. The anthropologist, on his part, need not be excessively civilized, modernist, or even foreign to the people his discourse concerns.2 The discourses in question (and particularly that of the native) are not necessarily texts, but rather may include all types of meaning practice.3 What is essential, however, is that the discourse of the anthropologist (or the “observer”) establishes a certain relation with that of the native (or the “observed”). This relation is one of meaning or, when the anthropologist’s discourse aspires to be Scientific, a relation of knowledge. By this token, anthropological knowledge is also a social relation, since it is the effect of the relationships that reciprocally constitute the knowing subject, on the one hand, and the subject he comes to know, on the other. As with all relations, this form of knowledge brings about a transformation in the relational constitution of anthropologist and native alike.4 The (meta)relation between anthropologist and native is not one of identity: the anthropologist always says and, therefore, does something different than what the native says or does, even when he intends to do nothing more than repeat the native’s discourse in a “textual” form, or when he tries to establish a dialogue—a dubious notion—with the native. This difference is nothing other than the knowledge effect created by the anthropologist’s discourse, which is produced by the relation between the meaning of this discourse and the meaning of that of the native.5 Clearly, this kind of discursive alterity is grounded in an assumption of similarity. The anthropologist and the native are of the same species and share in its condition: they are both human, and each of them is positioned in their respective culture, which could (even) be the same. But this is where the game starts to get interesting or, better, strange. For even when the anthropologist and the native share the same culture, the relationship of meaning between their respective discourses serves to differentiate them: the anthropologist’s and the native’s relationship with their respective cultures are not exactly the same. What makes the native a native is the presumption, on the part of the anthropologist, that the native’s relationship with his culture is natural, which is to say, intrinsic, spontaneous, and, if possible, nonreflexive or, even better, unconscious. Thus, the native gives expression to her culture in his discourse. The anthropologist does so too, but if he hopes to be something other than a native, he must also be able to express his culture culturally, which is to say, reflexively, conditionally, and consciously. The anthropologist’s culture is contained (in both senses of the word) in the relationship of meaning that his discourse establishes with that of the native. The native’s discourse, by contrast, is merely penned in by his own culture. The anthropologist’s deployment of his own culture is a necessary condition of his humanity, one might say, while for the native being deployed by his is a sufficient one. Obviously, these differences are not in the so-called nature of things. They are a feature of the language game that we are describing here, and serve to define the very characters we have been designating as “the anthropologist” and “the native.” So let us turn to some other ground rules. The anthropological idea of culture places the anthropologist and the native on an equal footing, inasmuch as it implies that the anthropologist’s knowledge of other cultures is itself culturally mediated. in the first instance, this sense of equality is simply empirical or de facto, since it refers to the common (or generic) cultural condition of the anthropologist and the native. However, their differently constituted relationships with their respective cultures, and therefore also with each other’s, are such that this de facto sense of equality does not imply an equality de jure—that is, an equality with regard to their respective claims to knowledge. The anthropologist tends to have an epistemological advantage over the native. Their respective discourses are situated on different planes. While the anthropologist’s capacity to produce meaning does depend on the meanings produced by the native, the prerogative to determine what those native meanings mean remains with the anthropologist—explaining and interpreting, translating and introducing, textual-izing and contextualizing, justifying and signifying native meanings are all jobs of the anthropologist. The anthropological discourse’s relational matrix is hylomor-phic: the anthropologist’s meaning is form; the native’s is matter. The native’s discourse is not the master of its own meaning. De facto, as Geertz might say, we are all natives; but de jure, some are always more native than others. This article proposes the following questions: What if we refuse to give this kind of strategic advantage to the anthropologist’s discourse over that of the native? What would happen if the native’s discourse were to operate within the discourse of the anthropologist in a way that produced reciprocal knowledge effects upon it? What might occur if the form intrinsic to the matter of native discourse were to be allowed to modify the matter implicit in the form of anthropological knowledge? it is said that to translate is to betray. But what happens when the translator decides to betray his own tongue? What happens if, unsatisfied with a mere passive or de facto equality between discursive subjects, we claim an active or de jure equality between their respective discourses? What if, rather than being neutralized by this equivalence, the disparity between the meanings produced on either side, by anthropologists and natives, is introduced into both discourses, thus releasing its full potential? What if instead of complacently admitting that we are all native, we take the opposite wager as far as it can go, namely, that we are all “anthropologists” (Wagner 1981: 36)—and, to boot, not some a little more than others, but just each in their own way, which is to say, very differently? in short, what changes when anthropology is taken to be a meaning practice that is epistemically continuous with the practices that it discusses, and equivalent to them? What changes, in other words, when we apply the notion of “symmetrical anthropology” (Latour 1991) to anthropology itself, not to condemn it as colonialist, exorcise its exoticism, or landmine its intellectual field, but rather to turn it into something else? Something different not only to the native’s discourse (for that is a difference that is constitutive of anthropology), but different also to the discourse that anthropologists habitually enunciate about themselves, often in hushed tones, when commenting on native discourses.6 If we do all of this, I would say that we would be doing what has always been called “anthropology,” properly speaking, rather than (for example) “sociology” or “psychology.” My hesitation here is due to the fact that much of what goes, or has gone, by the name of anthropology turns on the contrary assumption that the anthropologist has a privileged grasp of the reasons for the native’s reasons-reasons to which the native’s reasonings are oblivious. The anthropologist, according to this view, is able to provide a full account of how universal or how particular any given native might be, as well as of the illusions that the latter may have about himself-at times providing an example of his native culture while imagining that he manifests human nature in general (the native as unselfconscious ideologue), while at other times manifesting his human nature while thinking that he is displaying his own particular culture (the native as unwitting general cognizer).7 Here, the knowledge relation is conceived as unilateral, such that the alterity between the anthropologist’s and native’s respective discourses dissipates as the former encompasses the latter. The anthropologist knows the native de jure, even as he may not know him de facto. Or we could go the other way around: even though the native may know the anthropologist de facto (often better than the anthropologist knows him in turn), he does not know him de jure, precisely because the native is not an anthropologist, which is what the anthropologist, well, is. Needs must, the anthropologist’s science/knowledge is of a different order to the native’s: the condition of possibility for the former includes the denial of the latter’s claim to legitimacy—an act of “epistemocide,” to use Bob Scholte’s acute expression (1984: 964). The subject’s knowledge requires the object’s ignorance. But we need not be overly dramatic about all this. As the discipline’s history attests, this discursive game and its biased rules provided lots of instructive information about the natives. The experiment proposed in the present article, however, consists precisely in refusing to play it. This is not because this game results in objectively false results, say in representing the native’s nature erroneously; the concept of objective truth (along with the notions of representation and nature) is part of the rules of that game, not of the one proposed here. In any case, once the aims of that classic game are set, its results are frequently convincing, or at least, “plausible” as adepts of the game like to say.8 To refuse to play the game amounts simply to giving oneself a different set of goals, appropriate to different rules, as outlined above. What I am suggesting, in short, is that there are two incompatible ways of conceiving anthropology, and that one needs to choose between them. On one side, anthropological knowledge is presented as the result of applying concepts that are extrinsic to their object: we know what social relations, cognition, kinship, religion, politics, etc. are in advance and the task is to see how these play out in this or that ethnographic context—how they play out, of course, without the knowledge of the people involved. On the other side (and this is the game proposed here), we have an idea of anthropological knowledge that is founded on the basic premise that the procedures involved in anthropological investigation9 are of the same conceptual order as the procedures being investigated. It should be emphasized that this particular equivalence of procedure at once presupposes and produces the radical nonequivalence of everything else. For, if the first conception of anthropology imagines each culture or society as embodying a specific solution to a generic problem—or as filling a universal form (the anthropological concept) with specific contents—the second, in contrast, raises the prospect of the problems themselves being radically diverse. Above all, such an approach takes off from the principle that the anthropologist may not know in advance what these problems might be. In such a case, anthropology poses relationships between different problems, rather than placing a single (“natural”) problem in relation to its different (“cultural”) solutions. The “art of anthropology” (Gell 1999), I suggest, is the art of determining the problems posed by each culture, not of finding solutions for the problems posed by our own. It is just for this reason that positing a continuity between the procedures of the anthropologist and the native is such an epistemological imperative.10 It bears repeating that this pertains to the procedures, not to those that carry them out. After all, none of this is about condemning the classic game for producing faulty results that fail to recognize the native’s own condition as Subject-observing him with a distant gaze, devoid of empathy, which constructs him as an exotic object, diminishes him as primitive rather than the observer’s coeval, denying him the human right of interlocution-we are familiar with the litany. The problem is rather the opposite. It is precisely because the anthropologist very easily takes the native to be an other subject that he cannot see him as an other subject, as an Other figure that, more than subject or object, is the expression of a possible world. It is by failing to accept the native’s condition of “nonsubject” (i.e., his being other than a subject) that the anthropologist introduces his sneaky advantage de jure, under the guise of a proclamation of de facto equality. Before the game even starts, he knows too much about the native: he predefines and circumscribes the possible worlds expressed by this other, radically separating the other’s alterity from his capacity to induce difference. The authentic animist is the anthropologist, and participant observation is the true (meaning, false) primitive participation. It is therefore neither a matter of advocating a kind of intersubjective idealism, nor of standing up for some form of “communicative reason” or “dialogic consensus.” My touchstone here is the concept evoked above, namely the Other as an a priori structure. This concept is proposed in Gilles Deleuze’s well-known commentary of Michel Tour-nier’s Vendredi.11 Reading Tournier’s book as a fictional description of a metaphysical experiment—what is a world without Others?—Deleuze proceeds to gauge the effects of the Other’s presence through the effects of its absence. The Other thus appears as a condition of the field of perception: the existential possibility of those parts of the world that lie beyond actual perception is guaranteed by the virtual presence of an Other that perceives them; what is invisible to me subsists as real by being visible to an other.12 Without an Other the category of possibility disappears; the world collapses, reduced to the pure surface of the immediate, and the subject dissolves, turning into a thing-in-itself (while things-in-themselves, in turn, unravel into phantom doubles). An Other is thus no one (neither subject nor object) but rather a structure or relation—the absolute relation that provides concrete actants with their relative positions as subjects or objects, as well as their alternation between the two positions: the Other refers (to) me to the other I and the other I to me. The Other is not an element within the field of perception; it is the principle that constitutes such a field, along with its content. The Other is thus not a specific point of view to be defined in relation to the subject (the “point of view of the other” in relation to my point of view or vice-versa), but rather it is the possibility that there may be a point of view at all—that is, it constitutes the concept of a point of view. It is the point of view that allows the I and the Other to adopt a point of view.13 On this point, Deleuze is critically extending Sartre’s famous analysis of the “gaze,” by providing a prior structure for the reciprocity of perspectives associated with the Sartrian regard. What is this structure? It is the structure of the possible: the Other is the expression of a possible world. A possible world that exists, really but not actually—or not beyond its expression in the form of an Other. This express possibility is implicated in, and constitutive of, the perspective from which it is expressed (which nevertheless remains heterogeneous), and is effectuated in language, or the sign, which provides the reality of the possible as such—meaning. Thus, the I renders explicit this implication, actualizing its possibility by taking its rightful place in the language game. The subject is therefore an effect, not a cause, inasmuch as it interiorizes a relation that is initially exterior to it—or rather, a relation to which it is initially interior: relations are originally exterior to the terms, because the terms are interior to the relations. “There are many subjects because there are others, and not the contrary.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 22) The problem is thus not that of seeing the native as an object, and the solution is not to render him a subject. There is no question that the native is a subject; but what the native forces the anthropologist to do is, precisely, to put into question what a subject can be. This is the cogitation peculiar to anthropology: one that allows anthropology to take on the virtual presence of an Other who is also its condition—the condition for passage from one possible world to another—and that is only as a consequence able to determine the derivative and vicarious positions of subject and object. The physicist questions the neutrino, and cannot disagree with it; the anthropologist answers for the native, who can thus only (de jure and, frequently, de facto) agree with him. The physicist must associate himself with the neutrino—he must think with his recalcitrant object; the anthropologist associates the native with himself, thinking that his object makes the same associations as he does—that is, that the native thinks like him. The problem is that, like the anthropologist, the native certainly thinks, but, most probably, he does not think like the anthropologist. The native is certainly a special object: a thinking object, or, a subject. But if he is objectively a subject, then his thinking also takes objective form—just as the anthropologist’s thinking does—as the expression of a possible world. Thus, the Malinowskian distinction between what the native thinks (or does) and what he thinks that he thinks (or does), is spurious. It is precisely this cleavage, this bifurcation of the nature of the other, that the anthropologist (who would have himself do exactly as he thinks)14 hopes to exploit. However, a better distinction— the difference that really makes a difference—is between what the native thinks (or does) and what the anthropologist thinks the native thinks (and acts accordingly). The true confrontation is between these two manners of thinking (and acting). Such a confrontation, note, need not be reduced to similar forms of equivocation in each case—the misunderstandings are never the same on either side, just as the sides are not the same in the first place. In any case, who could venture to define what may count as mutual understanding here? But nor is it necessary to content ourselves by imagining this manner of confrontation as some kind of edifying dialogue. The confrontation should implicate the two sides mutually, altering the discourses it brings into play in equal measure, since the aim of the procedure is not to arrive at a consensual optimum, but a conceptual maximum. I evoked earlier the critical distinction between quid facti and quid juris. This seemed a useful distinction since the first problem consists in evaluating the claim to knowledge that is implicit in the anthropologist’s discourse. The problem is not a cognitive or a psychological one, since it is not about whether knowing another culture is empirically possible.15 The problem is rather epistemological, which is to say, political. It speaks to the properly transcendental question of how to decide on the legitimacy of discourses that enter into a relationship of knowledge. In particular, it speaks to the manner in which relations of order are established between these discourses—these relations are in no way innate, after all, and nor are their enunciative poles. No one is born an anthropologist and, as curious as it may seem, even less a native. At the limit In recent years, we anthropologists have worried greatly about the identity, as well as the destiny, of our discipline: what it is, if it continues at all, what it should be, if it has the right to exist, what its proper object might be, its method, its mission, and so on (see, for example, Moore 1999). Let us focus on the question of our discipline’s object, since the rest of these questions turn on it. Is it culture, as in the North American tradition of anthropology? Or is it social organization, as it was for the British? Or maybe human nature, as per the French approach? I think that the appropriate response is: all and none of the above. Culture, society, and nature— much of a muchness: such notions do not so much designate anthropology’s object or topic, but rather point to its basic problem, namely that it cannot adopt (Latour 1991: 109–10, 130) any such themes as its own, if in doing so it neglects to take into account the one “anthropological tradition” that counts most, namely, that of the native. If we must start somewhere, let us be British and acknowledge from the outset that the anthropologist’s privileged domain of concern is human sociality, that is, what we are happy to call “social relations.” We could then also suggest that “culture,” for example, cannot exist beyond its actualization in such relations.16 And we could add, importantly, that these relations vary in time and space. So, if culture does not exist beyond its relational expression, then relational variation is also cultural variation. Or, to put it another way, “culture” is the word anthropologists use to talk about relational variation. Thinking, then, about relational variation: would such a notion not willy-nilly imply some kind of subject—an invariable substrate to which relational variations would stand as predicates? This seems to be the ever-latent question, insistent always on some sort of immediate evidence. But this question is, above all, badly formed. For what varies, most crucially, is not the content of relations, but rather the very idea of a relation, i.e., what counts as a relation in this or that culture. It is not the relations that vary, but rather the variations that are related. And if this is so, then what is imagined as the substrate of variation, namely “human nature”—to turn to the darling concept of the third great anthropological tradition—would completely change its function, or better, it would stop being a substance and would become a true function. Nature would stop being a type of highest common denominator of cultures (the minimum high, so to speak, of a humanitas minima), or a sort of backdrop of similarity generated by cancelling differences so as to arrive at a constant subject—a stable referent capable of emitting variable cultural meanings (as if differences were not just as natural!). Instead, human nature could be conceived as something like a minimum common multiple of difference—bigger than cultures, rather than smaller—or something like the partial integer of the different relational configurations we call “cultures.”17 The “minimum,” in this case, is the multiplicity that is common to humans—humanitas multiplex. Thus conceived, nature would no longer be a self-same substance situated within some naturally privileged place (such as the brain, for example). Instead, nature itself would be accorded the status of a differential relation, best placed between the terms that it “naturalizes.” It would consist in the set of transformations that are necessary in order to describe variations between different known relational configurations. Or, to use yet another image, nature would become a pure limit—but not in the geometric sense of limitation, understood as a perimeter or a term that constrains and defines some substantive form (recalling the idea of “mental enclosures” [enceintes mentales], which is ever present in the anthropological vocabulary), but rather in the mathematical sense, as the point to which a series or relation converges: a tension-limit, as opposed to a contour-limit.18 In such a case, human nature would be the theoretical operation of a “passage to the limit,” indicating what human beings are capable of virtually, rather than a limitation that consigns them actually to being nothing other than themselves.19 If culture is a system of differences, as the structuralists liked to say, then so is nature: differences of differences. The theme of the contour-limit (so characteristically Kantian, and ever-present in the discipline’s imaginary) is at its most conspicuous when it provides a limiting horizon in the guise of so-called human nature, as is the case with naturalist-universalist approaches such as sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and, to a large degree, in structuralism itself. But it is also present in discourses about human cultures, where it renders clear the limitations—if I may call them thus—of the classic cultural-relativist position. This recalls the notion enshrined in Evans-Pritchard’s phrase about Zande witchcraft—a Zande man “cannot think that his thought is wrong” (1976: 109)—or the current anthropological image of culture as a prosthesis of the eye (or classificatory sieve) that only permits one to “see things” in a certain way (or which hides certain aspects of reality); or even, to cite a more recent example, the fishbowl metaphor, which encloses each historical period (Veyne 1983).20 Whether in regard to nature or cultures, the theme appears equally “limited.” If we were to be perverse, we could say that its strategic neutrality, its copresence in the otherwise opposed camps of universalism and relativism, is a good indication that the notion of a “mental enclosure” is one of the mental enclosures that most characterize our common historical “fishbowl.” In any case, it demonstrates that the supposed opposition between naturalist universalism and culturalist relativism is, at least, very relative (and perfectly cultural), for it can be summed up as a matter of choosing the dimensions of the bowl, or of the size of the cell where we are imprisoned: should it include all of human kind ecumenically, or should it be made to order for each culture? Or perhaps we might have one great “natural” prison with different cultural cell-blocks, some of them with slightly more spacious cells than others?21 Thus understood, anthropology’s object would be the variation of social relations. Not of social relations as a distinct ontological province, but of all possible phenomena taken as social relations, or as implying social relations: of all relations, in short, as social. This, however, would require adopting a perspective that is not completely dominated by the Western doctrine of social relations—a perspective that would be ready to accept that handling all relations as social could lead to a radical reconceptualization of what “the social” might be. Let us say, then, that anthropology distinguishes itself from other discourses on human sociality, not by holding any firm doctrine about the nature of social relations, but, on the contrary, by maintaining only a vaggue initial idea of what a relation might be. For its characteristic problem consists less in determining which social relations constitute its object, and more in asking itself what its object constitutes as a social relation—what a social relation is in that object’s terms, or better, in terms that can be formulated through the (social, naturally, and constitutive) relationship between the “anthropologist” and the “native.” From conception to concept Would all of this not simply suggest that the point of view defended here, and exemplified in my work on Amerindian perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1998), is “the native’s point of view,” which anthropologists have professed to be grasping for some time now? To be sure, there is certainly nothing particularly original in the point of view that I am adopting here. The only rightful claim to originality belongs to the indigenous point of view itself, and not to my commentary on it. Still, when it comes to the question of whether the object of anthropology ought to be the native’s point of view, the response must be both “yes” and “no.” “Yes” (certainly!), because my problem in the above-cited article was to discover what a “point of view” is for the native. In other words, what concept of a point of view do Amazonian cultures enunciate—what is the native point of view on the point of view? The answer is “no,” on the other hand, because the native concept of a point of view does not coincide with the concept of “the native’s of point of view.” After all, my point of view cannot be the native’s own, but only that of my relation with it. This involves an essentially fictional dimension, since it implies making two entirely heterogeneous points of view resonate with each other. My article on perspectivism, then, was at once a thought experiment and an exercise in anthropological fiction. Here, however, the expression “thought experiment” should not be understood in the usual way, as an attempt to think oneself into another form of experience but rather as a manner of experiencing for oneself an other’s form of thought. It is not a matter of imagining a form of experience, if you like, but of experiencing a form of imagination.22 The experience, in this case, is my own—as ethnographer, as well as reader of the ethnological literature about indigenous Amazonia—and the experiment is a fiction that is controlled by that experience. In other words, the fiction that is involved is anthropological, but the anthropology that it produces is not fictional! What does such a fiction consist in? It consists in taking indigenous ideas as concepts, and following through on the consequences of such a decision: to determine the preconceptual ground or plane of immanence that such concepts presuppose, the conceptual personae that they deploy, and the material realities that they create. And note that treating these ideas as concepts does not mean that, objectively or actually speaking, they are something else. Individual cognitions, collective representations, propositional attitudes, cosmological beliefs, unconscious schemata, embodied dispositions and so forth: these are the kinds of theoretical fictions I choose not to heed here. Thus, the type of work for which I am advocating is neither a study of “primitive mentality” (supposing such a notion might still make sense at all), nor an analysis of the natives’ “cognitive processes” (supposing these were accessible, given the current state of psychological and ethnographic knowledge). My object is less the indigenous manner of thinking than its objects, the possible world that its concepts project. Nor is it a matter of reducing anthropology to a series of ethno-sociological essays about worldviews. This is because, in the first place, no world that is ready to be viewed exists—no world that would precede one’s view of it, or precede even the distinction between the visible (or thinkable) and the invisible (or presumed), which provides the coordinates for this manner of thinking. Second, because treating ideas as concepts involves refusing attempts to explain them in terms of some transcendent notion of context (ecological, economic, political, etc.), opting rather to treat them immanently as problems, i.e., placing them in the field of problems in which ideas are implicated. And nor is it, finally, a matter of proposing an interpretation of Amerindian thought, but rather one of carrying out an experiment with it, and thus also with our own. In Roy Wagner’s words: “every understanding of another culture is an experiment with one’s own” (1981: 12). To treat indigenous ideas as concepts is to take an antipsychologizing stance, since what is at stake here is a de jure image of thought, irreducible to empirical cognition, or at least to the empirical analysis of cognition psychologists provide. The domain of concepts does not coincide with subjects’ cognitive faculties or internal states: concepts are intellectual objects or events, not mental states or attributes. They certainly “cross the mind,” as the English expression has it, but they do not stay there and, above all, they are not to be found there readymade. They are invented. To be clear: I am not suggesting that Amerindians “cognize” differently to us, or that their “mental” categories are different to those of any other human being. Certainly, it is not a matter of imagining them as instantiating some peculiar form of neurophysiology that processes difference in a different way. For my own part, I am inclined to think that Amerindians think exactly “like us.” But I also think that what they think, that is, the concepts that they deploy, the “descriptions” that they produce, are very different to our own—and thus that the world described by these concepts is very different to ours.23 And as far as the Amerindians are concerned (if my analyses concerning perspectivism are correct), I think that they think that all humans, and aside from them many other nonhuman subjects, think exactly “like them”—this being precisely the reason for subjects’ divergences of perspective; that is, the very opposite of a universal convergence of reference. The notion of a concept implies an image of thought as something other than cognition or a system of representations. What interests me in Amerindian thought, then, is neither local knowledge and its more or less accurate representations of reality—the so-called “indigenous knowledge” that is currently the focus of so much attention in the global market of representations—nor indigenous cognition, its mental categories, and how representative they are of the species’ capaci-ties—this being the main concern of human psychology as a “natural science.” Neither representations, whether individual or collective, rational or (“apparently”) irrational, which might partially express states of affairs prior and exterior to themselves; nor categories and cognitive processes, whether universal or particular, innate or acquired, which manifest the properties of some thing of the world, whether it be the mind or society. My objects are indigenous concepts, the worlds they constitute (worlds that thus express them), the virtual background from which they emerge and which they presuppose. In short, my objects are the concepts, which is to say the ideas and problems of indigenous “reason,” rather than indigenous categories of “understanding.” It should be clear by now that the notion of concept has a very specific meaning here. Treating indigenous ideas as concepts means taking them as containing a properly philosophical significance, or as being potentially capable of philosophical use. It might be said that this is an irresponsible decision, since neither the Amerindians nor even (and this must be stressed) the present author are philosophers. One might wonder, for example, how to apply the notion of a concept to a form of thought that has, apparently, never found it necessary to dwell on itself, and which would rather evoke the fluent and variegated schematism of symbols, images, and collective representations than the rigorous architecture of conceptual reason. Is there not, after all, any sign of the well-known historical and psychological abyss, or “decisive rupture,” between a panhuman mythical imagination and the universe of Hellenic-occidental rationalism (Vernant [1966] 1996: 229); between the sign’s bricolage and the concept’s engineering (Lévi-Strauss 1962); between the paradigmatic transcendence of the Figure and the syntagmatic immanence of the Concept (Deleuze and Guattari 1991); between an imagistic intellectual economy and a doctrinal one (Whitehouse 2000)? On all of this, which is more or less a direct legacy from Hegel, I have my doubts. I insist instead on talking about concepts, and this for a number of reasons. And the first among them, on which I shall comment here, stems from the decision to place native ideas on the same footing as anthropological ones. As stated above, the experiment I am proposing posits an equivalence de jure between the anthropologist’s and the native’s discourses, taking them as mutually constitutive of each other, since they emerge as such when they enter into a knowledge relation with one another. Anthropological concepts actualize this relation and therefore can only be construed as being completely relational, both in the manner of their expression and in their content. They are to be construed neither as truthful reflections of the native’s culture (the positivist dream), nor as illusory projections of the anthropologist’s culture (the constructionist nightmare). They reflect, rather, a certain relation of intelligibility between two cultures; a relation that produces the two cultures in question by back projection, so to speak, as the “motivation” of the anthropological concepts. As such, anthropological concepts perform a double dislocation: they are vectors that always point in the other direction, transcontextual interfaces that function to represent, in the diplomatic sense of the term, the other in one’s own terms (that is, in the other’s other’s own terms)—both ways. In short, anthropological concepts are relative because they are relational, and they are relational because their role is to relate. Indeed, their relational origin and function is marked by the habit of designating them with alien-sounding words: mana, totem, kula, potlatch, tabu, gumsa/gumlao…. Other concepts, no less authentic, carry an etymological signature that evokes analogies between the cultural tradition from which they emerged and the traditions that are their object: gift, sacrifice, kinship, person…. Yet other (and just as legitimate) ones constitute terminological inventions the role of which is to generalize the conceptual mechanisms of the people being studied—animism, segmentary opposition, restricted exchange, schismogenesis …—or, inversely, and more problematically, terms that are deployed in order to inject notions that are already diffuse in our own tradition into the interior of a specific theoretical economy—incest taboo, gender, symbol, culture—so as to universalize them.24 We can thus see that numerous concepts, problems, entities, and agents that are to be found in anthropological theories emerge through the imaginative efforts of societies on which the discipline hopes to shed light. Might one not say, then, that anthropology’s originality lies in just this synergy, between conceptions and practices pertaining to two worlds—the “subject’s” and the “object’s” respectively? Recognizing this might help, among other things, to mitigate our complex of inferiority in relation to the “natural sciences.” As observed by Latour: The description of kula is on a par with that of black holes. The complex systems of alliances are as imaginative as the complex scenarios conceived for selfish genes. Understanding the theology of Australian Aborigines is as important as charting the great undersea rifts. The Trobriand land tenure system is as interesting a scientific objective as polar icecap drilling. If we talk about what matters in a definition of science—innovation in the agencies that furnish our world—anthropology might well be close to the top of the disciplinary pecking order. (1996a: 5)25 In this passage an analogy is made between indigenous concepts and the objects of the so-called natural sciences. This is one possible, and even necessary, perspective: it should be possible to produce a scientific description of indigenous ideas and practices, as if they were things of the world, or better, so that they can become things of the world. (One must not forget that for Latour the objects of science are anything but “objective” and indifferent entities, patiently awaiting description.) Another strategy would be to compare indigenous conceptions with scientific theories, as suggested by Horton in his “similarity thesis” (1993: 348–54), which anticipates some aspects of Latour’s symmetrical anthropology. And yet another is the strategy advocated here. In this connection it is worth noting that anthropology has always been overly obsessed with “Science,” not only in relation to itself (is it a science? can it be? should it be?), but above all—and this is the real problem—in relation to the conceptions of the peoples it studies. The question then becomes whether to disqualify such conceptions as errors, dreams, or illusions, in order then scientifically to explain how and why the “others” cannot explain them(selves) scientifically; or to promote native conceptions as more or less continuous with science, fruits of the same desire to know, which unites all humans. Horton’s similarity thesis and Lévi-Strauss’ science of the concrete are two examples (Latour 1991: 133–34). And indeed, the image of science may well be considered a kind of gold standard of thought, at least as far as our own intellectual tradition is concerned. It is not, however, the only or necessarily the best terrain on which to establish fruitful epistemo-political relations with the intellectual activity of peoples who have no truck with our much-cherished cult(ure) of Reason. So, we might imagine a form of analogy different to the one suggested by Latour, or a manner of similarity other than Horton’s. A form of analogy in which, instead of taking indigenous conceptions as entities similar to black holes or tectonic faults, we took them as being of a kind with the cogito or the monad. We could thus say, to paraphrase the previous citation, that the Melanesian concept of the “dividual” person (Strathern 1988) is as imaginative as Locke’s possessive individualism; that understanding the “Amerindian philosophy of chieftainship” (Clastres [1962] 1974) is as important as commenting on Hegel’s doctrine of the State; that Maori cosmology is equivalent to the Eleatic paradoxes and Kantian antinomies (Schrempp 1992); that Amazonian perspectivism presents a philosophical challenge of the same order as Leibniz’s system…. And when it comes to what matters most in a given philosophical elaboration, namely its capacity to create new concepts, then without any desire to take the place of philosophy, anthropology can be recognized as a formidable philosophical instrument in its own right, capable of broadening a little the otherwise rather ethnocentric horizons of our philosophy—and, in passing, ridding us of so-called “philosophical” anthropology too. In Tim Ingold’s (1992: 696) pithy phrase: “anthropology is philosophy with the people in.” By “people,” Ingold means “ordinary people” (ibid.), to be sure. He is also playing, however, with the term’s connotation of “the people” or, more likely yet, “peoples.” A philosophy, then, with other peoples in it: the possibility of a philosophical endeavor that places itself in relation to the nonphilo-sophy—simply, the life—of other peoples on the planet, beyond our own.26 Not only the common people, but above all with uncommon people, those that are beyond our sphere of “communication.” If in “real” philosophy imaginary savages are altogether abundant, the geo-philosophy proposed by anthropology conducts an “imaginary” philosophy with real “savages.” “Real toads in imaginary gardens,” as the poet Marianne Moore has it. Note the significant displacement involved in the above paraphrase. It is no longer (only) a question of the kula’s anthropological description (as a form of Melanesian sociality), but (also) of the kula as a peculiarly Melanesian description (of “sociality” as a form of anthropology). Similarly, it would still be necessary to understand “Australian theology,” but now as constituting a form of understanding in its own right, just as, to give another example, complex alliance or land tenure systems can be seen as exercises of an indigenous sociological imagination. Clearly, it will always be necessary to describe the kula as a description, to understand Aboriginal religion as an understanding, and to form images of the indigenous imagination. Doing so is a matter of transforming conceptions into concepts, extracting the latter and returning them to the former. And a concept is to be understood here as a complex relation between conceptions—a manner of activating preconceptual intuitions. In the case of anthropology, the conceptions that enter into this kind of relation include, before all else, the anthropologist’s and the native’s—a relation of relations. Native concepts are the anthropologist’s concepts. or so we may suppose. Neither explain, nor interpret: Multiply and experiment! In The invention of culture, Roy Wagner was one of the first anthropologists to draw out the radical consequences of the idea that anthropologist and native can be treated on an equal footing due to their common cultural condition. From the fact that the anthropologist’s attempt to approach another culture can only be conducted through terms taken from his own, Wagner concludes that anthropological knowledge is defined by its “relative objectivity” (1981: 2). At issue here is not a deficient objectivity, that is, subjective or partial, but an intrinsically relational objectivity, as can be gathered from what follows: The idea of culture …places the researcher in a position of equality with his subjects: each “belongs to a culture.” Because every culture can be understood as a specific manifestation …of the phenomenon of man, and because no infallible method has ever been discovered for “grading” different cultures and sorting them into their natural types, we assume that every culture, as such, is equivalent to every other one. This assumption is called “cultural relativity.” …The combination of these two implications of the idea of culture, the fact that we ourselves belong to a culture (relative objectivity) and that we must assume all cultures to be equivalent (cultural relativity), leads to a general proposition concerning the study of culture. As the repetition of the stem “relative” suggests, the understanding of another culture involves the relationship between two varieties of the human phenomenon; it aims at the creation of an intellectual relation between them, as understanding that includes both of them. The idea of “relationship” is important here because it is more appropriate to the bringing together of two equivalent entities, or viewpoints, than notions like “analysis” or “examination,” with their pretensions of absolute objectivity. (Wagner 1981: 2–3) Or as Deleuze might say, it is not a matter of affirming the relativity of the true, but rather of affirming the truth of the relative. It is worth observing that Wagner associates the notion of a relation to that of a point of view (the terms that are related are points of view), and that the idea of the truth of the relative defines what Deleuze calls “perspectivism.” Whether it be Leibniz’s or Nietzsche’s, or, equally, Tukanoan or Jurunoan, perspectivism is not relativism, that is, the affirmation of the relativity of truth, but relationalism, through which one can affirm that the truth of the relative is the relation. I asked what would happen if we refuse the epistemological advantage of the anthropologist’s discourse over that of the native: what if we took knowledge relations as modifying, reciprocally, the terms they relate or, rather, actualize? This is the same as asking: what happens when native thought is taken seriously? What happens when the anthropologist’s objective ceases to be that of explaining, interpreting, contextualizing, or rationalizing native thought, but instead begins to deploy it, drawing out its consequences, and verifying the effects that it can produce on our own thinking? What is it to think native thought? I say “think,” here, without worrying whether what we think (namely, others’ thoughts) is “apparently irrational,”27 or, even worse, rational by nature.28 At issue is a manner of thinking that does not think itself from within the coordinates provided by these alternatives—a form of thinking entirely alien to this kind of game. For a start, taking native thought seriously is to refuse to neutralize it. For example, one ought to put in parentheses all questions of whether and how native thinking illustrates universal processes of human cognition; whether it can be explained as a result of particular modes of the social transmission of knowledge; or as the expression of a particular cultural world; or whether its functional role is to validate a particular distribution of political power. All such forms of neutralizing foreign thought should be resisted. suspending such questions or, at least, refusing to enclose anthropology within them, one might opt rather, say, to think other thought simply (so to speak) as an actualization of as yet unsuspected virtualities of thinking. Would taking the Amerindians seriously mean “believing” in what they say, taking their thought as an expression of certain truths about the world? Absolutely not; here is yet another of those questions that are famously “badly put.” Believing or not believing in native thought implies first imagining it as a system of beliefs. But problems that are properly anthropological should never be put either in the psychologistic terms of belief, or in the logicist terms of truth-value. It is not a matter of taking native thought as an expression of opinion (the only possible object for belief and disbelief) or as a set of propositions (the only possible objects for truth judgments). We know the mess anthropology made when it decided to define natives’ relationship to their own discourse in terms of belief: culture instantly becomes a kind of dogmatic theology. And it is just as bad to shift from “propositional attitudes” to their objects, treating native discourse as a repository of opinions or a set of propositions: culture turns into an epistemic teratology—error, illusion, madness, ideology.29 As Latour observes (1996b: 15), “belief is not a mental state, but an effect of the relation between peoples”—and it is precisely that effect that I do not mean to produce. Take animism, for example—about which I have written previously (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Lalande’s Vocabulary, which is hardly incompatible with more recent psycho-anthropological studies on this topic, defines “animism” in just these terms: as a “mental state.” But Amerindian animism is anything but: it is an image of thought that separates de facto from de jure, that which pertains to thought by right from what contingently refers to a state of affairs; it is, more specifically, an interpretive convention (Strathern 1999a: 239) that, formally speaking, involves personifying objects of knowledge, thus turning thought into an activity—an effect of the (“social”) relation between the thinker and what she or he thinks. After all, would it be appropriate to imagine, say, legal positivism and jus-naturalism as mental states? The same is (not) the case for Amazonian animism: it is not a mental state of individual subjects, but rather a transindividual intellectual disposition that, if anything, deploys the “mental states” of different beings in the world as one of its objects. It is not the native’s mental condition, but a “theory of the mind” applied by the native. Indeed, it is a manner of resolving—or better, dissolving—the eminently philosophical problem of “other minds.” If it is not a matter of describing American indigenous thought as a set of beliefs, then nor is it a question of relating to it via some prior notion of belief that might lend it its credibility—either by benevolently pointing to its allegorical “grain of truth” (a social allegory, for the Durkheimians, or a natural one, for the cultural materialists) or, even worse, by imagining that it provides access to the intimate and final essence of things, acting as a portal into some kind of immanent esoteric science. “An anthropology that …reduces meaning to belief, dogma and certainty, is forced into the trap of having to believe either the native meanings or our own” (Wagner 1981: 30). But the plane of meaning is not populated by psychological beliefs or logical propositions, and the “truth” of Amerindian thought is not, well, granular! Neither a form of doxa, nor of logic—neither opinion, nor proposition—native thought is taken here as an activity of symbolization or meaning practice: a self-referential or tautegorical mechanism for the production of concepts, that is, “symbols that stand for themselves” (Wagner 1986). The refusal to pose the question in terms of belief seems to me a critical anthropological decision. To emphasize this, we might reinvoke the Deleuzian Other: the Other is an expression of a possible world; but in the course of social interaction, this world must always be actualized by a Self: the implication of the possible in an Other is explicated by me. This means that the possible goes through a process of verification that entropically dissipates its structure. When I develop the world expressed by an Other, it is so as to validate it as real and enter into it, or to falsify it as unreal: the “explication” thus introduces the element of belief. To describe this process, Deleuze indicated the limiting condition that allowed him to determine the concept of the Other: These relations of development, which form our commonalities as well as our disagreements with the other, dissolve their structure and reduce it either to the status of an object or to the status of a subject. That is why, in order to grasp the other as such, we felt right to insist upon special conditions of experience, however artificial: the moment at which the expressed still has no existence (for us) beyond that which expresses it— the Other as the expression of a possible world. (1969: 335) [Emphasis removed in author’s translation. —Trans.] And he concludes by recalling a maxim that is fundamental to his thinking: “The rule invoked earlier—not to explain too much—meant, above all, not to explain oneself too much with the other, not to explain the other too much, but to maintain one’s implicit values and multiply one’s world by populating it with all those things expressed that do not exist outside of their expressions” (ibid.). Anthropology can make good use of this: maintaining an Other’s values implicit does not mean celebrating some numinous mystery that they might hide but rather amounts to refusing to actualize the possibilities expressed by indigenous thought— opting to sustain them as possible indefinitely, neither dismissing them as the fantasies of others, nor by fantasizing ourselves that they may gain their reality for us. The anthropological experiment, then, involves formally interiorizing the “special and artificial conditions” that Deleuze discusses: the moment in which the world of the Other does not exist beyond its expression transforms itself into an abiding condition, that is, a condition internal to the anthropological relation, which renders this possibility virtual.30 Anthropology’s constitutive role (its task de jure), then, is not that of explaining the world of the other, but rather of multiplying our world, “populating it with all those things expressed that do not exist outside of their expressions.” Of pigs and bodies Rendering native possibilities as virtualities is the same as treating native ideas as concepts. Two examples. Amerindians’ pigs In American ethnography one often comes across the idea that, for Amerindians, animals are human. This formulation condenses a nebula of subtly varied conceptions, which we shall not elaborate here: that not all animals are humans, and they’re not the only ones (plants etc. may also be human); that animals are not humans at all times; that they were human but no longer are; that they become human when they’re out of view; that they only think that they’re human; that they see themselves as human; that they have a human soul beneath an animal body; that they are people like humans are, but are not exactly human like people are; and so on. Aside from all that, “animal” and “human” are equivocal translations of certain indigenous words—lest it be forgotten, we are faced with hundreds of different languages, and in most of them the copula is not commonly marked by a verb. But no matter, for present purposes. Let us suppose that statements such as “animals are humans” or “certain animals are people” make sense for a certain indigenous group, and that their meaning is not merely “metaphorical”—as much sense, let us say (though not exactly the same kind of sense), as the apparently inverse (and no longer scandalous) affirmation—”humans are animals”—makes to us. Let us suppose, then, that the first statement makes sense to, for example, the Ese Eja of the Bolivian Amazon: “The affirmation, that I frequently heard, that ‘all the animals are Ese Eja’” (Alexiades 1999: 179).31 Right then. Isabella Lepri, an anthropology student who, coincidentally, at the time was working with the same Ese Eja, asked me whether I believed that the peccaries are humans, like the Amerindians say they are. I answered that I did not—doing so because I suspected (without any particular reason) that she believed that, if the Amerindians say such a thing, then it must be true. I added, perversely and rather untruthfully, that I only “believed” in atoms and genes, the theory of relativity and the evolution of the species, class war, and the logic of capital, in short, in that type of thing; but that, as an anthropologist, I took the idea that peccaries are humans perfectly seriously. She challenged me: “How can you maintain that you take what the Amerindians say seriously? Isn’t that just a way of being polite with your informants? How can you take them seriously if you only pretend to believe in what they say?” To be sure, this intimation of hypocrisy obliged me to reflect. I am convinced that Isabella’s question is absolutely crucial; that all anthropology deserving of the name must answer it; and that it is not at all easy to do so very well. Naturally, one possible response is that contained in Lévi-Strauss’ cutting remark on Ricoeur’s mythical (and mystical) hermeneutics: “It is necessary to choose which side you are on. Myths do not say anything capable of instructing us on the order of things, on the nature of reality, the origin of man or his destiny” (1971: 571). Instead, the author continues, myths do teach us much about the societies from which they originate and, above all, about certain fundamental (and universal) operative modes belonging to the human mind (Lévi-Strauss 1971: 571). One can thus oppose the referential vacuity of myths to their diagnostic richness: to say that peccaries are human does not “say” anything to us about the peccaries, but is highly telling about the humans who say it. The solution is not specific to Lévi-Strauss—ever since Durkheim or the Victorian intellectualists it has been a standard anthropological posture. In our days, for example, much of so-called cognitive anthropology can be seen as a systematic elaboration of this attitude, which consists in reducing indigenous discourse to a set of propositions, selecting those that are false (or alternatively, “empty”) and producing an explanation of why humans believe in them, given that they are false or empty. One such explanation, to continue with the examples, would be to conclude that such propositions are really forms of citation—statements to be placed between implicit quotation marks (Sperber 1974, 1982)—and therefore do not refer to the world, but rather to the relation between the natives and their discourse. This relation is, once again, the core theme for so-called “symbolic” anthropologies, of the semantic or pragmatic type: statements such as the one about peccaries, “in reality,” say something about society (or do something to it), not about what they are about. They teach us nothing about the order of things and the nature of reality, however, neither for us nor for the Amerindians. To take an affirmation such as “peccaries are humans” seriously, in this case, would consist in showing how certain humans can take it seriously and even believe in it, without showing themselves to be irrational—and, naturally, without the peccaries showing themselves to be human. The world is saved: the peccaries are saved, the natives are saved and, above all, so is the anthropologist. This solution does not satisfy me. In fact, it profoundly bothers me. It seems to imply that to take Amerindians seriously, when they affirm things such as “peccaries are humans,” is precisely not to believe in what they say, since if we did we would not be taking ourselves seriously. Another way out is needed. As I do not have either the space or, above all (and evidently), the ability to go over the vast philosophical literature that exists on the grammar of belief, certainty, proposition-al attitudes, et cetera, in what follows I will simply present certain considerations that have emerged intuitively, more than reflexively, through my experience as an ethnographer. I am an anthropologist, not a swinologist. Peccaries (or, as another anthropologist once said about the Nuer, cows) are of no special interest to me, humans are. But peccaries are of enormous interest to those humans who say that peccaries are human. As a result, the idea that the peccaries are human interests me also, because it “says” something about the humans that say this. But not because it says something that these humans are not capable of saying by themselves, and rather because in it the humans in question are saying not only something about the peccaries, but also about what it is to be “human.” (Why should the Nuer, for example, not say in their turn that cattle are human?) If the statement on the peccaries’ humanity definitely reveals something about the human mind (to the anthropologist), it also does more than that (for the Amerindians): it affirms something about the concept of humanity. It affirms, among other things, that the notion of “human mind” and the indigenous concept of sociality include the peccaries in their extensions—and this radically modifies these concepts’ intension in relation to our own. The native’s belief or the anthropologist’s disbelief has nothing to do with this. To ask (oneself) whether the anthropologist ought to believe the native is a category mistake equivalent to wondering whether the number two is tall or green. These are the first elements of my response to Isabella. When an anthropologist hears from his indigenous interlocutor (or reads in an ethnography) such things as “peccaries are human,” the affirmation interests him, no doubt, because he “knows” that peccaries are not human. But this knowledge (which is essentially arbitrary, not to say smugly tautological) ought to stop there: it is only interesting in having awoken the interest of the anthropologist. No more should be asked of it. Above all, it should not be incorporated implicitly in the economy of anthropological commentary, as if it were necessary (or essential) to explain why the Indians believe that peccaries are human whereas in fact they are not. What is the point of asking oneself whether the Indians are right in this respect—do we not already “know” this? What is indeed worth knowing is that to which we do not know the answer, namely what the Indians are saying when they say that peccaries are human. Such an idea is far from evident. The problem that it creates does not reside in the proposition’s copula, as if “peccary” and “human” were common notions, shared by anthropologist and native, the only difference residing in the bizarre equation between the two terms. We should say in passing that it is perfectly possible for the lexical meaning or semantic interpretation of “peccary” and “human” to be more or less the same for both interlocutors; it is not a translational problem, or a matter of deciding whether we and the Amerindians share the same “natural kinds” (perhaps we do…). The problem is that the idea that peccaries are human is part of the meaning of the “concepts” of peccary and human in that culture, or better, it is just this idea that constitutes the conceptual potency of the statement, providing the concept that determines the manner in which the ideas of peccary and human are to be related. For it is not “first” the peccaries and the humans each in their own place, and “then” the idea that the peccaries are humans: on the contrary, peccaries, humans and their relation are all given together.32 The intellectual narrowness that afflicts anthropology, in such cases, consists in reducing the notions of peccary and human merely to a proposition’s independent variables, when they should be seen—if we want to take Amerindians seriously—as inseparable variations of a single concept. To say that peccaries are humans, as I have already observed, is not simply to say something about peccaries, as if “human” were a passive and inert predicate (for example, the genus that includes the species of peccaries). Nor is it simply a matter of giving a verbal definition of “peccary,” much as a statement of the type “‘bass’ is (the name of) a fish.” To say that peccaries are human is to say something about peccaries and about humans, something about what the human can be: if peccaries have humanity as a potential, then might humans not have a peccary-potential? In effect, if peccaries can be conceived as humans, then it should be possible to conceive of humans as peccaries: what is it to be human if one is also “peccary,” and what is it to be peccary if one is “human”? What are the consequences of this? What concept can be extracted from a statement like “peccaries are human”? How can we transform the conception expressed in a proposition like this into a concept? That is the true question. Hence, when told by his indigenous interlocutors (under conditions that must always be specified) that peccaries are human, the anthropologist should ask herself or himself, not whether or not “he believes” that they are, but rather what such an idea could show him about indigenous notions of humanity and “peccar-ity.” What an idea such as this, note, teaches him about these notions and about other things: about relations between him and his interlocutor, the situations in which this statement is produced “spontaneously,” the speech genres and language games in which it fits, et cetera. These other things, however—and I would like to insist on this point—hardly exhaust the statement’s meaning. To reduce the statement into a discourse that only “speaks” of its enunciator is to negate the latter’s intentionality, obliging him to exchange his peccary for our human—a bad deal for a peccary hunter. Thus understood, it is obvious that the ethnographer has to believe (in the sense of trusting) his interlocutor: the native is not giving the ethnographer an opinion, he is effectively teaching him what peccaries and humans are, explaining how the human is implied in the peccary. Once more, the question should be: what does this idea do? What assemblages can it help constitute? What are its consequences? For example: what is eaten when one eats a peccary, if peccaries are human? Furthermore: we still need to see if the concept that can be built by way of such statements can be expressed adequately in the “X is Y” form. For it is not so much a matter of predication or attribution but of defining a virtual set of events and series into which the wild pigs of our example can enter: peccaries travel in a pack …they have a leader …they are noisy and aggressive …they appear suddenly and unpredictably …they are bad brothers-in-law …they eat palm fruit …there are myths that say they live in huge underground villages …they are incarnations of the dead …and so forth. It is not a matter of establishing correspondences between peccaries’ and human’s respective attributes—far from it. The peccaries are peccaries and humans, they are humans inasmuch as humans are not peccaries; peccaries imply humans, as an idea, in their very distance from them. Thus, to state that peccaries are human is not to identify them with humans, but rather to differentiate them from themselves—and therefore us from ourselves also. Previously I stated that the idea of peccaries being human is far from evident: to be sure, no interesting idea is ever evident. This particular idea is not nonevident because it is false or unverifiable (Amerindians have many different ways to verify it), but because it says something nonevident about the world. Peccaries are not evidently humans, they are so nonevidently. Could this mean that the idea is “symbolic,” in the sense given to this adjective by Sperber? I think not. Sperber conceives of indigenous concepts as propositions, and worse, as second-class propositions, “semi-propositional representations” that extend “encyclopedic knowledge” in a nonreferential manner: he seems to identify the self-positive with the referentially void, the virtual with the fictional, immanence with closure…. But one can see “symbolism” differently from Sperber, who takes it as something logical and chronologically posterior to the mind’s encyclopedia or to the semantic capacities it informs: something that marks the limits of true or verifiable knowledge, as well as the point at which this knowledge becomes transformed into an illusion. Indigenous concepts can be called symbolic, but in a very different sense; they are not subpropositional, but superpropositional, as they suppose encyclopedic propositions but define their most vital significance, their meaning or value. It is the encyclopedic propositions that are semiconceptual or subsymbolic, not the other way round. The symbolic is not semi-true, but pre-true, that is, important or relevant: it speaks not to what “is the case,” but to what matters in what is the case, to what is interesting in its being the case. What is a peccary worth? This, literally, is the interesting question.33 Sperber (1982: 173) once wrote, ironically, “profound: another semi-propositional word.” But then it is worth replicating—banal: another word for propositional. In effect, indigenous concepts certainly are profound, as they project a background, a plane of immanence filled with intensities, or, if the reader prefers a Wittgensteinian vocabulary, a Weltbild composed of foundational “pseudo-propositions” that ignore and precede the distinction between true and false, “weaving a net that, once thrown over chaos, can provide it with some type of consistence” (Prado Jr. 1998: 317). This background is a “foundationless base” that is neither rational/reasonable nor irrational/unreasonable, but which “simply is there—much like our own lives” (Prado Jr. 1998: 319).34 Amerindian bodies My colleague Peter Gow once narrated the following scene to me, which he witnessed during one of his stays among the Piro of the Peruvian Amazon: A mission teacher in [the village of] Santa Clara was trying to convince a Piro woman to prepare food for her infant child with boiled water. The woman replied: “If we drink boiled water, we catch diarrhea.” The teacher, laughing in mockery at this response, explained that common infant diarrhea is caused precisely by the ingestion of unboiled water. Without being flustered the Piro woman answered: “Perhaps that is true for the people from Lima. But for us, people native to this place, boiled water gives diarrhea. our bodies are different from your bodies” (Gow, personal comm., October 12, 2000). What can the anthropologist do with the Amerindian woman’s response? Many things. Gow, for example, wove a shrewd commentary on this anecdote: This simple statement [“our bodies are different”] elegantly captures what Viveiros de Castro (1996) called cosmological perspectivism, or multinaturalism: what distinguishes the different types of people are their bodies, not their cultures. However, it should be noted that this example of cosmological perspectivism was not obtained in the course of an esoteric discussion about the occult world of spirits, but during a conversation about eminently practical concerns: what causes diarrhea in children? It would be tempting to see the positions of the teacher and of the Piro woman as representing two distinct cosmologies, multicul-turalism and multinaturalism, and imagining the conversation as a clash of cosmologies or cultures. I believe that this would be a mistake. Both cosmologies/cultures have been in contact for some time, and their imbrication precedes the ontogenetic processes through which the teacher and the Piro woman came to formulate them as being self-evident. But above all such an interpretation would translate the dialogue in the general terms of one of the parts involved, namely, multiculturalism. The coordinates for the Piro woman’s position would be systematically violated by the analysis. of course, this does not mean that I believe that children should drink unboiled water. But it does mean that the ethnographic analysis cannot go forward if the general meaning of such a meeting has been decided from the word go.35 I concur with much of this. The anecdote told by Gow is certainly a splendid illustration of the irreducible divergence between what I have called “multicul-turalism” and “multinaturalism,” particularly as it stems from a banal everyday incident. But Gow’s analysis does not seem to be the only possible one. Thus, on the question of the conversation’s translation into the general terms of one party— in this case, the teacher’s—would it not be equally possible, and above all necessary, to translate it into the general terms of the other? For there is no third position, no absolute vantage point, from which to show the others’ relative character. It is necessary to take sides. It may be possible to say, for instance, that each of the two women is “cultural-izing” the other in this conversation—that is, attributing the other’s idiocy to her “culture,” while “interpreting” her own position as “natural.” In such a case, one might also say that the Piro woman’s argument about the “body” amounts to a kind concession to the teacher’s assumptions. still, if this were to be so, then note that the concession was not reciprocated. The Piro woman may have agreed to disagree, but the teacher in no way did the same. The former did not contest the fact that people in the city of Lima should (“maybe”) drink boiled water, while the latter peremptorily refuted the idea that people from the Santa Clara village should not. The Piro woman’s relativism—a “natural” rather than a “cultural” relativism, it should be noted—could be interpreted with reference to certain hypotheses on the cognitive economy of nonmodern societies, or those without writing, or traditional, et cetera. Take Robin Horton’s (1993: 379ff.) theory, for example. Horton posits what he called “worldview parochialism” as a prime characteristic of these societies: contrary to Western modernity’s rationalized cosmologies’ implicit demand for universality, traditional peoples’ cosmologies seem to be marked by a spirit of great tolerance, although it would be fairer to say that they are altogether indifferent to competing worldviews. The Piro’s apparent relativism would thus not be manifesting the breadth of their views, but much to the contrary their myopia: they remain unconcerned with how things are elsewhere.36 There are a number of good grounds to resist readings such as Horton’s. Among others, one reason is that so-called primitive relativism is not only intercultural, but also intracultural and even “auto-cultural,” and, to boot, expresses neither tolerance nor indifference, but rather an absolute departure from the crypto-theological idea of “culture” as a set of beliefs (Tooker 1992; Viveiros de Castro 1993). The main reason to resist such readings, however, is perfectly prefigured in Gow’s own comments, namely, that the idea of “parochialism” translates the Santa Clara debate into the terms of the teacher’s position, with her natural universalism and (more or less tolerant) cultural particularism. There are many worldviews, but there is only one world—a world in which all children should drink boiled water (if, of course, they find themselves in a place where infant diarrhea is a threat). Let me propose a different reading. The anecdote on different bodies raises questions as to the possible world that the Piro woman’s judgment might express. A possible world in which human bodies can be different in Lima and in santa Clara—a world in which it is necessary for white and Amerindian bodies to be different. Now, to define this world we need not invent an imaginary world, a world endowed with a different physics or biology, let us say, where the universe is not isotropic and bodies can behave according to different laws in different places. That would be (bad) science fiction. It is rather a matter of finding the real problem that renders possible the world implied in the Piro woman’s reply. The argument that “our bodies are different” does not express an alternative, and naturally erroneous, biological theory, or an imaginarily nonstandard37 objective biology. What the Piro argument manifests is a nonbiological idea of the body, an idea in which the question of infant diarrhea cannot be treated as the object of a biological theory. The argument affirms that our respective “bodies” are different, by which we should understand that Piro and Western concepts (rather than “biologies”) of the body are divergent. The Piro water anecdote does not refer to an other vision of the same body, but another concept of the body—the problem being, precisely, its discrepancy from our own concept, notwithstanding their apparent “homonimy.” Thus, for example, the Piro concept of the body cannot be, as ours is, in the soul or “in the mind,” as a representation of a body that lies beyond it. 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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehouse, Harvey. 2000. Arguments and icons: Divergent modes of religiosity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1930–48) 1982. Remarques sur le Rameau d’Orde Frazer. Translated by J. Bouveresse. Paris: L’Age d’Homme.   Eduardo VIVEIROS DE CASTRO is Professor of Social Anthropology at the National Museum, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He has been Simon Bolivar Chair of Latin American Studies at Cambridge University (1997–98) and Directeur de recherches at the C.N.R.S. (2000–2001). His publications include From the enemy’s point of view (Chicago, 1992), Métaphysiques cannibales (PUF, 2009), The inconstancy of the Indian soul (Prickly Paradigm, 2011), and “Cosmo-logical perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere” (HAU Masterclass Series, 2012). ___________________ Editor’s note: This is a translation of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2002) “O nativo relativo,” published in the Brazilian journal Mana 8 (1): 113–48. We are grateful to Mana and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro for granting us the permission to publish this translation. We also thank the translators, Julia Sauma and Martin Holbraad. —Ed. 1. The original article was prefaced by the author with the following preamble: “The pages that follow have been adapted from the introductory remarks of a book, currently in preparation, in which I develop ethnographic analyses that have been sketched out in earlier work. The main one is an article published in Mana, ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’ (Viveiros de Castro 1996 [this appeared in English in JRAI in 1998]), whose metatheoretical premises, as it were, are rendered explicit in the present work. While the text presented here requires no previous familiarity with that earlier work, the reader may bear in mind that such notions as ‘perspective’ and ‘point of view,’ as well as the idea of ‘indigenous thought,’ are elaborated there also.” —Trans. 2. The use of the masculine is arbitrary. 3. The fact that, canonically as well as literally speaking, anthropological discourse takes the form of texts has a host of implications, which cannot be explored here, though the topic has received exhaustive attention in recent currents of auto-anthropological reflection. The same can be said of the fact that native discourse is, generally, not a text, as well as of the fact that it is often treated as if it were. 4. “Knowledge is not a connection between a subject-substance and an object-substance, but rather a relation between two relations, one located in the domain of the object and the other in the domain of the subject; …the relation between two relations is a relation itself” (Simondon [1964] 1995: 81; translation, emphases removed). I translated the word rapport, which Gilbert Simondon distinguishes from relation, as “connection”: “we can call a relation the disposition of the elements in a system, which is beyond the spirit’s simple and arbitrary target, and reserve the term connection for an arbitrary and fortuitous relation …the relation would be a connection that is as real and important as the terms themselves; consequently, we could say that the true relation between two terms is actually equivalent to the connection between three terms” (Simondon 1995: 66; translation). 5. For an analysis of the relational assumptions of this knowledge effect, see Strathern (1987). The author argues that the native’s relation with his discourse is not, in principle, the same as the anthropologist’s relation with his own discourse, and that this difference at once conditions the relation between the two discourses and imposes limits to the whole auto-anthropological enterprise. 6. We are all natives, but no one is native all the time. As Lambek (1998: 113) remarks in a comment about the notion of habitus and its analogs, “[e]mbodied practices are carried out by agents who can still think contemplatively; nothing ‘goes without saying’ forever.” Thinking contemplatively, one should say, does not mean thinking as anthropologists think: reflexive techniques crucially vary. The native’s reverse anthropology (the Melanesian cargo cult, for example; Wagner 1981: 31–34) is not the anthropologist’s auto-anthropology (Strathern 1987: 30–31): symmetrical anthropology carried out from the tradition that generated anthropology is not symmetrical to symmetrical anthropology conducted from beyond that tradition’s boundaries. Symmetry does not cancel difference, because the virtual reciprocity of perspectives that is at issue here is not a “fusion of horizons.” In short, we are all anthropologists, but no one is an anthropologist in the same way: “it’s fine when Giddens affirms that “all social actors …are social theoreticians,” but the phrase is empty when the theoretical techniques have little in common” (Strathern 1987: 30–31). 7. As a rule, it is assumed that the native does both things—natural ratiocination and cultural rationalization—without knowing what he does, at different phases, registers, or situations during his life. The native’s illusions are, one might say, taken as necessary, in the double sense of being inevitable as well as useful (or as others would say, they are evolutionarily adaptive). Such a necessity defines the “native,” and distinguishes him from the “anthropologist”: the latter may err, but the former deludes himself. 8. “Implausibility” is an accusation that is frequently raised by practitioners of the classic game, against those who might prefer other rules. But this notion belongs in police interrogation rooms, where one must indeed be careful to ensure the “plausibility” of one’s stories. 9. This is how I interpret Wagner’s (1981: 35) declaration: “We study culture through culture, and so whatever operations characterize our investigation must also be general properties of culture.” 10. See Jullien (1989: 312) on this. Other cultures’ real problems are only possible problems for our own culture; the role of the anthropologist is to give this (logical) possibility the status of an (ontological) virtuality, determining—or rather, constructing— its latent operation in our own culture. 11. Published as an appendix to The logic of sense (Deleuze 1969a: 350–72; see also Deleuze 1969b: 333–35, 360). It is reconsidered in practically identical terms in What is philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 21–24, 49), (almost) his final work. 12. “…Others, from my point of view, introduce the sign of the unseen in what I do see, making me grasp what I do not perceive as perceptible to an Other” (Deleuze 1969a: 355, English translation 2003: 306). 13. This “he,” as Other, is neither a person—a third person to I and you, awaiting his turn in a dialogue—nor a thing—a “this” to speak about. The Other would be the “fourthperson singular”—situated along the river’s third bank, one might say,—and is therefore logically anterior to the perspectival game of personal pronouns (Deleuze [1979] 1995: 79). 14. The anthropologist does exactly what he thinks because the bifurcation of his own nature, while admitted perhaps in principle, is ruled out of court when it comes to his own role as anthropologist. After all, for the anthropologist it is just such a bifurcation that distinguishes the “native” from the “anthropologist” in the first place. The expression “bifurcation of nature” is coined by Whitehead ([1920] 1964: chap. II) as part of his argument against the division of reality into primary qualities, that are inherent to the object, and secondary qualities, that are attributed to it by the subject. Primary qualities are the proper object of science, although, in an ultimate sense, they remain inaccessible to it; secondary qualities are subjective and, ultimately, illusory. “Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream” (Whitehead [1920] 1964: 30; see the quote and its commentary in Latour 1999: 62–76, 315 n49 and n58). Such a bifurcation is identical to the anthropological opposition between nature and culture. And when the object is also a subject, as in the native’s case, the bifurcation of his nature transforms itself through the distinction between the anthropologist’s conjecture and the native’s dream: cognition vs. ideology (Bloch), primary vs. secondary theory (Horton), unconscious vs. conscious model (Lévi-Strauss), propositional vs. semi-propositional representations (Sperber), and so on. 15. See Strathern (1999b: 172), on the terms of the possible knowledge relation between, for example, Western anthropologists and Melanesians: “This has nothing to do with understanding, or with cognitive structures; it is not a matter of knowing if I can understand a Melanesian, if I can interact with him, behave appropriately, etc. These things are not problematic. The problem begins when we begin to produce descriptions of the world.” 16. This is Alfred Gell’s (1998: 4) suggestion. Of course, it could be applied just as well to “human nature.” 17. This argument is only apparently similar to the one Sperber (1982: chap. 2) levels at relativism. For the author does not believe that cultural diversity is an irreducible politico-epistemological problem. For him, cultures are contingent examples of the same substantive human nature. The maximum for Sperber is a common denominator, never a multiple—see Ingold’s criticism (2000: 164) of Sperber, advanced from a different perspective, but compatible with the one adopted here. 18. On these two ideas of limit, one Platonic and Euclidian, the other Archimedean and Stoic (reappearing in the infinitesimal calculus of the seventeenth century), see Deleuze (1981). 19. In the same sense, see Jadran Mimica’s (1991: 34–38) dense phenomenological argumentation. 20. Veyne inadvertently paraphrases Evans-Pritchard, when, in characterizing this (universal) condition of being a prisoner in a (particular) historical fishbowl, he writes that “when one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind” (Veyne 1983: 127, my emphasis, for greater clarity). 21. I am obviously interpreting Veyne’s essay here with some malice. His work is much richer (because it is so much more ambiguous) than this, taking the fishbowl beyond the “fishbowl’s” sorry image. 22. This reading of the notion of Gedankenexperiment is applied by Thierry Merchaisse to the work of François Jullien on Chinese thought (Jullien and Marchaisse 2000: 71). See also Jullien (1989: 311–12), about comparative “fictions.” 23. Responding to critics of her analysis of Melanesian sociality, who accuse her of negating the existence of a “human nature” that includes the peoples of that region, Marilyn Strathern (1999b: 172) clarifies: “[The] difference lies in the fact that the modes through which Melanesians describe, cope with human nature, are radically different to our own—and the point is that we only have access to descriptions and explanations, we can only work with them. There is no means to elude this difference. So we cannot say: very well then, now I understand, it is just a matter of different descriptions, so we can turn to the commonalities between us and them …from the moment we enter into communication, we do so through these auto-descriptions. It is essential that we can account for this.” In effect, the point is essential. See also what Jullien says about the difference between the affirmation of the existence of different “modes of orientation in thought” and the affirmation of the operation of “other logics” (Jullien and Marchaisse 2000: 205–7). 24. On the “signature” of philosophical and scientific ideas, and the “baptism” of concepts, see Deleuze and Guattari (1991: 13, 28–29). 25. The quote, and the paragraph that precedes it, have been cannibalized from Viveiros de Castro (1999: 153). 26. On “non-philosophy”—the plane of immanence or life—see Deleuze and Guattari (1991: 43–44, 89, 105, 205–206), as well as Prado Jr.’s brilliant commentary (1998). 27. The expression “apparently irrational” is a secular cliché in anthropology, from Andrew Lang in 1883 (cf. Detienne 1981: 28) to Dan Sperber in 1982. 28. As the “common-sense school of anthropology” professes, as penned by authors such as Obeyesekere (1992) or LiPuma (1998), for instance. 29. Wittgenstein’s observations on the Golden bough remain pertinent in this regard. Among others: “A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. An error belongs only with opinion”; “I believe that what characterizes primitive man is that he does not act according to his opinions (contrary to Frazer)”; “The absurd here consists in the fact that Frazer presents these ideas [about rain rituals, etc.] as if these peoples had a completely false (and even foolish) representation of nature’s course, when all they actually have is a strange interpretation about the phenomena. That is, if they could put their knowledge of nature into writing it wouldn’t be so fundamentally different from our own. It is only that their magic is different from ours” (Wittgenstein [1930–48] 1982: 15, 24, 27). Their magic or, we could say, their concepts. 30. Rendering exterior this special and artificial condition—that is, generalizing and naturalizing it—gives rise to the classic anthropological mistake: the formal eternity of the possible is transmuted onto a historical scale, rendering anthropologist and native noncontemporaneous with one another. We then get the Other as primitive, freezeframed as an object (of the) absolute past. 31. Alexiades cites his interlocutor in Spanish—“Todos los animales son Ese Eja.” We should note that there is a further twist here: “all” the animals (the ethnographer shows numerous exceptions) are not “humans,” but they are “Ese Eja,” an ethnonym that can be translated as “human people,” and understood in opposition to “spirits” and “strangers.” 32. I am not referring to the problem of ontogenetic acquisition of “concepts” or “categories,” in the sense given to these terms by cognitive psychology. The simultaneity of the ideas of peccary, human and their identity (conditional and contextual) is, from an empirical point of view, characteristic of the thought of adults in that culture. Even if we admit that children begin by acquiring or manifesting the “concepts” of peccary and human before being taught that “the peccary are human,” it remains for the adults, when they act or argue this idea, not to re-enact this supposed chronological sequence in their heads, first thinking about humans and then peccaries, and then their association. Aside from that and above all, this simultaneity is not empirical, but transcendental: it means that the peccaries’ humanity is an a priori component of the idea of peccary (and the idea of human). 33. “The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I am saying” (Deleuze 1990: 177, my emphasis, English translation 1997: 130). 34. The quotations from Bento Prado Jr. are translations by this article’s translators. —Ed. 35. This is a translation of the author’s translation of an email conversation with Peter Gow. —Trans. 36. In effect, the Piro woman’s response is identical to a Zande observation, which can be found in the bible for those anthropologists of a Hortonian persuasion: “I once heard a Zande say of us: ‘Maybe in their country people are not murdered by witches, but here they are’” (Evans-Pritchard 1976: 274). I must thank Ingrid Weber for reminding me of this. 37. As Gell (1998: 101) forewarned in a similar context, magic is not a mistaken physics, but a “meta-physics”: “Frazer’s mistake was, so to speak, to imagine that practitioners of magic afforded a nonstandard theory of physics, when, in fact, ‘magic’ is what one has when one goes without a theory of physics due to its superfluousness, and when one seeks support in the perfectly practicable idea that the explanation for any given event …is that it is caused intentionally.”  

Godelier: Bodies, kinship and power(s) in the Baruya culture Excerpt translated from the volume entitled Le corps humain, by Maurice Godelier, pp 29–64. © CNRS editions, 2009. Bodies, kinship and power(s) in the Baruya culture* Maurice Godelier, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales   The themes developed in the present text, written in 1998, appeared in conclusion to an earlier piece of work on the relationship between the sexes and the different forms of power and hierarchy among the Baruya, a population living in the interior highlands of New Guinea (Godelier 1982; 1986). This was the theme of the “sexed” body, which functions as a ventriloquist’s dummy, constantly invited to speak about and to testify for (or against) the prevailing social order. The idea was that the way the body is represented stamps each person’s innermost subjectivity with the order or orders that prevail in his or her society and which must be respected if the society is to be reproduced. A body is made of flesh, blood, bone, breath and one or more spirits, all of which are possessed by everyone, male or female; but there are also organs—a penis, a clitoris, a vagina, breasts—and substances—semen, menstrual blood, milk—which not all people have and which make individuals different or alike. All cultures have answers to the questions of where the bones, the flesh, the blood, the breath or a person’s spirit come from: from the father, from the mother, from both, from neither and in that case, from where? But not all cultures bother to account for every component of the body: some say nothing about semen, others pass over blood, or bone, … and these silences speak volumes. Among the many representations of the body, those having to do with the making of children—conception, intra-uterine growth, development after birth—occupy a strategic position because it seems that they usually fulfill two important functions for a society. First of all they legitimize the appropriation of each child that is born by a group of adults that regards itself as the child’s kin. And secondly, they assign this child a future destiny and position in society according to its sex, male or female, which it has from birth. It is specifically this category of representations that we will address in the following pages. We have therefore left to one side a whole series of details about the body which enable the Baruya explain the nature and origin of disease, death, accidents and so forth, in sum to account for evil, misfortune, illness and bad luck, which are usually interpreted as the doings of evil spirits or the results of sorcery between Baruya or on the part of enemy tribes. In this line we would have to analyze what the Baruya think about vomited blood, urine, feces, mucus, nail parings, pieces or flakes of skin, hair and so on. But we will not be doing this here. Of course everything anthropologists place under the heading of “bodily substances” is a series of fantasized ideas and images, which refer to imaginary concepts, causes or effects, but which are important in determining the way people behave and society works. The analysis presented here must therefore be understood as part of a vast anthropological effort over the last twenty years to come to grips with the relationship between gender, forms of kinship, initiation practices, ritualized (homo- and hetero-) sexuality, found in the many social configurations encountered in New Guinea, and more generally throughout Oceania.1 I will proceed in two stages. First, I will attempt to review the information we have on these themes, and then move on to an analysis which brings out the relations of appropriation, of domination, or simply of tribal and ethnic membership that are signified through the Baruya’s representations of the body and which are instilled into the body of every Baruya from birth. The first part therefore reiterates a good deal of information contained in earlier publications. But this has been summarized and references provided for further information. I have also added a number of new elements concerning blood, bone and Baruya names. So we will begin with the question: What is a child for the Baruya? For the Baruya, children are the product of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, combined with the intervention of the Sun, the cosmic power which, by disengaging himself from the Earth from which he had originally been indistinguishable and rising into the sky above her, followed by the Moon, brought the first period of the Universe to a close and established the cosmic order as we now know it. Moon, in the exoteric versions of the Baruya myth, is the wife of Sun; but in the esoteric versions of the shaman master, Moon is Sun’s younger brother. Both are at the origin of the alternation of the seasons and the success or failure of crops. If the sun comes too close to the earth, all growing things are scorched and they wither; and if the moon comes too close, the world grows cold and wet. In the beginning, man and woman each had a sexual organ and an anus, but these were not pierced and could not be used. One day Sun took pity on them and tossed a flint stone into the fire. The stone exploded and pierced the sexual organs and the anus of the man and the woman, who ever since have coupled and had children. During one of the opening rituals of the male initiation ceremonies, all of the fires burning in the villages are extinguished, and the “first fire” of the big ceremonial house, the tsimia, is lit by striking two sacred flint stones together. These flint stones once belonged to a special clan, whose ancestor received them from Sun himself together with the spell for their use. In everyday life, the Baruya light their fires by friction, never by striking. In another version, it is not Sun, but the woman, who—indirectly—pierced the man’s penis. She stuck the bone from the wing of a bat into the trunk of a banana tree at the height of the man’s genitals, and he accidentally impaled himself. Enraged with pain, and guessing that it was the woman who had put the bone there, the man seized a sharp piece of bamboo and, with one swipe, slashed her sexual organ. Today a few old Baruya women still wear this kind of very thin bone—normally used as an awl or a needle—in the septum of their nose, like a dart. Moon is also the one who pierces young girls at puberty and makes their menstrual blood flow for the first time. According to some informants, Sun helps Moon in this task. When a girl has her first period, a man, her mother’s brother as a rule, pierces her nose without any ceremony, in broad daylight and in the village. Menstrual blood is dangerous for men. It is a constant threat to their strength and health, and sometimes a woman who wants to kill her husband by sorcery will sneak some into his food. When a young man and a girl get married, the men of the husband’s lineage build the hearth that stands at the center of the house and which will be used for cooking. For several days, or even weeks, until the walls of the house have become blackened with soot from the fire, the young couple is supposed to abstain from making love. The young man fondles his wife’s breasts and gives her his semen to ingest. The semen is supposed to nourish the woman and give her strength for bearing children and working in the fields, but above all it is stored in the young woman’s breasts and will turn into milk when she becomes pregnant and bears a child. Semen, then, is nourishment for the woman and, when it changes into milk, for the children she will bear. Then, when the time comes, the man and the woman have intercourse. This is performed with the man lying on top of the woman. The inverse is forbidden, since the woman’s vaginal fluids would run out onto the man’s stomach and sap his strength and his health. Sexual relations take place in the women’s part of the house, between the central hearth and the door. On the other side of the hearth, the man sleeps alone or with any sons he may have. A woman must never step over the hearth on which she is cooking the family’s food, for fluids from her vagina or dirt from her skirt might fall into the fire and defile the food that goes into the man’s mouth. Were this to happen, she would be accused of practicing sorcery on her husband; he would beat her and, in some cases might even kill her. A couple does not make love when the woman is menstruating. During these few days, the wife does not live with her husband, but stays in a hut some ten meters from the house or more often on the outskirts of the village, in a place forbidden to men, where all the women go to give birth. A menstruating woman is not allowed to prepare food for her husband; he is given food by his sisters or daughters, or he cooks sweet potatoes for himself. A couple does not make love when pigs are to be killed or their meat distributed, when the forest is to be cleared for the big taro fields, when the men are preparing for war, when salt is being crystallized or when the initiation ceremonies are about to begin, and so forth. In short, one does not simply make love anywhere, anytime (and with anyone), for the sexual act affects not only the reproduction of society but also the order of the universe (if sexual taboos are violated, nothing grows in the gardens, the pigs’ flesh turns to water, etc.). Sexual relations are thought and experienced as dangerous by their very nature, and they are even more dangerous when they are illegitimate, performed in secret, in forbidden places (gardens, the bush…). A child is conceived when the man’s semen enters a kind of pouch, tandatta, in the woman’s womb and is retained. Semen makes the child’s bones, its skeleton. The blood normally comes from the man and “grows” as the embryo develops. But the Baruya say that, in some cases, the mother’s blood passes into the child, and this child will look like its mother or some member of her lineage. During the pregnancy, Sun intervenes in the woman’s womb and gives the embryo its final shape. He completes the child by causing its fingers and toes to grow, and by fashioning its nose, mouth and eyes. In other words, he completes the four limbs and the head.2 The sun is called Nila in standard Baruya, but in more familiar language it is known as Noumwe, the term of affection used for addressing one’s father and one’s father’s brothers. The Baruya consider the nose and the prominent part of the forehead to be the seat of intelligence and “wisdom.” It is also the passageway for the breath of life. A boy’s nose is pierced at the time of the initiations, and the hole is subsequently enlarged over the years to hold the objects symbolizing the changes in the man’s status (signs of the different initiation stages, the insignia of shamans, warriors, cassowary hunters, etc.). The body also means the liver. The liver is the seat of strength and life. The heart, on the other hand, does not have the same importance for the Baruya. The liver is gorged with blood. Enemy shaman-sorcerers feed on livers. The Baruya are of the opinion that their own shamans do not devour the liver intentionally (that would be sorcery). When they do, it is thought that they are driven to this extremity by hunger and are unaware of what they are doing (witchcraft). Formerly, in times of war, the Baruya used to torture some of their enemies, primarily famous warriors they had succeeded in capturing. After breaking their arms and legs, they would deck them in their best feathers. Then a band of young warriors would come running down a hill, brandishing ceremonial bamboo knives wrapped in a strip of beaten bark, died red, the color of the sun, and would plunge the knives into the prisoner’s chest. The blood from the wounds was collected in bamboo tubes and rubbed onto the spectators—men, women and children. Finally someone would slit open the victim’s abdomen and tear out his liver, which would be divided among the men in attendance and eaten raw or cooked. Nowadays, during male initiations, the men kill a marsupial with very long teeth, which is dangerous to catch barehanded; the animal is then cut open with a ceremonial knife and the liver extracted. It is cut into thin strips, which are placed between the halves of an areca nut and given to third- and fourth-state initiates to chew. They are not told what they are chewing. Finally, the human body is inhabited by one (or more) spirits. For the Baruya, the spirit is something that dwells at the top of the head, inside the skull. Apparently a person’s spirit needs some time to take up residence. Sometimes this spirit belonged to an ancestor and re-embodies itself in one of his or her descendants. About a year after a child’s birth, when everyone is more confident that it will live and the father has presented a ritual gift to the child’s maternal kin, that is to his wife’s lineage, the child is given its first name, while the second name, or the “big” name he or she will bear after being initiated, is kept secret for the time being. This name is that of the grandfather or great uncle, or grandmother or great-aunt, depending on the child’s sex. Names are handed down to individuals of the same lineage in alternate generations. Let us pause for a moment here to take a closer look at the nature of Baruya personal names; after all, it is when a person receives a name that he or she becomes a true member of society. An analysis of over four hundred Baruya names shows that half of them (49.5%) refer to the names of trees or wild plants, especially flowers, to which must be added the names alluding to cultivated plants (8%) and those which designate different types of soil or heavenly bodies, stars and meteorological phenomena such as wind, rain and so forth (10%). Also mentioned are many species of birds and a few insects. In all, 67.5% of Baruya names have some connection with nature; and it is striking to see both the extreme importance of wild plants and the forest and, at the same time, the almost total absence of any reference to wild animals, with the exception of birds and insects, but nothing about snakes, marsupials, the cassowary and so forth. Snakes are not game. The Baruya fear them, even the non-poisonous kinds. They think that snakes “spoil” a woman’s womb and make her sterile. But at the same time, the giant python is associated with the origin of menstrual blood. Alternatively, the many species of marsupial are game par excellence, as well as the privileged object of exchange between men and women or young male initiates. It is interesting that Baruya are not named after marsupials, whereas they feed the young boys their raw livers, thus making the animal on more or less the equivalent of the enemy bodies from which the livers used to be taken and eaten ritually during cannibalistic meals. The cassowary, on the other hand, represents woman in her wild state, and women may not eat its flesh. As the cassowary’s blood must not be spilled, the birds are snared in a noose, which strangles them. The hunter who sets the trap does not eat the victim, which is reserved exclusively for the young initiates, who eat it in a ritual meal. The second major category of names refers to toponyms, especially those of rivers and tracts of forest that are good for growing taro or are planted in areca or pandanus (25.8%). All of these lands and rivers are owned by the lineages of the tribe, and it is the male or female descendants of the first owners who bear their names. Most of these sites are located in Marawaka valley, where the Baruya’s ancestors took refuge after having been forced to flee the Yoyue tribe to which they originally belonged. We also find the names of rivers flowing through the valleys that were once part of the Yoyue territory. A total of 93.3% of Baruya names designate some aspect of nature or cultivated spots claimed by the Baruya. The rest, 6.7%, refer to a wide variety of phenomena: a cave in a cliff, the flat roof of a house, a bird snare, an ax-handle, lizard eggs, pig names, a bowstring, perspiration, the fact that someone is the daughter of a man who died before her birth, and so on. Thus the first major point we see in the Baruya naming system is that a very large proportion of names identify their bearer with some natural element, primarily from the plant world, except for birds and insects. The foregoing describes the nature of Baruya personal names, but it does not tell us how these names are distributed among the lineages and individuals. There is a tendency for men to have names of trees and toponyms, while women are more often named after flowers and rivers flowing through ancestral territory. Rivers often mark the boundaries of the mountains and forests owned by a clan. In the case of individuals with this type of name, as soon as one hears the name, one knows the person’s lineage, since every Baruya knows which lineages own the various parts of the tribal territory. The essential point, however, is that each lineage possesses a stock of names (of plants, mountains, etc.) which belong to that lineage and which are passed on to every other generation, in other words, from grandfather to grandson, from paternal great-aunt to great-niece, and so forth. Names are not inherited through the maternal line (although women do pass on to their daughters both the names for their pigs and the magic spells for raising them). Several lineages may refer to the same plant in constructing one of their personal names. In this case, each adds an element so as to distinguish their name from those of other lineages. For instance, the word maye means “flowers” in general and more particularly the magic flowers used to adorn the bodies of the initiates and initiators. It is used as a personal name by the Kwarandariar lineage, which belongs the Baruya clan that gave its name to the tribe. Meyaoumwe is another name made from the same root, but which designates members of another clan, the Bakia. Personal names distinguish their bearer clearly then, since they indicate the lineage and clan, and also situate him or her in the Baruya’s wild or domesticated natural environment. Thus the name envelops the person as a skin encloses the body, and it seals in realities that make up the person, but only for his or her lifetime. Nevertheless, it may occur that two people from the same clan have the same name at the same time, which should not happen. This stems from the fact that the tribe is split into two subgroups, one of which lives in Marawaka Valley and the other in Wonenara Valley; the latter are the descendants of the Baruya who left Marawaka at the end of the 19th century in search of a new space. It also sometimes happens that the same name is given to individuals belonging to different clans. This usually creates a problem, and one of the clans accuses the other of having robbed them. All of these practices reflect a strong desire to distinguish individuals while at the same time thinking of the individual as the reproduction or incarnation of an entity (spirit, ancestor, etc.) that is part of a pool specific to each lineage. For the spirit leaves the human body not only after its death but also while it is alive. It can therefore go and take up residence in another person living at the same time, or skip a generation and reincarnate at some later time. Lastly, we must keep in mind that every person who lives long enough to be initiated receives two names, a “little name” used before initiation, and a “big name,” which a boy receives when his nose is pierced and a girl, when she menstruates for the first time. It is forbidden to go on calling an initiated man or woman by their “little name.” It would shame them. But this leads us to an entirely different chapter, which is the taboos surrounding names. For instance, an initiate may not call a co-initiate by his name, a wife may not pronounce her husband’s name and vice versa, and so on. Last of all, a great many individuals have a nickname, which is used much more often than their real name. For example, Koumaineu, a Nounguye clansman, is called “Tsinname,” “dirty nose” because he has a big broad nose. The spirit leaves the body when the person is asleep, whether in the daytime or at night. Spirits fly like birds and visit all parts of the Baruya territory. Many stray over the border into enemy lands, where sorcerers try to capture them. The Baruya shamans—male and female—are therefore constantly on the alert, and their own spirits form a sort of magic barrier around the territory to stop Baruya spirits as they are about to cross the boundary. The shamans drive them back into Baruya territory and into their bodies, where they once more take up residence, before dawn or before the end of the nap. But sometimes a spirit does not return to its body. The person goes on living, but now behaves strangely, until one day a shaman discovers that he or she has no spirit, and undertakes the journey that will lead to the spot where an enemy sorcerer is holding its victim captive. Following a successful battle, the Baruya shaman returns with the delivered prisoner and restores it to its body. These are the main elements of the Baruya’s theory of how children are made. Before going on to analyze the relationship between these ideas and Baruya social structure or models of social organization, however, I would like to complete these ethnographic details by some social representations and practices that have to do with skin, flesh, bones and semen, but which are not directly connected with conception and procreation. Flesh and bones: death, cannibalism and initiations Before the Europeans arrived, when an important or widely respected man or woman died, it was customary to stop up the body’s orifices and to leave the corpse for several days in a sitting position beside a burning fire. The deceased received many visitors, who would crowd around the body, stroking it, crying over it and insulting it for leaving them, and so on. When several days had elapsed and the body began to decompose, they would flay it and place the pieces of skin in a bark cape, which they would then take into the deceased’s piece of forest or into the bushes surrounding his or her house. Then the flesh would be rubbed with blue clay, a color that closes the way to evil spirits, and the first funeral would be held. Depending on the clan and the status of the deceased, the body would be buried or placed on a raised platform. The dead were buried or exposed in a sort of no-man’s land on the side of a mountain, with the head towards their hunting grounds and streams. In most cases, the bodies of great warriors were exposed on a platform with their bow and arrows, and the platform surrounded by a fence, forming a sort of small garden. Taros would be planted beneath the platform so that the deceased’s fluids would drip onto the plants as the body decomposed. At the time of the second funeral, the taros would be dug up, and the members of the deceased’s family and his or her descendants would transfer them to their own gardens. The earth nourishes humans, but humans enrich the earth they leave to their descendants with their own flesh. This is a good time to recall that the Baruya and other Anga tribes such as the Watchakes explain the origin of cultivated plants by the murder of a woman, who was killed by her husband and buried in the forest. From her corpse sprang all the plants that humans now cultivate and use (Godelier 1982: 119; 1986: 71). While the Baruya see agriculture as a sort of transition from the savage state to a state of civilization, they make the murder of a woman the condition of this passage. Even though they acknowledge by this account that women possess a power and a fecundity that men do not, they maintain that it is by doing violence to women that this fecundity, this creative force is set free and placed, by men, at the service of all, of society as a whole. And a last remark on the subject of the body and its flesh: it is important to keep in mind that the Baruya used to be cannibals, and that they ate their enemies, and not only the most valiant enemy warriors killed in battle. They would cut off the arms and legs of a certain number of bodies fallen on the battlefield. That, they said, was easier than carrying back whole bodies. They would eat the limbs either on the way back, if the expedition had taken them far from home—and in this case they would roast them; or they would take them to the village and cook them in pits, like pigs. The fingers were a favorite “delicacy.” It would be untrue to think that the Baruya ate only great enemy warriors whose might they wanted to assimilate. After several years of fieldwork, when my informants thought they could trust me, they confided that their ancestors also used to kill and eat women and children of enemy tribes when they came upon a group in the forest or in the gardens. Their flesh was highly prized. So for the Baruya, the human body is not only strong and handsome, it is also good to eat. But flesh matters less than bone, for the Baruya, something that is corroborated by the custom of the second funeral. Some months after the body of a great warrior has been buried or exposed on a platform, his bones are carefully recovered. The bones of his left hand are placed in a areca tree along with the skull. The long arm and leg bones are placed in holes in trees or rocks standing on the deceased’s hunting grounds or in the forest around his house. The finger bones of the right hand are divided among his paternal and maternal relatives, or given to young boys who seem destined to become great warriors, aoulatta. Several years ago, Inaaoukwe, a great warrior, died. Before the European arrival, in 1951, he had single-handedly killed “dozens” of Baruya enemies. Although it had been over 25 years since the Australians had pacified the area, as soon as Inaaoukwe was dead, his close relatives cut off his right hand—the killing hand—and had it dried so as to preserve it. They claimed that they wanted his descendants to be able to show it to future generations whenever his exploits were recounted and celebrated. Another example. Until 1960-61, which is to say two years after the Australians had established the first patrol post at Wonenara and begun to pacify the tribes in the area, the Baruya had carefully kept the hand of one of their legendary heroes, Bakitachatche. Unfortunately, Bakitchatche’s fingers went up in smoke when an Australian officer burned down the village where they were kept to punish its inhabitants for having taken up arms against another Baruya village. Such incidents attest the importance of certain ancestral bones in the initiation ceremonies, where they are used to pierce the nose of the young boys just taken from their mother and the women’s world. These bones are also an essential component of the kwaimatnie, the Baruya’s sacred objects, owned by a few clans, which have the exclusive power to initiate boys and men. Two of the kwaimatnie are also used in the initiation of shamans, and, in this case, serve to initiate women as well as men. A kwaimatnie is an oblong parcel some 40 centimeters in length and 12 centimeters across, wrapped in barkcloth and tied up in a ypmoulie, the headband worn by men, which is made of strips of bark died red, the color of the sun. Inside the packet, some long, sharp bones and flat “nuts” surround a smooth black stone. All the bones, with the exception of one, come from the eagle. The eagle is the sun’s bird. The Baruya charge it with carrying their prayers, breath and spirits up to the sun. But alongside the eagle bones, which can always be replaced, lies a bone that is irreplaceable, regarded as sacred, a bone (from the forearm) of a famous ancestor who passed the kwaimatnie on to his descendants, who keep the memory of his name alive. The word kwaimatnie comes from kwala, “men” and yimatnia “to raise the skin,” “to make grow,” “to make bigger.” So the kwaimatnie contain the supernatural power to make children grow. The Baruya also associate the word with another, nymatnie, which means “fetus,” “apprentice shaman” or “novice.” Only certain clans and lineages have inherited such powers, and their ancestors received them directly from Sun at a time when humans were not like they are now but were wandjinia, spirits. In addition to the human and eagle bones, a kwaimatnie usually contains the seeds of an inedible fruit found in the forest. These seeds are small, flat discs, purple or brown in color, with a design on one side that looks like the iris of an eye: the Baruya call them “babies’ eyes.” When the eye is “open” it is a sign of life. Men suck these seeds to purify their mouth when they have been talking about women, and especially when they have discussed subjects having to do with sexual relations, children and so forth. When sucked, these “nuts” transmit to the men the sun’s strength, which spreads “from the roots of their teeth down to their penis.” At the center of the kwaimatnie lies a long, smooth black stone. All kwaimatnie come in pairs and work as a couple: one is male and the other, female. The more powerful of the two, the “hotter,” is the female kwaimatnie. Only the representative of the lineage that owns the kwaimatnie can use this one. The other, the male kwaimatnie, is left to his brothers or to other men from the lineage who assist him in his ritual functions. The existence of these kwaimatnie “couples” and the fact that the female is the more powerful are kept strictly secret from women and young boys, even when the latter are initiated. At the beginning of the initiations the kwaimatnie-bearers and their assistants circle the line of boys several times, and then the kwaimatnie-men go down the row, striking each child twice on the chest, once on the left, once on the right, with the kwaimatnie. As they do this, they silently invoke the secret name of the sun and the magic spell their ancestors handed on to them with the kwaimatnie. At this moment, the force of the sun enters the boys’ bodies and illuminates them. Then the master of the ritual goes back down the line, stopping before each child, and presses the child’s elbows between his hands, then the knees; as he squeezes them, he gives them a twist. Finally, he jerks each child’s arms upwards. In short, without going into further detail concerning the rituals performed on the initiates’ bodies, it can be said that the kwaimatnie-men literally make the boys grow and fortify the weak points of their bodies, the joints. Of course, for the Baruya, these are not “symbolic” gestures. They are simply effective because they operate in accordance with a reality that is invisible to non-initiates. For the Baruya, then, the men’s power is an accumulation and a combination of two kinds of power, men’s and women’s. An essential part of the men’s power lies in their semen, which makes the bones and imparts strength. But it is in women’s wombs that children grow, and it is women who bring them into the world and raise them. The Baruya recognize the woman’s absolute right to kill her child at birth. And many do. As a rule, when his wife comes back from the birthing hut without a child, a man refuses to believe it was stillborn or died shortly after birth. He accuses his wife of having killed it, especially if he learns that it was a boy. The men endeavor to bring the boys into the world a second time when they are old enough to get along without their mother. They do this by tearing them away from the world of women and initiating them into the secrets of men. The young initiates are regularly nourished with the semen of older boys, third- and fourth-stage initiates, who are already young men but have not yet had sexual relations with a woman and are not yet married. In this manner, the life-giving substance circulates, nourishing and fortifying each new crop of men from one generation to the next. But it circulates among young men and boys who have never had sexual contact with a woman and who are therefore free of the pollution necessarily involved in sexual relations with them. These gifts flow in one direction only, however: those who receive the semen cannot give their own back to the givers. Unlike what happens when men exchange women, here the takers cannot in turn become the givers. All married men are excluded from giving semen, for actually putting a penis that has entered a woman into the mouth of a boy who has just been separated from his mother and the world of women would be the worst kind of violence and humiliation for a Baruya. Young men of an age to give their semen and who are related on their father’s or mother’s side to the initiate are also excluded.3 And so it is beyond the bounds of kinship, beyond the circle of relatives that men act as a group to produce and reproduce their strength, their identity, their superiority over women.4 The generalized exchange of semen begins beyond the sphere of the restricted exchange of women. But the collective effort of the men alone could not accomplish the goal were it not for the force of the sun, mediated by the kwaimatnie owned by the lineages that hold the right to initiate the boys and to make shamans. It is only by combining and conjoining human and superhuman powers that the men are able to separate the women from their creative capacities and to expropriate these. Men’s power therefore is necessarily ambivalent, since it rests both on the explicit denigration of women’s powers and on the implicit acknowledgment of their existence. Men can exercise power only by keeping women in ignorance about their own powers. For the most part, we have seen that these female powers exist only in and through the Baruya’s mind and thought processes; and the violence which enables men to appropriate these powers is perpetrated in their minds, it is first of all a conceptual or mental violence [violence ideelle]. But this is, in fact, the source of the real ideological violence that men impose daily on women. This original violence, which founded men’s supremacy, is continually rehearsed in the tales they hear during the initiation ceremonies. They are told that, long ago, women invented the bow and arrow, but they held the bow backwards. They shot at anything that came along and, in particular, killed too much game; this continued until one day a man stole the bow and turned it around. Since that time, men kill as they should (what they need), and women are forbidden to use bows and arrows. They are also told that women used to own the flutes that are now used in the initiations and which they now may not see on pain of death. The secret name of the flutes, as revealed to the initiates, is namboula-mala. Namboula means “tadpole,” mala, “fight.” One Baruya “myth” tells that women existed before men. One day the men appeared to them in the form of tadpoles; the women made them loincloths and miniature bows; later these tadpoles turned into men. But the word namboula is also used by men to designate the woman’s vagina. It would seem that, for Baruya men, the flutes represent the power contained in women’s vaginas and associated with tadpoles, which look like children in their initial, incomplete fetal form. What the men tell the women, on the other hand, is an entirely different story. They say that the sounds they hear in the forest during the initiations are the voices of spirits conversing with the men. Of course young initiates are forbidden, on pain of death, to tell the women that the men produce these sounds using the flutes. In addition to the flutes, the Baruya use bull-roarers to produce frightening noises unlike anything that can be heard in nature. The Baruya say that these bull-roarers were given to men by the yimaka, forest spirits, in the shape of “arrows”, which their ancestors found sticking in the trunks of certain trees. These “arrows” are one of the sources of the men’s fighting powers, of their death-dealing powers. When the bull-roarers sound deep in the forest, the initiates’ sponsors go to gather the sap (semen-milk) of a particular tree and come back to place it in the mouths of the young initiates. In this combination of two opposing powers, a life-giving power and a death-dealing power, one of which was originally in the possession of women, who were dispossessed of it, and the other, from the beginning given to men by the spirits and therefore exclusively theirs, we find the perfect formula for male domination in Baruya society: the accumulation, in the men’s hands, of both the powers that belong to them and those they have stolen from the women. In short, women, believed by the Baruya to have invented the bow, cultivated plants, the flutes, life, initiations and so on, are seen as having greater creative powers than men. But when the women are left to their own devices, these powers engender chaos. The men were forced to step in and restore order, and to do this, they had to inflict violence on the women, kill them, rob them and so forth. In sum, force or cunning was required to separate the women from the sources of their power so that the men might capture and harness it for the benefit of all. However, according to the Baruya, male supremacy is never definitively acquired because the women’s powers were not destroyed by the acts of violence committed at the beginning of time. Even though they have been appropriated and held captive by men, these powers still exist. That is why chaos would once again erupt if men were ever to relax their hold. The men’s struggle against the women is never-ending. If the order of society and that of the universe (as the rite of the primordial fire at the beginning of the initiation ceremonies testifies) are to be preserved, they must be recreated, as it were, by each generation. And this is precisely what the Baruya are doing when they initiate their boys and build the big ceremonial edifice, the tsimia, to house them. Each pole of the tsimia, planted in the ground by a married man, stands for an initiate. Each pole, the Baruya say, is like “a bone,” and the frame of the house is like a huge “skeleton” that they cover with thatch, which they call “the skin” of the tsimia. The thatch is brought to the site by hundreds of women of all ages, and laid on and attached to the skeleton of the house by the men, standing on the roof and protected by the shamans from the pollution of the women who have gathered and transported the shocks of thatching material. The tsimia, they say, is the body of the Baruya tribe; it contains and represents them, everyone, men and women, young and old, all of the villages and lineages, without distinction. The towering center pole upon which the whole edifice rests is called “Grandfather.” It is the link between the dead ancestors and the new generations of their descendants. All of this is done in full view of visiting crowds from (temporarily) friendly tribes, who are left to judge for themselves the Baruya’s strength and might, and to understand the wordless message being sent. The Baruya and their neighbors understand each other not only because they speak the same or closely related languages but also because they share the same culture, the same social representations, the same symbols. They and their neighbors fight each other or make peace, but they all know that they wear the same ornaments, and that, to be handsome, they do not need to rub their bodies with melted pig fat like the tribes on the other side of the Lamari River, the Awa, the Tairora, and so on. For this fat makes their bodies stink and in a few hours they are even dirtier than before. One does not marry such people. The Baruya way of existing together is deeply buried in the body (intimacy) Is it possible for a non-Baruya, without betraying them too much, to examine their ideas about the body and their bodily practices using analytical categories already developed by anthropologists in order to discover some meaning that would permit cross-cultural comparisons (with Melanesian or other cultures)? I believe it is, although I know that, for some of my colleagues, like David Schneider, such an undertaking can only reflect back, indefinitely, through the image we have of others, our own image of ourselves as Westerners and anthropologists (Schneider 1984). First however, and in support of David Schneider, I would like to make the trivial remark that we must bear in mind that many of what appear to us to be symbols and “symbolic” practices are not symbolic for the Baruya. If a symbol is a sign (a sound, a gesture, a natural or man-made object, a substance or whatever), which designates and stands for a thing, a reality other than itself, then the Baruya know as well as we do what a symbol is, and they use them liberally. The ornaments that mark the various stages of initiation, the objects worn in the nose and which tell us that a man is a shaman or a cassowary hunter, the scenes acted out in deep silence before the initiates by two men, one of whom squats in front of the other, head lowered, representing a woman, are a world of signs, of symbols pointing to ranks, powers, rules of conduct, which are thereby constantly held up to be seen and recalled to mind. But, for the Baruya, something quite different is going on, it seems to me, when the kwaimatnie-man strikes the chest of the young initiates with this sacred object, when he pulls their arms and squeezes and twists the weak points of their limbs, when he has them swallow bits of food in which he has concealed leaves from magic plants that he has personally gathered from the ancestral territory at Bravegareubaramandeuc. These gestures, these acts performed on the initiates’ bodies are not “symbolic”; they are not images or play-acting. These gestures really transmit to the initiates’ bodies the real powers contained in the kwaimatnie, the force of the ancestors, of the sun, and so forth. They make the officiant the indispensable mediator between human beings and the powers that rule the universe. These potent gestures full of meaning are performed in an atmosphere of profound silence. Afterwards, the master of ceremonies directs the sponsors to place on the heads of the tchouwanie, the third-stage initiates, a headdress made of the beak of a hornbill, mounted on a reed band terminating in two wild-boar tusks, which are dug into the initiate’s forehead. Then they are told the meaning of these objects. The hornbill is the man’s penis, the tusks are the woman’s vagina and the placing of one upon the other symbolizes man’s superiority over woman and at the same time the suffering he must expect to undergo from the woman’s vagina, from their future heterosexual relations. This revelation is accompanied by long lectures on the initiates’ new duties to their elders, their wife, their children, interspersed with accounts of great moments from Baruya history. They are promised—if they live by the Baruya ethic—victory over their enemies, a life of plenty and so on. It is clear, then, that inasmuch as these conceptions of life and power form a coherent picture and are shared by one and all, men and women, old and young—or at least the portion of this knowledge that each one is supposed to possess in accordance with his or her gender, age and functions -, inasmuch as these ideas have become gestures, actions, ways of organizing relations between individuals, in short, the social “order,” the strongest force maintaining this order is not the violence, in its various forms, perpetrated by men upon women and the young. It is the belief, the subjective acceptance by one and all of these representations; it is this approval that gives rise to the various degrees of more or less profound and sincere consent, to the various ways the initiates have of cooperating more or less voluntarily in the reproduction of an order that humiliates and segregates them temporarily, in the case of boys, or definitively, in the case of women, and may even oppress them. To the extent that these social representations—which add up to a sort of profile of the individual as seen by the Baruya—are buried deep in each living, concrete individual from his or her birth, they become for each person the objective, a priori social condition of the experience of self and others; they are the paradoxically impersonal, cultural form of the individual’s intimacy. A form that encloses and encompasses this intimacy in a ring of “Baruya” norms and constraints, which mean that the individual can exist and develop only by reproducing, in his relations with himself and others, the organizational and thought patterns upon which the society rests. What, then, are the organizational principles of Baruya society that are expressed in their ideas about the body and buried deep within the child from infancy. The relations of appropriation, belonging and domination entailed in the Baruya’s ideas about conception The Baruya father is represented as the “genitor” of the child, and the mother as the “genetrix.” The father contributes his semen (in Baruya, lakala alyeu “penis water”) to the child’s conception. The mother makes her contribution with her uterus, her womb. Semen produces bone, the bodily framework, that which persists the longest after death. Semen also nourishes the fetus in the woman’s womb. What these social representations tell us is that sexual union is necessary to make a child, but that the man’s role is by far the more important. The dual role attributed to semen seems to legitimize the fact that from birth the child belongs potentially, through the father’s semen, to his kindred (the child’s patrilineal kin). In short, there is a connection between these representations of semen and the Baruya descent rule, which is the patrilineal principle. In fact, if we also take account of the Baruya’s relative silence on the role of the woman in conceiving a child, we find we are dealing with a veritable primacy of semen. The mother is merely a womb in which the semen is deposited and will develop. Sometimes, however, the mother’s blood enters the fetus and molds it partially in her own image or in the likeness of some member of her own lineage. But without the man’s repeated contributions of semen and Sun’s intervention in the woman’s womb, she would be incapable of bearing a normal, whole, living child. The primacy of semen does not seem to be founded only on the patrilineal descent rule governing kinship relations, though. For the Baruya, semen also serves another purpose, that of constructing and legitimizing the simultaneously collective and individual supremacy of adult men over women and over young men; and this domination springs from somewhere beyond kinship relations. It is there that we will find the reasons for the positive emphasis placed on men’s semen and the negative emphasis on women’s menstrual blood: opposite but complementary ways of establishing the same thing: male domination. None of this prevents the Baruya placing great importance on a person’s relations with his or her mother and maternal kin. The mother’s sisters are regarded as other mothers, and her brothers are called api aounie, “uncles of the breast,” to distinguish them from “classificatory” maternal uncles, api. Throughout his or her life, a Baruya can count on the affection and protection of his or her maternal uncles and aunts. We might almost speak of a sort of “complementary filiation,” to borrow Meyer Fortes’ expression. It used to be customary, for a year or so after a child was born, for the mother to keep its face hidden from the father if he was around when she was nursing or washing it. At these times she would wrap a loosely crocheted stringbag around the baby’s face. But these precautions were unnecessary in the presence of her brothers, who could look directly at the faces of their nephews and nieces. This taboo was lifted when the child looked like it was going to live, and the father was to give him or her its first name, the name used before initiation. At this time a ceremony was performed in which the father presented the child’s maternal kin, his own affines, with gifts of pig meat, salt and sometimes even shells. The father’s rights over the child, which up to that point had been only potential, then became “real”, without cancelling the privileged ties or the rights of the maternal kin with regard to the child. However, if the child happened to die before this time, it was buried by its mother without ceremony, in an uncultivated spot not far from the village but not on land belonging to its father’s kin. The strong ties between a Baruya boy and his mother’s brothers extend to the latters’ children as well, to the matrilateral cross cousins. But he is forbidden to marry his matrilateral cross cousins, with whom he has a joking relationship with strong sexual overtones. The Baruya marriage rule says that a man may not repeat his father’s marriage by taking a wife from his mother’s lineage. Furthermore, two brothers may not marry two sisters, in other words take women from the same lineage. Marriages are thus governed by two rules, which oblige each generation to contract and multiply new alliances. Two brothers therefore marry in different directions, which means that they often find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict, out of solidarity with their brothers-in-law. It also means that their children, who are parallel cousins, can find themselves opposing each other out of solidarity with their mother’s linage. I think it is probably for this reason that relations with maternal kin tend to grow weaker the further one moves away from the circle of the mother’s direct brothers and sisters towards “classificatory” uncles and aunts. In the end, far from strengthening the internal solidarity of the patrilineal lineages that make up Baruya society, this marriage policy undermines and weakens it. But as far as I know, no part of this marriage policy is actually formulated or legitimized “in the body.” Alternatively, a Baruya may not marry his father’s brothers’ daughters because they are said to come from the same semen as he does and are therefore his sisters. Such a union would be seen as incestuous and be punished by death. He may marry his mother’s sisters’ daughters, though, because they do not come from the same semen as that from which their mother and Ego’s mother were conceived, even though the Baruya, who use Iroquois kinship terminology, call them “sisters” as well. His father’s sisters’ daughters, his patrilateral cross cousins, are considered to be potential wives. Like his matrilateral parallel cousins, they do not come from the same semen as he, and so they are eligible. But in addition, he has rights over them because they come from the womb of a woman of his lineage. And he can exercise these rights if the lineage that took his father’s sister has not yet given a woman in exchange. In this case, the young Baruya may ask for one of his father’s sisters’ daughters, and she will be given. In short, among the women he calls “sisters, not all are prohibited, and among those he calls cousins,” not all can be married. A child is not merely the product of the union of a man and a woman and the result of an exchange of women between two lineages, however. To be born as a finished human, it needs the intervention of Sun, which completes its feet, hands, eyes, mouth and nose while it is still in its mother’s womb. In short, a child is the product of a man, a woman and a supernatural force, Sun, which adds its power to that of Moon, Sun’s wife/younger brother. It is therefore the product of an exchange between two groups of humans and of a gift on the part of Sun-Moon, with apparently nothing in return from the human side, except perhaps the many ritual prayers they say. This representation of Sun’s role in a child’s conception bespeaks its membership in another relationship distinct from the relations of descent and filiation, which are transmitted by the father and the mother. It makes a child a member of the Anga people, or more accurately—because not all Anga groups have the same representations or institutions as the Baruya and their neighbors—it makes the child a member of a set of tribes whose specific cultural world is characterized by this emphasis placed on semen and the importance of the sun, by the strict segregation of boys, who spend years of their life separated from the world of women and outside the village, by the construction of a large ceremonial house, the tsimia, for the initiations, which represents the union of all the villages and lineages of the tribe in the initiation of its boys, by the generalized practice of direct sister exchange between men and, last of all—but this is the least widespread feature—by the existence of female initiations. In other Anga groups, such as the Ankave, who have been studied by Pierre Lemonnier and Pascale Bonnemere, descent reckoning, while still patrilineal, has a much more pronounced bilateral character; boys are initiated but not systematically cut off from the world of women, and so forth. In the Ankave’s representations of the body, there is no special emphasis on the role of semen. No mention is made of Sun helping make the child. Red, the color of the sun for the Baruya, is the color of menstrual blood for the Ankave (Pierre Lemonnier, pers. comm.). A study of these transformations in the social organization is in progress.** By tribe, I mean a local group constituted by the temporary association of a number of lineages living side by side in villages or widely dispersed, who have joined together to occupy and defend a territory, which they have divided among themselves, and to practice among themselves, rather than with other tribes, the exchange of women; or to put it more succinctly, groups which have temporarily united in order to reproduce themselves together. Each of these local groups has its own name—a “big name”—which its members use to designate themselves and which is also used by members of neighboring tribes to refer to them: Baruya, Andje, Usarumpia and so on. These local groups are divided into lineages, which have distinct names, but the same lineage names may be found in other tribes, neighboring or not, friendly or hostile. This is both the result and the evidence of the constant fission and fusion ever at work under the surface. The existence of lineages of the same name in different tribes probably indicates a remote common origin that underwent numerous divisions and dispersions. In no case, however, do the members of these lineages get together and act in common. Which means that they never come together in a clan as might be supposed from the fact that they bear the same name. The reference to Sun’s participation in the conception of the child thus testifies that this child belongs to a given Anga tribe through its father’s lineage. If the father is a Ndelie from the Baruya tribe, the child will be a Baruya; if the father is a Ndelie from the Andje tribe, the child will be an Andje and an enemy of the Baruya. But whatever tribe they belong to, all these children know that they wear the same body ornaments and share the same secrets, the same “culture.” Summing up: social representations of the process by which a child is conceived present themselves first of all as a relatively succinct “explanation” of this process: semen makes the bones, the blood comes from the father or sometimes the mother, and so on. The Baruya “theory” of the process of child conception seems to aim less at “explaining” this process than at formulating and “legitimizing” two types of relations that are imposed on the child—relations of appropriation and relations of domination. It is important to note here that, in this vision of the world, so-called “kinship” relations alone do not suffice to make a child. Even before its birth, the child is enrolled in a universe that extends beyond its relations with its father, its mother and the groups to which they belong, a universe which points to (and transcends) the limited capacity of mere kinship to constitute society as such and to reproduce it. This becomes even more evident when we analyze Baruya representations no longer of conception now but of the child’s development and growth from before birth to adulthood and marriage. Baruya representations of intra-uterine growth and subsequent development It is in this area that the fact that the child is a boy or a girl takes on its full significance. For the Baruya believe that a girl grows more easily and faster than a boy. Proof of this, they say, is that, when a girl has her first period, her body is already developed, while boys of her age are still small and skinny. Boys and girls would seem to be engaged in a sort of “race,” and it is the girls who win. It is for this reason that a boy does not marry a girl of his age and that two co-initiates always exchange their younger sisters (or two of their patrilateral parallel-cousins), the one directly behind them in order of birth. Unlike girls, who give the Baruya the impression that they grow up nearly unaided, at their mother’s side and within the family circle, boys, in order to become men and ultimately stronger than women, must be separated from their mother and receive enormous quantities of attention and strength, which are lavished on them by the men’s group and, owing to the intercession of the kwaimatnie-men, by Sun and other supernatural powers, Moon, the pleiades, and so forth. In fact, boys must be literally “re-birthed” by the men. The Baruya regard this process of re-engendering as a waounie nanga, a major undertaking (waounie), which begins when the men take the boy from his mother to pierce his nose and begin his initiation. It is a task that will last more than ten years. In the case of both boys and girls, however, it can be said that the conditions of their growth are established even before their conception. Immediately after marrying, the future father begins storing up in his young wife’s body the food she will turn into milk. This semen also nourishes the future mother and makes her strong enough to bear children.5 - As soon as the woman realizes she is pregnant,6 she tells her husband, and the couple then increase their sexual relations so that the man’s semen may nourish the fetus in its mother’s womb and make it grow.7 - When a pig is killed, it is baked in an earth oven; the fat is fed first of all to the children. The liver is cooked in a bamboo tube and, after a portion has been sent to the men’s house for the young initiates, the rest is divided among the men present. Women are not entitled to any. But all this care, this work, the nourishment provided by the father, the mother and the lineages of both still do not suffice to make a child grow. Additional forces must contribute, those of all the men and women of the Baruya tribe, working together to initiate their children, the forces of Sun and Moon, which are showered upon everyone by the effects of the ceremonies and the efforts of the kwaimatnie-men. If the child is a boy, there is first of all the force that comes from the repeated gifts of semen from older initiates, who nourish him in the men’s house. If the child is a girl, this force will come from the milk the new mothers give her to drink. There is also the tree sap (semen-milk) that the male initiate’s sponsor sucks up and gives him to drink. The sap gives the boy the strength of the big trees whose crowns reach towards the sun. In passing it should be pointed out that every young initiate has two sponsors of different ages, chosen, as a rule, from his mother’s lineage; one of these is said to be “like his mother,” and the other, “like his sister.” The maternal functions are thus transferred to the sphere of the male initiations and transposed into a masculine mode. Last of all, there are the magic foods gathered from the now-abandoned ancestral territory, which the kwaimatnie-men have the initiates swallow. But these men do more than simply nourish the boys, they transmit the full force of the sun (and the moon) to the boys when they strike them with the kwaimatnie, pull their arms and squeeze their joints. The force of the sun and the force of the sacred foods fill the body and make it handsome and glowing. These forces collect in the liver, which explains why, at a number of points in the ceremonies, the kwaimatnie-men take bamboo torches and inspect the abdomen of the initiates. This is to see if their liver is black, if illness or evil forces are eating away at them, if they are going to die a premature death. In this case, without a word to the initiate concerned, the kwaimatnie-man will then alert the shamans, who will perform the appropriate ceremonies to restore the initiate’s strength and health. But the kwaimatnie-men do much more. For the duration of the ceremony and only during this period, they have the gift of “seeing”: as they inspect each initiate’s body, they discern what he will become, a shaman, a great warrior, a cassowary hunter, or nothing at all, a wopai, a sweet potato. It is they who, over the course of the ceremonies, search for and find the signs the spirits have sent men to indicate the destiny of each initiate. A splinter of black-palm wood, from which bows and arrows are made, means the child will become a great warrior, while a piece of eagle feather is the sign of a future shaman. The kwaimatnie-man will then tell the initiate’s father and brothers as well as the shamans. This gift of “seeing” comes from Sun, who bestowed it on one of their ancestors as he gave him a kwaimatnie and the spells to be uttered when they are used. The unequal distribution of the kwaimatnie among the clans attests a military past and a “political” history, which has present-day repercussions, a relationship between refugees who subsequently became conquerors and who were conquered in turn. Thus, by compounding all these forces, the Baruya reproduce the structure of their society and that of its hierarchies, hierarchy between men and women, between great men and the rest; and this structure is embedded in the body of each and every Baruya. But the formidable conceptual difference, the ideological barrier erected between the sexes, does not account for the whole distance separating the destiny of a Baruya boy from that of a Baruya girl. Because they are female, girls will be excluded from owning ancestral land (but not from using it). They may neither own nor use steel axes, as formerly they were not allowed to use stone tools. They will not have the right to manufacture or use weapons, which excludes them from hunting, warfare and recourse to armed violence. They will not be allowed to manufacture salt or trade it with neighboring tribes. They will be dependent upon men for the bars of salt that, on the other hand, they may use as they wish to buy clothing, ornaments and so forth. And above all, they will be excluded from owning and using kwaimatnie, in other words, they will be denied the means of communicating with the supernatural forces which control the reproduction of the universe and their society. Last of all, they will be dispossessed of their own children, in particular their sons, although they will always have a say in the decisions made by the father and his lineage concerning the child’s future (marriage, etc.). So what, for the Baruya, justifies such a difference in status and destiny between men and women? I was given two reasons: women have no semen, and menstrual blood flows from their bodies at regular intervals. Both reasons are negative, but they are different. The absence of semen negates by depriving; the presence of menstrual blood negates by its very action. We have not said much about this bodily substance particular to women. The word for blood in Baruya is tawe, but menstrual blood is designated by another word, game. Baruya men become almost hysterical when they talk about menstrual blood: their reaction is a mixture of disgust, repulsion and, above all, fear. It is a substance they compare with blood that is vomited, urinated or found in the feces of those who are soon going to die, of victims of sorcery whose liver is being devoured by a spirit. Instead of bringing about the death of the woman’s body, though, menstrual blood merely weakens it temporarily. Its deadly power (its destructive force) seems in fact to be directed at men. It poses a permanent threat to their strength, to their life-force, to the roots of their superiority. Menstrual blood is, in a sense, the rival of semen, it is anti-semen. But at the same time, it is the sign that the woman has been pierced by Moon and is now ready to be fertilized by a man, that she is capable of bearing life. Hence the Baruya’s ambivalence. Baruya men, however, emphasize what they see as the dangerous nature of menstrual blood. They accuse women of killing them with sorcery by mixing menstrual blood with the food they prepare. And it is true that women sometimes deliberately use a bit of their husband’s semen to drive him to suicide. After making love, the woman takes the man’s semen and, before his eyes, deliberately flings it into the fire. Confronted with such a gesture, by Baruya rules the man is supposed to commit suicide. He hangs himself. Representations of menstrual blood play a key role in legitimizing male power. Through these, women, who are clearly treated as inferior beings in the Baruya social order, are made the guilty parties. Here is an anecdote to illustrate the point. When I asked why women were excluded from owning land, weapons, salt, and so forth, an old man, exasperated by my (voluntary) lack of comprehension, shouted: “Can’t you understand? Haven’t you seen the blood running down between their thighs?” We may suppose that the more these ideas about the body are shared by both men and women, the less women find in their own minds the reasons and means to question the social order that weighs on them and which is embodied in them. Ultimately, it could even be said that the more successfully this order is inculcated and embodied, the more consent leads to silence. Each man or woman has only to live as the body dictates and to look at him- or herself to know what he or she may or may not do, may want or must avoid desiring. This analysis brings us face to face with a fundamental fact. In Baruya culture, as in no doubt all cultures, the anatomical and physiological differences between men and the women—presence or absence of a penis, a vagina, semen, milk, menstrual blood, in short all those organs and substances connected with sexuality and the different role each sex plays in reproduction and life—are used to formulate and to seal the social destiny of every individual. The sexed body is asked not only to bear witness to, but to bear witness for the order that prevails in society and the universe, since the universe, like society, is divided into a male and a female part. The body works like a ventriloquist’s dummy, always holding forth in silent discourse on the order that must prevail in society, a discourse which not only legitimizes the appropriation of children by adults regarded as their kin but also dictates the child’s pre-ordained place in society as determined by its sex. In conclusion, I would like to make several remarks, which will bring us back to some current theoretical discussions in our field. As we saw in the case of the Baruya, depending on whether one is male or female, lands, ranks and powers do or do not circulate from one generation to the next. This transmission is effected primarily through kinship relations, which provide the supporting structure and preferential channel. I suggest that everything which insinuates itself into kinship relations in this manner, for purposes of circulation, is metamorphosed into an attribute of kinship, into norms which “characterize” certain kinship relations: those between father and son, for instance, which are different from these between father and daughter, those between two brothers or between brother and sister, and so forth. And I will advance the complementary idea that everything that is changed into kinship attributes is ultimately changed into gender attributes, rights granted or refused an individual on the grounds of his or her sex. It is therefore a series of metamorphoses which link and enable power structures, kinship structures and representations of the body to act upon each other and within each other. But if this is the case, if (economic, political or other) realities that are not necessarily directly connected with a particular mode of descent reckoning or marriage rule, in short with a particular kinship system, if these realities insinuate themselves into this system and circulate through certain ties or channels that the system privileges (between father and son, or mother’s brother and nephew, for instance), it might well be that within this system these realities appear in a form which encodes their meaning in a different way. Land problems become kinship problems, and difficulties with production ultimately appear as signs of sorcery between affines or consanguines. We are now talking about the daunting problem of explaining the way in which societies apprehend their own reality, the problem of the genesis of native forms of consciousness (the emic analysis of representations). For if we are to go beyond so-called emic and etic analyses of native representations, we will sooner or later need to reconstruct the process which gave rise to these representations among the autochthonous inhabitants, and this process often takes place in the unconscious part of the actors’ minds. Another theoretical debate might be engaged on the relationship between the features of the kinship system found in a given society and the latter’s representations of the body, and more specifically representations of how children are conceived and grow. These representations are not simply tacked onto a kinship system which may well have emerged before these representations and without their help. I think that a kinship system always includes among its components a series of representations concerning the bodies of men and women and the process of making children. It could not emerge and crystallize without them. But a problem is created, as the Baruya example clearly shows, by the fact that representations of the body are linked not only to the society’s prevailing kinship system but to other social relations as well, which these representations are also called upon to express and legitimize. Hence the polysemic character of such representations, which are not “overdetermined,” for there is nothing excessive about their significations, but instead, as certain theoreticians suggest, “pluri-determined” by different fields of social praxis. And this is why they are so difficult to analyze. But if such is the case, if certain realities act upon and interact with others and in part become these other realities, if the actors’ own representations of these realities is polysemic, it is clearly not possible that the various material, institutional and conceptual components of society are linked by linear, one-way relations of cause and effect. So how are we to think of these relationships? For instance, if Baruya representations of semen say something about both kinship relations (patrilineal descent reckoning) and about power relations (the mechanism of initiations), we must ask ourselves what is the relationship between kinship and initiation. Was it by chance that they grew up side by side in the same society? Or is there an element of necessity in their co-existence? I would like to take the time here to refine the hypothesis I advanced in The making of great men, which suggested a fairly direct cause-and-effect link between the practice of exchanging women and the existence of an initiation mechanism. The effect of the Baruya’s initiations is to mold all of the men into a collective force, each generation forming a bloc, which transcends their divisions (e.g. belonging to different lineages or to villages with sometimes conflicting interests). This collective male force is clearly turned both inward, towards Baruya society (their women, their young people), and outward, towards neighboring tribes, enemies and alien groups. It is therefore likely that several, mutually non-exclusive reasons worked together to produce these male initiations, and that the fact that there were several explains their influence on the workings of Baruya society. The initial reason may have been the need to gather a common military force for the purpose of conquering and defending a common territory. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the Baruya were in effect actively engaged in expanding their territory. After having gradually settled Wonenara Valley and driven back or expulsed two local groups, the Baruya virtually constituted one of the frontiers of Anga expansion. But it is quite possible to build a common military force and organize defense or attacks without necessarily using collective initiations to prepare young men for warfare. Therefore it seems to me that military needs must have played a role in organizing society into age grades and giving rise to initiations only insofar as they were articulated with something else, with the organization of male-female relations. And first of all in response to needs arising from the kinship system. The reasoning would go as follows: In a classless or a casteless and therefore relatively egalitarian society, in which marriage between lineages is based almost exclusively on the direct exchange of women, men would have needed to construct some kind of collective force, an always potentially threatening presence, to back up each man when he was called upon to decided the personal fate of his sisters or their daughters. To this, Baruya society adds the need to ensure that another principle of organization is respected; this is the exclusion, to the men’s benefit, of women from controlling territory, weapons, salt-money and means of communication with the world of the supernatural. In these areas, all women stand on the same unequal footing with men. But here, too, the hypothesis must be tempered: there are societies which practice direct exchange of women but do not have an initiation system. However this is often the case when the direct exchange of women is merely one of a number of rules for contracting alliances and marriages. Alternatively, in New Guinea, wherever bridewealth dominates marriage exchanges, there are as a rule no elaborate initiation rites. It seems that the link between kinship and initiation system, by way of the requirements of warfare, may have been the existence of an ideology in which women represented a constant source of danger for men, and especially a danger for the reproduction of society itself, because of their regular flow of menstrual blood. It is this representation of female pollution which legitimizes the segregation of the two sexes, particularly that of boys, which gives rise to the systematic denigration of women, the “theft” of their powers, and so on. This perhaps was the kernel around which all the institutions co-existing in Baruya culture crystallized and became bound up with each other. In short, these remarks lead me to conclude that it would be altogether fallacious to regard Baruya society as kin based, whatever the importance of their kinship system founded on the generalized direct exchange of women among men. One does not become a man or a woman in Baruya society until one has been initiated; initiation makes each person a member of a community which extends far beyond the family, the lineage and the zone of kinship relations that every individual entertains with a number of members of his or her tribe and of neighboring tribes. As to why all these different forms of social organization can be found in Melanesia, I think it would be useful to make a systematic comparison of the relationship between representations of the body, kinship systems and forms of power in these societies. Unlike Edmund Leach (1957: 50-55), who ironically wondered whether the idea that one society is “more patrilineal than another” made any sense at all, I believe there are wide variations in the application and the signification of a descent rule, be it patrilineal or other. And I think that representations of the body reveal these variations quite explicitly. I am referring, for instance, to Erik Schwimmer’s highly evocative article in Man (1969: 132-33) in which he introduces the case of the Orokaiva into the debate opened by Leach’s text on “Virgin Birth” (1966: 39-46). According to Schwimmer, the Orokaiva think that a child is conceived when an ancestor’s spirit wants to reincarnate itself in a new human body. If the child is a boy, the Orokaiva believe it comes from the sexual union of the father and the mother, each of whom has given it their blood. If it is a girl child, they believe the spirit entered the fetus when the woman was alone. At that point the father has not yet transmitted his own “strong blood,” which enables boys to transmit in turn the clan blood to the next generation. Nevertheless, he does contribute to the development of all his children, boys or girls, in their mother’s womb, since his semen is believed to nourish the fetus; therefore the couple increases the rate of sexual relations once the woman realizes she is pregnant. But in every case, if the man has made a payment of bridewealth to his wife’s family, he is deemed to have priority to the children he brings into the world. The key element in this theory of how children are conceived is the idea that a spirit enters the woman in order to be reincarnated. Blood—and not semen—plays an essential role in justifying men’s superiority over women, for a man’s blood also carries a special power, ivo, which is not found in the blood of women. Girls, deprived in their fetal state of their father’s “strong blood,” are therefore incapable of reproducing the clan. Their blood is “weak.” Baruya women lack semen. Orokaiva women lack their father’s blood. In both societies, semen plays a nurturing role,8 but for the Orokaiva, it does not have a fertilizing role. Fecundation results from an ancestor choosing to reincarnate him or herself. For the Baruya, semen fertilizes and links the child to its patrilineal ancestors, but alone cannot make a child. A spirit must intervene which is stronger than the ancestor’s spirits in order for the child to assume its final form and be viable. This spirit is the sun. But the fact that they are the son or the daughter of the sun makes all Baruya children alike, regardless of their belonging to this or that lineage, regardless of their descending from this or that ancestor. For the Orokaiva, on the other hand, a child’s identity is not as straightforward as it is in Baruya culture. If the child is a girl, there is no problem. It is one of her mother’s ancestors, who has decided to be reincarnated. But in the case of a boy, there is always some doubt as to the identity of the reincarnated spirit: it may be an ancestor from the father’s side just as well as one from the mother’s. Because of this doubt, a shaman, sivo embo, must be consulted to determine from which side the boychild’s spirit has come. It is only then that the child will receive its name, which is given either by the paternal kin or by the maternal kin, depending on the identity of the in-dwelling spirit. Such practices are unthinkable for the Baruya, just as it is impossible for a young Baruya to lay claim to land belonging to his mother’s clan and cultivated by his mother’s brother and his children. This is perfectly possible in Orokaiva, however, and a maternal uncle’s sons live in fear that their father’s sister’s sons will ask them to share their lands. If we wanted to go beyond Melanesia and compare the Baruya and the Orokaiva with the Yap Islanders, we would see—without going into the polemics raised by Schneider’s “radical” theses—that one more step had been taken along the path already traced by the Orokaiva in thinking that girls receive their spirit from their mother without any contribution from their father. On Yap, where descent reckoning is supposed to be matrilineal, it is the men of the domain, tabinau, where the newlyweds live who pray to the ancestors of the matrilineages that preceded them on this land to intercede with Marialang, a spirit considered to be the master of the fecundation of women, to give the woman a child as a reward for her devotion in maintaining the fertility of the tabinau’s lands (cf. Schneider 1984). On Yap sexual relations are therefore not supposed to play a role in the conception of the child, whether it is male or female. Here, too, however, the idea reported by Schneider has been contested by other anthropologists like David Labby and S. Lingenfelter, who worked on Yap some twenty years after Schneider. Whatever may be the case on Yap, we may conclude from this outline of Orokaiva representations of the body, that the “patrilineal” aspect of descent and membership in a single kingroup is much less clearly established here than among the Baruya. This is probably one of the reasons for the sometimes-sharp discussions between the anthropologists who have observed this society, from William’s first description, to Schwimmer, Rimoldi, Iteanu and more recently Lanoue.9 Do the Orokaiva have “patrilineal” leanings, or is this an anthropologist’s deformation of empirical reality? perhaps the answer lies in an even more detailed analysis of Orokaiva ideas about the process of conception and of the indications these provide about the right of the adults who call themselves the child’s father and mother, and the kinship groups to which they belong to appropriate this child—ideologically—in other words in their minds, by their thought processes, even before it is born. However, we must keep in mind that, while the body speaks, testifying for or against the social order, it also does this by its silences. The fact that the Orokaiva say next to nothing about semen, that in New Caledonia nearly no mention is made of it in certain groups studied by A. Bensa,10 in which the name and the land come from the father, the flesh and the bones from the mother, and where the child ultimately still belongs to its father’s group, remind us that there are many ways of manipulating and legitimizing the descent rule when one is faced with problems that ultimately have nothing to do with kinship (appropriation of land, religious status, political function, etc.). Perhaps when semen no longer enters into the making of the child and when society professes to be “patrilineal,” then the mind must ascribe a more important role to spirits and ancestral spiritual forces, which can exist apart from or mingled with the land on which their descendants live and which provides them with their living. 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H. 1983. “Sex relations and gender relations: Understanding Kwoma conception.” Mankind 14 (1): 12-23. Young, M. W. 1987. “Skirts, yams and sexual pollution: The politics of adultery in Kalauna.” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 84: 61-71. ___________________ * Translated by Nora Scott. 1. Among others, I would like to mention D. Battaglia (1986, 1990), A. Bensa (1990), A. Biersack (1983), P. Bonnemère (1990), B.J. Clay (1977), D.A. Counts (1983), P. Errington and D. Gewertz (1987), D.S. Gardner (1987), G. Gillison (1983), M. Godelier (1982, 1991), G. Herdt (1982, 1984, 1987), P. Hinton and G. McCall (1983), A. Iteanu (1983), L. Josephides (1991), B. Juillerat (1986), B. Knauft (1987), D. Kulick (1985), E. Lipuma (1988), E. Mandeville (1979), A. Meigs (1984), M. Mosko (1983), M. Panoff (1968, 1976), P.J.P. Poole (1984, 1985), L. Serpenti (1984), A. Sorum (1984), A. Strathern (1981, 1982), M. Strathern (1987, 1988, 1991), J. Van Baal (1984), R. Wagner (1983), J. Weiner (1980, 1982), A. Weiner (1978, 1980), M.W. Young (1987). 2. In Baruya mythology, there is a character called Djoue, the ancestor of the wild dog, who is something of an anti-Sun or a negative version of Sun. His existence was revealed to me in 1974, by Inamwe, the master of the shamans’ initiations; he confided to me that he regarded this as his most secret piece of knowledge. For his tale, see Godelier 1982: 243-45; 1986: 156. In his account, which the Baruya call “a short speech” and we call a “myth,” we find some of the basic Baruya thought patterns which attempt to explain the hidden foundations of the social and cosmic orders: Women appeared before men. At that time, they were able to bear children without the help of men. The wild dog put an end to this practice by devouring the woman’s children in her womb. Next the woman gave birth to a normal child and had incestuous relations with her son. They had a daughter, and the brother in turn had incestuous relations with his sister. Mankind was born of two acts of incest, but thereafter incest between mother and son, and brother and sister was forbidden, even though—according to the Baruya—men still have the desire to lie with their sisters. The wild dog became the eagle, the bird of the sun and of shamans. He has remained in the service of the shamans, who secretly send him with the men when they go hunting or to war. And at the same time the dog became also all the marsupials of the forest and the source of the game men present to the initiates and to women; unlike the domestic pig, this game owes nothing to the work of women or to the cultivation of plants. 3. Alternatively, among the Sambia, an Anga tribe studied by Gilbert Herdt, maternal kin are reported to give their semen to initiates born to women of their lineage (Herdt 1987: 145-59). 4. It is important to remember that, at the time of the female initiations, during which hundreds of women from the surrounding villages spend several days and nights gathered around the girls who have just menstruated for the first time, one of the most important rituals—unknown to the men—is, I was told, the giving of milk to the initiates by young mothers who have just given birth to their first child and whose breasts are swollen with milk. ** Since this article was published, we know now much more about the Ankave thanks to the publications of Pascale Bonnemere and Pierre Lemonnier who have spent many years among them. 5. Despite the importance of the representations of semen as food for men and women, it seemed to me on several occasions that the Baruya women felt ambivalent about the idea of mother’s milk being a metamorphosis of semen. Some women, who emphasized the foods to be eaten by nursing mothers, did not seem altogether convinced that their milk owed everything to their husband and nothing to themselves. perhaps it is because the bodily representations used to validate male domination do not coincide entirely with individual experience or perhaps it is due to the transformations of the Baruya ways of living and thinking under the colonial and postcolonial orders. This breach—if breach there be—may be the refuge of the tensions between the two sexes so prevalent in this society. 6. If a woman cannot have children, it is always her fault; for a man, according to the Baruya cannot, as a principle, be sterile. 7. As soon as the baby is born, the woman’s husband, her brothers-in-law and her cousins go hunting and, a few days later, return with a large quantity of game, of which she redistributes a portion to the girls and boys of the village and consumes the remainder over the two or three weeks she spends in the birthing hut. The meat is given to her so that she can “replenish the blood” she lost in childbirth. When the period of seclusion comes to an end and the woman returns home with her child at her breast, her husband gives her his semen so that she may recover her full strength and feed the child well. 8. The emphasis Melanesians place on the nurturing role of semen seems quite alien to the traditional ideas Westerners have about the substance. One must bear in mind that distinguishing the fertilizing and the nurturing roles of semen by opposing them may mask the fact that, for some cultures, that which nourishes also engenders; that what you eat makes you what you are and ultimately determines to whom or to what you belong (to a lineage and to the land that feeds you, etc.). In short, the nature/nurture distinction must be handled with extreme care. 9. Schwimmer, Rimoldi, Iteanu, Lanoue [Editor’s note: the original text contains no specific references); see also Oceania, vol. 60, no 3, March 1990, pp. 189-215. 10. See A. Bensa, regarding the Paici, in De jade et de nacre: Art canaque (Paris: Réunion des Musées de France, 1990); specifically the chapter “Des ancêtres et des hommes: introduction aux théories de la nature, de l’action et de l’histoire.”