Agency between humanism and posthumanism This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Andrew B. Kipnis. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.004 DEBATES Agency between humanism and posthumanism Latour and his opponents Andrew B. KIPNIS, Australian National University Two articles in the special section on knot-work in this journal (HAU 2014, volume 4, issue 3) take issue with the “posthumanism” of Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT). Arguing that Latour’s conception of agency undermines critical attitudes toward capitalism, they insist on an all-or-nothing, accept or reject attitude toward Latour’s work. In this article, I sketch an alternative vantage on questions of nonhuman agency and Latour’s oeuvre, which, though critical, is much less polemic. While proposing an intermediate stance for framing a theorization of agency, I conclude that it is not ANT’s theorization of agency that inhibits critical ethnographers of capitalism but rather habits in its application that derive, in part, from ANT’s insistence on painstaking ethnographic research. Keywords: Actor Network Theory, Latour, posthumanism, agency, ethnography Recent articles in this journal (see especially those by Keir Martin [2014], but also Chris Gregory [2014] and, perhaps, David Graeber [2014]) take issue with the “posthumanism” of Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT). While these articles are concerned with much more than Latour per se, they take a completely oppositional stance toward Latour’s work. This insistence necessarily misses some of the usefulness and humanity Latour’s broader oeuvre. In drawing lines in the way that they do, these critiques also steer discussion of Latour’s conception of agency in a direction that is not particularly productive, even for those interested in global inequality, and mark, from a non-European perspective, what seems to be a particularly British or perhaps European stand-off among different schools of anthropology. In the following, I hope to sketch an alternative vantage on questions of nonhuman agency and Latour’s oeuvre, which, though critical, is much less polemic. [44]The named target of their criticism seems to drift somewhat, but centers on four poles: Bruno Latour, ANT, the ontological turn, and posthumanism. Posthumanism is a particularly vague term engaging a wide range of authors. For the purposes of this article, posthumanism will refer to analytic stances that grant agency to nonhuman entities and that downplay the differences between human and nonhuman agency. I take a stance between Latour and his critics by granting agency to nonhuman entities but emphasizing the difference between human and nonhuman agency. The involvement of the three authors in a direct critique of Latour varies. Martin attacks Latour head on. Gregory focuses on critiquing Appadurai, Callon, and the “cultural economy” approach but states that “Latour is a theological thinker who has devoted his life to attacking humanist thought” (2014: 49), and concludes that Latour’s premises are so different from his own that no engagement, other than agreeing to disagree, is possible. Graeber never mentions Latour or posthumanism directly, but, perhaps wrongly, is dragged into the fray by Martin, who asks “what happens to politics in contemporary anthropological descriptions, particularly in the posthuman approaches that are so strongly critiqued by both Graeber and Gregory” (Martin 2014: 99); and later states, “For both Graeber and, especially, Gregory, the rise of ’posthuman’ perspectives within anthropology over the past decade is inextricably linked to the continued consolidation of neoliberal hegemony within the academy and the wider world” (Martin 2014: 102). The oppositional framing of this debate by Martin seems to me especially British or Northern European, though of course in this day in age, no academic debate (especially those that take place in English) can be confined to a single locale. I am an Americanborn and trained anthropologist, who regularly attends the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings, but has spent the past sixteen years of his career in Australia. It was at the 2013 AAA meetings where I got my first inkling of what seemed to me to be a European take on these issues. At a well-attended double session titled “Anthropology’s Public Engagement with Capitalism: Beyond Gifts Versus Markets” (American Anthropological Association 2013: 294), Don Kalb compared the size of the audience with that at a session on the ontological turn, announcing Marxian political economy and ontology as the two main competing trends in contemporary anthropology and insinuating that though ontology seemed to have the upper hand at certain elite British institutions, the audience at his session suggested that critics of capitalism still could attract an anthropological crowd. At the same meetings, I also attended two large sessions devoted to the “ontological turn,” but the participants in those sessions did not make me think the anthropological world divided so neatly into these two camps. At the first, in addition to noted “ontologists” Eduardo Viveros de Castro and Eduardo Kohn, there were speakers like Ghassan Hage and Elizabeth Povenelli (American Anthropological Association 2013: 118). At the second, in addition to the ontologists Bruno Latour and Philippe Descola, was Marshall Sahlins (American Anthropological Association 2013: 389). The papers and roles of these noted Australian (Hage) and American (Sahlins and Povenelli) anthropologists suggested to me that, at least outside of Europe, it was possible to be simultaneously interested in the ontological turn and critiques of global capitalism. Indeed, the respondent to Graeber’s paper [45]in the HAU special issue, Jane Cowan, begins by pointing out the parallels between Graeber’s and Hage’s approaches to anthropology (Cowan 2014: 89). Reading Latour’s oeuvre The criticisms of ANT’s posthumanism, by which Gregory means “a theory of value that attributes agency to things” (2014: 45) misses the broad, and I would argue, broadly humane, balance of Latour’s writing. Latour’s oeuvre begins with works on science as a series of projects of constructing truth by human actors (Latour 1987, 1988; Latour and Woolgar 1979). The extent to which this work riled some scientists is difficult to overstate (see, for example, David Berreby (1994) for an account of enemies made and Latour’s blocked appointment at Princeton). But even in his early work, Latour never argued that because scientific facts were constructed that they were necessarily false. He simply insisted that the objects science investigates do not speak for themselves. The facts that they are held to establish must be made through the efforts of the scientists themselves. He used the concept of a “black box” to designate processes that were assumed to yield “truth” regardless of the extent to which one understood how the process worked. In We have never been modern (Latour 1993), he continues his assault on the separation of the social from the scientific, famously arguing that science and politics have never been separate—how to answer questions like the extent of global warming or at what moment human life begins necessarily involves politicized debates over scientific data. In his work on Actor Network Theory (Latour 2005, 2010), he applies this critique to the social scientists. Rather than constructing black boxes with big concepts like society or class, he asks us to trace out exactly how processes unfold and the place of the nonhuman in these processes. The nonseparation of the political from the scientific has implications for those who study human societies as much as those who study electrons. One could argue about whether Latour’s theoretical stance evolves over his career. Is the shift from examining the social construction of scientific facts to the social/natural construction of human facts a reversal or a continuity? But social scientists who only read his work on ANT and conclude that he is a neoliberal conservative whose deconstruction of “society” simply echoes Thatcher’s disbelief in the concept are missing his insistence on the social aspects of scientific work. His position is not “antisocial” but it is antidualistic and anti–black box thinking. This misreading of Latour’s work is deepened by accusations that Latour is cynical and dismissive toward those with activist inclinations (Martin 2014: 110–11). Latour certainly can be critical of various forms radical thought and action that he finds misplaced or one-sided. But he is no antiradical polemicist. He dishes out criticism to an enormous range of thinkers and actors including various versions of his own self. Though himself a European man, he constantly quips about the arrogance of Whites who dismiss the idols of colonized people (Latour 2010). Generally he is quite broad in the targets of his criticism. In a book where he discusses his own Catholicism at length, consider what he says about various forms of religious, philosophical, and radical thought: [46]These factishes are all broken, shattered by the hammers of critical thought whose long history takes us back: to the Greeks who abandoned the idols of the Cave but put Ideas on pedestals; to the Jews who broke the Golden Calf but built the Temple; to the Christians who burned pagan statues but painted icons; to the Protestants who whitewashed frescos but brandished the true text of the Bible from the pulpit; to the revolutionaries who overthrew the old regimes but founded a cult devoted to the goddess Reason; to the hammer-wielding philosophers who put a stethoscope to the cavernous emptiness of the statues of every cult but put the ancient pagan gods of the will to power back in place. (Latour 2010: 30–31) By comparison, the tone he takes toward political activists or academic radicals on the pages that Martin cites are quite mild. Equally lopsided are the comparisons of Latour’s thought and theorization of agency to the anti-humanism of Althusser, which denies humans agency in the face of the all-determining structures of history (Martin 2014). Latour is not denying human agency at all. In fact he sees the denial of human agency as simply the other side of the coin of declaring all agency human. Consider his analysis of a cartoon about stopping smoking. In the first frame a middle-aged father is comfortably relaxing in a chair smoking a cigarette. His young daughter asks him what he is doing. He says, “I am smoking a cigarette.” The daughter innocently replies, “Oh, I thought the cigarette was smoking you.” The father then panics, cutting his remaining cigarettes and their package to shreds with a pair of scissors. Latour comments: Moving from the first to the last scene, we basically pass from one extreme to another: at the start, the father believes himself given to an innocent vice that he has almost completely under control; at the end, he can extricate himself from his shackles only by pulverizing the cigarette, which so totally controls him that his daughter thought she had seen, in this hybrid, a cigarette smoking a man. In the two instances . . . the reader believes that we are talking about control. From the active form “I smoke a cigarette,” to the passive form, “you are smoked by the cigarette,” nothing has changed other than the apportionment of master and instrument. The father alternates too drastically from one position to the other: too comfortable in the first image; too panicked in the last. What if the question rested instead on the absence of mastery, on the incapacity— either in the active or passive form—to define our attachments? How can we speak with precision of what the Greeks call “the middle voice,” the verb form that is neither active nor passive? (Latour 2010: 55–56) Two pages later, Latour describes what a good “middle-voiced” reply by the father would have looked like: “Yes, Mafalda, my daughter, I am effectively held by my cigarette, which makes me smoke it. There is nothing in this resembling a determining action, neither for it nor for me. I do not control it any more than it controls me. I am attached to it and, if I cannot hope for any kind of emancipation from it, then perhaps other attachments will come to substitute for this one.” . . . We can substitute one attachment with another, but we cannot move from a state of attachment to that of detachment. This is what a father should tell his daughter! (Latour 2010: 58) [47]A Latourian analysis does not deny human agency but examines how other things mediate that agency. These things can take many forms. A surfer or a white-water kayaker might say that she struggles to become “one with the water,” to sense through the surfboard or the kayak, the water’s every movement. At the moment when she performs her most difficult maneuver, she could be said to have fully adjusted to the water’s ebbs and flows and, therefore, to be following the water precisely. A violinist or guitarist may talk of the years it takes to learn “what his instrument may do.” This may refer both to the years needed to learn to play the class of instrument in general, and to the microadjustments necessary to get the most out of the idiosyncrasies of the particular instrument he plays. But these examples do not need to only be about nonhuman things. Perhaps our musician is a singer and she speaks of spending months learning how to get the most out of a particular song, to see “where that song can take her.” Or perhaps a person seeks out certain forms of social relationships because she believes that they will transform herself. These transformations could be of an emulative nature. We can only hope that young students come to admire the anthropologists on campus, both students and faculty, and decide to study anthropology in order to spend more time with anthropologists and thus become more like them. But they could also take a less iterative form. A young man could decide to become a nurse at a psychiatric institution because he believes that helping difficult people will transform himself into a better person, not because he wants to become more like the patients. But whether these agentive attachments are between humans and nonhuman objects, between humans and human products like songs or books or artworks, or between one human and another, all human agency takes place through attachments. To become detached is to erase agency. It is even possible to read the critiques of Latour presented by Martin in a Latourian vein. Martin seems to tell us that reading the works of Latour could make us less moral anthropologists than reading the theories of humanistic Marxists like Lukács. Thinking in “posthumanist” terms such an argument goes, makes us less likely to see the abuse of power by corporations, less likely to politically fight the greed of the 1%, less likely to join the movement to protect the downtrodden masses. It might even be worse than smoking too many cigarettes! Form your attachments carefully, the argument seems to say, for the ethical future of anthropology as a collective discipline and you as an individual anthropologist depends on it. And are these texts, by Latour or Lukács or Marx, human or nonhuman agents? Clearly it would be wrong to suggest that the effects of the texts are simply the responsibility of the authors themselves. Is Marx responsible for the crimes of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea? I think not. Neither is Marx or any other author reducible to his books. Nor would it be correct to say that the readers of texts accept the crimes of the authors. But even if readers do not accept the crimes of the authors they read, or the crimes that others have committed in the name of those books, is it fair to say that they simply impose their own will on the text? Again, I think not. We read to be moved. A text that simply reinforces what we already know, no matter how well written, bores us. Reading is the search for engagement, a give and take, the start of a dialogue that will change the way we think, alter our feelings, transform our outlook. In this sense the text, a hunk of disembodied discourse, like a musical [48]instrument, a hammer, or a song on the radio, is an agentive human artifact. Shaped by humans to be sure, but not human in itself. In their concerns with the ethical effects of reading and applying various forms of theory, the “humanist” arguments of Gregory, Graeber, and Martin also turn on the agency of nonhuman things. On agency and agencies While it is possible in the Latourian sense to ascribe agency to anything in the world, it is not necessary to say that all agencies are the same. Putting my own spin on Latour’s framework, I would begin with positing that the divisions in academia reflect the division of the world into types of agents. The physicists deal with ever smaller and smaller particles. The chemists deal with their chemical “agents.” The biologists with living creatures, the art historians with art works, and the anthropologists with humans in their “societies.” The goal of any form of research is to better understand the properties of a given form of agency so that humans in general, or, in this day of privatized research, a particular group of humans can better manipulate those agencies or profit from their manipulation. But it is only by working through the agencies of different things that humans accomplish anything. The differences between various categories of agents are no doubt up for debate, but laying out some usually accepted starting points allows for discussion. The ways in which physical particles interact with one another are complex and multiple, but at least since Newton (or perhaps Aristotle), we have known that there are no unmoved movers. The agency of one particle must be understood in relation to the agencies of others. With life another factor enters the equation. Life actively seeks to persist over time. Living beings that reproduce sexually exhibit different dynamics of agency from those that reproduce asexually. Beings that move have different limitations than those that are rooted. Beings that can directly utilize the energy of the sun differ from those that need to eat. Moving further toward the human, we might ask what distinguishes beings who are self-conscious, who can think themselves as separate from the worlds that they inhabit and thus consciously make choices about their course of action. Gordon Gallup (1979) famously operationalized self-consciousness by placing mirrors in front of various animals and studying their reactions. Only a few animals (chimpanzees but not monkeys, for example) demonstrated the capacity to recognize that the creature in the mirror was itself rather than another animal. From this fact he posited that a limited range of animals, including but not limited to humans, had self-consciousness. And finally, to demonstrate on my own humanism, I suggest that existing as a self-conscious animal in worlds that include complex symbolic systems which have evolved over millennia and which mediate communication among fellow species members gives a special twist to the dynamics of agency. This manner of categorizing agencies differs considerably from that put forth by Latour (2013) in his An inquiry into modes of existence. Strictly speaking, Latour does not categorize agentive beings but rather “modes of existence,” each of which has its own “felicity/infelicity conditions” and types of “beings to institute” (2013: 488–89). But he does place the type of agents I refer to—inanimate objects, plants and animals, human products like technologies, artworks and fiction, and human [49]institutions like law, religion, politics and science—into his categories of modes of existence, so some resemblance emerges. But the gaps between our schemes reveal differing attitudes toward human agency, and, perhaps, different degrees of “posthumanism.” Latour begins his categorization of modes of existence by pointing out that science and law have differing conceptions of truth—differing types of felicity and infelicity conditions—making them different modes of existence. Fair enough. But he then applies the notion of felicity and infelicity conditions to all possible modes of existence and the beings they involve. He portrays technologies, plants, animals, and mountains as having felicity and infelicity conditions. He acknowledges that some readers may object, but insists on proceeding with the extension of the meaning of “felicity and infelicity conditions” away from linguistic notions of truth and toward processes like the ability to reproduce over time. In my view, such an extension of what at base is a concept of truth results in forms of anthropomorphic fallacy typical of posthumanists who wish to flatten the differences between human and nonhuman agency. First such posthumanists deny the importance of what is typically considered unique about human agency—language and self-consciousness. Then they metaphorically extend concepts derived from the study of human language and consciousness to nonhuman agents in anthropomorphic language. Latour, for example, depicts how the “mode of technological beings . . . misunderstands” other modes of existence (2013: 215). Mute forms of life are said to “enunciate themselves (in the etymological sense)” (2013: 285). In Latour’s case, even the distinction between inanimate and animate beings is blurred as mountains are depicted as reproducing themselves in the same way as animals: “a mountain makes its way in order to maintain itself in existence” (2013: 88). Here I object again. In actively seeking to reproduce themselves, plants and animals exhibit a type of agency quite distinct from mountains. Mountains may persist over time but it is not because of their own active efforts. Latour generously invites other scholars to participate in his project by suggesting and arguing for additional modes of existence to add to his framework. But because of the centrality of “felicity/infelicity conditions” to his categorization, I would find it impossible to do so. Returning to my own categorization of agencies, I would admit that space must be made for revision in the ways in which I draw boundaries between various forms of agency. When chemists discovered that chemical reactions involved the reorganization of the orbital paths of electrons, then particle physics became relevant to chemistry. When socio-biologists insisted that the social lives of non-self-aware creatures demonstrate a biological basis for all social organization, social anthropologists became defensive. But the anthropologists were able to articulate forceful responses to the socio-biologists and the chemists have maintained enough specificity to the objects of their research to maintain a separate discipline. Consequently, though I will not argue that biologists will never discover greater commonality between humans and certain animals than is currently commonly acknowledged, I see no problem with maintaining a position that humans, like all species, have unique characteristics. I thus see anthropomorphic ascriptions of agency as a fallacy. This fallacy is not one of ascribing agency to things but one of ascribing a human form of agency to things. So when a surfer who wants to be one with the water asks the Ocean Gods to be kind to her, to protect her safety while [50]showing her the most exciting waves and the best ways to ride them, she gives the water a form of intentionality and capacity to make choices that we do not need to accept. When a scientist, frustrated with her complex experimental apparatus and months spent reading its output with no advancement in knowledge, yells out to her instruments, “Speak to me!” we can understand the entanglement of her agency without accepting that the experimental apparatus itself has the capacity for self-recognition and decision making. And when I sit at my computer with writer’s block and invoke the muses, begging them to let the words move through me, to arise in my head, flow through my hands to the keyboard and on to the screen, I do not really believe in the existence of a sentient being capable of such action. But I do acknowledge the complexity of my relationship to language, that the process of academic creation involves the interaction of reading and writing, involves listening to too many other voices to remember to find my own, involves emulating some, resisting others, and unconsciously echoing others still. In short, I think that the language speaks me as much as I speak it, and that our relationship should properly be described in a middle voice.1 To sum up, the position I take here is that many types of agency exist and that agencies emerge through entanglements and attachments—no agency exists as an isolate. But I still see human agency as distinct in some ways from the agencies of other things and creatures. The dilemmas of human agency bring us into the world of ethics and choice, which is the realm on which Gregory, Graeber, and Martin would like us to focus our disciplinary attention. Human agency and the ethical In a stellar essay on the relationships between ideas of agency and those of human ethical responsibility (an essay seemingly ignored throughout the special issue on knot-work), James Laidlaw (2010) contrasts ideas of agency arising from Bourdieuian practice theory with those from Latourian ANT. Practice theory led to a conception of “agency” as an abstract capacity held by particular individuals and opposed to the social “structures” that restrain those individuals. This conception places agency and structures in a zero sum game and implies that politically committed anthropologists should devote themselves to “enhancing” the agency of oppressed people so that they can be liberated from their oppressive structures. The agency that is to be enhanced is completely conscious and should arise solely from within a given individual. Such a concept of agency resonates well in a society where individuals are constantly asked to make choices. But such a concept of agency cannot explain how people become agents of a particular type. It ignores the necessity of agency arising through entanglements. As Laidlaw (2010) points out, oppressed agents who seem to voluntarily submit to their structures of oppression are particularly problematic for such a conception of agency. Thus when Saba Mahmood (2001) or Tanya Luhrmann (2015) discuss pious Muslim or Christian women who exercise their agency by actively submitting [51]to patriarchal religious institutions, they pose a challenge to the type of feminism that insists on a purely “humanist” view of agency. But such a humanism misses the point that to become an agent we must submit to something. Most readers of HAU have submitted to the discipline of anthropology. This submission has meant reading texts under the direction of certain established academics and having one’s writing criticized, corrected, and edited by these same academics. Even after receiving our doctorates, we face a lifetime of criticism and rejection. Our writing must be peer-reviewed and then edited by someone else. And the opportunity to be reviewed and criticized only occurs if we find a venue that does not reject us outright. The politically active among us must submit to a cause. Activists must tailor their voices to the needs of the movement. Protestors must shout their slogans in unison. Whose voice is more regulated than a professional politician who gains electoral success by staying “on message” and sticking to the party line? Power in democratic politics, or in any society where popular legitimacy matters, comes from numerical dominance and the only way to achieve this dominance is to speak in a voice that the majority appreciate. Does a politically active left wing anthropologist really exert or “have” more agency than a piously submissive evangelical Christian? At best we might say that modern humans exert agency by choosing what and whom to submit to in order to modify the shape of their own agency. Questions of ethics, of the morality of our choices, of the attribution of blame and responsibility for wrongdoing sidestep the question of how a particular type of human agent comes into being. As Laidlaw points out, other concerns arise when humans ascribe ethical blame or responsibility to a human or human-like actor in a wide range of societies. Following Bernard Williams (1985), Laidlaw identifies these concerns as cause, intention, state, and response. To be blamed for something an individual or group of individuals must be held to have caused a negative situation; their blame increases if this result was intended by the actor; their blame might be reduced if their state of mind was induced by an outside actor—a spirit who possessed them, a temporary madness that overtook them or perhaps drugs or alcohol; finally, the actor should have the capacity to make a response. An agent without the ability to pay compensation, or who lives outside the jurisdiction where the relevant authorities can capture him, is simply not worth pursuing. Of these concerns, state of mind comes the closest to the question of how a human comes to be a certain type of agent, that is, an agent with the proclivity to make certain types of choices over others. Lawyers in a court of law might be tempted to stretch the logic of a state of mind defense; even if a certain murderer did it, intended to do it, was sober at the time of murder, and was caught by the authorities that have jurisdiction, the lawyer might argue that the murderer’s actions were influenced by her genes, the family in which she grew up, or the abuse she suffered in school as a child. The range of potential causes for a human agent to be predisposed to make certain types of choices is enormous. Such arguments could draw upon social, psychological, biological, or even anthropological research. “Culture,” “Social Structure,” or “Habitus” all are possible anthropological conceptions for such an argument. In this sense, Latour’s or the posthumanist focus on nonhuman agency is hardly unique in the way in which it makes the attribution of agency difficult. Almost any serious form of social theory, not just the structural Marxists or the posthumanists, theorizes how certain people become agents of a certain type. [52]Here I find myself sympathetic to Michael Fischer’s (2014) reading of Latour, in which Latour is framed in relation to a series of other Western thinkers rather than seen, for better or worse, as a singular starting point, an unmoved mover, for a wide range of ideas about agency. But in the courtroom or in everyday life, there are limits to how far such arguments may be pushed. We may never know why the murderer has such violent tendencies, or why a fraudulent banker became so greedy, but we agree that such people need to be punished both to prevent them from committing further crimes and to discourage others from following in their path. In fact, one could argue that a serious Latourian attempt to understand the processes of subject formation through the interaction of mediators could increase the space for human ethical action. In so far as one did understand how certain inclinations came to be, one could make a choice to engage with mediators that increase inclinations for ethical action. But though such a project could attribute agency to a wide range of human and nonhuman entities, it would still need to distinguish between agents that make self-conscious choices and those that do not. ANT and political critique The relationship between any form of theory and political action is difficult to assess. The political activism of theorists themselves shows little pattern. Pierre Bourdieu’s depictions of humans as solely preoccupied with the pursuit of capital (of one form or another) did not prevent him from protesting loudly against neoliberalism. Michel Foucault’s “posthumanist” deconstruction of the subject did not impede his activism on behalf of prisoners and against racism. Bruno Latour’s ANT has not kept him from attacking climate change deniers. But the question of the political limitations of certain forms of theory exceeds that of the political inclinations of any particular theorist. While certain conceptions of ANT could make adequate theoretical room for critical anthropological efforts of the sort that Gregory and Graeber might support, Latour himself rarely moves in those directions. Moreover, careful ANT research by anyone raises difficult methodological issues for critically minded ethnographers. Consider an imaginary case of an ANT researcher investigating the activities of a selfish banker bent on greedily accumulating an even greater share of the earth’s resources than he already controls. Let us imagine that with the help of a team of accountants, lawyers, economists, and IT specialists, the banker comes to control a “derivative machine.” The machine can rapidly undertake complex stock transactions by manipulating many forms of economic data. It is electronically fed with latest information at speeds milliseconds quicker than is available elsewhere. The accountants have told the banker that they cannot guarantee how much profit the machine will make him, but more often than not, each time he sets it into motion, money will move out of other peoples’ brokerage accounts and into his. The economists are not sure of the long-term effects of using the machine, but warn him that using it too often increases the danger of worldwide economic collapse. The lawyers say they have managed to construct a state of legal ambiguity around the use of the machine but still suggest maintaining a [53]state of “plausible deniability” around his relationship to it. The banker informs none of these people of his precise intentions and hides the machine in his office’s private bathroom. Every day, claiming constipation, he spends hours in his bathroom, setting the machine into action on different settings and recording the rate at which his brokerage accounts grow. If the world economy crashes, he reasons, governments will have to intervene but the profits of using the machine go to him and him alone. Faced with such a subject, an ANT researcher would have many politically critical topics to consider. The Latourian black box of the machine needs to be opened up for understanding. What accounting categories does the machine manipulate? What trading formulas does it use? What legal definitions allow for ambiguity over the process of taking money out of one person’s account and putting into his? How is the machine wired and how does it interact with the technical systems of various banks and brokerage firms? Exactly how does the banker use the machine and what does he do with the data he derives from its use? Does his constant use of the machine and his careful recordings of data do anything to the banker’s own subjectivity? Does it make him even greedier than he was before? None of these questions are without a critical edge. But of course such a scenario would never occur. The most improbable part of it is not so much the existence of derivative machine itself, nor the existence of a banker ready to use it or a team of accountants, economists, lawyers, and IT specialists willing to help in its construction. Rather the most improbable part of this admittedly contrived scenario is the ability of our researcher to gain the research access necessary to answer her questions. She would never be allowed to see the machine or the bathroom, let alone observe the banker using it and recording his data. She would not be allowed to interview the accountants, lawyers, IT specialists, or economists, and if she did get a short interview with the banker, most of his answers to her questions would be lies. The methodological problem that ANT poses for politically critical research is not so much that it considers the agencies of nonhuman entities, or that in “posthumanist” fashion it considers agency to arise in networks rather than to reside in the individualized subjectivities of conscious human actors, but rather that it requires researchers to engage in slow, painstaking, and careful ethnographic research. Doing this research properly requires research subjects who are willing to both answer questions as truthfully as they can and to allow us to observe and possibly participate in their practice. While such research may be possible among surfers who want to become one with the water, or even among scientists manipulating complex experimental apparatuses, it is rarely possible among powerful economic and political actors bent on amassing even more money and power. Here I find much in common with Kim Fortun’s (2014) discussion of Latour and the importance of the silences and absences that emerge in ethnographic research.2 A focus on injustice [54]often requires pursuing what our research subjects do not want to show us or tell us, what is hidden in the ideology of their language, or what is latent in the situation that they accept as the ground for their decision making. Pursuing such issues may require relying on the work of historians, cultural studies analysts, investigative journalists, or medical researchers, or adopting their methods for our own ends. This political problem with ANT is thus the same as that of any ethnographic research. Ethnography works best with cooperative research subjects, and even when our subjects are cooperative, we must use other methods to explore the absences and silences in the narratives they tell us and the processes they show us. But the answer to this dilemma is not to abandon ethnography or ANT but rather to make these methods part but not all of the anthropological toolkit. Doing ANT or politically critical research are not either-or choices. In addition to ethnography, anthropologists can undertake the sort of research critical investigators undertake when they do not have the cooperation of their subjects. If many other disciplines now at least attempt or claim to do ethnography, why should we not avail ourselves of the full range of methods known to social researchers? It is also true that Latour does not often take interest in political economic inequality. To me this comes across most forcefully in An inquiry into modes of existence: An anthropology of the moderns (Latour 2013), rather than in his famous essay “Why has critique run out of steam?” (Latour 2004), which I read as simply a reiteration of his argument not to reduce the world to a few black box forces like power and capital, and thus to conduct painstaking ANT-style research rather than positing conspiracy. In contrast, the lack of discussion of Capital and Power in his seemingly encyclopedic “Anthropology of the Moderns” makes me cringe. How can capital not be one of the modes of existence for modern humans? Latour does carefully analyze economic calculation as a mode of moral thinking (2013: 443–74), and I have some sympathy with what he says there—who should get how much and why is indeed the most moral of problems. But the problem he ignores is how capital as an instituted agent compels us moderns to make these calculations in an exclusionary manner. When a CEO thinks “screw the workers, the consumers, and the people who live near my factory, my job as a CEO (with many stock options) is to maximize returns for the shareholders,” capital demonstrates its instituted agency. Or, to use a more homely case, when I shop for the best bargain at the supermarket, without considering the agricultural workers who produced the product or the ecological effects of its production, I am making my “moral calculations” purely for the benefit of my own nuclear family. Capital is an instituted agency that pressures us moderns to make our calculations selfishly. It is too important to ignore. Finally, I find Latour’s relative disinterest in human power relations mirrored in his lack of attention to the concept of power. If I were rewriting his conceptual framework, I would substitute “power” for “felicity/infelicity conditions” as the primary dimension for differentiating types of agents. Power is both a quantitative and qualitative concept. Consider the difference between a lion bounding at you across the savannah and a kitten bounding at you across the living room carpet. [55]The former is no doubt more powerful than the latter, but its power is also of a different type. The lion’s power derives from its size, strength, and desire to eat you. The kitten derives its power from its ability to entice you to care for it, to form an emotional attachment to it. Power takes many forms, but its relative quantity always matters. Conclusion Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism is well known. Under the spell of capitalism, people mistake ownership as a matter of a relationship between a person and a thing (a relationship between an owner and the thing owned) rather a matter of a relationship between people (a relationship between those who do and do not have the right to use the thing in question). Capitalists can even purposefully depict ownership as a relationship between a person and a thing to silence discussion of the relationship between classes. Gregory (2014) invokes this critique to imply that ANT threatens us with same form of misrecognition. But I think that Gregory’s invocation unnecessarily slips us into an either-or type of thinking. I own a car. Undoubtedly this ownership grants me a form of privilege envied by some who would like to own a car but cannot afford it. My teenaged son certainly thought this way whenever he requested to use the car but I refused. But the car also affects me directly. Perhaps I walk less often because of the car and have become less healthy. Perhaps I hit a kangaroo with my car and feel sickened by the experience. Perhaps I visit my aged mother more often because of it. Perhaps some of you do not begrudge me my stinking, little car, but do resent the fact that my driving it further pollutes the air that we all have to breathe. In all of these examples, the relationships among (and the agency of) people and things are thoroughly intermixed. Marx rightly criticized those who insisted that the relationship of a person to a thing did not involve other people. But we are not required to take the opposite position and ignore the intertwining and imbrication of people and things. Like Michael Herzfeld (2015: 19), I “would prefer to avoid the rather arid debate about whether objects have agency.” I have three propositions to prevent such an arid debate from tying us down. First, I suggest granting agency to everything (which is to acknowledge that anything and everything could affect us), but differentiating types of agency. The types of agency we get with life and self-consciousness are particularly worth differentiating and highlighting. Self-consciousness raises the problems of ethics and choice, and our own ethical concerns require us to consider the effects of our agency on other humans above all. Second, I suggest acknowledging that Newton’s law of no unmoved movers applies to human agency as much as it does to objects moving through space. This rather modest position, like Latour’s call for a middle voice, or Marx’s famous quote that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past” (cited in Tucker 1978: 595), is hardly a form of antior posthumanism. Every form of social theory between the extremes of volunteerism and determinism attempts to voice such a compromise. Nor does such a position render ethics impossible. We [56]can advocate an ethics of nonviolence or equality, and even argue that murderers or fraudulent bankers should be punished, without denying that something outside of the murderer may have caused him to be so violent or that something outside of the banker may have made her so greedy. Finally I would like to suggest that we differentiate agency from power in general and human agency from human power in particular. Certainly I can empathize with the political stance of those who hope to “enhance the agency” of relatively powerless people. But I prefer the language of “empowering” them for analytic precision. I see human agency as that contradictory space we experience whenever we attempt to make a decision about the unknown. If I really knew what the outcomes of a particular decision would be—should I read this book or that book, should I pursue this research project or that one—then I wouldn’t have a choice to make. The best path would be obvious to me and my actions would be dictated by that path. The criteria of what I considered to be best would have been dictated by the “circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” It is only when I don’t know what to do—when I have to flip a coin or go with my gut instinct— that I can say that I am making a choice. It is this feeling of needing to make a decision in the face of unknown consequences that makes me aware of my human agency. Such a feeling or a dilemma is not the same as power. It is not something that one can have more of or less of. Barack Obama or Bill Gates undoubtedly have more power than I do. They get to follow their proclivities or gut instincts across a wider range of contexts than I do and their decisions certainly affect a greater number of people than mine. But this power does not give them more agency than me. Though their gut instincts are more powerful than mine, their relationships to their guts are not “larger” than mine. And if the latest medical research is to be believed, then this relationship may literally be mediated by the bacteria in our guts to a greater extent than any of us previously imagined (see Smith 2015)! References American Anthropological Association. 2013. “Program: 112th Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois.” Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association. Berreby, David. 1994. “And now, overcoming all binary oppositions, it’s that damned elusive Bruno Latour.” Linguafranca 6 (4): 1. Cowan, Jane K. 2014. “Struggling over procedures and other interventions: A comment on David Graeber’s ’Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class.’” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 89–97. Fischer, Michael M. J. 2014. “The lightness of existence and the origami of French Anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux and their so called ontological turn.” HAU: Journal of Anthropological Theory 4 (1): 331–55. Fortun, Kim. 2014. “From Latour to late industrialism.” HAU: Journal of Anthropological Theory 4 (1): 309–29. Gallup, Gordon G. Jr. 1979. “Self-awareness in primates.” American Scientist 67: 417–21. [57]Graeber, David. 2014. “Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 73–88. Gregory, Chris. 2014. “On religiosity and commercial life: Toward a critique of cultural economy and posthumanist value theory.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 45–68. Herzfeld, Michael. 2015. “Anthropology and the inchoate intimacies of power.” American Ethnologist 42 (1): 18–32. Kipnis, Andrew B. (Forthcoming) 2016. From village to city: Social transformation in a Chinese county seat. Berkeley: University of California Press. Laidlaw, James. 2010. “Agency and responsibility: Perhaps you can have too much of a good thing.” In Ordinary ethics: Anthropology, language and action, edited by Michael Lambeck, 143–64. New York: Fordham University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1988. The pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1993. We have never been modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ———. 2004. “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern.” Critical Inquiry 30: 225–48. ———. 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. On the modern cult of the factish gods. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2013. An inquiry into modes of existence: An anthropology of the moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Los Angeles: Sage. Luhrmann, Tanya M. 2015. “The appeal of Christian piety.” New York Times, July 4, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/opinion/sunday/t-m-luhrmann-the-appeal-ofchristian-piety.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. “Feminist theory, embodiment, and the docile agent: Some reflections on the Egyptian Islamic revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2): 202–36. Martin, Kier. 2014. “Afterword: Knot-work not networks, or, anti-anti-fetishism and the ANTipolitics Machine.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 99–115. Smith, Peter Andrey. 2015. “Gut feelings: Can the bacteria in your gut explain your mood?” New York Time Magazine, June 28, 2015. MM46. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/can-the-bacteria-in-your-gut-explainyour-mood.html. Tucker, Robert C., ed. 1978. The Marx-Engels reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the limits of philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. L’agency, entre humanisme et posthumanisme: Latour et ses détracteurs Résumé : Deux articles de la section dédiée par Hau aux nœuds (Hau 2014, volume 4, numéro 3) s’en prennent au « posthumanisme » de la théorie de l’acteur réseau (ANT) de Bruno Latour. En arguant que la conception de l’agentivité (agency) de Latour sape les attitudes critiques vis à vis du capitalisme, ils laissent le chercheur devant un choix manichéen entre l’adhésion ou le rejet des travaux de Bruno Latour. Dans cet article, j’ébauche une position alternative face au concept d’agentivité non-humaine et à l’œuvre de Latour – une position critique mais bien moins polémique. Si je propose une position intermédiaire dans l’optique de fonder une théorisation de l’agentivité, je conclus que ce n’est pas la théorisation de l’acteurréseau qui entrave les ethnographes critiques du capitalisme mais bien plutôt ses modes d’application, en particulier ceux qui dérivent de l’insistance de l’ANT sur la recherche ethnographique assidue. Andrew B. KIPNIS is a Professor of Anthropology in the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, at The Australian National University. Two of his books include China and postsocialist anthropology: Theorizing power and society after Communism (2008, Eastbridge) and From village to city: Social transformation in a Chinese county seat (2016, University of California Press). From 2006–2015, he was editor of The China Journal. Andrew B. KipnisDepartment of AnthropologySchool of Culture, History & LanguageThe Australian National UniversityActon ACT 2601Australiaandrew.kipnis@anu.edu.au ___________________ 1. Perhaps because of his desire to flatten the distance between human and nonhuman agencies, Latour does not designate language as a category of his modes of existence. 2. Also, like Fortun (2014), the category of “modernity” for me means much more than the separation of science from politics (as in Latour [1993]), or the emergence of certain forms of argument about agency and the iconoclastic rejection of fetishism (as in Latour [2004, 2010, 2013]), but involves the rapid acceleration of processes like industrialization and urbanization. Such a concept of modernity, however, does not require rejecting Latour’s arguments about the intertwining of science and politics or those about iconoclasm. For detail on how I grapple with the category of modernity in my own research see Kipnis (forthcoming).  

The art of conviviality This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Andrew Brandel. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.020 SPECIAL SECTION The art of conviviality Andrew BRANDEL, Institute for Human Sciences This essay proposes a conception of anthropology as a romantic science concerned with what Lévi-Strauss called a posteriori logics. I shift our attention from disagreements in conceptual knowledge to conditions of possible experience—that is, to the grounds of the emergence of concepts in life together, com vivere. Such conviviality, I suggest, offers to us another way to understand the work of ethnography as a sensibility through which we place our own logics at risk. This picture of anthropological thought, moreover, demands that we reimagine the contours of the history of the field, remaining open to what might count as or for anthropology. Keywords: History of anthropology, Lévi-Strauss, Novalis, romanticism, aesthetics To be one with all that lives! With these words virtue removes itswrathful armor, the spirit of man lays its scepter aside and allthoughts vanish before the image of the world’s eternal unity, just asthe rules of the struggling artist vanish before his Urania. —Hölderlin Thus Hyperion writes to Bellarmin, lamenting both his exile and his schooling, the pursuit of knowledge having left him a stranger before nature. “Oh, man is . . . a beggar when he thinks.” When Bellarmin asks his friend to recall his youth, Hyperion replies, “When I was still a serene child, and knew nothing of all that surrounds us, was I not then more than I am, after all . . . the reflection and struggle?” But as much as Hyperior’s words and Grecian hermitage capture a theoretical longing for an ancient and natural order of things, Hölderlin’s protagonist is never so far at remove from the trappings of human life among others, open to contestation within various registers of intimacy, as itself an engine of thought. His is a love affair, not with solitude but with underlying agreements. A string of passionate encounters ensues, what Paul de Man calls “a series of initiations”; first as a student, then a friend, and later a lover. In the first instance, he meets the knowledge of his day and rapidly rises above it. In a second, with Alabanda but also Bellarmin, we find the [324]force of friendship: “it is the specific mood of innocent man to be a ‘friend’ of nature . . . in a powerfully spontaneous way. In a friendship between men this feeling prevails in its purest form. Friendship is unity, and beyond that, it is conversation (Gespräch) within the sphere of unity, the worldly equivalence of the conversation between the gods and the child that was at the beginning of things” (de Man 1956: 32–33). In love, he writes, we reach the experience of this unity. In the figure of Hyperion’s initiations, we encounter an imagination of what it means to live and to think together, across multiple registers. It is a description at once familiar to the anthropologist, of thought grounded in conviviality, in life lived with others with whom we share an intimacy that allows our forms of thought, the very conditions of our experience of the world, to be challenged. Life with those who offer not only competing answers to our questions but also competing questions.1 If, as Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested, anthropology consists in the pursuit of a posteriori logics, I understand ethnography to be the sensibility through which we arrive at their shore, in the ways we live with others, in human bodies, in spirits, or in their words. Dialectically we produce knowledge, gather up of descriptions of states of affairs, kinship terms, modes of production and consumption, superstitions, rituals—concepts are produced and contested. But by means of this knowledge, our world and the logics that order it are transformed; we arrive we hope, he says, at some measure of wisdom. It strikes at the very heart of the transformations in Lévi-Strauss’ own thinking, as he lived among the structures of Murngin kinship and Kariera totems, with Bororo myths and Swaihwe masks. We encounter others, as Heidegger taught us, not only in their immediate presence to us but also in our involvement in a world we share, in which we live with, com vivere, the products of their collective (un)consciousness, their words, or their art. Life after all is not lived in the company of embodied humans alone but also among texts. We risk ourselves in engaging, moreover, not only new ideas but also new forms of thought. Lévi-Strauss calls this the condition of the anthropologist (see also Brandel 2015) a vocational narrative often chided as heroic but that, upon deeper inspection, reflects the fragility of the ethnographer who stands to learn from the world and not just about it, and who, in so doing, has sacrificed not only the surety of her own convictions, even their very foundations. It is a way of thinking and living ever struggling to find a footing in the world, ever on the move. “Ethnographic experience,” Lévi-Strauss once said, “is an experimental form of research on something which escapes you” ([1991] 1998: 168). This essay is an attempt to consider the epistemic and existential stakes of this picture of anthropological thought by tracing its expression in the development of Lévi-Strauss’ oeuvre, and in the conviviality (Geselligkeit) of the early German [325]romantics (Frühromantiker), gathered together in drawing rooms of Jena two centuries ago. This collective of writers and philosophers, translators, and naturalists, collaboratively authored an alternative reception of the Copernican Revolution, drew foreign philosophical thought and artistic forms into the German tradition at a time when Hegel dismissed the world, and brought scientific and poetic experimentation together to the betterment of both. I draw them together here through their respective attempts to affirm a Kantian legacy, while demanding it be made to reconcile with the force of the world in which we live among others, to transform even the grounds of subjective experience. Through a conception of anthropology as a romantic science, we arrive at a notion of conviviality, which, on the basis of knowledge, makes possible a more existential transformation of the conditions of that knowledge. Rather than trace a genealogy of inheritances and resistances through Rousseau or Hegel, however, I engage them in the register of a romantic ethnography, as those among whom I myself live. If ethnography invites instruction from the world, such conviviality also transforms our thanking about anthropology, much as Victor Turner learned from Muchona the Hornet, or Sidney Mintz from Don Taso. In this way, we do not know beforehand what counts as or for anthropology. And if anthropological thought is thus fragmentary, ever striving, constantly upended by life, then we must rethink the ways we tell the stories of our discipline and approach that history likewise in an ethnographic mode—not through an account of the lives of others but by living with them and allowing them to mark us. In recent years, Alain Caillé (2009, 2000; Adloff 2016) has turned sociological theory toward the language of conviviality as an ideal expression of a social organization built upon the Maussian gift; that is, on exchange that is simultaneously self-interested and altruistic, dutiful, and spontaneous. From city streets, it has been evoked as “radical” formulation invoking difference with an encompassing ethical horizon and without falling into communitarianism, or the insidious politics of integration and multiculturalism once popular in European discourses (Valluvan 2016). Anthropology, on the other hand, has been drawn to local conceptions and practices of conviviality, ranging from the “amelioration” of difference as a response to ubiquitous state violence in Johannesburg (Vigneswaran 2014), to the fragility of negotiation and translation in the register of everyday life of neighborhoods in Catalonia and Casmance (Heil 2014), and in the Amazon as an “aesthetics of community” encompassing and exceeding European categories opposition, an unfolding play between constructive and destructive forces (Overing and Passes 2000). One finds in these accounts echoes of classical anthropological definitions of hospitality, from Lewis Henry Morgan’s ([1881] 2003) “communistic living” and Marcel Mauss’ (1923) preconditions of the receipt of the gift. By the same token, efforts to transform the trope of hospitality through a recuperation of Augustus Pitt-Rivers’ figure of the stranger has revealed how rather than merely holding the threat of otherness in abeyance, such spaces are also essentially transformative (Candea and da Col 2012). Yet as Lévi-Strauss’ critique of Mauss reveals, there is another register that makes the hospitality to the thought of others possible but that is also restructured in light of that encounter. It is into this space that I think reading Lévi-Strauss alongside [326]romanticism becomes especially productive.2 Together, I will argue, they allow us to trouble our assumptions about who is the subject of anthropological thought, through the language of art. The Jena circle inaugurated a call for an intellectual and spiritual collaboration not merely as joyous agreement, nor as an overcoming of difference (or otherwise spectacularly transcending the distance to the mind and world of the other) but as a waiting in moments of resistance. This was the project of Sympoesie and Symphilosophie, a motif for a “new epoch of science and art,” defined by the “merger” of individuals (Individuen zu verschmelzen), and the generation of “fantastic combinations.” It is borne from an intimacy that can bear disagreement, and works not only at the level of conceptual difference but on the conditions of our experience. Conviviality, then, as resource for the poetic remaking of the world. This poetics gives us a way of critically waiting in such tension, neither resolving nor abandoning, an insistence on the merging life—and therefore the sciences that examine it—with art. The skillful means of a poetic disposition For Lévi-Strauss the relationship between anthropological knowledge and wisdom rests on the specialness of our object of inquiry. It is not just possible but essential, he writes, to “postulate that, when we uncover a deep structure, there will be an even deeper, and yet another deeper after that” (Lévi-Strauss 2014). My thinking about the nature of such wisdom begins with Lévi-Strauss’ reply to Paul Ricoeur’s (1963) charge of structuralism’s latent Kantianism. If the pursuit of social structure takes as its guide the “constraining structure of the human mind,” then structuralism proceeds in what Lévi-Strauss himself calls the “manner of Kantian philosophy.” Yet, “unlike the philosopher,” the anthropologist does not begin from the constraints of his own thought, 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” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 10). The anthropologist is attuned to “empirically collective forms of understanding, whose properties have been solidified . . . in countless concrete representational systems.” (1969: 11) The [327]transcendental philosopher examines the conditions of possibility of experience in general beginning from her own. It is this argument with which Ricoeur takes issue, calling structuralism “Kantianism without a transcendental subject”—a label Lévi-Strauss is happy to accept. It is “an inevitable consequence, on the philosophical level, of the ethnographic approach [he has] chosen; [his] ambition being to discover the conditions in which systems of truths become mutually convertible and therefore simultaneously acceptable to several different subjects, the pattern of those conditions takes on the character of an autonomous object, independent of any subject” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 11). Thus when he speaks elsewhere of “a posteriori necessity” in relation to the possibility of a logic (say, of totemic classification) the grounds of which are utterly contingent, he notes an apparent paradox of using a language that connotes, as philosophy likes to say, a truth everywhere and in every case, to connect terms themselves not intended to fulfill this function. Lévi-Strauss provides two resolutions: 1) a posteriori logics only appear impossible with regard to history and not within the coherence of the system wherein they are manifest and 2) neither the images of myth nor the material of the bricoleur are “products of ‘becoming’” but rather “condensed expressions of necessary relations which impose constraints with various repercussions at each stage of their employment” (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 36). For Lévi-Strauss, anthropology pursues how “systems of truths,” collective forms of understanding, become “acceptable” to multiple subjects. “Time” and “space” as concepts within systems of representations (not as pure judgments, a distinction that eludes Durkheim’s use of the language of categories of the understanding) do not bear the burden of transcendental correspondence to particular objects—between Kant and Hume, they are subject to deductions that are at once empirical and necessary. The anthropologist does not start from a transcendental subject because her inquiry begins between them, in their mutual participation in a conceptual network, under a posteriori conditions that are nevertheless determinate of the possibilities for empirical concepts. He says, by way of critique of Rousseau’s political philosophy (and his reasons for moving away from it), that the Social Contract similarly posits a “direct relationship between individual and collectivity . . . for me, it is these intermediaries (between the two) that gives social life its flesh and blood” ([1991] 1998: 169). The difference highlights a point Lévi-Strauss makes elsewhere, regarding the depth wherein structure resides. It is worth recalling that in Structural anthropology, he returns to Franz Boas’ distinction between the unconscious and the conscious precisely to reveal this shortcoming of Durkheim’s and Mauss’ sociological method in beginning from the “native categories of thought.” Important as conscious models of systems of representation may be, they are “just as remote from the unconscious reality as any other” (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 245–46). Ino Rossi (1973) has argued that for Lévi-Strauss, anthropology borrowed from Kant an investment in the structure of experience, but from Mauss a conviction that social and mental substrates thereof were likewise sites of conditions of possible experience. Lévi-Strauss’ view, then, is that we proceed in a Kantian spirit, insofar as he is likewise in pursuit of logics, only empirical ones (a variation perhaps of what Kant called general but applied logic) rather than pure elementary logic. Kant ([1787] 1901: B78) [328]distinguishes general from particular uses of the understanding, the first containing the absolutely necessary rules of thought and the second constituted by rules for thinking about this or that object, hence as the organon of particular sciences. Within general logic, pure logic pertains to a priori principles and thus makes up the canon of the understanding and reason, while applied logic is “merely a cathartic of common understanding.” Anthropology becomes a necessary partner to philosophy in the elaboration of human knowledge—a view that Kant himself might, if in some other fashion, endorse—as the science of a posteriori necessities within empirical systems of truths. We then understand Lévi-Strauss’ critiques of Sartre’s claim of a de jure or absolute difference between dialectical and analytic reason, and its replacement with a conception of the dialectic in addition, as the “necessary condition for (analytical reason) to venture to undertake the resolution of the human into the non-human” (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 246). The difference between the two is relative; dialectical reason is constitutive insofar as it is the “bridge” that analytical reason “throws out over the abyss,” and as such is the gesture by which analytic reason reforms itself in the face of the social world. The progress of ethnographic analysis is not (as in Rousseau) with the dissolution of differences between systems but with the “reintegration of culture in nature” (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 247). The distinction of an order of inquiry then marks out anthropology as the “principle of research” to this end, precisely because philosophical inquiry makes one a “prisoner of his own Cogito.” Sartre’s “socializing” of the Cogito, “merely exchanges one prison for another” (Lévi-Strauss 1967). Or put another way, Sartre’s move trades in the possibility of a science of man for a science of men. It is for this reason that Lévi-Strauss elsewhere calls Rousseau of the Discourse the founder of the human sciences (and specifically ethnology), and not, say, Descartes, for we are liberated from the prison of the egoism by our methodology, and our radical risking of ourselves qua the other (Lévi-Strauss 1976: 34). Rather than invert a hierarchy established by Sartre regarding two different ways to approach the world (through their contradictory temporalities), Lévi-Strauss puts them on equal footing. On Lévi-Strauss’ reading of Sartre, dialectical reason is at risk of being “carried away by its own elan”; but even more, we must avoid too that “the procedure leading to the comprehension of an other reality attribute to it, in addition to its own dialectical features, those appertaining to the procedure rather than to the object.” Thus, not “all knowledge of others is dialectical.” Sartre’s mistake is in thinking of our knowledge of the other as standing in dialectical relation to their thought. Lévi-Strauss claims Sartre’s language of a progress-regressive method thereby for anthropology, but doubles it. First we observe, we analyze our data, we put these ethnographic observations into the context of whatsoever historical antecedents can be unearthed. But a second move is required on another plane, one in which analytical reason tries to ford the distance (determined in the first) to the “ever unforeseen complexity of this new object and the intellectual means at its disposal” (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 253). The new totality that is formed is then met with others, and little by little we accumulate mass, like the dualities of Caduveo body painting. At every step, such a procedure requires moreover that reason double back, to recall the totality that is both means and ends of the operation. In this way, analytical reason is said to account for dialectical, where the latter can account for neither itself nor its counterpart; dialectical reason then at end is [329]“only a reconstruction, by . . . analytical reason, of hypothetical moves about which it is impossible to know.” That is to say, dialectics involve a reconstruction of the history of consciousness, which, in Lévi-Strauss’ view, need not in reality contain the “truest” kernel of the matter, since superstructures do not progress and improve teleologically but rather reflect transformations of socially successful elements in the face of historical events. Art: Or, how we come to a posteriori necessity If we understand our object in terms of a posteriori necessities, taking them seriously cannot be limited to encountering them at a distance as intellectual objects but must instead find a way to ford the distance between the conditions of my experience and theirs. At the same time, we must avoid naïve notions of cultural relativism gone awry, the solipsism of “going native.” As Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Jackson, and Bhrigupati Singh (2014) have shown through attention to the place of the Churinga in his thought, for Lévi-Strauss scientific and mythological patterns are mediated in the artistic mode. But this is not to suggest any expression is a pure form of one or the other pattern of thought; rather Lévi-Strauss’ conceptual figurations stand in dynamical and internal relation to one another, not as pure forms expressed by individuals. If myths are transformed through bricolage with a set of elements, the same set might be worked on simultaneously through poetic construction—but without recognizing the dynamism of these exchanges, we misrecognize the authorship, say of Oedipus or Antigone, or even Mythologiques, and ascribe to it a false character. While relatively few commentaries exist on the relevance of art to Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology, those that have recently emerged have begun to reshape contemporary appreciation of the structural legacy, especially in relation to the artistic nature of anthropological thought itself. Boris Wiseman’s (2007) account of Mythologiques both as a treatise concerning aesthetic problems (especially creation) and as itself such a creation, as a “mytho-poem,” is exemplary of such a move. He reads Lévi-Strauss’ “scientificity” as marked likewise by an “aesthetic,” insofar as they “make manifest the hidden connections that link myths into a single whole and bring to light . . . necessity”3 (196). Claude Imbert (2009) takes another route, through Lévi-Strauss’ varied attempts at addressing a fundamental set of questions to a problem of anthropological knowledge: one related to the nature of structure, another to his fieldwork in the Mato Grosso, and a third to his inheritances of certain achievements of the Maussian-Durkheimian legacy. The ultimate “anthropological fact” of the peculiar weave of ethnological data and “anthropological configuration” revolves around the quest for the symbolic mediations of the subject and object, not “[propositionally] frozen in transcendentalism” but as a continuous flux between two points. This line of inquiry calls for artistic activity, as the meditational spur that allows us entry not only into the questions posed by fieldwork but also by those of the modern world. Thus, anthropology’s “scientific interest” moves away from the limiting demands for “concreteness” and “immediacy” and “towards the [330]production of intelligibility as an essential part of exchange and social life. The ethnographer turned anthropologist was summoned to detect an ongoing process of rationality, and its concomitant differentiation in contemporary times” (Imbert 2009: 136). I want to draw out this figuration of Lévi-Strauss’ work as evidence of a “philosophical mind” having become aware of its own suppleness vis-à-vis the world, and explore how we might think of such an “opening” of the mind as a scientific project. Already at the Departure of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss draws the return from the field into the writing of ethnography, to publication, to the “scrap(ing) clean of all this fungus.” By the time we receive the Apotheosis of Augustus, on our way back to France, we find the anthropological hero drenched in the micro-organismic debris of life with others. “The investigator eats his heart out in the exercise of his profession.” When the situation in the field deteriorates utterly, it becomes a “time, above all, of self-interrogation. . . . What is, in point of fact, an anthropological investigation?” He offers some preliminary suggestions. “Does it follow upon some . . . radical decision—one that calls in question the system within which one was born and has come to manhood” (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 374)? He finds in the desolation of his supremely immediate situation, his mind wandering back home before him on the tune of Chopin’s Etudes, op. 10. Hence Lévi-Strauss’ own surprising inversion—that one might shatter his or her ties to home only to find its true impression in a supposed radically other world. But we leave the detour of a play the anthropologist scribbled on paper in the western Mato Grosso to find we still have no answer to the “contradiction implicit in the circumstances of (the anthropologist’s) choice.” It was meant, he tells us, only to attest to the “disorder” of his mind in that moment of self-examination. Lévi-Strauss’ suggestion is that behind even the conformist anthropologist, some feeling of the inadequacy of, or detachment from, the home seems to prod him along “already . . . ‘half-way to meet’ societies unlike his own.” We move from objectivity at first “out of the question” in our society, where we from the start are implicated, to bringing another “under scrutiny” and in so doing “all is changed.” What had been “present to us as a moral dilemma, can now be a pretext for aesthetic contemplation” (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 382–83). This detachment from transformations ongoing in our society leads to a startling discovery, “that certain civilizations . . . have known quite well how to best solve problems with which we are still struggling.”4 The dissatisfaction at home with a problem sets us out already on our journey to find another teacher, one who may well have had the best answer even centuries ago. Very subtly we have to come to a relativism that is nevertheless open to critique—in this way, it escapes both the erasure of meaningfulness and of authoritarian unthinking (the twin threats of skepticism-cum-solipsism and dogmatism). Eclecticism tempered with the capacity nevertheless for exclusion; epistemic pluralism that submits itself still to a principle of adjudication. Criticism, though never perfect, is ever bettered as the “field of investigation” grows. It is asymptotic and “truth” marks the zero incline. He asks, [331]“What, after all, have I learnt from the masters I have listened to, the philosophers I have read, the societies I have investigated, and that very Science in which the West takes such a pride? Simply a fragmentary lesson or two which, if laid end to end would reconstitute the meditations of the Sage at the foot of his tree” (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 294). The contradiction between critic and conformist, analysis of and enmeshment within conditions of experience, is also dissolved in the last moment, as we recognize there is there no conflict—it is their isolation that produces the appearance of distinction. It is a condition proper to “humanity as a whole and bears within itself the reason for its existence . . . or what is the use of action, if the thinking which guides that action leads to the discovery of the meaningless” (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 396). This resolution cannot be thought but must rather be felt. If there are many stages, “as in the Boddhi tree” or the system of philosophy, “they exist as a single whole,” and if we are to reach shore thereupon, “I shall be called upon continually to live through situations, each of which demands something of me, I owe myself to mankind, just as much as to knowledge. . . . Like the pebble which marks the surface of the wave with circles as it passes through it, I must throw myself into the water if I am to plumb the depths” (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 396). Allow me to juxtapose the pictures of the world and thought Lévi-Strauss offers in the first volume of Mythologiques with the one he borrows from Boas in The Savage Mind: first, “myths signify the mind that evolves them by making use of the world of which it is itself a part” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 341), and second, “it would seem that mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shattered again, and that the new worlds were built from the fragments,” which he amends to recognize the “continual reconstruction from the same materials” of thought, such that “the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa.”5 Where—the question seems to beg itself—might anthropological thought fall? Though the bricoleur works with those “messages” that have been disclosed in advanced, the scientist, “whether he is an engineer or a physicist” is always in pursuit of “that other message” (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 20). Lévi-Strauss writes in the Overture to The raw and the cooked, that such an ethnological study aims to “show how empirical categories . . . which can only be accurately defined by ethnographic observation and, in each instance, by adopting the standpoint of a particular culture—can nonetheless be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them in the form of propositions” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 1). And then at the very end, when having rehearsed the outcome of his mythographic study of the given dialectic, we are confronted with a problem of structural method; “for if the myths of a particular society admit of every kind of combination, the set as a whole becomes a nonredundant language; since all combinations are equally meaningful . . . in this case mythography would be reduced to a form of lallorhea” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 333). Thankfully, this is the not case, if we follow three methodological rules. First, various iterations of a myth are “not all situated on the same level of mythological thought”; second, the capacity to fix the variables and their “relative degree of complex” means that versions can be arranged in a “logical order”; and finally, each iteration provides an “image of reality” such that, in our critical position, we are “able to replace the relation orders [332]we have already obtained by an absolute order” in terms of their ordinal degree of transformation from the “directly observed reality” (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 333–34). The multiplicity of levels appears then as the price that mythic thought has to pay in order to move from the continuous to the discrete. It has to simplify and organize the diversity of empirical experience in accordance with the principle that no factor of diversity can be allowed to operate for its own purposes in the collective undertaking of signification, but only as the habitual or occasional substitute for the other elements included in the same set. Mythic thought only accepts nature on condition that it is able to reproduce it. (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 341) “Art,” he writes, “lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought” (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 22). The art-product, Kant’s work of genius,6 is both an “object of knowledge” and a “material object.” And if the scientist and the bricoleur represent inverse relations to the manifold of structure and event, ends and means, the artist seems to do both at once—“the painter is always mid-way between design and anecdote, and his genius consists in uniting internal and external knowledge, a ‘being’ and a ‘becoming,’ in producing with his brush an object which does not exist as such and which he is nevertheless able to create” (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 25). The artist’s creation is both a “material” object and an “object of knowledge.” If the scientist changes the world (effects events) by means of structures, and the bricoleur by means of events fashion structure, the artist works with a set of objects and events it then unifies “by revealing a common structure (26). Art thereby integrates structure and event, and attempts to communicate by means of it with either the model, the material, or the user (or future user). In this way, as to the relation to the object (or the product of the creative activity, more precisely) and the event, mythological thought and artistic production are likewise inverted. The balance that is struck in any case by these various arrangements, Lévi-Strauss warns, is easily tipped over. § The problem of the subject recurs, then, in relation to its capacity to remake the world through art. If we trace a genealogy from Lévi-Strauss to Jung to the romantic philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, we find the subject displaced however in art’s counterpart in mythology (Bowie 2003). Schelling regards ideas in the realm of mythology as the products of a “natural consciousness . . . left to its own devices,” distinct from the free action of the subject. Schelling’s compatriot A. W. Schlegel, is likewise interested not in the intentional activity of the subject but “the surrender to the other,” a return to another way of inhabiting the world. As we reach out to [333]touch reality, we find ourselves ever confronted by antimonies of reason, and so as we recognize the inadequacy of our thought to the world, Lévi-Strauss once said, we might begin to doubt even thought itself, and by extension ourselves. Nevertheless, guided by “several thousand years’ experience,” we are convinced of a middle ground, and “this is the level of scientific understanding, intellectual activity, and artistic creation” ([1991] 1998: 162). It is this sensibility in Lévi-Strauss that I am proposing romanticism helps us to clarify. Schlegel’s notebooks of 1797–98 provide an analytical frame for the group at Jena: “The Romantic imperative calls for the mixing of all poetries. All Nature and Science should become Art. Art should become Nature and Science. Imperative: Poesy should be moral, and Morality should be poetic.” Not art to the exception of science but inclusive of it; the surrender to the world that includes me, and its acknowledgment as a creative process. The collective writes in Athenäumsfragment §116: [Romantic Poetry’s] aspiration is not merely to reunite all the distinct species of poetry once more. . . . It desires that poetry and prose, genius and criticism, poetry of art and natural poetry, mingle and fuse in a lively and sociable poetry, one that makes life and society poetic, that poeticizes wit and fills the forms of art with everything good, with the vibrations of humor . . . the midpoint between the represented and the representer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, it can multiply it in a perpetual series of mirrors. . . . Romantic poetry is in the arts what wit is in philosophy, and what society and sociability, friendship and love are in life . . . [it] should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its ideal. Though literature is perhaps its primary form, it is not exclusively so. Romantische Poesie is meant instead to signify a much broader field of creative activity. Gathering up eclectic sources and forms, it a poetics defined only by the most abstract qualities—fantasy, mimesis, and sentimentality. By the time of the 1800 Gespräch über die Poesie, “the poetic” came to be associated “with the creative power in human beings, and indeed with the productive principle in nature itself” (Beiser 2003: 15). “Poetry, taken in the widest sense is the power to create the beautiful and to present it,” simultaneously the “immediate production or creation of something real . . . invention in and for itself” and in a metaphysical sense as the creative act of genius that “reveals the divine within himself by making the universal and ideal something particular and real.”7 The youthful Novalis, perhaps the most radical of the group, imagined poesy as a free employment of the faculties, inspired by Goethe’s picture of organic growth. Drawn to the natural sciences, to mineralogy and chemistry, as much as to poetry, in Jena Novalis envisioned an “imaginative transformation” (Kneller 2006: 202), bridging cold Kantian reason with a mode of inhabiting the world that allows the world to lead the “self where it needed to be.” During the course of his education, Novalis’ poetic science moved away from the haphazard and solely external (sensory) taxonomy of Werner’s system of geology [334]and closer to Goethe’s active empiricism.8 Classification in his view required also a thoughtful consideration of the internal make up of things (the endogamous relations of mineral and organic nature) (Novalis 1988: vol. 3, 141). The aim was not to impose a subjective order on the world, but in arranging knowledge of nature, to reveal its underlying structure (370). The organization of scientific knowledge moreover requires both a principle of necessity and of completeness (358). How do we come to know Nature? By means of our body, which is a variation of the whole, what later he would call the world-all; the individual is a member of the world (Weltglied) (Novalis 1988: vol. 2, 551). Knowledge of the world through its variant is a symbol of the essence of existence, an analogy. Scientific knowledge (of nature) is transformative, not merely mimetic. “Nature, through its study, through experiments and observation, refers to us, and the examination of ourselves, through experiments and observation, refers to the outer world. . . . We can examine the inner soul of nature only through thought, just as [we can only] examine the body of nature and the external world through sensation” (Novalis 1988: vol. 2, 429). Like Goethe’s scientific method, his is an “active empiricism” (Novalis 1988: vol. 2, 641), one that requires the play of critical imagination and thorough observation. It was Goethe, after all, who wrote of “the experiment as mediator between subject and object,” and who imagined the human body as the exacting instrument of systematic inquiry. This position had allowed him to maintain both the freedom of the individual and the “objectivity” of scientific method by calling for the great proliferation of free positions. Goethe describes his “genetic method” beginning from the empirical encounter with an object and following its creation through a series of steps to its originary moment, and nevertheless holding this progression in the mind as an “ideal whole.” As nature leaves no gaps, one has to approach progression as if it were an “uninterrupted activity,” achieved by “dissolving the particular without destroying the impression itself” (Goethe 1988). Part and parcel to the fundamental character of such an effort of writing (and living) was the fragment, a “text for thinking” Novalis liked to say, which ebbed between completeness and incompleteness. Fragments stand outside mereological adjudication. Any suggestion, or representation, is determinately incomplete—if the issue were to be settled, the fragment would cease to be what it is. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy read the fragment as an embodiment of the promise of the System, as the systactical (as they say, in Heidegger’s language) ideal. The System is the System-Subject.9 “Because the System itself must be grasped absolutely, the fragment as organic individuality implies the work, the organon. ‘Systasis’ (association, coming together) necessarily takes the place of the organicity of an organon, whether it be a natural creature, society, or a work of art. Or rather, that it be all of these at once, as is indicated by the absence of a specific object for [335]the totality of the Fragments” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1998: 47). The fragment manifests the truth of the work, in its relation to the System, “or better yet the absolute fragmentary grasping of the System thus depends on the dialectic concerning the Work taking place within the fragment” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1998: 47). It is the fragment’s self-containment, seeds as Novalis calls them, and its call for association (in criticism), like the Hermetic divination of Proteus, in which the fallow soil is forever being remade for the harvest. The poetics of apprenticeship (to the world) Stephen Spender has compared Novalis’ Lehrlinge zu Sais (1798–99) with Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre (1871). This comparison is, I think, quite useful—where the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud captures a series of cherished images of nature in charming—if ecstatic—evocation of the senses, Novalis’ aim is properly Naturphilosophic. The latter is chasing after the sober resolution of “impassioned dreams”—as Spender quotes from Manheim’s translation; “therefore, he who feels an inner calling to impart the understanding of nature to other men . . . must first give careful regard to the natural causes of this development and to learn the elements of this art from nature. Having thus gained an insight he will devise a system based on experiment, analysis, and comparison hereby these means may be applied by any individual” (Spender 2005). It is this first task of such a science of nature that is set out in his novelistic fragments. The first book, The novice (Die Lehrlinge) is an introduction to the scene, opening a clearing: “various are the roads of men” (Mannigfache Wege gehen die Menschen). And then from far away, the narrator hears, “the incomprehensible (Unverständlichkeit) is solely the consequence of incomprehension.” But “holy writing requires no explanation,” for the word of “whoever speaks true” (wer wahrhaft spricht) is a “chord of the symphony of the World-all” (ein Akkord aus des Weltalls Symphonie) ([1845] 1984: 61). The voice is speaking, we come to find, of “our teacher.” He has spent his life in search of experience, analyzing the movement of celestial bodies, and gathering up and arranging all manner of natural debris, arranging them into orderly rows. What was strange “ordered itself within him.” He came to see no single thing by itself; rather he “heard, saw, tasted and thought at the same time” and “delighted in bringing strangers together” ([1845] 1984: 63). Here we have the first taste of Lehrlinge’s essential insight about the unity of nature, and thus the unity of its study. For Novalis, the art of apprehending nature is to be learned from nature itself. The “teacher” becomes a conduit for the instruction of nature, for our apprenticeship at its feet as to the manner of its study.10 Confused by the myriad voices, all of which in turn seem correct, the astute novice becomes anxious. At once, another voice chimes in to assure him and relays [336]a cryptic story, known by most as the fairytale of the Hyazinth and Rosenblütchen (Rose Petal). The story begins with Hyazinth in a state of nonconsciousness, surrounded cheerily by the trappings of nature and his beloved Rosenblütchen. A stranger arrives and tells the couple of all the marvelous places he has traveled and leaves a book in an undecipherable script. Stirred to action by the stranger’s words, Hyacinth sets out to find the “mother of things,” Novalis’ famed metaphor of the veiled maiden. He wanders the world until finally he makes his way to the resting place of the heavenly maiden where he falls asleep to reach her holy heights. There he stands before her, and once he lifts her veil, his own Rosenblütchen falls into his arms. The journey represents the loss and reclamation of the paradisiacal “immediate consciousness of the whole world.” But this return is one that moves forward as it moves back. For Novalis, “feeling” itself pertains to the relation of the self to itself. Against J. G. Fichte, Novalis argued that the reflection of the subject on itself could not rely on the positing of an Absolute subject who stood in a position outside reflection but rather self-feeling I was nothing other than representation. The distinction comes down to a technical incongruity between immediacy and self-reference. Rather than ascribe to self-reference an exogamous fact-act (Tathandlung), the intuited subject, Novalis argues that Fichte had conflated intuition and thought; self-reference was in reality an act of representing what was given immediately, namely the content of what was properly intuition (what Kant would call sensation, and Novalis renames “feeling” and at times “not-knowledge” [nicht-Wissen] or “faith” [Glaube]) and as such had to be distinguished for conceptual thought. When we see self-feeling/self-intuition (Selbstgefühl) reflected in the “mirror of thought” we think it is just as it appears; really we have caught nothing but the representation, the mirror image of that intuition, not feeling itself. This grounds the sciences in a “theory of intuition” that incorporates—in opposition to the Enlightenment view—feeling and imagination with reason, and distinguishes Stoff (the substrate of representation) from Materie (the substrate of intuition). The imagination mediates between these binaries. “Everything,” Novalis wrote, “irrespective of whether we reflect upon or sense it, is an object and so stands under the laws of the object. . . . Presentation is also object” (§290 of his Fichte Studien [1988: vol. 2]). These oscillations of the imagination, furthermore, are bound to essence of freedom, and thereby to the ethical project of Bildung. Novalis famously writes in the Blüthenstaub (Pollen), “we are on a mission: we are called upon to educate the earth.” And of anthropology, Novalis tells us that if it is to be “truly tranquil and freely active in every kind of situation,” that is “thoroughly healthy” and indicative of a “true presence of mind” then it should strive unto a harmonious state of the negative and the positive activities (that is, the subjective and the objective). He elaborates: “artist through morality” and in brackets “the complete and perfect artist is above all moral through himself—so too the complete and perfect human being in general” (Novalis 2007: 39). In a stunning move beyond Kant (and one especially pertinent to ongoing theorization in anthropology of the everyday), Novalis suggests that the “world making” capacity of the imagination is not a transcendental overcoming of the noumena but an “appearance . . . rooted in ordinary life” (Kneller 2006: 205). Novalis calls such ordinary events “a sensation of immediate certainty . . . the appearance (Erscheinung) [337]strikes us particularly at the sight of many human forms and faces, especially in a glimpse of some eyes, some demeanors, some movements, or at the hearing of certain words, the reading of certain passages, certain perspectives on life, the world, and fate” (as cited in Kneller 2006). While Fichte began from identity of the I and itself in self-consciousness, an I that posits itself and meets its limit (Anstoß) only insofar as it does (and abstraction from which leads to the Absolute-I), Novalis regards a structure of representation that places the I outside itself as removing its essential nature, namely its unity. The I is not transparent to itself, because such knowledge would require understanding the ground of that awareness in the first place, nor is I merely productive of itself outside of a representation qua intellectual intuition. If we take the radical proposition that consciousness is a “being outside being in being,” we might regard the I as a sign (Frank 1989, 1997; Frank and Kurz 1977)—that is, as nothing, except for that everything is given to it, and neither it nor the given are anything without the other. Novalis uses the language of schema to describe the relation between sign and signified, which he borrows from Kant’s definition as the link between the necessary and the free (the receptive and spontaneous grounds of knowledge). It is through the schema moreover that we understand the mutual intelligibility of signs to multiple subjects. Andrew Bowie (2003: 90) explains, “language can only be understood as language via the assumption that the necessitated . . . events in which it is instantiated . . . are linked to the meaning intentions of a (free) subject. Communication is possible, then, via the ‘as it were, free contract’ inherent in language.” Communication operates through the simultaneous acceptance of objective, or applied necessity of the signs publically used and the acknowledgment that other language users are likewise capable of free intentional meaning that might escape me. Language in its use carries with it the possibility of its failure. In our reliance on this schematic relationship, Novalis says, the I “paints” its own image under the “mirror of reflection” and “the picture is painted in the position that it paints itself” (as cited in Bowie 2003: 91). They are (re)united in a transcendental poetics mutatis mutandis—the possibility that through poetry one might take hold of what appears hopeless. The educated feeling, at which we arrive at the end of the journey, is not the original identity of the self and nature but rather one that has been rediscovered. Art mediates these modes of thinking/relating, which we earlier called dialectical historical consciousness on the one hand and mythological thought on the other. He says in relation to Fichte: The law of the concept and the law of the object must be one—only in reflection to be separated. . . . There [the I] is as an intelligence, here, as a pure I, free. There it separates its reflective activity from its essence—it goes outside of itself—here it unites both—it goes within itself. It must do the former, in order to do the other. The latter is the purpose, the former the means—the means produces the purpose. / All knowledge should produce morality—the moral drive, the drive to freedom leads to knowledge. Being-Free (Freyseyn) is the tendency of the I—the capacity to be free is the productive imagination—harmony is the condition of its activity—hovering, between opposites. . . . All Being, Being as such, is nothing but Being-Free—hovering between extremes, which it is necessary to unite and necessary to separate. (Novalis 1988: vol. 2, §555; italics in the original)[338] This Ichheit (I-ness), as a productive power of the imagination, Novalis goes on to write, produces the extremes between which it hovers—it is this hovering that produces reality as such. This conception of the I has met with a wide variety of interpretations. Kristin Jones has summarized a field of interconnections: “for Haering, Novalis was proto-Hegelian; for Walter Benjamin, he embraced a filled infinity of reflection not unlike Leibnizian monads; for Lacoue-Labarthe, his most important influence was Kant’s third Critique, though he supported a discursive equivocity that puts him in the company of Blanchot and Derrida; for Frederick Beiser, he offered a Platonic argument for vitalist organicism; and for Manfred Frank, Novalis’ Kantian anti-foundationalism anticipated aspects of post-modern theories of the subject and of knowledge” (2013: 13). More fruitful for our purposes, however, might be his connection to Hölderlin (Kuzniar 1987), with whom this essay began, and their mutual insistence on a realm of Being that escapes us, save for an “infinite approximation.” For Hölderlin (especially in Hyperion) as for Novalis, we travel multiple roads at once, some where the subject feels itself master of the world, and others where we are nothing. Hyperion’s journey, like Novalis’ activity of the I, stages encounters with possibilities each of which prove—independently—untenable, and we can rest in the end only in our restlessness (Lamore 2000). If we are to move beyond the shadow of idealism and reconcile it with the drive to empiricism, perhaps it can only be achieved through a recognition of unity in Absolute Being; that is, by thinking the “concrete and internally differentiated” unity of both the world and of thought, as ongoing activity (Nassar 2014). To speak of the self as nothing but representation, as empty of inherent existence, is to recognize also that there is no great distance between concepts and life. Returning to conviviality, I said at the outset that it could be distinguished from anthropological notions of hospitality, even those that understand the latter as transformative, because it must maintain a distance between the level at which concepts are exchanged and the life behind those exchanges. Conviviality, then, is activity at both registers simultaneously. Anthropological thought and its history I have tried to follow two registers of anthropological thinking, dwelling on sparks of shared inspiration. One I have called knowledge, dialectical and analytical, conceptual and empirical, propelled by distinctions and the work that happens at limits, of a world, of a self, between me and others, between words and the world. The conditions of possibility of that knowledge are more difficult to upend, to put under risk, or to transform, as they can be reached only through those concepts and that language that they simultaneously ground. To think of anthropology as a romantic science, then, is to consider how ordinary moments might allow us to recognize the underlying agreements we share in forms of life that enable limits and difference to appear to us but that also allows us to transform that condition. The art of cultivating a disposition is then a kind of self-work, a preparation that allows us to be challenged at the level of our very relation to the world; one that distinguishes the knowledge that allows us to reach wisdom (and to abandon itself) from the end in itself. The art of anthropology (Gell 1999) is not merely in the [339]material traces we leave, in monographs or field notebooks, but in comporting ourselves to the possibility of transforming the conditions of our knowledge. Through fragmentary sensibility we hover between these registers because they are integral to one another. The capacity to rest in (rather than resolve) what appears to us as in tension, to recognize they are once the same and different, is what I have been calling the aesthetic sense. This productive hovering between the registers of difference and identity, in which we turn to life with others, from the wise and knowledgeable of the worlds we study, to our disciplinary colleagues, to the ghosts whose books we cherish, opens up the horizon of who or what might count for anthropological thought, and by extension, as a part of its history. Many have suggested that a concern with structure came at the expense of history and infrastructure. Lévi-Strauss writes that the problem of Marxism in anthropology pertains to the thought that “practices followed directly from praxis,” but that are in fact mediated by a conceptual scheme “by the operation of which matter and form, neither with any independent existence are realized as structures, that is as entities which are both empirical and intelligible” (1966: 130). It is to this manifold that our attention is drawn, not to either axis in itself. The distinction Lévi-Strauss made with respect to Sartre’s division of dialectic and analytical reason is thereby a difference in their readings of Marx. Sartre missed that for Marx, meaning is not absolute but rather “superstructures are faulty acts which have ‘made it’ socially” (1966: 254). For Lévi-Strauss there is an important difference between the historian’s interest in history, and anthropology’s (between the super- and infrastructural, and their mediating schema). If the historian’s fundamental dilemma is between “teaching” and “explaining,” one option appears to be to take flight from history, either by appeal to the bottom, to individual psychology, or to the top, to biology and ultimately cosmology. There is another possibility, however, when we recognize history as having no distinct object to itself, as a product of its method. We do not throw history away—we simply take it as the beginning of the search for meaning, rather than the end. Where the continuity desired by the ingenieur, it might be objected, considered abstractly is opposed to the concrete praxis of life, Lévi-Strauss suggests the latter is “no less derivative than the former” because “for praxis to be living thought, it is necessary first (in a logical and not a historical sense) for thought to exist . . . [it] must be given in the form of an objective structure of the psyche and brain without which there would be neither praxis nor thought” (264). Thus we return full circle to the nature of conditions of experience and with an anthropological history of anthropology—I have argued that anthropology is concerned not with a symbolic order that merely represents an otherwise concrete reality (like rose-colored glasses), but with genuine knowledge at its limits. The stakes then are not in the tolerance of multiple adjacent, intransigent worlds but with possibilities for being together. Anthropologists, Lévi-Strauss told an American audience, are “the ragpickers of history”—a phrase that was met with much consternation ([1991] 1998: 122). We, like the societies in which we live, manifest a multitude of attitudes toward history—some set up chronologies and others, genealogies; some struggle against time and others make cults to it (125). History and structure, time and space, self and other, appear from one angle distinct and from another, identical. This was the lesson of Marx’s Feuerbachian critique of [340]Hegel and Wittgenstein’s language games, that problematic disjuncture is not a problem in the world but in the approach we adopt. Our logics organize and connect the appearance of our concepts, lives, events, even our epistemes. And if anthropological thought is marked by the seriousness with which it encounters new logics, then so, too, should such perspectives and their relations to the past be brought to bear on the history of anthropology. My hope has been to offer conviviality as an alternative starting point through which we accept with equanimity such tensions rather than erase them or resolve them. Such an openness to surprise, seems to require of us, in Jane Guyer’s (2013) words, “a refined sense of unresolvability . . . seen as truer and better in human affairs than certainty.” Her sense that poetry and scientific empiricism might, to use Ben Okri’s phrase, share a hunger for the widening of the world, for “more life,” captures precisely what is at stake between Lévi-Strauss and romanticism. If this is our entrance into a picture of anthropological thought, it is for the same reason, an invitation to rethink its history and to include among its vaulted names countless others whose marks have been left indelibly on our lives. References Adloff, Frank. 2016. Gifts of cooperation, Mauss and pragmatism. New York: Routledge. Beiser, Frederick. 2003. The romantic imperative: The concept of early German romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boas, Franz. 1898. “Introduction.” In “Traditions of the Thompson River Indians of British Columbia,” by James Teit. Memoirs of the American Folklore Society 6, 1–26. Bowie, Andrew. 2003. Aesthetics and subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brandel, Andrew. 2015. “Triste Romantik.” In Wording the world: Veena Das and the scenes of inheritance, edited by Roma Chatterji, 300–18. New York: Fordham University Press. Caillé, Alain. 2000. Anthropologie du don. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. ———. 2009. Théorie anti-utilitariste de l’action. Paris: La Découverte. Candea, Matei, and Giovanni da Col. 2012. “The return to hospitality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (1): S1–S19. Crapanzano, Vincent. 2004. Imaginative horizons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and words: Violence and the descent into the ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Das, Veena, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, and Bhrigupati Singh. 2014. “Experiments between anthropology and philosophy: Affinities and antagonisms.” In The ground between: Anthropologists engage philosophy, edited by Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, and Bhrigupati Singh, 1–26. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Debaene, Vincent. 2014. Far afield: French anthropology between science and literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[341] de Man, Paul. 1956. “Keats and Hölderlin.” Comparative Literature 8 (1): 28–45. Frank, Manfred. 1989. Einführung in die Frühromantische Äesthetik. Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp Verlag. ———. 1997. Unendliche Annäherung. Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp Verlag. Frank, Manfred, and Gerhard Kurz. 1977. “Ordo inversus.” Geist und Zeichen. Heidelberg: H. Anton. Gell, Alfred 1999. Art and agency: An anthropology theory. Oxford: Claredon Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1988. “Studies for a physiology of plants.” In Scientific studies. New York: Suhrkamp Verlag. Guyer, Jane I. 2013. “The quickening of the unknown.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 283–307. Heil, T. 2014. “Are neighbors alike?: Practices of conviviality in Catalonia and Casamance.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (4): 452–70. Imbert, Claude. 2009. “On anthropological knowledge.” In The Cambridge companion to Lévi-Strauss, edited by B. Wiseman, 118–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Michael. 1989. Path toward a clearing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jones, Kirstin. 2013. “Revitalizing romanticism: Novalis’ Fichte Studien and the philosophy of organic nonclosure.” PhD dissertation, Harvard University. Kant, Immanuel. (1787) 1901. Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. Band IV. Berlin: de Gruyter. ———. 1793. Kritik der Urtheilskraft. Zweyte Auflage. Berlin: F.T. Langarde. Kneller, Jane. 2006. “Novalis’ other way out.” In Philosophical romanticism, edited by Nicholas Kompridis, 196–214. New York: Routledge. Kuzniar, Alice. 1987. Delayed endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1998. The literary absolute: The theory of literature in German romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: SUNY Press. Lamore, Charles. 2000. “Hölderlin and Novalis.” In Cambridge companion to German idealism, edited by Karl Ameriks, 141–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1961. Tristes Tropiques. New York: Criterion Books. ———. 1966. The savage mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. ———. 1967. Structural anthropology. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. ———. 1969. The raw and the cooked. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1976. Structural anthropology. Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1983. Le Regard Eloigné. Paris: Plon. ———. 2014. “Anthropology and the ‘True Sciences.’” edited by Andrew Brandel and Sidney W. Mintz. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(1): 241–48.[342] Lévi-Strauss, Claude, with Didier Eribon. (1991) 1998. De près et de loin. Éditions Odile Jacob. Translated as Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maskens, Maïté, and Ruy Llera Blanes. 2013. “Don Quixote’s choice: A manifesto for a romanticist anthropology.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 245–81. Mauss, Marcel. 1923. “Essai sur le don forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.” L’Année sociologique 1: 30–186. Morgan, Lewis Henry. (1881) 2003. Houses and house-life of the American aborigines. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Nassar, Dalia. 2011. “‘Idealism is nothing but genuine empiricism’: Novalis, Goethe, and the ideal of romantic science.” Goethe Yearbook 18:67–95. ———. 2014. The romantic absolute. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Novalis. (1845) 1984. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais. Stuttgart: Reclam. ———. 1960–1988. Novalis Schriften. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. ———. 1964. Heinrich von Oftendingen. Translated by Palmer Hilty. Long Grove, IL: Waveland. ———. 1997. Philosophical writing. Edited by Stoyjar. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2007. Notes for a romantic encyclopaedia. Albany: SUNY Press. Overing, Jane, and Alan Passes. 2000. The anthropology of love and anger. New York: Routledge. Ricoeur, Paul. 1963. “Symbole et temporalité.” Archivio di Filosofia 1–2: 5–41. Rossi, Ino. 1973. “The unconscious in the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss.” American Anthropologist 75 (1): 20–48. Spender, Stephen. 2005. “Introductory Note.” In The Novices of Sais, by Novalis. Translated by R. Manheim. New York: Archipeligo Books. Valluvan, Sivamohan. 2016. “Conviviality and multiculture: A post-integration sociology of multi-ethnic interaction.” Young 24 (3): 204–21. Vigneswaran, Darshan. 2014. “Protection and conviviality.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (4): 471–86. Wiseman, Boris. 2007. Lévi-Strauss, anthropology and aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. L’art de la convivialité Résumé : Cet essai propose de concevoir l’anthropologie comme une science romantique qui s’intéresse à ce que Lévi-Strauss appelait la logique a posteriori. Je déplace notre attention, en l’écartant des désaccords conceptuels et en l’orientant plutôt vers les conditions d’expérience de notre savoir, c’est à dire vers le terrain d’émergence des concepts: la vie en commun (com vivere). Cette importance de la [343]convivialité permet de comprendre le travail ethnographique comme une sensibilité, à travers laquelle nous risquons nos propres modes de raisonnement. Cette image de la pensée anthropologique requiert de plus que nous réimaginions les contours de l’histoire de cette discipline, en gardant l’esprit ouvert quant ce qui peut potentiellement constituer l’anthropologie. Andrew BRANDEL is a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. He is currently completing a book on the figurations of literary thought in contemporary Berlin, and is coediting a volume on the anthropology of texts. Andrew BrandelInstitute for Human SciencesSpittelauer Lände 31090 Vienna, AustriaABrandel@jhu.edu ___________________ 1. In life together we meet resistance, we recognize that we mark one another, we are unsettled, but at a minimum we share a boundary. We agree, Wittgenstein says, in a form of life. And as our concepts are never fully unbound from this life, these exchanges transform not only our ideas but also the very soil from which they spring. I am reminded of what Veena Das calls her “love affair” with anthropology, “in which when I reach bedrock I do not break through the resistance of the other, but in this gesture of waiting I allow the knowledge of the other to mark me” (2007: 17). 2. Maïté Maskens and Ruy Blanes (2013) have been inspired by a distinct tradition of romanticism through Cervantes and a desire for militant subversion. I sense a greater affinity, however, with Michael Jackson’s (1989) radical empiricism, moving in the interstices or clearings of thought, to gather one’s self. Another kin lineage might be through Vincent Crapanzano’s (2004) “transgressive montage,” which not only tries to dislodge experiential categories by pointing to their constructedness but also tries to subvert the aesthetic criteria that are the conditions of such constructions. There is a manifest kinship as well with Vincent Debaene’s (2014) rendering of Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology as an entropological and endless circulation between documentation and evocation, transforming the connection between the work of art, science, and myth. Lévi-Strauss thus becomes the fulcrum on whom the French tradition of anthropology pivots in its connection to literature. 3. My reading differs from Wiseman’s on the meaning and place of universality in Lévi-Strauss, and, on Mythologiques status as poem. My own sense is we require a finer distinction between the poetical and the poem. 4. As Debaene notes, quoting Lévi-Strauss, “As the instrument of his own observation, the ethnographer must cease to be ‘a purely contemplative intelligence’ in order to become ‘the involuntary agent of a transformation conveyed through him’” (2014: 42–43). 5. The first reference is to Boas (1898: 18). The second is Lévi-Strauss’ addendum to Boas’ quotation, from Lévi-Strauss (1967: 21). 6. Marked by the relation of the imagination to reflective judgment’s production of concepts. Beautiful art, in the technical sense as the work of genius, excites universal satisfaction without appeal to concepts, igniting a free play of reason and imagination without one subsuming the other under a law (Kant 1793). This interweaving of forces reveals a harmony between Nature as a whole and the “ways in which we think about and related to it” (Bowie 2003). 7. A. W. Schlegel and F. W. J. Schelling respectively, as cited in Beiser (2003: 17). 8. Dalia Nassar has traced their shared conception of knowledge as an infinite activity within and upon the world, through “creative, living thinking”—a process immanent to the world itself, or more precisely to nature, from which the knower is never detached, a potentiation (2011: 86). Thus Goethe and Novalis share a conviction, as she quotes from the latter, that “idealism is nothing but genuine empiricism.” 9. We must moreover bear in mind the distinction here between the espirit systematique rather than the espirit de systems. 10. The second book opens, “it must have been a long time before man thought to give the various objects of their senses common names (gemeinschaftlichen Namen) and placing them in opposition to themselves” (Novalis [1845] 1984: 64). The history of the world becomes distorted and divided as the history of humankind. Many voices try their hand at explicating nature in the course of the text. One exclaims science and poetry are two aspects of the same friendship with nature, whereby scientists gather and order stores, and poets make them into “daily food and consolation of human hearts” (75).  

Message, myopia, dystopia This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Michael Silverstein. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.027 COLLOQUIUM Message, myopia, dystopia Michael SILVERSTEIN, University of Chicago The workings of “message”—a coherent, brand-like biographical chronotope—as it has long-circulated in the specifically American system of fifty-state presidential electoral politics helps to explain the outcome of the 2016 vote. The agōn of positive and negative messaging about the respective candidates, Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump, seems to have worked, at the regional margins of an otherwise remarkably stable system, to the ultimate disadvantage of the former and the ultimate advantage of the latter. Keywords: US electoral politics, political message, Hillary Clinton, Donald J. Trump Despite the claims of the recently installed Trump Administration, it certainly was not millions of votes of “illegal aliens” that won Secretary Clinton a commanding lead in the nationally aggregated popular vote. But a slight shift at the margins of polling expectation principally in several Rust Belt states won Mr. Trump the decisive lead in the Electoral College. The structural fact many people forget is that an American presidential election is actually fifty simultaneous state-level elections, however national the mediatized lens on them, and hence that the distribution of the popular votes in respect of state boundaries is what ultimately matters, and ought to matter to those who run presidential campaigns. Many presidential elections have hinged on a small number of state outcomes, even the results in a single state—Tilden vs. Hayes, Cleveland vs. Harrison in the nineteenth century; Nixon vs. Kennedy, Gore vs. Bush the Younger in more recent times. But what, I suppose, is gnawingly irksome for Secretary Clinton’s supporters in 2016 is the consistent direction of tilt in the Electoral College toward the Republican Party candidate in both twenty-first-century instances, the matter in the year 2000 decided not, as the Constitution prescribes, in the House of Representatives (as was the Tilden–Hayes contest in 1876) but by the US Supreme Court in a one-vote cliffhanger, and in the 2016 election notwithstanding a Democratic popular vote plurality of nearly 3,000,000 votes of some 128,825,223 certified overall.[408] The media, lulled by the proba-ballistics launched by pollsters, have professed astonishment at Mr. Trump’s “upset victory” over Mrs. Clinton. But I think that if we retrace matters in the frame of political “message,” we can understand why all along they should have been—and some of us in fact were—preparing for it. “Message,” as I introduced in a little 2003 book, Talking Politics (Silverstein 2003), and as Michael Lempert and I developed further in Creatures of Politics (Lempert and Silverstein 2012), has nothing inherently to do with positions on issues of public policy; such issues become, at best, useful ingredients for or components of creating a message, and need not even be communicated in denotationally explicit language of committing to a certain position. That is what the metaphorical metapragmatic caption “dog whistle” describes, a political figure’s interdiscursive citation as an act of Bakhtinian voicing of a well-known word or phrase (“America first!”) articulated by stereotypic others so as to align the politician with a particular interest group who are, thereby, interpellated, called out by this verbal gesture to target them as like-minded addressees. Message need not even be communicated in language. Older Americans recall that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 anti–federal government campaign started with a speech announcing his candidacy for the presidency that was carefully located in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a famous, quasi-sacralized site of the politics of segregationist “state’s rights” deep in the heart of Dixie. Not a “dog whistle” so much as a tableau vivant of the candidate’s message. And more recently even in the primary run-ups to the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination, Barack Obama was repeatedly assailed—especially by Clintonistas, let alone Republicans—for not wearing an American flag pin on the left lapel of his beautifully cut Hart Schaffner & Marx [Marx!!!] suits. (He capitulated, though only after a speech about true vs. faux patriotism.) Message in politics, like brand in the more obviously commercial marketplace, is thus a semiotic composite, a projectable distinctive (and thus differential) narrative or biography—of a political figure no less than of a product or service—that, whatever the facts of the matter, situates the imaginary of use-value or functionality in a chronotope, a space-time of relationship to the individuals in the voting public or consumer market. In marketing circles, brand is spoken of as “value added” by all the differential semiotic additives of packaging, placement, and promotion, and it must always be contingently curated, sometimes, as circumstances dictate, in fact requiring agile rebranding. Similarly the realm of electoral politics in contemporary times has been ever more conceptualized by professionals as political marketing designed, as positive message for one’s client, to keep the biographical imaginary fresh and relevant to key electoral constituencies with a trajectory of emplotment not only of a past and present, but most critically of a trustable future. (Mr. Trump as president keeps reminding his base that his every Executive Order and Cabinet, agency, or court appointment is making good on his campaign promises, note.) At the same time, since message is relational above all else, critical to the agonistic universe of electoral politics is the promotion of negative message for one’s political opponent(s), always being sufficiently agile to track the changing fortunes of an opponent’s positive message. (Note the example of the flag lapel pin above that, once dispatched, led to further insinuendo involving Mr. Obama’s association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.)[409] In the recent presidential cycle, then, we must start with the basic facts of (1) long-term stability of a great core of each political party’s electoral base, ensuring a “default” vote in the absence of message-driven reasons to do otherwise (reliably Democratic urban cores vs. reliably Republican suburbs and exurbs; stably reliable ethnic, class, etc. bases); (2) the persistent regional stability of dominance of one or the other major party, from the beginning of the nation’s history a pattern of electoral sectionalism stable, for one or another reason, over lengthy intervals of time though affected by patterns of migration (Federalist Atlantic Northeast vs. emerging [Democratic-]Republican South and noncoastal Midlands; Civil War–era Democratic Southeast transformed only by civil rights legislation in 1964 as “southern strategy” turf of the 1968 Humphrey vs. Nixon race); (3) the deplorable (or agreeable, depending on partisan strategy) and reliably consistent low turnout among eligible voters even in presidential years, but especially in default years (51.2 percent in 2000 [Gore v. Bush] with a popular vote difference of >0.5 million, compared to 58.2 percent in 2008 [McCain v. Obama] with a popular vote difference of

code{white-space: pre;} This is just a dummy file to create a link.

Title code{white-space: pre-wrap;} span.smallcaps{font-variant: small-caps;} span.underline{text-decoration: underline;} div.column{display: inline-block; vertical-align: top; width: 50%;} Title This is a filler document.

Political chimeras This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Antonio Guerreiro. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.1.004 Political chimeras The uncertainty of the chief ’s speech in the Upper Xingu Antonio GUERREIRO, University of Campinas This article deals with the issue of ritual polities in Southern Amazon, and in particular the case of “chieftaincy without power.” Through the analysis of ritual oratory among chiefs in the multiethnic and multilingual system of the Upper Xingu, it considers how the concepts of “ritual condensation” and “chimera” could be useful for the description and analysis of such polities. In the Upper Xingu, certain chiefs are fluent in a verbal genre known as “chiefs’ talk,” composed of formalized speeches directed either to leaders of other groups or to their own people, depending on the context in which they are delivered. Analyzing discourses of the latter kind among the Kalapalo (a Karib-speaking people of the region), the article shows how both the chief and his audience are symbolically constructed as “paradoxical” subjects characterized by contradictory predicates, and discusses how this is related to Kalapalo ideas on kinship and power. By engaging with the concepts of “ritual condensation” and “chimera,” the article resumes the debate on political oratory generated by Pierre Clastres and investigates how uncertainty—rather than “authority” or “belief ”— can enact an exchange of perspectives through which the identities of the group and the chief are produced. Keywords: ritual, political oratory, Pierre Clastres, Amerindian politics, Upper Xingu The typical image of Amerindian chieftaincy that appears throughout Pierre Clastres’ work is quite well known: the chief should be someone generous with his goods, from whom society expects a great oratory capacity, and who also enjoys the privilege of polygamy.1 From a gift-theory perspective, he would be a donator of [60]goods and words, and a receiver of spouses. Yet, one of Clastres’ main arguments is that the bond between the chief and the group is only apparently an exchange relationship. To the contrary, he suggests that these gifts would be excluded from their specific exchange circuits, and goods and words could never count as retributions for the women the chief receives from the group. The gifts that circulate from the chief to the group (goods and words), or from the group to the chief (wives), would always follow a unilateral direction, and would never be compensated. The chieftaincy would, as such, be a place of “nonexchange” (Lanna 2005: 427), in which signs are deprived of their circulation value and reciprocity is denied under the demand that society make visible the foundations of power (a break with the structures of reciprocity that tie social life together), maintaining them under the control of the collective body. The chieftaincy, excluded from the main circuits of exchange that structure social life, would thus be transformed into an empty function, and power would be deprived of a means of being put to use. Primitive society, placed in the creditor position of its chiefs, would imprison power and assume control of the place where it could emerge—it would be a society against the state (Clastres 1990b). In the multiethnic and multilingual complex of the Upper Xingu (Southern Amazon), ritual sponsoring accounts for both the production of chieftaincy and social life at the local level, and the articulation of a large, multicentric, regional network of persons and groups. This open-ended regional system can be considered a “ritual polity,” in which public rituals are the main motor of collective life. Most of the qualities attributed to chiefs are linked to their participation in such rituals, which, via several artistic means (such as music, bodily painting, verbal arts), make the chiefly condition “visible.” By being endowed with a conventional form (an aesthetics), chieftaincy is also endowed with its proper efficacy. Politics is art. How is the idea of chieftaincy produced and transmitted in ritual? Houseman and Severi (1998) have argued that ritual actions have a common characteristic, which they call “ritual condensation.” According to Houseman (2004: 76), ritual condensation is “the simultaneous enactment of nominally contrary modes of relationship: affirmations of identity are at the same time testimonies of difference, displays of authority are also demonstrations of subordination, the presence of persons or other beings is at once corroborated and denied, secrets are simultaneously dissimulated and revealed, and so forth.” This combination of contradictions creates a distinctive context of communication, in which the very conditions of ritual efficacy are generated. Applying these ideas to the analysis of different iconographic traditions, Severi (2015) developed the concept of “chimera,” which proved a useful means of understanding the ritual efficacy of images and objects, their relation to mnemonic technologies, and the relations between images and words. Could the production of ritual images also play a role in indigenous modes of understanding power and dealing with it? Could these concepts be useful for [61]understanding Amerindian politics in particular, and maybe the relations between ritual and politics in other cases? For Severi (2013: 45), one could call a chimera “every image that, by designating a plural being by means of a single representation, mobilizes its invisible parts, by purely optical means or by a set of inferences.” A chimerical image associates, in a single visual form, “indexes from different beings (a bird and a human being, a serpent and a jaguar, a wolf and a sea lion …),” provoking “a projection by the eye, which gives rise to an image implying at the same time the presence of these different beings” (Severi and Lagrou 2013: 11). What is presented to the observer necessarily evokes something that is implicit or absent. From a logical point of view, chimerical images present a “specific link between iconic representation (by imitation and convention) and indexical indication (visual, tactile or other) of a presence whose mode of existence, especially mental, is not realized materially” (Severi 2013: 46). This peculiar game between perception and projection, iconic representation and indexical indication, is responsible for an intensification of the efficacy of chimeric images. By capturing the observer’s eye, they also capture his or her imagination, and demand that he or she, by projection, mentally “complete” the image. According to Peirce (1955), indexical signs have a causal, or spatiotemporal, contiguity with what they signify. Thus, the missing parts of a chimeric image mentally projected by the observer are also made present in the context of its perception. In a recent book on chimeras in Amazonia, Severi and Lagrou call attention to the “synesthetic” character of the relation between different artistic means in interlinked contexts of ritual action and artistic creation. They argue that “relations, correspondences and transformations between music, rhythm, movement and graphism” appear to be especially relevant in Amerindian ritual contexts (Severi and Lagrou 2013: 12). Taking this argument as a point of departure, I would like to explore the possibility of thinking about Xinguano images of chieftaincy, as they are produced through ritual action, as a kind of chimeric image—not, though, as an exclusively (and not even mainly) visual one, but as a “mental image” produced by the combination of linguistic and extralinguistic media in ritual performance (Severi 2015: 201). According to Michael Silverstein (2003: 15), the combining of indexical signs in communication acts produces “a kind of poetry of identities-inmotion,” capable of projecting complex images of a nonvisual kind. In his words, “image is not necessarily visual; it is an abstract portrait of identity fashioned out of cumulating patterns of congruence across all manner of indexical signs—including visual ones—that addressees and audiences can imaginatively experience, like a hologram.” It is in this sense that I propose to discuss Kalapalo political oratory as presenting a certain “image” of Xinguano chieftaincy. If chimerical representation is an “art of ambiguity” (Severi and Lagrou 2013: 14), it could be related to a classic issue of Amazonian ethnology: the “dualism in perpetual disequilibrium” discussed by Lévi-Strauss (1991) in The story of Lynx, which may account for the “pendular movement” of Amerindian politics, combining centripetal forces of centralization with centrifugal forces of dispersion (Perrone-Moisés 2012). Taking forward Severi and Lagrou’s proposal of identifying the forms that chimeras may assume by combining different aesthetic resources, this concept could help us to understand the complex relations between hierarchy [62]and counterhierarchy, power and counterpower, in the so-called “societies against the state,” such as made perceptible/comprehensible by indigenous knowledge practices. I also intend to suggest how Kalapalo ritual speeches could be compared to other forms of political oratory. As Silverstein (2003, 2005) discusses, the mark of political oratory, modern and nonmodern, is not necessarily the conveyance of “meaning,” but the relation between poetics and the production of identities. I hope this comparison can be seen as an effort to produce a more symmetrical understanding of Amerindian politics in relation to other political forms. Language, politics, and ritual Language has a special place among the three exchange circuits explored by Clastres. He notes that “talent as a speaker is both a condition and instrument of political power” (Clastres 1990c: 31), and “it would seem, then, that power and speech cannot be conceived of separately, since their clearly metahistorical bond is no less indissoluble in primitive societies than in formations with a State” (Clastres 1990a: 152). The difference is that in state societies the word would be a right to power that may be used to command, while in societies against the state the word would be a duty of the chief (ibid.: 153; 1990c: 41): an indigenous leader must be capable of offering society the words that it demands. According to Clastres, the chief ’s speech, despite being demanded by society, would be directed toward an audience that has neither the obligation, nor even the interest, to hear it or respond to it: the Amerindian chief “is a voice preaching in the wilderness” (Clastres 1990c: 31), since his speech “is not spoken in order to be listened to” (Clastres 1990a: 153). The chief also wouldn’t say anything that is really worth hearing anyway, “since the chief, for all his prolixity, literally says nothing. His discourse basically consists of a celebration, repeated many times, of the norms of traditional life” (ibid.). Limiting himself to exalting the community to live according to correct ancestral customs, the chief ’s speech would only be a repetition of what Clastres (1990c: 31) calls “edifying discourse.” In the same way that the lack of reciprocity in the field of goods and women would cause them to lose their exchange value, the chief ’s words would be deviated from the “function of communication that is immanent to language” (ibid.: 46). Deprived of this function, the chief ’s speech is transformed into pure value and, “in its solitude, recalls the speech of a poet for whom words are values before they are signs” (ibid.: 47). Clastres also defines language as the inverse of one of the most striking facets of coercive power: violence. A man who has the privilege of speaking to others, who are obliged to hear him out, is endowed with the power to coerce, while he who must speak to an “anti-audience,” is deprived of this possibility: “The duty of the chief ’s speech, that steady flow of empty speech that he owes the tribe, is his infinite debt, the guarantee that prevents the man of speech becoming a man of power” (Clastres 1990a: 155). Clastres asks himself: “What does the chief say? What is the word of a chief like?” (ibid.: 153). He argues it is a “ritualized act,” instead of an act of communication. Is Clastres suggesting that ritual action doesn’t communicate anything? Or, still, might language not be used as a mode of action, contrary to literature on ritual language as well as pragmatics (Austin 1975; Tambiah 1985; Silverstein 1997)? As [63]Magnus Course says, Clastres’ model “presupposes an understanding of language as primarily ‘symbolic’ and in which speech is firmly rooted in its speaker’s intention, a model rooted in Western, not Amerindian, language ideology” (Course 2012: 20). Focusing on the referential or denotative function of language, Clastres’ perspective leaves aside its pragmatic aspects, that is, elements of enunciation (oral or not) that may produce effects on the enunciator as well as on his or her audience (Silverstein 1997). Silverstein (2005: 1) argues that what is called politics, “the dynamic arrangement and rearrangement of people as subjects within structures of actual and potential action of all sorts,” always comprises a poetics, because everything experienced as effective “practice” is formed semiotically—that is, through signs. As he states, “political events … reach whatever effectiveness they have only in a semiotic—a sign-mediated—order or they don’t reach any effectiveness at all qua sociocultural fact” (ibid.: 3). Conversely, communication forms are also able to “create social arrangements as consequences of using these forms” (Silverstein 2003: 10–11). Political oratory, rather than “informing” the “content” of a message, would use poetical resources that allow interlocutors to have their identities mutually constructed by means of indexical signs that connect the message’s form to extralinguistic contextual facts. It would be possible, in this way, to “inhabit” a message: “a really powerful ‘message’ ascribes to me—as opposed to describes—my reality” (ibid.: 16). If, as Clastres notes, the chief ’s speech is a “ritualized act,” it should be treated as such. The first step in doing so is assuming that its referential meaning must be understood in relation to other functions characterizing ritual oratory. The symbolic procedures that separate ritual speech from ordinary interactions are not necessarily intended to “mean something,” but—as Malinowski ([1935] 2002) had already noticed in relation to Trobriand magic—to do something. As Severi (2004: 816) suggests, when we focus on ritual speech acts, it is necessary “to reconstruct the pragmatic conditions that define the kind of ‘language game’ in which they are used.” In his study on political oratory, Bloch (1975: 22) argues that formalization (the reduction of combinatory and creative possibilities of language by the use of formulas, archaic vocabulary, syntactic and stylistic patterns), by distancing the discourse from its semantic content, draws attention to its context and performance, endowing the speech with the capacity of producing effects. There are plenty of works discussing ritual speech in indigenous South America (Graham 1986; Urban 1986; McCallum 1990; Gow 1991; Santos-Granero 1991; Belaunde 1992; Franchetto 1993; Farage 1997; Passes 1998; Beier, Michael, and Sherzer 2002; Rubio 2004; Ball 2007), and it would be impossible to review all of them here. However, it’s important to note that certain authors claim that Amerindian chiefs’ speech has, through its aesthetic and moral dimension, a politically relevant role in the production of sociality. As Cecilia McCallum (1990: 416) says about the Kaxinawa, a leader’s speech “can be understood as a force in the production of persons, on the one hand, and of communities, on the other.” But how is the meaning of a supposedly meaningless speech created, and what role could it play in social relations? According to Severi (2002: 28), ritual action usually focuses on what he calls “reflexivity,” or the “definition of its own meaning and effectiveness within the context of ritual communication.” In this sense, we should investigate how the chief ’s speech produces its own context and meanings, [64]and how its “efficacy” could be generated in such conditions of action, and not by external causes (such as “authority,” “‘morality,” or the “refusal of the state”). In what follows, I will analyze a set of two pieces of ritual oratory among the Kalapalo. By analyzing elements of its performative and poetic structure, I will demonstrate how these oral performances simultaneously construct an image of the chief as a “consanguine kin” and a potentially dangerous enemy/affine, and how the identification of his fellows both as his children and as his prey could be related to the production of kinship. According to Houseman and Severi (1998), one of the clues for understanding ritual communication is to analyze how ritual defines a special form of interaction, characterized by ritual condensation, by means of which the identities of the participants are constructed. The intentional contradictions frequently used in ritual speech create what Severi (2004) calls a “complex enunciator,” someone whose identity is defined by contradictory predicates. The Kalapalo chiefs seem to be enunciators of this kind. In the Kalapalo case we find a “paradox,” two contradictory statements related by a logical link, such as: “As I am your enemy and affine, I am your protector and consanguine.” My intention is to understand both the ontological ground that demands such paradoxical construction of identities, and how it is symbolically achieved by the ritual use of language. I argue that, instead of relying on external notions of “authority,” “consensus,” or “reciprocity,” as some visions of political oratory suggest (see Bloch 1975), the key for understanding the chief ’s speech is its own ambiguity, and that the duality generated by gestural and verbal aspects of such performances indeed imposes an exchange between speaker and addressee—not of words, in Clastres’ sense, but of perspectives—through which their identities emerge. Such ritual performances involve the perception of fragmentary signs that suggest the presence of their counterparts to the hearers, as in a chimerical representation: when the chief speaks as a consanguine/father, his performance “points to” (indexes) an occult affine/enemy quality; when the signs of his alterity/enmity become visible, they index his conditions of father/protector. This alternation makes chieftaincy effective to different observers, bringing either hierarchy or symmetry to the foreground. This, I suggest, would allow us to talk about “political chimeras” in the Xinguano context, and possibly elsewhere. Akitsene: The chiefs’ ritual oratory The Upper Xingu is a multiethnic and multilingual society, articulated by the circulation of people, objects, and participation in regional rituals. This sociocultural complex is made up of ten peoples, who speak languages pertaining to different linguistic branches and families, located at the south of the Indigenous Park of Xingu, in Midwestern Brazil. There live Arawak (Mehináku, Wauja, and Yawalapíti), Karib2 (Kalapalo, Kuikuro, Matipu, and Nahukwá), and Tupi (Kamayurá and Aweti) speakers, besides the Trumái, who speak an isolated language. The Kalapalo population reaches almost seven hundred people distributed mainly in ten villages, [65]almost all of which located along the course of the Culuene River, the main affluent of the Xingu River. The Kalapalo refer to certain men and women as anetü and itankgo, “male chief ” and “female chief,” respectively, and equivalent terms exist among all groups in the region. It is a condition simultaneously inherited and developed throughout life: it is not enough to be the son or grandson of an anetü in order to be one as well, but rather one must develop a beautiful and strong body, serene and generous behavior, and linguistic abilities. Chiefs are the objects of intense mythical, aesthetic, and ritual elaboration, but they have no power to command and are described as having two great responsibilities: on the one hand, they must take care of their people, guiding them with “good speech,” feeding them, and pleasing them by sponsoring rituals; on the other, they must welcome messengers from other peoples and conduct their group to rituals sponsored by other villages. Both of these activities demand ritual uses of speech, which, as has been widely observed, is one of the main characteristics of the chiefly condition (Basso 1973: 135; Viveiros de Castro 1977: 218; Franchetto 1986, 1993, 2000; Ball 2007). Certain oral anetü performances are part of a “singing speech” style known as anetü itaginhu, “chiefs’ speech” or “chiefs’ talk,” a formal genre characterized by the successive chanting of monotone lines organized according to a parallelistic style (Franchetto 2000). There are different sets of discourses appropriate for each situation, with diversified contents, and they employ specific vocabularies and stylistic resources. This speech genre is marked by the use of a “figurative, metaphorical, and erudite language that is typical of a very special register and restricted to few specialists” (Franchetto 1986: 365). The Kalapalo say that many words and expressions used in the anetü itaginhu are “ancients’ language” (ngiholo akisü) or “chiefs’ language” (anetü akisü), and as such are not fully understood by people who do not know it. The use of such formal style would confirm the tie between those speaking it—living chiefs—and earlier anetü, to whom they are considered as substitutes (itüpohongo). Bruna Franchetto (1986: 366) observes that a chief ’s interest in learning the anetü itaginhu “is the consequence of a conscientious intention to achieve and guarantee the recognition of power and cohesion of their domestic group and allies. The apprentice makes explicit his determination to perpetuate a tradition that ties him to the chieftaincy’s lineage.” It’s possible to divide Kalapalo ritual speeches into two groups: those delivered to foreigners, and those delivered to fellow villagers. In the first case are those groups of discourses used in each regional ritual, designated by the name of the ritual followed by the nominal word itagimbakitoho (“made in order to greet”), such as, for example, egitsü3 itagimbakitoho (“made in order to greet in egitsü”). There are also discourses used to receive messengers from other villages, called etinhü itagimbakitoho (“made in order to greet messengers”), that present variations according to the ritual for which the village has been invited. In the second group (speeches for fellow villagers—akitsene, in Kalapalo), may be found what Franchetto calls “political oratory,” a nonceremonial public speech tied to village politics, which may only be pronounced by chiefs and elders. This kind of oratory deals with events in the life of the village, and the speaker “constructs [66]his discourse by taking advantage of a relative creativity in order to advance his own proposals in a particular context” (Franchetto 1986: 378). In consequence, “the language of this oratory is less differentiated from common registries than the ceremonial language” (ibid.: 382), and the fact that it is less ritualized is made evident by the prolongation of verses and the reduction of parallelisms and repetition. At least among the Kalapalo, there are also two formal speeches that may be framed in the subgenre of political oratory, yet are more formalized and their execution is restricted to great chiefs. Their content is fixed and their form constant, approximating them to the itagimbakitoho, and it is these two speeches that will be discussed in this article. In the village of Aiha, Ageu is the only chief familiar with these speeches. He learned them from his father, but never actually delivered them in public. The Kalapalo say that in the last few decades these speeches have been used by fewer chiefs, and seem to be disappearing from all villages. In Aiha, it is said that they have not been heard since the 1980s. This absence does not bother the Kalapalo too much, but they do think it is a sign that they may be “becoming white” (I will return to this point later). These discourses are associated with two animals considered as their “owners,” a kind of small hawk (ugonhi, or kakahuẽgü) and the jaguar4 (ekege). Ugonhi is, together with other birds of prey (among which the most important is the harpy), the bird chief, while the jaguar is the head chief of land-based animals. Both occupy these positions because of their hunting skills, since any chief is, when among other peoples, represented as a beast of prey and a potential enemy. The speeches form an ordered (tinapisinhü) group, in which the hawk’s speech is considered as the “first” (ihotugu; lit. point, prow, beak), and the jaguar’s discourse “second” (isotohongo; lit. “its other equal”). I documented the versions transcribed here together with Ageu, while he was teaching them to his maternal nephew. The transcriptions and translations were made together with a group of different Kalapalo collaborators.5 Ugonhi akitsu: The Hawk’s Speech The Hawk’s Speech should be pronounced before dawn. This is when the ugonhi wakes up and starts singing—that is, proffering his speech, since what humans perceive as bird chanting is actually the hawk-chief ’s speech according to the birds’ point of view. The chief must deliver this speech in the center of the village, standing up and with his body facing east. He doesn’t need any adornment, but if he wishes he may use his akitsoho (“made to discourse”), a set consisting of a bow and arrow worn by chiefs when they appear in public in rituals and deliver speeches. The bow should be a majahi, the largest and most resistant bow in the Upper Xingu; the arrow should be a “winged arrow,” with a hawk feather and a scarlet macaw feather. [67]These instruments are indexes of chiefly status, since they are related to mythical chiefs: the majahi is the jaguar’s hunting bow, and it appears in the origin myth as the weapon of Enitsuẽgü, the jaguar-father of the twins Taũgi (Sun) and Aulukumã (Moon); the hawk feather refers to the bird chief; and the scarlet macaw feather is linked to Aulukumã, from whose blood that bird was created. Unlike the speeches that chiefs deliver to each other during ritual meetings, in a low tone, this one should be pronounced in a loud voice, so as to wake the whole village up. Ageu explained it was directed to the boys’ parents, and its purpose was “to guide his people.” He calls his audience ukandagü, “our folks” or “our people.” Andagü is the possessed form of anda, a word that’s difficult to translate and doesn’t seem to apply outside of the chieftaincy context. It has no plural, and refers to a group of people. It only appears in its relational and possessive form, preceded by the name of someone and followed by the relational suffix -gü (“X andagü,” with X being a chief). The expression indicates, thus, an asymmetrical relationship between a denominated (individualized) person and an undifferentiated collective— in this case, between someone possessing the words to guide a people, and those who need guiding. In the transcriptions that follow, each numerated line corresponds to a melodic unit. There aren’t, in almost any of them, any complete sentences, since the enunciations are broken down into parallel verses. There are certain exceptions, in which various “lines in potential” were agglutinated by the speaker in one single melodic unit (enunciated in the same tone with no pauses to breath), but whose structure (preceded by an expletive—ah—and followed by a regular set of particles) suggests they could be executed as discrete melodic units. Because there are few lexical elements in each melodic unit, it is difficult to translate the speeches. These elements are followed by several grammatical particles of complex meaning, with regular and formalized use. There are even lines formed only by an expletive and a set of particles, with no lexical element. The inferiorizing particle muke is one of the most recurrent, and makes up self-derogatory forms of speech. It reduces the importance of what the speaker says, producing what Ellen Basso (2009: 246) calls a “humbling effect.” Another element used quite frequently is the deictic ige, an evidential particle that indicates proximity/presence/existence, fixed to the copula-i (Franchetto 2000: 492). The particle gitse may also be frequently found, which would mean, according to Basso (2009), “poorly,” “incomplete.” Franchetto (2000) defines it as a “devaluating particle.” It’s always used by chiefs when they speak of the present, or when they use the imperative—as if the present were imperfect, and the imperative needed to be softened or devalued. Finally, the adverb gele (“still”) abounds, as does the emphatic suffix-ha (ibid.: 492–503). The speech starts as follows: 1 Kamaῖ, Kamaῖ, Kamaῖ, Kamaῖ,Kamaῖ, Kamaῖ My brother, my brother, my brother,my brother, my brother, my brother   Ah, luale muke ataitsange Ah, please, let it be so   Ah, etijipügüha gitse itakeingakeha gitse Ah, take your children from their hammocks   [68]Ah, kutaũpüaõ muke geleha gitse, ah, uitunguki muke geleha gitse Ah, from the sleep, ah, of our grandparents 5 Etijipügüha gitse itakeingakeha gitse Take your children from their hammocks   Inke ande ehisuü̃daõ itsa Look, here are your brothers   Ah, itsasüha engihisatanümingo Ah, they will deal with their work   Ah, kingakeha gitse etijipügü hekeha gitse Ah, always tell your children   Ah, muke geleha gitse6 – 10 Ah, igehunguki muke geleha gitse Ah, this way   Ah, kutengatanini muke geleha gitse Ah, all of us are moving on   Ah, isekalu tohoila muke geleha gitse Ah, without making any noise   Ah, itseke tologu heke muke geleha gitse Ah, the spirits’ bird   Ah, kutekaginetatanini muke geleha gitse Ah, it’s scaring all of us Starting from line 3, we may see that the devaluating particle gitse ends almost every line, forming a block of parallel verses in which the chief gives advice and comments on the present situation of his people. The chief opens his speech referring to his audience as kamaῖ, which means “my brother” in “the ancients’ language,” and in this context it’s a synonym for anetü. So, the orator speaks to his peers, other chiefs, whom he requests to wake up their children. The use of the imperative-hortative mood is characteristic, but the recurrence of gitse makes the speech sound more like a piece of advice, or a humble suggestion, than an order. According to the interpretation of a Matipu chief, the children mentioned in the discourse are chiefs’ children, youth preparing to master the art of Xinguano ritual-sportive wrestling (ikindene). It used to be that youth preparing to become ikindene champions would be woken very early, and spend hours and hours sitting on their hammocks in silence thinking about the wrestling, their behavior, and listening to their father’s advice. According to the Matipu chief, this was so that these champions could become strong and fast messengers (ngengoku7) for other chiefs when there were rituals to be performed. In lines 11 and 12, the chief takes up a recurrent subject in other speeches, the lack [69]of “noise” in his village. “All of us are moving on/Without making any noise” means that rituals are no longer performed, which is why people are living sadly. (The Kalapalo emphasize that one of the aims of the rituals is to produce beauty and joy.) “The spirits’ bird,” mentioned in line 13, is the chicken, and the spirits are, according to the orator, the Whites. This passage also seems to be tied to the lack of “noise” and rituals. In times of festivities, from way before the sun rises, it’s common for men to emit long high-pitched and melodic screams as soon as they wake up, which are responded to by others in their own homes, in order to wake the whole village up with joy. The message the chief conveys is that, unfortunately, his people no longer wake up with joy, but scared of the chanting of the “spirits’ bird.” The following passage embodies a central concept of Kalapalo chieftaincy—aki-hekugene, or “the practice of true/good words”: 15 Ah, kutaũpüaõko muke ata hale igei ũãke Ah, but our grandparents   Akihekugeneki higei ũãke, etiji-pügüko muke ata hale igei ũãke, ihijü heke muke ata hale igei ũãke By practicing the true words, on their children, they worked   Ah, üngelepe entanügü muke gele higei ũãke Ah, those who have already died would come   Akihekugeneki higei ũãke By practicing the true words   Ah, tihisatühügü muke gele higei ũãke Ah, [to do] what they were taught 20 Ah, tüilüinha muke gele higei ũãke Ah, to do   Ah, tüãdagü muke gele higei ũãke Ah, for their people   Ah, upetegijüinha muke gele higei ũãke Ah, to guide   Akihekugeneki higei ũãke By practicing the true words   Ah, tihisatühügü tüilüinha muke gele higei ũãke Ah, by doing what they were taught to do 25 Ah, kutaũpüaõko muke ata hale igei ũãke Ah, our grandparents   Akihekugeneki higei ũãke By practicing the true words   Tetijipügüko hijü heke muke ata hale igei ũãke They worked on their children In contrast with the first block, all lines of this passage end with the epistemic marker ũãke. It is used in affirmations about the past, and indicates that the speaker has authority over his speech (Franchetto 2000: 492), whether by direct knowledge or, as is the case here, by having received the information from people with the authority to transmit it—that is, previous chiefs. The passage is about past chiefs, called “our grandfathers” or by the anaphoric pronoun üngelepe, which I have translated as “those who have already died.” The anaphoric üngele (that) and ünago (those) are indirect forms of saying “chief(s)” throughout the anetü itaginhu. Akihekugene is what I have translated as the “the practice of true words,” a term formed from aki (word), hekugu (true/good), and the nominative suffix-ne (Santos 2007). The general meaning of the expression aki hekugu, “true word,” describes any good, lovely, calm, peace-bringing, or incentivizing speech, and those recognized for speaking the truth and being good people are called akiheku, or takihekuginhü [70](“whose words are true/good”). Yet its specific meaning refers to chiefs’ speechmaking, who by definition must have been trained to be well behaved and have great rhetorical skills, capable of guiding their people in a calm and humble way (“to do what they were taught to do”). Akihekugene is the Kalapalo version of Clastres’ “edifying discourse.” Regarding past chiefs, it is said that they did what they were taught, “worked” on their children by using the true speech. “To work” here is a way of saying “making,” and the relationship between parents and children is indeed conceived as a relationship of fabrication, in which children are the result of the father’s intentional and continuous effort. This is not only a description of the past, but rather a complex resource through which the past serves as an example because it contrasts with the present—such as the contrasting use of hale in lines 15, 16, 25, and 27 makes clear. The chief constructs an opposition between past and present, in which the latter is nothing more than an impoverished form of a previous age idealized as grandiose: there were chiefs who, with their good speech, “worked” on their children, but such is no longer true nowadays. However, this is exactly what the chief is doing, despite denying it in his speech. Moreover, the chief can only do it by denying it: in order to act like a chief, to “work on his children” like an ancestor, he must state that he could never do so. By acting in this way he demonstrates how a chief should behave: as the most humble of persons. Denying his position, diminishing himself in front of past chiefs, he displays the behavior expected of a genuine anetü. Discussing Kuna shamanism, Severi (2004) argues that what allows the shaman to lend his voice to invisible beings and heal his patients are the symbolic connections between the world of ordinary life and the supernatural world, which are achieved by a common linguistic resource: parallelism. Through the enchainment of repeated verses and themes, the shaman is symbolically identified as a paradoxical character, at one time human and nonhuman, here and there, in the present time and in the mythic time. As Stanley Tambiah (1968) had already shown, parallelism may establish a chain of analogies that, more than just “comparing” different subjects or objects, may transfer properties from one being to another. In the chief ’s speech, we may consider that there is not only a formal parallelism between verses and blocks, but also a “performative parallelism” between the actual chief and those before him. The present time and the chief who speaks, despite the emphasized contrast, replicate the past in his performance. In the chief ’s speech, persons and times are contrasted, but in his actions the difference between past and present is attenuated, and his actions and those of ancient chiefs are made parallel to one another. He speaks about ancestors, as an ancestor (using their language), and on ancestors’ behalf (since they are gone). The Kalapalo say that the contrast between past and present is supposed to provoke “shame” in the listeners, who feel compelled to act as the ancient chiefs’ own children. We could say, then, that the antonymic affirmations in the speech have something similar to what Austin (1975) calls “illocutionary force,” which gives the chief the capacity to perform an act in saying something. Hyperbole and contrast are the means by which the audience could be aesthetically and morally compelled to act in some way, as in what Austin called “perlocutionary acts.”   [71]Ah, luale muke ataitsüha Ah, please, let it be so   Ah, etijipügüko tehugu igakanügü muke ataitsüe kangamuke hekeni muke Ah, set aside food for your children’s bellies, children 30 Ah, luale muke ataitsüha Ah, please, this is how it should be   Ah, etijipügügüko tehugu igakanügü muka tsitsü ehekeni Ah, set aside food for your children’s bellies   Ah, ukugepeki manga igei ũãke Ah, it was with that which had once been human   Angaũpüaõko muke gele igei ũãke That your grandparents   Etuatanügü muke gele igei ũãke They got exhausted 35 Ah, ukugepeki higei ũãke Ah, it was with that which had once been human   Angaũpüaõko muke gele higei ũãke That your grandparents   Etuatanügü muke gele higei ũãke They got exhausted   Ah, kohinhanduhüngüki, ah, kuminhangokiha uketuanalü Ah, with that which isn’t bush, ah, with our foodz we get exhausted This passage is about the importance of cultivating corn, called “that which had once been human” (line 35) in reference to the mythical human origin of the plant. Corn cultivation used to be important during the rainy season, when manioc isn’t harvested. In the old days, Xinguano peoples weren’t always able to stock large quantities of manioc starch for the rainy season, and corn fields were very important. Nowadays, with bagging, it has become possible to store enough starch and, as such, few people plant corn. The final part of the Hawk’s Speech is about cultivating another plant crucial to Xinguano diet—manioc—and the dangers of witchcraft:   Ahütü muke ataitsüha You shouldn’t 40 Ah, engihitsügüko ukukijila ehekeni Ah, rub that which you have worked with   Ah, ingike muke niha gitse Ah, look   Ah, tekundipüngühüngü ekutanügü muke geleha gitse kupeheni muke geleha gitse Ah, it’s not inedible food this that we are eating   Ah, muke geleha gitse –   Ah, igehunguki muke geleha gitse kutengatanini muke geleha gitse Ah, as such we’re all moving on 45 Ah, isekalu tohoila muke geleha gitse Ah, without making any noise   Ah, kutengatanini muke geleha gitse Ah, we’re all moving on   Ahütü ataitsü You shouldn’t   [72]Ah, engihitsügüko ukukijila ehekeni, kangamuke Ah, rub that which you have worked with, children   Ingike muke niha gitse Look 50 Ah, ande tekundipüngühüngü ekutanügü kupeheni muke geleha gitse Ah, it’s not inedible food this that we are eating In lines 40 and 48, ukukijila, a negative form of ukukijü, “to rub against,” is a metaphor for “bewitch.” Engihitsügüko, in the same lines, means “what was worked on,” and it refers to manioc leaves cut off from the plants. A spell on these leaves may destroy someone’s manioc crops, and this is the danger the passage is talking about. “It’s not inedible food this that we are eating” (lines 42 and 50), says the chief, but it’s clear that this is a risk in the case of witchcraft—a risk that the chief ’s speech has the aim of avoiding. The Kalapalo say that if there is a lot of witchcraft in the village, it’s because the chiefs are not giving good advice to their people. Ideally, wherever chiefs are respected, people don’t seek to harm others or cast spells that may destroy a whole village. Yet when the chief is weakened, the danger of witchcraft is greater, since with no guidance, people tend to be more egoistic, “go crazy,” and forget about their relatives—the first step in producing a witch. The succession of parallel verses ending with the same particles produces an antithetic parallelism of blocks that oppose each other: blocks formed by verses ended in gitse refer to the present, and those formed by verses ended in ũãke refer to the past. We may note a poetic structure in this speech: (1) an opening line; (2) counseling, with verses ending in gitse (lines 2–14); (3) contrast between past and present, with verses ending in ũãke (lines 15–27); (4) counseling, with no special mark on verses (lines 28–31); (5) contrast between past and present, with verses ending in ũãke (lines 32–37); counseling, with verses ending in gitse (lines 38–50). The key themes of the Hawk’s Speech are the foundations of kinship: generating and raising children, producing food, and avoiding witchcraft (i.e., thinking about kin, instead of forgetting them). It’s as if the chief ’s speech led the fabrication of kin’s bodies on another scale, fomenting the fabrication of a collective body of kin, organized around a metaphoric relationship of filiation between chiefs and their people (I’ll return to corporality later). The chief ’s rhetoric, by pointing out the imperfections of the present as well as an ideal of social life, is supposed to encourage people to behave like kin, a kind of behavior that needs to be actively produced in face of desegregating forces such as lack of rituals and witchcraft. (Gow [1991: 226–27] develops a similar argument about the Piro.) Nothing in this speech may characterize it as an authoritarian discourse; to the contrary, the chief humbly requests, advises, but, as Allan Passes says about Pa’ikwené leaders’ rhetoric, this is precisely why such words “hold within them the positive moral and creative element of power; and contain meaningfulness, value, artistry and affective mass” (Passes 1998: 138). Or, as Fernando Santos-Granero (1991: 302) suggests, “the speech of the Amerindian leaders carries the weight of an order without appearing as such, for it is grounded in moral considerations shared by both leaders and followers.” Maybe we could add that, together with such moral considerations (and without focusing only on “authority” or “power”), the formal [73]use of antonymic affirmations and parallelism is a piece of artistry which redefines the chief ’s identity and that of his people, creating, at least for a brief moment, a world where the difference between chiefs and nonchiefs can be effective. And, as in rituals for spirits or in shamanism, the world that brings together different subjects comes into being only for a short period, but its effects are expected to endure. Ekege akitsu: The Jaguar’s Speech The Jaguar’s Speech should also be delivered in a loud voice in the center of the village, but after sunset. The chief should also be turned toward the east, but now he needs to speak crouched down and looking toward the ground—as if he were facing a foreign chief, in a respectful/ashamed position. The difference in positions refers to body postures of the animals that own the speeches: in the morning, the body must be positioned just like a resting hawk—standing on a tree branch—and at night like a jaguar. The time of day when each speech is given also refers to these animals’ active periods: the hawk hunts during the daytime, while the jaguar is a mainly crepuscular-nocturnal animal. Speaking is part of a complete performance involving the chief ’s body, and, as in other Amerindian rituals, to “act like” other beings is to become something like them, activating their own bodily—and thus subjective—capacities. This speech has a pessimistic tone; when the day is over, the chief lectures on the difficulties of the present time—the lack of chiefs to guide their people, and the deaths provoked by spirits and the Whites. If the sunrise speech is about the process of kinship and life, its sunset counterpart speaks not as much about death, but rather about the uncertainties of the future and the importance of the chiefs in giving continuity to collective life (i.e., the very condition of kinship). 1 Ah, kangamuke, kangamuke, kangamuke Ah, children, children, children   Ah, luale muke ataitsüha gitse Ah, please, let it be so   Ataipanenatüeha gitse Rejoice   Ah, tü akisü kaemanga gitse kutengalüko egea gitse? Ah, with the speech of whom we have always followed, like so? 5 Ah, ukugetihü akisü kae muke ata hale gitse Ah, with the speech of a chief   Ah, kutehotanünkgo muke ata hale gitse Ah, we would follow   Ah, muke geleha igia kutengatanini muke geleha gitse Ah, but even so we still follow   Tetihoi muke geleha gitse With no mainstay   Ah, kutengatanini muke gele higei (gitse) Ah, we follow 10 Ah, itseke heke muke gele higei, ah, tünotohokoki muke gele ah ukinahanetatanini muke Ah, the spirits, ah with their mortal objects, ah, they are killing us [74]While the Hawk’s Speech starts by exhorting the chief ’s “brothers,” this one starts with the word “children.” If, at first, the chief treats his interlocutors in a symmetrical way, now he speaks to them in an asymmetrical way. “Children” is the most common form of address of a chief to his people, to whom he is like an adoptive father. This aspect of the relationship between a chief and his people evokes a set of relations recurrent throughout indigenous South America, centered on the figure of “owners” or “masters.” According to a synthesis developed by Carlos Fausto (2008: 330), the concept of owner “designates a position that involves control and/or protection, engenderment and/or possession, and that applies to relationships between people (humans and nonhuman) and between people and things (tangible or not),” generally formulated according to the symbolic language of adoptive affiliation. A chief ’s position as an adoptive father is tied to the production of kinship in a village. This is made evident by the use of an interesting term for “chief ”: ukugetihü (line 5). The Kalapalo, trying to segment this word, divide it into ukuge, “people,” and (t)ihü, “trunk/stem” or “body,” which would permit translating ukugetihü as the “people’s trunk-body.” The suggested translation gains force when we look at the expression katote ihü (or katotihü), “trunk-body of all,” which can also be used in the same sense. Another form of saying chief is iho, which means “mainstay” or “prop”—something made from a tree trunk. In its literal meaning, iho refers to the wooden post on which a person ties his or her hammock, but its semantic field is greater, designating a person responsible for giving support to others (a father or owner of a house, for example). A chief is also called kuge iho, “people’s mainstay,” since it is understood that a chief ’s duty is taking care of his people. The condition of iho is tied to the production of kinship and a collective point of view in the Xinguano system. As elsewhere in the indigenous Amazon, nobody is born completely human. For a baby to become fully human, proper nurturing, protection, and affection must be offered to it, a long process that fabricates the baby’s body in the image of its parents’. Becoming a person means becoming someone’s kin, and vice-versa (Gow 1997; Coelho de Souza 2002, Vilaça 2002). On the one hand, a child starts to become someone’s kin at home, with its parents; on the other, this process is only completed in rituals, since becoming an adult person means coming out of seclusion during a regional ritual. Villages capable of sponsoring rituals are precisely the largest ones, where, according to the Kalapalo, there must be at least one great chief capable of bringing enough people together. In a village—which needs an iho/chief to endure—living together, sharing meals, and reciprocity are responsible for producing a generalized kind of kinshiping, transforming a heterogeneous collective of covillagers into a differentiated “we” in the multiethnic Xinguano complex. In order to produce collectives on varied scales, an asymmetrical relationship is necessary between a body/trunk/mainstay and the people who live around it, and chiefs are the human form of this trunk-body. Despite the passage above saying there isn no mainstay/trunk whose speech the group may follow, the Kalapalo state that the chief is actually “lying a little”: he says that there is no one to guide his people, while the truth is that he is obviously doing so (as we have already seen in the Hawk’s Speech). [75]Finally, there’s the issue of white people, once more taken as spirits. The mortal objects that the chief speaks of mean Western commodities, long seen as witchcraft. With the epidemics that broke out from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the Upper Xingu peoples quickly associated white people’s objects with diseases and sorcery.   Ah, luale muke ataitsü egekaluko, kangamuke Ah, please, let it be so, make noise, children   Ataipanenatüe ataitsü hetsange May you all rejoice   Indegela muke gele akangabaha igei gitse It’s not here   Ah, kutelüko hata muke geleha gitse Ah, where we follow 15 Ah, kutaũpüaõko muke geleha gitse, ah, engikapügütela leha gitse Ah, it’s not in a place cleared out by our grandparents   Ah, kutelüko hata muke leha gitse Ah, where we follow Once again the chief exhorts his people to make noise and rejoice, since their living conditions don’t favor joy—they no longer live in a village cleared out by their grandparents, but in other people’s village. It’s difficult to interpret this passage. Since they moved to Aiha, the Kalapalo live in Kamayurá territory, and to this day these Tupi provoke them by saying that they no longer inhabit a village where their grandparents are buried. If we interpret the above passage literally, we might be led to think that it refers to this specific situation, which could have been incorporated into the speech at some point in the last fifty years. Yet the situation gets more complicated if we consider that the man who taught this speech to his son had never delivered it in Aiha, but only in the old Kalapalo village, whose region had been densely occupied by the Kalapalo since at least the beginnings of the eighteenth century. In a trip to the region, Ageu referred to that territory as the place “where his grandparents gave their speeches.” The way I see it is that living in a place that hadn’t been cleared out by one’s ancestors is the same as saying that there are no more chiefs: the antonym is a rhetorical resource chosen to affirm something in a subtle and humble way. By denying a relationship with the land, or his chiefly condition, the speaker is actually emphasizing his position as a substitute for all the chiefs who had spoken there before him. He is a mainstay, a trunk growing on the land giving support to the production of a collective body of kin—and, thus, he is the personification of that body.   Ah, luale muke ataitsü atipanenünkgo, kangamuke Ah, please, let it be so, rejoice, children   Isekalu tohoila mukeha kutengataniniha gitse Without making noise we keep on following   Tü akisü kaemana gitse kutengalükoha gitse With the words of whom do we follow?[76] 20 Ah, ukugetihü akisü haindipügü kae muke ata hale gitse Ah, with the speech of a chief, of someone aged   Ah, kutehotanünkgo muke ata hale gitse Ah, we would be following   Ah, isekalu tohoila muke geleha gitse kutengatanini muke geleha gitse Ah, without making noise we keep on following   Ah, luale muke ataitsüha gitse Ah, please, let it be so   Ataimpanenatüe Rejoice The speech ends by going back to the problem of a lack of “noise” (feasts/joy) and the lack of a chief (hence the hypothetical usage seen in line 21: “we would be following,” kutehotanünkgo). It makes sense that the speech be delivered at sunset: it’s not only the end of a day, but also the (supposed) end of a people who live in sadness, with no chief whose words they may follow, besides their ancestral lands, and also threatened by the mortal objects of the spirits (whether these be acts of witchcraft, or Western commodities). If the sunrise speech focuses on the kinship process itself, the sunset speech points toward the fragile continuity of this process, and the importance that chiefs and their words may have in it. Speaking, hearing, transforming One night, a man sleeping on a hammock near mine got up, picked up a slingshot, and went outside. When he returned and I asked him what he had gone to do, he told me that he had gone out to kill an owl, since he thought that its hoot was similar to the expression keteha!, “let’s go!” The animal could be the form taken on by the soul of a deceased relative or friend trying to call him and, were he to clearly hear the owl’s chant just like a human voice, he would soon die and meet up with whoever had been calling out to him. While the owl’s hoot is heard as such, it is seen as a mere animal; when its hoot is perceived as a human voice, this is a sign that whoever hears it is being transformed into a being of the same kind as the enunciator. While walking through the woods, people are also in danger of hearing the calls of animals that may sound just like human voices. This implies a process of starting to become “a bit animal like,” starting to live with these beings, developing a body similar to theirs, and becoming their kin, which causes disease and possibly death. Viveiros de Castro argues that, in multinaturalistic ontologies such as those found throughout lowland South America, the positions of human and nonhuman, as well as the circulation between such positions, have a pronominal character. In a world where everyone may occupy the position of subject/human in a relation, this position is nonetheless unequally distributed. The reflexive I of the subject can relate either to a He/she, objectified as part of nature, or to a You, encompassing him/ her in the point of view of the speaker: The typical supernatural situation in the Amerindian world is the encounter, in the forest, between a human—always alone—and a being that, firstly seen as a mere animal or person, reveals itself as a spirit [77]or as dead, and talks to the man… . Whoever answers to a You said by a nonhuman accepts the condition of being its “second person,” and by assuming, in turn, the position of I he will already do it as a nonhuman. (Viveiros de Castro 2002: 397) Language for the Kalapalo is taken as a characteristic of the human condition, which, for many Amerindians, is shared by virtually all beings. In such cosmologies, the human soul—the capacity to utter an I—is seen as a given, while differences between beings must be actively produced in (and by means of) their bodies (Viveiros de Castro 2002). Creating a common human condition means producing similar bodies, and being able to communicate verbally, besides being a marker of this condition, also seems to be a force capable of taking part in its creation, since it implies the differential positioning, through language and communication, of the related parties. As the dangers of hearing the uttering of other beings suggests, language is capable of engendering the mutual bodily assimilation of subjects: hearing what other beings say could make the listener suffer a corporal transformation that attracts it to the enunciator’s point of view. I suggest that the discourses analyzed here could be taken as part of this same relational matrix. The logic of ritual action in the Upper Xingu (and among Amerindians) is metamorphosis: by producing corporal alterations it becomes possible to transform a person into an agent, allocating this person in the universe of difference and potential affinity the locus of the capacity of agency (Coelho de Souza 2002). Beasts of prey are usually considered the most powerful agents, thus having greater capacity to attract others to their point of view—a hierarchical encompassing movement that may be interpreted from the logic of “familiarizing predation” (Fausto 2008: 335). Chiefs’ ritual speech should be seen according to the same logic: when a chief addresses his audience as You, “speaking like” a bird of prey or a hunting cat, he activates the capacities of agency of these beings, occupying the reflexive position of I, and thus becoming capable of not only having a point of view, but also attracting others to it by symbolically defining them as his potential prey. The apparent paradox is that, in becoming “prey,” people also become kin (both to the chief and to each other). This surely isn’t an exclusively Xinguano feature, and it evokes Course’s discussion on “excess force” of language as used among the Mapuche. For the author, “speech itself is understood to be saturated with an excess of force (newen) which ultimately distances every utterance from the control of its speaker” (Course 2012: 8), in such a way that language has the capacity to produce effects independently of the speaker’s intentions, as if it were an agent itself. Indeed, Passes (1998: 6–7) had already made a similar observation, arguing that in the Amazon it’s common to attribute power to words, “with utterances being endowed with the cosmogonic power of creation and destruction.” This also becomes clear in the conceptions the Kalapalo maintain on “spells” (kehege), words of enchantment capable of “adhering” to objects or persons in order to produce effects. It seems important that, despite his use of chiefly insignia and his bodily position, the chief has to be invisible to his fellow villagers: he speaks either before sunrise, when they are still in their homes, or after sunset, when they have already returned. He speaks loudly in order to be heard, but must not be seen. The use of [78]status objects is intended not to be seen by the people, but to activate the capacities of the beings with which those objects are related: the mythic jaguar-chief, and the twins Sun and Moon, who passed on their chiefly condition to some humans. He also needs to be unspeakable: the orator disappears from the discourse by opposing himself to past anetü and affirming the nonexistence of a present-day chief. A predatory and collectivizing force has to be produced in the chief ’s body, but it also must be attenuated by his invisibility and absence from discourse. Alterity enables the chief to become “great”—magnified (Sztutman 2012)—and encompass others, but it also brings the risk of transforming him into a complete stranger, an Other. Following Beatriz Perrone-Moisés (2012), Amerindian chiefs are in a “betweentwo” position, mediating the relations between the self and the other in a world where alterity is essential to the production of sociality, and limits are never rigid. In this sense, chieftaincy seems closer to shamanism. Such a mediating position is important in a world where its political figures, as Perrone-Moisés says, “are never ‘completely’ this or that” (ibid.: 10). Ameridian political figures move “in the ‘space-relation’ between poles, without ever fixing in one of them” (ibid.). They occupy the cosmopolitical space to where different beings must converge in order to become fully human, but this is always a movement between identity and difference, and not a state. As Perrone-Moisés argues, Amerindian chieftaincy “is located in the interval of the opposition between being and not-being, neither one thing nor the other, nor the sum of the two” (ibid.: 20). Difference cannot be abolished by complete identity, since such inertia would mean the ceasing of social life. As Amerindian cosmogonies emphasize, there can only be perfect stability, identity, and hierarchy among the dead. What becomes immediately “visible,” perceptible, through the chief ’s speech? Although in a humble way, the speaker defines his identity as a substitute of deceased chiefs. (Everybody understands that the chief is “lying a little” when denying his position.) He also brings the listeners’ attention to “indexical signs” that invite the audience to complete the picture with something that is invisible, but is nonetheless part of the performance. Who might be discoursing before dawn or after sunset, and addressing others as his “children”? As is known from myths and ritual performances, the chiefly condition is founded in a predatory bodily quality, which results in the subjective capacity of uniting a plurality of persons in a single body of kin. The act of delivering speeches may suggest to the minds of the audience that the one speaking could be a hawk (who owns the first speech) or a jaguar (owner of the second one). This would be explicit if the audience could see the chief ’s body. The mental image of the chief would thus be completed by means of the projection of an invisible, but nonetheless necessary, part of it. The ritual performance therefore assembles two contradictory perceptions of the chief, a political agent with a properly chimeric aesthetic. This argument is reinforced by the Kalapalo idea that, during the Hawk’s Speech, a kind of kiskadee bird8 replies from its home: “You say that you take care of us, but you eat us.” There is a “logic of the sensible” underlying this statement: the kiskadee (specially the great kiskadee), despite its modest size, is famous for defending its nest from attacks by birds of prey. The kiskadee’s fear can only be understood if [79]we suppose that the chief could exert some kind of force over his people through the form of predation. Indeed, chiefs may be dangerous, and they must deliberately be “tamed” so that they behave well with their group. If we see the word as the complete opposite of violence, as Clastres proposes, ritual speech tends to be dissociated from any sort of symbolic efficacy; however, if we see it as a modality of predatory force in a perspectivist ontology, we may understand why the chief ’s speech, when aesthetically controlled and moderated, is important, and also what the kiskadee is worried about. This chimeric composition is reversed in other situations. If in these ritual speeches the predator-quality of the chief is invisible, it is brought to the foreground when chiefs appear to foreigners, presenting visual signs of the jaguar, the harpy, or the anaconda. As I have argued elsewhere (Guerreiro 2011), this ritual confrontation between chiefs who present themselves as enemies or potential affines to each other “cuts” the continuum of the Xinguano regional network, creating the conditions for the emergence of kinship in different collectives. Such duality is constitutive of chiefly persons, and must be made perceptible in every situation where such agents are meant to be effective. This relation is never symmetrical, though, but hierarchical. In order for the consanguine aspect to be visible, the affinal/predator one must be invisible; conversely, when the predator-like quality must be shown, its counterpart is kept hidden, but not absent or obliterated: extralinguistic aspects of the chief ’s performance point to their quality as enemies/affines, just as the visible jaguar-chief ’s aesthetic in front of his people when confronting opposing groups points to his condition as a protector/consanguine. This echoes qualities and effects of Amerindian graphic arts: In Amazonian art, lines call the attention to what connects and not to what separates distinct bodies and beings, it is an art of between-two: connecting human beings and animals by the quality of having designs, just as the visible and invisible sides… . What is drawn is, rather than their form, the relation that connects and constitutes them. (Severi and Lagrou 2013: 14–15) In the Kalapalo case, it seems that language and the chief ’s bodily performance do the same, pointing to the relations between humanity and animality, consanguinity and affinity, hierarchy and symmetry, which constitute chieftaincy and social life. Conclusion The aim of this article was to discuss how “chimerical images” could be made effective in political rituals. I hope this also contributes toward an ethnography of the verbal genre known as “chiefs’ speech” in the Upper Xingu, and a better understanding, through Kalapalo own “modes of description,” of some relationships between ritual, aesthetics, and politics in Amazonia. As we have seen, by delivering a speech a chief is not merely “preaching in the wilderness.” Besides being a complex verbal art, both refined and quite valued, the chief ’s speech is a fine indigenous reflection on both kinship and power, the relations between consanguinity and affinity, identity and difference, symmetry and hierarchy. [80]Discussing Kuna shamanic chants, Severi (2004: 816) argues that “the enunciation of ‘obscure words’ does not imply the intention to convey a meaningful message to the patient, but tends to construct an acoustic mask, indirectly defining the nature of the shaman-chanter” (see also Severi 2015: 224). He argues that an “acoustic mask” is “a reflexive means to define the ritual identity of the speaker” (Severi 2004: 830–31), evoking the same kind of bodily transformation produced in ritual action among Amerindians, in which masks may bring to presence supernatural beings by the controlled metamorphosis of the person wearing such objects. Kuna chants would produce the shaman-chanter as a “paradoxical enunciator,” which condenses contradictory characteristics and capacities—he would be at the same time a shaman in the past, an actual human shaman, and a spirit—endowing him with the capacity to realize effective symbolic actions. We see the same kind of symbolic operation in Kalapalo chiefly discourses. The speeches use paradoxical affirmations that define the chief as a substitute of the ancestors, a father, a mainstay—a consanguine—and at the same time his bodily indexes define him as a potential nonhuman predator. His audience’s identity is also produced by paradoxical connotations: they are simultaneously his kin and his prey, a chiefless people and a people with a chief. The audience is the chief ’s “second person,” a collective You brought to his perspective, but the absence of any answer could also be seen as a resistance to it. Through discourse, the chief is produced as a complex enunciator, as is his people created as a “complex addressee.” Chiefly oratory is not “about” something, but is intended to produce a set of differences by means of which sociality is created: chief/nonchief, predator/prey, individual/collective, affine/consanguine, hierarchy/equality: the poles of a “dualism in perpetual disequilibrium” that gives movement to social life. Such ritual performances, in their unique form, create a kind of relational situation that exists only through ritual condensation, but provides a background for everyday life. As is clear, while dealing with political oratory we must not appeal to external causes, such as tradition, authority, or belief, to understand its efficacy, but we must understand how meaning and persons are contextually produced through discursive pragmatics. It’s noteworthy that the symbolic resources used in chiefly speeches to produce the identities of the interlocutors are basically the same found by Silverstein in other forms of political oratory: parallelism and indexical signs. Discussing a male genre of “gossip”, called talanoa, in a Fijian village, Silverstein shows that what is at stake in such talk is not the communication of complete and organized stories, but rhythmically coconstructed conversations that, rather than asserting something, only point to known or supposed facts by other participants (Silverstein 2005: 6). The coalition of persons in this discursive coconstructions would point to their social identities as participants of potential political factions (ibid.: 9). The same would apply for speeches given by American politicians that, rather than communicating messages on “political issues,” would use poetics to identify them with a set of such issues, thus making them inhabit the message and constructing their identities as different from others. Apparently, political oratory in “state societies” is just as “empty” as in “societies against the state”: it’s not the referential content of the message that matters, but the effects of the poetics on the participants’ identities. However, there still [81]are important differences: while the political discourses discussed by Silverstein intend to produce an identity relation between the speaker and his audience (as in the American case), or between the cospeakers (as in the Fijian case), the speeches discussed here seem to introduce a difference between the parties. When Kalapalo listeners understand themselves as the chief ’s children, they are reminded that he is also different, an Other, as a hawk or a jaguar. Also, in order to “inhabit the message” in those cases, one has to create a resonance between oneself and the themes one speaks about. Kalapalo oratory, however, produces dissonance when the chief dissociates himself from the message, attributing its “true” form to deceased chiefs. On the one side, such observations may account for specific qualities of Amerindian politics, such as the alternation between hierarchy and symmetry. On the other, our analysis may lead us see Kalapalo ritual speech as closer to other forms of political oratory, in an exercise of anthropological symmetrization. The ambiguous character of the interlocutors seems central here: the speaker could be just an ordinary man—or not; he could be an ancestor—or not; he could be a predator—or not; he could be human—or not. Such situation is necessary for the chief to occupy an intermediary position between ancestral chiefs and living people, between other peoples and their own, in order to become the mediator whom he is supposed to be. Clastres argued that chiefly discourses denied reciprocity. However, as Marilyn Strathern (1992: 178) suggests, any exchange in gift economies enacts an exchange of perspectives: each person can only become a donor or receptor by assuming the perspective of the other. I think there is something similar in the Kalapalo case. The chief anticipates his people’s point of view (as prey) and conceals his predatory nature, while his fellow villagers see each other as kin (and human) while collectively assuming the chief ’s point of view (recognizing his hidden nature). In this sense, the chief ’s speech is all about exchange, although not in Clastres’ sense. I’ve mentioned that such discourses have fallen into disuse in the Upper Xingu. What could be the consequences of this? Obviously, there could be no measurable effects, but the Kalapalo have their theories. Some say that today there is more witchcraft than in the past; others say that people are becoming more egoistic and don’t share their food with just anyone; others are exchanging ritual decorations and festivals for Western clothes and music. Isn’t it precisely food, caring for relatives, and feasts that the speeches are all about? These speeches reflect (and intend to act) upon the challenges of moving on in the face of the desegregating effects and transformations represented by witchcraft, enemies, and the dangerous spirits who are white people. Clastres was right: the chief ’s speech doesn’t demand or produce laws—but it has a great reflexive capacity, and that’s where it gains at least part of its force.[82] References Austin, John. 1975. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ball, Christopher. 2007. “Out of the park: Trajectories of Wauja (Xingu Arawak) language and culture.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago. Basso, Ellen B. 1973. The Kalapalo Indians of Central Brazil. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ———. 2009. “Civility and deception in two Kalapalo ritual forms.” In Ritual communication, edited by Gunter Senft and Ellen Basso, 243–69. Oxford: Berg. Beier, Christine, Lev Michael, and Joel Sherzer. 2002. “Discourse forms and processes in indigenous lowland South America: An areal-typological perspective.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 121–45. Belaunde, Luisa Elvira. 1992. “Gender, commensality and community among the Airo-Pai of Western Amazonia.” Ph.D. thesis, London School of Economics. Bloch, Maurice. 1975. “Introduction.” In Political language and oratory in traditional society, edited by Maurice Bloch, 1–28. New York: Academic Press. Clastres, Pierre. 1990a. “The duty to speak.” In Society against the state. Translated by Robert Hurley, 151–5. New York: Zone. ———. 1990b. “Society against the state.” In Society against the state. Translated by Robert Hurley, 189–218. New York: Zone. ———. 1990c. “Exchange and power: Philosophy of the Indian chieftainship. Translated by Robert Hurley, 27–47. New York: Zone. Coelho de Souza, Marcela Stockler. 2002. “O traço e o círculo: O conceito de parentesco entre os Jê e seus antropológos.” Ph.D. thesis, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Course, Magnus. 2012. “The birth of the word: Language, force, and Mapuche ritual authority.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 1–26. Farage, Nádia. 1997. “As flores da fala: Práticas retóricas entre os Wapishana.” Ph.D. thesis, Universidade de São Paulo. Fausto, Carlos. 2008. “Donos demais: Maestria e domínio na Amazônia.” Mana 14 (2): 329–66. Franchetto, Bruna. 1986. “Falar Kuikuro: Estudo etnolingüístico de um grupo karib do Alto Xingu.” Ph.D thesis, Museu Nacional/UFRJ. ———. 1993. “A celebração da história nos discursos cerimoniais Kuikuro (Alto-Xingu).” In Amazônia: Etnologia e história indígena, edited by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, 95–116. São Paulo: EDUSP/FAPESP. ———. 2000. “Rencontres rituelles dans le Haut-Xingu: La parole du chef.” In Les rituels du dialogue: Promenades ethnolinguistiques en terres amérindiennes, edited by Aurore Monod-Becquelin and Philippe Erikson, 481–509. Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie. Gow, Peter. 1991. Of mixed blood: Kinship and history in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. “O parentesco como consciência humana: O caso dos piro.” Mana 3 (2): 39–65. Graham, Laura. 1986. “Three modes of Shavante vocal expression: Wailing, collective singing, and political oratory.” In Native South American discourse, edited by Joel Sherzer and Greg Urban, 83–118. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [83]Guerreiro, Antonio. 2011. “Refazendo corpos para os mortos: As efígies mortuárias Kalapalo (Alto Xingu, Brasil).” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 9 (1), Article 1: 1–29. ———. 2012. “Ancestrais e suas sombras: Uma etnografia da chefia kalapalo e seu ritual mortuário.” Ph.D. thesis, Universidade de Brasília. Houseman, Michael. 2004. “The red and the black: A practical experiment for thinking about ritual.” In Ritual in its own right: Exploring the dynamics of transformation, edited by Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist, 75–97. New York: Berghahn. Houseman, Michael, and Carlo Severi. 1998. Naven or the other self: A relational approach to ritual action. Leiden: Brill. Lanna, Marcos. 2005. “As sociedades contra o Estado existem? Reciprocidade e poder em Pierre Clastres.” Mana 11 (2): 419–48. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1996. The story of Lynx. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1935) 2002. Coral gardens and their magic, Vol. II. New York: Routledge. McCallum, Cecilia. 1990. “Language, kinship and politics in Amazonia.” Man (N.S.) 25 (3): 412–33. Passes, Allan. 1998. “The hearer, the hunter, and the Agouti head: Aspects of intercommunication and conviviality among the Pa‘ikwene (Palikur) of French Guiana.” Ph.D. thesis, University of St. Andrews. Peirce, Charles S. 1955. “Logic as semiotic: The theory of signs.” In Philosophical writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler, 98–119. New York: Dover Publications. Perrone-Moisés, Beatriz. 2012. “Bons chefes, maus chefes, chefões: Elementos de filosofia política ameríndia.” Dossiê Pensar com Clastres, Revista de Antropologia 54: 5–20. Rubio, Javier Carrera. 2004. “The fertility of words: Aspects of language and sociality among Yanomami people of Venezuela.” Ph.D. thesis, University of St. Andrews. Santos, Gélsama Mara Ferreira. 2007. “Morfologia Kuikuro: Gerando nomes e verbos.” Ph.D. thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Santos-Granero, Fernando. 1991. The power of love: The moral use of knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru. London: Athlone Press. Severi, Carlo. 2002. “Memory, reflexivity and belief: Reflections on the ritual use of language.” Social Anthropology 10 (1): 23–40. ———. 2004. “Capturing imagination: A cognitive approach to cultural complexity.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 10 (4): 815–38. ———. 2013. “O espaço quimérico: Percepção e projeção nos atos do olhar.” In Quimeras em diálogo: Grafismo e figuração na arte indígena, edited by Carlo Severi and Els Lagrou, 25–65. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 7 Letras. ———. 2015. The chimera principle: An anthropology of memory and imagination. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: Hau Books. [84]Severi, Carlo, and Els Lagrou. 2013. “Introdução.” In Quimeras em diálogo: Grafismo e figuração na arte indígena, edited by Carlo Severi and Els Lagrou, 11–24. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 7 Letras. Silverstein, Michael. 1997. “Language as part of culture.” In Horizons of anthropology, edited by Sol Tax and Leslie Freeman, 119–31. Chicago: Aldine. ———. 2003. Talking politics: The substance of style from Abe to “W.” Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. ———. 2005. “The poetics of politics: ‘Theirs’ and ‘Ours’.” Journal of Anthropological Research 61 (1): 1–24. Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. “Qualified value: The perspective of gift exchange.” In Barter, exchange and value, edited by Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones, 169–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sztutman, Renato. 2012. O profeta e o principal: A ação política Ameríndia e seus personagens. São Paulo: EDUSP. Tambiah, Stanley. 1968. “The magical power of words.” Man (N.S.) 3 (2): 175–208. ———. 1985. “A performative approach to ritual.” In Culture, thought and social action, 123–66. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Urban, Greg. 1986. “Ceremonial dialogues in South America.” American Anthropologist 88 (2): 371–86. Vilaça, Aparecida. 2002. “Making kin out of others in Amazonia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 8 (2): 347–65. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1977. “Indivíduo e sociedade no Alto Xingu: Os Yawalapíti.” Ph.D. thesis, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. ———. 2002. “Perspectivismo e multinaturalismo na América indígena.” In A inconstâcia da alma selvagem e outros ensaios de antropologia, 345–99. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify. Des chimères politiques: L’incertitude dans le discours du chef dans le Haut-Xingu Résumé : Cet article s’intéresse aux formes de gouvernement rituelles dans le Sud de l’amazonie, et en particulier au cas des “chefferies sans pouvoir”. A l’aide d’une analyse des arts oratoires rituels entre les chefs dans le système multi-ethnique et plurilingue du Haut-Xingu, il montre que les [85]concepts de “condensation rituelle” et de “chimère” peuvent être utiles à la description et l’analyse de telles formes de gouvernement. Dans le Haut-Xingu, certains chefs maitrisent un registre appelé “langage des chefs”, qui consiste en un ensemble de discours conventionnels s’adressant aux chefs d’autres groupes ou à leur propre peuple, selon le contexte dans lequel ils sont prononcés. Cet article analyse des discours de ce registre parmi les Kalapalo (un peuple de cette région parlant une langue caribe) et montre que dans ce registre le chef et le peuple sont évoqués comme des sujets “paradoxaux” caractérisés par des prédicats contradictoires; il considère également comment cet état de fait se rattache à des idées Kalapalo au sujet de la parenté et du pouvoir. En utilisant les concepts de “condensation rituelle” et de “chimère”, cet article propose de réouvrir le débat sur la rhétorique politique lancé par Pierre Clastres et de s’interroger sur la manière dont l’incertitude—plutôt que l’ “autorité” ou la “conviction”—peut enclencher un échange de perspectives, à travers lequel les identités du groupe et du chef peuvent être reproduites. Antonio GUERREIRO is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Campinas, and a member of the Research Center on Indigenous Ethnology (CPEI/Unicamp). Since 2005 he has worked with the Kalapalo, a Karib-speaking people of the Upper Xingu, Southern Amazon. His main research interests are ritual, exchange, and politics in Amazonia. Antonio GuerreiroDepartamento de Antropologia, IFCHRua Cora Coralina, 100, Cidade Universitária Zeferino VazUniversidade Estadual de CampinasCampinas, SPBrazil 13083-896jrguerreiro@gmail.com ___________________ 1. This article is based on a lecture given in October 2012 at Quartas Indomáveis, a monthly event held by the Post-Graduation Program in Social Anthropology of the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). I would like to thank Marcos Lanna for the invitation, and all those who attended for the valuable questions and suggestions. I thank Bruna Franchetto and Mara Santos for our conversations on Xinguano rituals, and their invaluable help with the Kalapalo language. Comments and suggestions by the anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor, Giovanni da Col, were also very helpful. 2. All Karib words used in this article have been written according to the orthography developed by Bruna Franchetto together with indigenous teachers. 3. A feast in homage to deceased chiefs, known as “Quarup” (see Guerreiro 2012). 4. According to a female chief, this discourse is “owned” by Enitsuẽgü, the jaguar-father of the twins who created humanity. 5. I would especially like to thank Ugise, Teue, Orlandinho, and Kayauta for their help. 6. Typical formulaic phrase of anetü itaginhu, with no lexical content. 7. In the context of regional rituals, ngengoku is translated as “messenger,” but the Kalapalo generally translate it as “employee.” 8. The bem-te-vi, in Portuguese.  

Introduction This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Stephan Palmié and Charles Stewart. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.014 SPECIAL SECTION INTRODUCTION Introduction For an anthropology of history Stephan PALMIÉ, University of Chicago Charles STEWART, University College London Although Sahlins proposed it over thirty years ago, and notwithstanding various noteworthy contributions in the interim, a concerted anthropology of history has not yet come into being. This introduction, and the case studies which follow it, lay out the interrogatives of such an endeavor by reference to ethnographic and historical studies of Cuba, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, the United States, and early modern Euro-America. The anthropology of history inquires foremost into the very idea of history—the assumptions, principles, and practices that inform the acquisition of knowledge about the past, and its social presentation. Finding the terms to understand alternative forms of history making requires an ethnographic and historical sense of how the Western concept of history (historicism) came to be and how this historicism is, in fact, lodged within a plurality of alternative practices in Western communities. We see the anthropology of history as a large collective interdisciplinary enterprise that will involve archaeologists, historians, and many others in understanding the possibilities of history as a practice and as an analytic. Keywords: chronotope, eventuation, historicism, past relationships, revelation and history, temporal pollution. We have had history and anthropology, historical anthropology, and even anthrohistory (Murphy et al. 2011), but as yet there has been no concerted anthropology of history. The insertion of the preposition “of” has epistemic repercussions disproportionate to its grammatical minimalism. We have long been accustomed to viewing all forms of knowledge production as open to historical study—the natural sciences have their historians, and the history of anthropology has long existed (Lowie 1937; Hodgen 1964; Stocking 1968). The anthropology of history invites critical reorientation by turning history itself, as a form of knowledge and social praxis, into an object of anthropological inquiry. Through ethnography, anthropology can [208]provide perspectives that historiography or the philosophy of history cannot offer—not only because they mainly consider written texts, but also because their analytic lenses have been trained exclusively on Western historical thought.1 An anthropology of history, as envisioned in this collection, extends the exploration of how history is conceived and represented to take in non-Western societies, where ethnographic study can reveal local forms of historical production that do not conform to the canons of standard historiography (Hastrup 1991; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 157; and see Feierman 1999 for striking examples). People produce representations of the past obliquely, in practices such as dancing (McCall 2000), spirit séances (Lambek 2002; Palmié 2013a), or encounters with artifacts (Hodges 2013; Stewart 2012). Just as kinship studies have come to focus on the practices by which consociates establish relationships with one another (Howell 2001), the anthropological study of history takes on the broader task of establishing and analyzing what the historian J. G. A. Pocock (1962) felicitously called human “past relationships,” in all their stunning diversity. To be sure, an anthropology of the ways in which people variously conceptualize and morally evaluate the past in its relation to the present (and future) seems thinkable along such lines, and while it has, indeed, been repeatedly proposed by Sahlins (1981, 1985, 2004), it has decidedly not taken organized shape.2 Considering the enormous influence of Sahlins’ work, many anthropologists might feel that they have long been doing the anthropology of history. Nonetheless, the inquiry into what passes for history here or elsewhere—in the sense of guiding principles and assumptions (more than substantive historical representations)—has not been the main framework for very many works.3 While aware of local ways [209]of conceptualizing “the historical,” and occasionally homing in on it, anthropologists have, for the most part, and quite justifiably, allowed their ethnography to take them where it leads, thereby producing studies classified under other headings. The contributors to this collection might, under other circumstances, have developed their studies into, respectively, a social history of American fairs and commemorative stamps, the procedures and politics of spirit possession, Christian conversion, and Euro-American calendrics. Instead, these subjects are all explored for what they might reveal about local conceptions of space-time and the relationships between past, present, and future. This introduction seeks to delineate the analytical, theoretical, and empirical considerations involved in treating (the very idea of) history as an object of study in the conviction that much more research remains to be done in this area, the results of which need to be brought into comparison and theorized. To begin to locate practices analagous to Western “history,” one must consider very closely what one assumes history to consist in. The value of an anthropology of history lies as much in conceptual unpacking as it does in the variety of practices it might bring to notice. Such a project will not only require identifying contemporary Western historiography and its “historicist” philosophical underpinnings as objects of study in their own right; it will also have to encompass vernacular Western practices such as the writing and consumption of historical fiction, the staging of historical walking tours, or the issuing of commemorative postage stamps (Handler, this collection), and set these practices side by side with, for example, spirit possession in Madagascar (Lambek, this collection), Melanesian engagements with biblical genealogy (Handman, this collection), teleportations across disparate “chronotopes” prompted by verbal and musical performance in Cuba (Wirtz, this collection), or, indeed, the eschatological concerns (Hamann, this collection) that led to the institutionalization of the modern supposedly secular calendar. The ethnographic studies in this collection deepen awareness of received ideas about proper Western history, both by exposing these to close inspection, and by examining alternatives, which throw standard Western, historicist assumptions into high relief. The study of history that we propose may easily fall prey to ordinary-language misunderstandings and, at the risk of belaboring the point, it is necessary to register two caveats. In our view, “the anthropology of history” should not be understood to mean the anthropological study of past times, and conflated with a well-recognized field called “anthropological history” or “historical anthropology” (Burke 1987). That enterprise involves bringing anthropological knowledge to bear on past societies, such as Ladurie (1980) did by presenting his study of the medieval French village of Montaillou on the model of a village ethnography, or as Price (1983) did in reading the present-day Saramaka maroons’ recollections of their eighteenth-century freedom struggle against the records of the Dutch colonial state. In contrast to such efforts at harnessing anthropological methods and perspectives to the goal of representing the past, the anthropology of history that we propose focuses foremost on the principles, whether ideological, cosmological, or scientific—call [210]them broadly cultural—that underpin practices of inquiry into the past, as well as the forms and modes in which the past is represented to others.4 The second caveat is this: when we refer to the “West,” as in “standard Western history,” we are referring to principles of historical research espoused by the history profession and taught in schools and universities in many parts of the world (in and outside the West). Following a tradition of usage, we term this approach “historicism.”5 As noted above, historical practices within any Western community—and likely within any community in the world—are not homogeneous. The West is not exceptional in this respect, but its epistemological economy is particular insofar as historicism occupies a hegemonic place within it. Historicist procedures are necessary in order to have a chance to win cases in court or debates in government or at the university seminar table. The ghost hunter as well as the creationist know, at some level, that theirs is not the dominant view in the secular nation-states they inhabit. And many native communities engulfed by such states know, again at some level, that even though their own vision of the past may clash with dominant historicist versions of it, the latter are ignored only at one’s peril. The power of historicism has affected the rest of the world and become part of local epistemological economies, although in often highly divergent ways. When we speak of “Western history,” then, we will aim to be clear when we are referring to the coherent paradigm of historicism, and when we are referring to the plurality of historicizing practices that mingle and contest one another in a given Western society: Western history as paradigm, on the one hand, and Western history as nonhomogeneous social field, on the other. Recognizing these tensions is a necessary step in the anthropology of history since anthropology, as a post-Enlightenment discipline, has long shared the assumptions of standard Western history (i.e., historicism). This has impeded the ability to recognize alternative historicizing practices as such. The anthropology of history must find a way out of this predicament. The anthropologist of history works within a Western science paradigm that enjoins logical argument, evidence, and proof, while identifying other historicizing practices grounded in different principles. The goal is to capture how these other practices succeed in representing the past in ways that local societies—and possibly the anthropologist, too—find [211]important and convincing. Rather than declaring these alternative procedures for history making, and the histories they offer, deficient, we aim to understand them in their context. Our approach to Western history is, correspondingly, “critical,” not in the sense of judgmental and dismissive, but rather as a ruminative “critique” (Foucault 1997; Butler 2002) of the fundamental ways in which Western history has been instituted and articulated with common sense. Historians have also subjected historicism to critique from the perspectives of postcolonial history (Chakrabarty 2000), comparative world history (Duara, Murthy, and Sartori. 2014), and, perhaps less explicitly, ethnohistory (Nabokov 2002). Our complementary angle from comparative ethnography contributes to a shared endeavor to find ways to think more expansively about “history” by sounding it out—making it ring, to borrow the Nietzschean procedure applied in Hamann’s contribution to this collection. For the time being, however, we recognize that this introductory essay and the others contained in this collection must work largely within historicism in order to be intelligible to Western audiences even as they bring to light other versions of history that depart from Western scholarly standards for history, and so open these standards up to the possibility of principled debate. The (pre)suppositions of history One of the things everyone seems to know about history and anthropology is that Lévi-Strauss once pronounced that there were two types of society, hot and cold. This little phrase, thrown out in an interview, has been one of the most misconstrued statements ever produced by anthropology. It was so badly misunderstood that Lévi-Strauss (1983, 1998) twice returned to clarify that societies may not be divided into historical and ahistorical as a matter of objective classification. In his words, his intention in making this distinction was not to “postulate a natural difference between societies; it does not place them in separate categories. It refers, rather, to the subjective attitudes that societies adopt vis-à-vis history; to the variable ways in which they conceive it” (1998: 67).6 All societies differ in their openness to the idea of historical change: some encourage it, others suppress it—not the facts of change, but the idea of it. Cultural notions as to what constitutes “time,” what is an “event,” what kind of agent can bring about “change,” how perceived “change” is set apart from the regular flow of happenings—all of these vary from society to society and modulate the understanding of what we might call history. Yet, what once seemed like a regrettable, ethnocentric stereotypification—we are “hot,” they are “cold”—actually points in the right direction. Sahlins’ (2004) refrain “no history without culture” reformulates this basic insight about the cultural modulation of history. Causation stands as one pillar of historicism. Causes have effects, and the historian is trained to locate the antecedents that give rise to a particular configuration or event and these are debated. Was it Prussian ambition, Balkan nationalism, a [212]disrupted balance of power in Europe, or one of many other causes that gave rise to World War I? Causation depends on other basic building blocks of historicism7 such as linearity and sequentiality. Present situations give rise to future situations in sequence, and time moves forward and accumulates progressively and irreversibly. These formulations are absolutely consistent with ideas of bodies, motion, and time in classical physics and basic science, and the kind of naturalistic causal uniformitarianism established by Lyell in geology, and then transferred by Darwin into the biological realm. That is why linear uniform causality is so difficult to think beyond: one would be proposing an alternative to Western common-sense reason itself. This is true at some everyday level, even though we might know that in advanced physics time is relative, and can even go backward. We know this, and yet not a few of us would express surprise at the fact that some of our own consociates are convinced that they have had personal experiences of past lives or premonitions of the future. By contrast—or analogy, as it were—the Saulteuax Ojibwa (Hallowell 1955) and the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea (Schieffelin 1985) espouse the idea that reciprocity governs causation. Commit a moral transgression and something bad will happen to you and your group, such as a frightening thunderstorm, an attack by wild animals, or a bout of serious illness. As Schieffelin reports, “The reciprocity scenario embodies deeply felt cultural assumptions concerning the way events in the world are constructed and how actions are meaningfully related to one another” (1985: 48). The Ojibwa, in turn, regard themselves as (human) persons engaged in continuous moral reciprocity with what Hallowell called “other than human selves” (1955: 104), willful and wily, but ethically aware agents, capable of judging human action and reacting to the former’s moral infractions in a finely calibrated calculus of dream visitations and infliction of “eventful” calamity. Clearly, these are different forms of common sense, belonging to people who, in the first case, consider that all of nature was originally human, and only later developed into flora and fauna, and, in the second, see themselves as part and parcel of a human/nonhuman commonwealth in which social infractions can occasion the wrath and retribution of nonhuman agents. Considerate exchange with nature—the “nonhuman”—assumes moral overtones, and results in real events. Expressions in our own society such as “what goes around comes around,” “just deserts,” “karma,” or “divine punishment” do not pass muster as serious rational statements, still less break through into the armory of historical method. At best they are wishful thinking, at worst an intimation of a theodicy that needs to be kept at abeyance at all costs, lest it violate one of the core tenets of historicism (Chakrabarty 2000): the ontological injunction against supernatural causation. The intrusion of the numinous into the phenomenal world (or so we have come to think of it since Kant)—put differently: the agency of the nonhuman in human [213]affairs—is only part of the problem. But it is one that medievalist historians know all too well. No historian of the European Middle Ages can risk importing the nineteenth- and twentieth-century visions of “rational man” acting in a secular, amoral universe—so commonly smuggled into accounts of non-Western societies—into scenarios where people were thought to subsist on nothing but the host and droplets of holy water for years on end, where fragments of martyred saintly bodies were expected to exert causal influence on the course of human affairs (Bynum 1992), or where the teenage girl we know as Joan of Arc retrospectively became an “agent of history” only because she was the “patient” of angelic communications. And, one might add in historical retrospect, because the angels spoke to her about courses of action that happened to relate to the wars between France and England of her time, and happened to have an impact on their course (or so we think today). This raises another issue that philosophical historicism banned as beyond the pale of acceptable and legitimate accounts of the past: that of historical knowledge derived not from diligent and painstaking research and reconstruction, but through revelation, mantic technique, oneiric, prophetic, or otherwise “inspired” (instead of rationally contrived) forms of knowledge production. To be sure, Ginzburg (1980) has made a case for the origins in ancient mantic divination of what he calls the “evidentiary paradigm” still governing the praxis of Western historiography. Yet as Koselleck (2004) has argued, one of the crucial developments in the rise of modern secular notions of history in the West was the suppression of political prophecy, first by the Catholic Church itself in the aftermath of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), and then, after the peace of Westphalia, by states turning away from eschatological visions of the unfolding of events and asserting their control over the future by the protracted replacement of inspired prophecy (often based in scriptural visions of the past) with rational prognosis in which knowledge of “laws of tendencies” extrapolated from historical patterns (a dream that lives on among economic forecasters) was once and for all to secularize and rationalize the making of history (Abrams 1972; Koselleck 1988, 2004). Yet in England, for example, inspired prophecy drawing on visions of the past experienced a final flourishing as late as the turbulent last decades of the eighteenth century (with, for example, Joanna Southcott or Richard Brothers), becoming effectively neutralized as a political threat only through the passing of laws of insanity in the early nineteenth century (Barr 2006). The principles that animated “inspired” history by no means became “a matter of the past” in much of Europe. Thus in the 1830s, on the island of Naxos in Greece, where Stewart (2012) has conducted long-term field research, people experienced dreams of the Virgin Mary telling them where to dig to find an icon buried on a hillside. These dreams were consistent with the general expectation at the time that dreams revealed the future. After five years of intermittent digging, people unearthed four devotional Christian icons, and some human bones. In further dreams, the Virgin Mary gave them information about how the icons came to be in the mountainside, and in yet further dreams and waking stories the villagers expanded this information into a historical account. They told of Egyptian Christians arriving on their shores over a millennium earlier to escape persecution. The stories included details of these [214]people’s names and described their clothing. Local history, then, was instigated by predictive dreams which revealed theretofore unknown pasts.8 While the Naxiots were recurring to a mode of oneiric revelation that can be traced back in the Aegean area to the Revelation of St. John9, Handman (this collection) shows how missionary tutelage of the Guhu-Samane of southwestern Papua New Guinea (PNG) eventually prepared them for a similar revelatory discovery of their Mediterranean Christian past. The Summer Institute of Linguistics and other missionaries have offered different practices of “past relating,” in succession, over the last fifty years. First they translated the Bible and gave people contextual historical information so that they could understand the biblical meaning of objects such as mustard seeds or sheepskins in their original place and time; later, they identified illustrative equivalents in the Papuan cultural environment so that people could localize Christianity and experience it in their own cultural terms; and then the Guhu-Samane took the final step. They identified themselves not just as Christians, but as the literal descendants of the ancient Hebrews who first converted to Christianity. Their journey through historicism and presentism (Stocking 1965: 211) culminated in a revelation that radically ruptured their previous understanding of their past. Much like the Black Hebrew Israelites of the United States and Israel (Dorman 2013; Jackson 2013), the Guhu-Samane discovered not just a congruence of, but an identity between, their past and that of the biblical Jews.10 Rock carvings on their territory, previously considered the sacred engravings made by ancestral figures in the distant past, came to be thought of as Hebrew signs, indexes of Jewish presence in PNG. One wonders if the missionaries are pleased or dismayed by these developments. The Guhu-Samane have jumped into Christianity with both feet, which must count as a success, but in the process they have trampled on basic assumptions about authenticity which Protestantism has done so much to formulate and disseminate [215](Keane 2007). These assumptions are consistent with nationalist historiography11 where each nation erects a specific and discrete history as the authentic source of the collective (Anderson 1983). To be sure, such a view has come under productive scrutiny by historians,12 but it still inheres in the pedagogies served by national secondary school curricula. In such a view, every identifiable human grouping has its own individual history and it is impossible—at best mistaken, at worst deceitful—to claim someone else’s history as one’s own. When Guhu-Samane, African Americans, or, for that matter, nineteenth-century British adherents of Anglo-Israelism (Parfitt 2002) declare themselves Hebrews, they diverge from a key assumption of Western historical thought, and court the charge of inauthenticity. These examples return us to the topic of common sense about nature considered at the beginning of this section. Revelation, as Handman notes (this collection), implies rupture with the past, and this flies in the face of the basic Enlightenment assumption articulated by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century: “Nature does not make jumps” (Natura non facit saltum). Nor does “history” in its secular, historicist sense.13 Miraculous appearances of Hebrew epigraphy in PNG, or even ancient Egyptian icons on Naxos, are only acceptable if spatial and temporal contiguity can be demonstrated. Continuity is the baseline assumption not just for history or anthropology (Robbins 2007), but for all of natural science. In semiotic terms, icons cannot be made into indexes by mere charismatic pronouncement. An unbroken chain of evidence is needed. Temporality and event A closely related presupposition to be considered in this context concerns the question of anachronism—the violation of sequential irreversibility—which arguably is both a boon and a bane of modern Western history in that it undergirds what Lévi-Strauss (1966: 260) called its chronological code. Handler’s exploration of commemorative postage stamps celebrating annual fairs and exhibitions (this collection) reveals the arbitrary underside of the code in a deft anthropological analysis of history in the heartland of American bureaucracy—the US Post Office Department. Successive fairs in American cities around 1900 chose arbitrary moments in the past to commemorate (e.g., St. Louis’ 1904 fair commemorated the 1803 Louisiana Purchase; Jamestown 1907, the 1607 Jamestown settlement). On the one hand, time was moving forward, while, on the other, the pasts selected for commemoration on stamps jumped back and forth in an alternative code. To [216]be sure, all humans live in pluritemporal lifeworlds. Yet in the modern West, the simultaneity of the noncontemporaneous (Bloch 1977) has been carefully quarantined by concepts such as “tradition,” “heritage,” or, conversely, “survivals” and “regression.” Thus while the dead can be seen as our contemporaries, the “truth” of statements to that extent can only be metaphorical: as, for example, in cases where Truth and Reconciliation Commissions or investigations into genocidal wars use a language of accountability of the living to the dead when it comes to reckoning with past atrocities. Yet what if the present absence (Domanska 2006) of the dead, in other words, the weight of the past (Lambek 2002), were not only borne by their descendants in a symbolic fashion, but constituted part and parcel of the interactional reality of their present social worlds? Malagasy spirit possession as considered by Lambek (this collection) represents a case in point. While the copresence of the living royal dead in the lives of contemporary inhabitants of Majunga is simply a social fact (they reappear in the bodies of their mediums at regularly staged royal services), the emergence and proliferation of hitherto unknown types of jiriky spirits in times of political crisis not only prompt reflection on a seeming misalignment of past and present; they amount to a poignant comment on the moral and ethical force exerted by the past. In Majunga, we might say with Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” ([1951] 1996: 85). While we will return to the implications of Lambek’s ethnography of what Bohannon (1958) might have called an “extra-processual event” in the social reproduction of Sakalava “past relationships” (i.e., an unexpected disturbance of the flow of ritual eventuation), it is clear that what from a historicist point of view looks like “chronological pollution” (Hamann 2008) is constitutive of Sakalava political ethics not just on a local level, but within the context of Malagasy politics more generally. Or consider here, if in a different register, the case of palo monte, an Afro-Cuban ritual complex in which human remains are dug up and incorporated into composite power objects known as ngangas or prendas (Palmié 2006, 2013b). Within such objects, the dead human being (“muerto”) to whom the bones belonged takes on a new worldly existence as a nfumbi (a term only poorly glossed as “spirit”). Ritually installed in a nganga object, the nfumbi animates a complex new life form capable of agentively and eventfully interfering in present human affairs by performing mystical “works” at the bidding of a palero, as the human masters of ngangas are known. Housed in metal cauldrons, ngangas possess internal logic and coherence. Their components act in synergetic concordance, so that while, for example, the human remains will guarantee the “inspired” nature—willfulness, personality, agentive force, and so on—of a nganga, the addition of, for instance, a dog’s head, the skeleton of a bat, or a desiccated scorpion or spider will channel such force by amplifying and directing the ways in which the nfumbi will conduct its mystical errands (such as smelling out its target, flying in the night, or stinging and sucking the life out of the victims of sorcerous attacks and counterattacks). Packets attached to the outer surface of a nganga may contain further instructions concerning specific “works” (trabajos) that the nfumbi is to perform, and the residue of the animal or other sacrifices with which a nganga is remunerated for its services will gradually build up, and often overflow the cauldron itself, spilling out into veritable ritual landscapes that can come to fill whole rooms. These have their own depositional [217]logics and histories, and they present a materially accreting record of mystical interactions between the nfumbi and its human master. The resulting tableaux morts thus come to document a sort of history that chronicles the nganga’s owner’s agency and mystical pursuits in, for example, healing the sick, influencing the outcome of court cases, procuring exit visas to the United States, or warding off sorcerous attacks. But the history thus materialized systematically blurs the bright lines of Western common-sense ontological divisions, such as those between persons and things, life and death, past and present. While a new nganga is fed with its owner’s blood, initiation into the cult of a nganga involves rubbing some of the nganga’s contents into small wounds cut into the skin of the future palero, rendering the nganga and its owner the coconstitutive parts of a supra-individual relation. Such relations ramify outward in space and time by assimilating actors and entities on both sides of the divide between the living and the dead: just as new initiates literally become consubstantial with the ngangas they acquire, so will a palero “seed” a nganga object fashioned for a neophyte with parts of the contents of his own nganga (which, in turn, had once been charged with elements derived from a preexisting nganga), thus constituting a pattern that cascades across time and (social) space in a historicity that appears to defy any and all Western modes of temporal, physical, and even metaphysical common sense. This common sense arises from the widely shared historicist supposition consolidated in the early modern period (Fasolt 2004; Koselleck 1988, 2004) that the past is past, and separated from the present, which is, in turn, separate from the future. In line with the view of classical physics, students of history are taught to understand the past in its own terms, and not pollute it by anachronistic assumptions about the operation of ideas or technologies that only arose later. The nganga, in contrast, is an exercise in temporal pollution. Like the Naxos villagers who found their past riding on the coattails of their future, or the Guhu-Samane, whose past had to be retrospectively changed in order to prefigure their present conversion to Christianity, time may not be realized as linear and progressive. Ethnographic sensitivity to the intricate linkages between past, present, and future guides the anthropological study of histories as they take shape in specific social settings. This holds just as true for historicism, where historians have constantly fended off the specter of presentism in order to conduct the business of history. Modern historiography purifies itself (Latour 1993) of temporal pollution to create the past as an object of the present. There are historical reasons for this. According to Fasolt (2004), modern history in the form we know it arose in the seventeenth century as people began to assert the possibility of a different future where they would not be held so firmly in place by the church or the monarch. Not unlike the Guhu-Samane, or the Naxiots, in the process of creating a new present and future, they changed their understanding of the past. The past was now conceived to be separate and different from the present. A notion of human individuality, free will, choice, and change came gradually to inform historical study as well as personal assumptions about life. If the future would be novel and undecided, then the past must have taken shape under the same conditions. This spelled the end of pattern and teleology in history, and the beginning of historicism, as we know it. Fasolt (2005) went so far as to cast the practice of history in the West as a ritual reaffirmation of human liberty, constantly repeated to remind us of our innermost values of [218]individual autonomy. But as Latour would have predicted, and as the essays in this collection show, like all programs of modernistic purification, this one, too, turns out hybrid after hybrid. Scales and modes Perhaps, each nganga object—just like a dead Sakalava royal taking possession of its medium, the Virgin appearing in Naxiot dreams, a series of commemorative postage stamps, or the Gregorian calendar—is best seen as constituting a chronotopic constellation of its own: encompassing a register of potential eventuation with its own coordinates of space, time, and value. A key concept for the anthropology of history that we envision, Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of the “chronotope” needs addressing here, especially since, as Wirtz rightly notes, it is “increasingly cited, sometimes applied, but only rarely given sustained theoretical attention” (this collection, p. 343). In contrast to the naïvely Newtonian nature of Western temporal common sense, Bakhtin’s concept analogically recurs to a post-Einsteinian relativity from which a plurality of senses of space and time become not only thinkable, but also potentially psychologically and socially inhabitable. Fusing Bakhtin’s own concept of heterochronicity with a non-Euclidian notion of space, one might call this “heterochronotopy,”14 in order to capture the dialogic relationship between chronotopes in a social field—a concept akin to heteroglossia, but emphasizing the evocation of temporal envelopes rather than just persons and authorities per se. While structuring the time-space coordinates of social ontologies in a way that makes eventuation thinkable in the first place, such chronotopes, according to Bakhtin’s crucial insight, are themselves “historical,” that is, subject to change and modification over time. Here we have, it seems, a way of operationalizing Sahlins’ notion that “an event is a relation between a happening and a structure” (1985: xiv, emphasis in original), so that a potential multiplicity of locally salient chronotopic registers can determine what, if anything, can come to constitute an “event,” and what incidents get banished to the realm of mere duration: the “empty stretches” (Ardener 1989) that largely make up the unnoticed and unnoticeable “incremental,” “eventless,” even “evolutionary” (Ingold 1986) or “structural” (in Braudel’s [1980] sense) processes by which social systems—including their chronotopic regimes—get both reproduced and transformed over time.15[219] At the same time, the chronotope offers a concept of unstable time, where chutes into the past can suddenly open and afford time transportation, which is why, in usage, it is not always clear if chronotope refers to a present “here” or a temporally removed “there.” When Wirtz speaks with some Cuban oldtimers about religion in the past—in what, for her, was a chronotope of “the interview” grounded in basic historicist assumptions—they begin singing, thereby opening for themselves a chronotope of spiritual immanence. And spirits of the dead duly appear. Mean-while, the reggaeton music blaring on the street constantly threatens to shatter the frame and haul everyone back into the chronotope of the Cuban present. This shows the complexity of triggers for activating different chronotopes, which can vary from subtle linguistic cues to ambient soundscapes and visual phenomena encountered by chance. Everything in the present has a past, and therefore the potential to be viewed as historical, yet we operate much of the time without noticing the historical aspect of, say, the window we look through or the paper we write on—these objects and activities are transacted instrumentally in the present, conceptually unconstituted as such (Lucas 2004), and thus readily “at hand” (in Heidegger’s sense) as a material scaffolding for our present pursuits. To activate historical thought, to see our worlds as “pastful,” we must perform the operation of viewing the “present under the aspect of the past” (sub specie praeteritorum), as the philosopher of history Oakeshott phrased it (1933: 118). Chronotopes are different from intellectual switches where we agree to consider the past. They are modal switches that activate—often unintentionally and spontaneously—particular pasts in joint or individual attention. In chronotopic switching, affectivity takes precedence over reference: in Jakobson’s (1960) terms, the expressive function in communication has salience over the referential; mood, the feel of the past, floats above tense, which classifies pastness and relative pastness. When Swann tastes the chronotopic madeleine in Proust’s novel, he is conducted by his sense of taste to the emotive recovery of Sunday mornings at his aunt’s house. It is not one particular Sunday morning on a given date, but the general affective overtone of Sunday mornings during that time of his life. Chronotopes often carry an iterative aspectual dimension, the imperfective, which captures action from the inside. They deliver people into generalized past worlds, epochs, eras, or envelopes of time, not necessarily to fixed points and singular moments. The Alevi ritual of cem provides a further example. Participants light twelve candles for the twelve martyrs (imams) of their faith, douse them, and begin to weep as they immerse themselves in the thought of painful events, recent and distant, in an act of analogical compression where the present, near past, and remote past are fused. The cem includes music and a trance-inducing dance in which participants commune with their history, embodying it and bringing it to life. The pictures of Atatürk (the twentieth-century political leader), Haji Bektash (the thirteenth-century mystic), and Ali (the seventh-century son-in-law of Muhammad) prominently hanging on the wall act as visual guides to the past, prompting people to sink into thought of their history as a concatenation of suffering (Mandel 2008: 255, 280). In a different, but not unrelated, way, among the Wari’ of the Brazilian Amazon (Conklin 2001), the smell of decomposing flesh, the sight or smell of burning trees [220]or huts, and the size of trees in the forest are all historicizing triggers. They are indices of persons who have died. The Wari’, however, work the chronotope from the opposite direction (cf. Taylor 1993). They want to forget people who have died because it is too painful to remember them; thus there are no memorials or gravestones, only the gaps in nature and society, opened up particularly wide because the Wari’ obliterate houses and trees or plants associated with the deceased (Conklin 2001: 224ff.; n.d.). These gaps are antimonuments, visible less as man-made “lieux de mémoire” than as the work of biotic processes contingent upon human interference in the realm of the nonhuman (such as in the new vegetation emerging from burnt forest spaces). But they are nonetheless reflections of a past separated from the present. Instead of submitting to the affectivity of history—the passion of the past—the Wari’ seek to establish tense at the expense of mood in order to render the past definitively over and done. This attitude resembles Western historicism’s separation of past and present, with the difference that, among the Wari’, no one is invited to go back and research and recover this type of personal past in a form approaching historiography. They are content to know that their deceased have been transformed into spirits or animals occupying a timeless mythic dimension, and therefore are not located in the past at all (Conklin n.d.; cf. Taylor 1993: 675). Inverting Harvey’s (1989) diagnosis of the chronotope of technomodernity—the annihilation of space by time—the Wari’ annihilate time by reworking lived space or place. Given the particularities of the Wari’ case, it may seem ironic that Western historiography cultivates a similar dispassionate relation to the past. Overdependence on the affective connection to an epoch or zeitgeist runs against the grain of historicism, which seeks to establish truths about the past on the basis of tangible evidence and by providing temporal specificity in relation to the chronological code. Academic history also seeks to keep the past in the past, by objectifying it—just not in the form of altered landscapes sinking back into the gradual oblivion guaranteed by micro- and macrobiotic processes (Harrison 2004), but by entombing it in writing (de Certeau 1988). Each wave of revisionary interpretation that grips the discipline in roughly generational intervals thus might be analogized to secondary burials as they are known from the ethnographic literature. But as is made clear by the essays in this collection that explicitly deal with “the West” (Handler, Hamann), such distancing between the present and the past has an epistemic premise: professional historians espouse primarily a correspondence theory of history where, in order to be true, statements about the past must capture actual past arrangements. The alternative would be a coherence theory where statements can be true because they are consistent with expectations, beliefs, and sentiments held by the historian as an individual and a member of society. Not surprisingly, we find both of these epistemologies coexisting in Western societies. The Chicago world’s fair of 1893 commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America. This was such a large “event” that it exposed some indicative problems of scale for Western historical thinking. Which was the actual moment that one wished to remember? The Post Office issued a commemorative series of sixteen stamps parsing out the events within the event, breaking down the broad chronotopic epoch into specific points in time. These events were then ranked, with the most significant moments pictured on the lowest-denomination [221]stamps, so that the largest number of people would encounter them. Capitalist economic considerations and democratic values thus drove historical production. The conflict between affective—value-rational, in Weber’s sense—and historicist histories continues to surface in recent and ongoing public discussions. Consider the following case: on September 28, 1987, a group of African Americans first celebrated what since has become a major tourist attraction, sponsored by the City of Annapolis. Originally known as Kunta Kinte Arrival Day, the Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival nowadays draws thousands of visitors.16 It commemorates an event that—at least for academic historians—remains beyond verification and endorsement: the arrival of novelist Alex Haley’s putative Gambian ancestor Kunta Kinte (a fictitious name, as Haley conceded) among ninety-eight slaves brought to Annapolis aboard the ship Lord Ligonier on that day in 1767, as described in Haley’s 1976 novel Roots: The saga of an American family, and portrayed in the 1977 TV miniseries Roots. Even at the time, Haley was widely criticized by historians who—while not impugning his motives—rather conclusively proved that Kunta Kinte was a figment of the author’s imagination. And yet Kunta Kinte’s—ostensibly fictitious—arrival in America has now been commemorated for close to a generation. A curious case of text come to life, we might say. Fiction celebrated as historical fact. And yet, ought we not ask: From whose perspective? Make no mistake here. There is no doubt in the archival record that the British slaver Lord Ligonier went to anchor at Annapolis on September 28, 1767, and disgorged a mass of enslaved Africans: human commodities who survived the middle passage, were sold at auction, introduced into New World plantation slavery, and forcefully renamed as Toby, Phoebe, Jack, or George. Every one a Kunta Kinte of sorts, and some of them the distant, often unknown, ancestor of those who commemorate a fictitious—or not so fictitious—event at the Annapolis City Docks each September. Correspondence to historical facts, no. Coherence with the moral vision of a vast number of Americans of African descent, yes. The story of Kunta Kinte is true at this scalar level, and as a proxy for the family history of a great number of people in the United States today. The history profession demands, however, that if specific names, dates, and places are adduced, then they must be verifiable in the record. A commemorative postage stamp has value for collectors, yet, as Handler notes in this collection, it takes on even more value if it is canceled with a postal date stamp at the exhibition it commemorates. That is the historicist perfecta: the iconically compelling commemorative stamp turned into an index of the proof of actual connection to the exhibition place and time; the knowledge of an African ancestor beyond documentary authentification, in contrast, remains in a historicist limbo, no matter how compelling its moral veracity may be to large numbers of contemporary Americans. Historicities in collision Returning to our earlier distinction between historicism, on the one hand, and historical practices in Western societies, on the other, we have used the former to [222]indicate broadly a type of historical practice to which professional historians aspire, and which the educational systems of Western countries impart. This general sensibility about history—what it is, and how to do it—is, as we have shown, largely consistent with natural science and practice in other spheres of society such as law and government. Yet it is also clear that the underlying principles of historicism are not fully espoused by everyone all the time. People operate with multiple tenets of historical thought in the West, as, indeed, they do in other societies. The ways of establishing relationships to the past in the West quite simply cannot be reduced to a standardized monothetic set of practices. To claim otherwise would be to succumb to the allure of a facile “Occidentalism.”17 We suggest that this plurality of historicizing practices be viewed more as a polythetic set (Needham 1975) where practitioners share certain common suppositions but not others, and also where they mix in tenets excluded by historicism, such as adoption of the wrong scale of analysis, overreliance on affect, or representation in unrecognized forms such as dancing.18 The anthropology of history creatively investigates this area of mismatch between asserted or assumed ideals and actual practices, showing in the process that historical practice in the West shares much more in common with historical practices outside the West than one might like to think. What better antidote to the temptation to a self-congratulatory Occidentalism, then, than Hamann’s study (this collection) of the Catholic Church’s replacement of the Julian calendar by the Gregorian calendar in the sixteenth century in order to fix more precisely the date of Christ’s resurrection (i.e., Easter). Although this change eventually did spread its empty, homogeneous units of time measurement across the globe, gaining belated scientific ratification in the form of atomic clocks initially calibrated to its specifications, it originally arose as an eschatological instrument. Furthermore, the calendar that we now take to epitomize progressive, secular time was actually designed as an instrument to “reduce” time, that is, make it go backward to the perfection of Eden, reversing the degenerated Julian system of reckoning. The endorsement of the Catholic Church aroused opposition in Protestant countries such as England, where the Gregorian calendar was not accepted for many years. The idea of a secular universal time arising in the early modern period emerges as an Occidentalist misconstrual of a divisive, religious innovation. The Spanish Catholic interest in redemption and eschatology actually had much more in common with the viewpoints of local peoples in Mexico or Afghanistan [223](Hamann, this collection) than it did with secular modernity (cf. Subramanyam 1997). The congruence of present-day common-sense history (at various social levels) vis-à-vis paradigms of past relationships in world societies is not likely so extreme, but Hamann’s study of the calendar furnishes a provocative analogy in regard to the historical specificity of historicism’s chronological code. Anthropologists and historians have used the handy terms “historicity” (Sahlins 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Trouillot 1995; Hirsch and Stewart 2004; Stewart in press) or “regimes of historicity” (Hartog 2015) to capture the cultural paradigms modulating historical experience and practice, with the often unstated premise that what, at least since Marx, has come to be known in the West as “historical consciousness” might be subsumable under such terms as well.19 In this collection, several such historicities—or forms of human awareness of being and becoming in time—are on display, notably the image of the sunrise on the Tlaxcalan lienzo (Hamann), which signifies the end of an epoch and the beginning of a new one; or the figuralism of Bible interpretation with its anticipatory post hoc, ergo propter hoc logic (Handman). Perhaps the most striking is Lambek’s deeply impressive explication of the “sublunary” historicity of the Sakalava royal lineage, which waxes and wanes, neither strictly linear nor reversible. Yet Lambek is careful to explain that this historicity sits alongside other historicities, such as the commoner historicity of death and replacement. It is also subject to internal tensions and political oppositions within its own terms of spirit possession. Finally, it sits inside other historicities, notably that of modern global historicism, with which it contends, in a continual dynamic relationship as an “immodern” counterpart. The analysis of Sakalava historicity resonates with our preceding observation about the nonunitary nature of Western historicism, itself but one example of a historicity, as we would like the term to be understood here. Although convenient, one must be vigilant not to allow the term “historicity” to lull one into thinking that the principles of a historicity—its “regime,” in Hartog’s (2015) sense—are all shared and equally distributed among members of a society. Societies borrow from each other and change internally, which creates dynamic situations such as the different understandings of Kunta Kinte, or the uncertainty of the Guhu-Samane man who, unlike many of his consociates, could not find his genealogy in the Bible (Handman, this collection). At such moments, as Handman goes on to say, it is often a charismatic figure who effects change through resort to chronotopic speech genres—in this case, one of revelation—that alter convictions in an Austinian perlocutionary act. The architecture, imagery, rituals, and cultural logics of different historicities come into view especially at moments of collision between utterly heterogeneous historicities—or chronotopic regimes. To give yet another example, Sahlins [224](1985: 54ff.) tells the story of how the Maori repeatedly tore down the flagpole erected by the British during the Maori revolt in the 1840s. The British, who were trying to forge an alliance with the Maori chiefs that would effectively give them sovereignty over New Zealand, could not understand why the Maori did not destroy the Union Jack flying on the flagpole—the very symbol, to their minds, of “sovereignty.” Sahlins explains that for the Maori, the future is behind one: everything that happens in the present is an analogical reoccurrence of an earlier cosmological event. In Maori cosmology, in the beginning, the sky was collapsed onto the earth and a hero prized the two apart and propped the sky up above the earth using four poles. This was the originary event by which the ancestors claimed possession of the land. The British flagpole was seen as replicating this cosmic event and claiming ownership of the land, hence it had to be knocked down over and over again. A British historicity of progressive, future-oriented colonial expansion crossed swords with a historicity emphasizing the eternal return of the past. They diverged fundamentally over the identification and significance of “the event” at the heart of the flagpole affair. Something similar happened on the island of Naxos, where, after independence in 1832, the new Bavarian-led government of the independent Greek state, seeking to cultivate a less mystical version of Greek Orthodoxy, confiscated the villagers’ newly discovered icons. They accused several charismatic dreamers of charlatanry and took them to court. The villagers’ Christian-infused archaeological practice was delegitimated by new laws against the excavation of artifacts without a permit. Objects in the ground were reconfigured as part of a frozen past perfect, highly valued as patrimony, and placed under protection in line with historicist ideas. For the villagers, the icons were part of a past imperfect, a continuous liturgical present in an Orthodox Christian temporality where figures from the past such as the saints portrayed on icons can be in the home, touched, kissed, and treated virtually as family members. What (to use Lévi-Strauss’ terminology) was “heating up” matters in these cases is what Sahlins might call the vicissitudes of a “structure of the conjuncture” between different ways of organizing and recognizing “events” and making them stand out from the endless stream of nonevents that form their backdrop in the social imaginaries in question. But as Wirtz (this collection) shows, what we may need to consider is that such moments do not only operate on a macroscale, but equally characterize social interaction on the most microsociological levels, even among members of one and the same social formation. Attention to real-time everyday social language use and performativity thus can reveal switches of chronotopic registers that, in themselves, demonstrate the potential heterochronotopy of any and all regimes of historicity. We may not think of it this way, but our lifeworlds are inherently “plural”—full of “multiple realities” (Schuetz 1945), including temporal ones, that can be activated, and given a “reality accent,” at any moment, regardless of whatever may prompt such chronotopic switches: a certain linguistic cue, a tune (from the “soundtrack of our lives”), or a whiff of something, we can often not even tell what it is, that triggers olfactorily encoded forms of experiences of the past. The key issue, as Wirtz reminds us, is that these transportations across chronotopes are social in nature: not only recognizable in the instant that they occur, but also iterable across various instances on the basis of a socially shared “semiotic ideology” (Keane 2003) allowing for what we might call past recognition.[225] Conclusion As is well known, years ago anthropology took what is now known as the “historic turn” (McDonald 1996). It went from a predominantly synchronic approach to societies frozen in an “ethnographic present” (Fabian 1983) to recognizing the need for historical perspective. Eric Wolf ’s Europe and the people without history (1982), published over thirty years ago now, can be pointed to as a landmark. This initiative gave rise to colonial and postcolonial historical studies where anthropologists placed peripheral societies within our framework of history. We gave them history according to our historical reasoning, and often as tied up with our own story of contact with them. This led to some important and, at times, spectacular revaluations of non-Western pasts—but always on terms that were ours. Just how these people themselves conceived and represented the past was less often studied. Not only that, however: as many critics have noted, historicism drives out of circulation what Nandy (1995) calls its non-Western “doubles,” as if by some Gresham’s law of epistemological economy. Ironically, when anthropology took its “historic turn,” it largely took Western historicism off the shelf and used it as the tacit gold standard in its well-intentioned endeavors to reconstruct, verify, and legitimate other modes of relating to the past.20 However impressive the results were in many instances, the inescapable conundrum was (and remains) that the resulting historicization of “other pasts” subjected them to a regime of historicity that, as we have argued, is not even consistently pervasive in the West itself. The task at hand for an anthropology of history thus involves not solely appreciating “other pasts” delegitimated by, subordinated to, or subsumed under Western academic historiography. We also need a reverse anthropology where Western historicism itself, as it arose and triumphed in the course of the nineteenth century over earlier or rival forms and principles of generating knowledge about the past, comes into focus as a historically and culturally specific, if nowadays near globally diffused, phenomenon. As Mannheim diagnosed in 1924: “Historicism is a Weltanschauung that determines our forms of thought” (1952: 85). By the time of his writing, historicism as “the Weltanschauung of modernity” had become hard to think outside of, and this—to this day—makes recognizing and understanding other cultural approaches to the past a major challenge. Hence we must recognize the framing power of our intuitive suppositions—our chronotopic ethnocentrism—and suspend judgment when it comes to other modes of forging past relationships. This means placing our own historical imagination and praxis in a broader context of human cultural possibilities and thereby putting historicism at productive risk.[226] The anthropology of history thus ventures on the assertion that we have not always been looking for history in the right places. This, however, raises a crucial question: How does one define “history” so as to do the anthropology of it, without reimporting Western historicism as the framework through which all other past relationships are viewed? Our suggestion is that we begin with a simple, heuristic definition of “history” not only as “practices of knowledge production” aiming at forging “relations to the past,” but also as “intimations of the past,” since the past may be perceived nonobjectively, or sensed affectively (even if later given representation, the experiential moment of the historical is relevant). Representation of such past relationships, and the mode in which they are cast—scriptural, mnemonic, constituted by evanescent cues, or features of the landscape traversed by human groups who relate to them in such a way—all these are not matters to be decided a priori on conceptual grounds, but need to be opened to ethnographic inquiry. To quote Sahlins once more: not only “no history without culture,” but also “other cultures, other historicities” (1985: x).21 Western historicism generally expresses itself in writing, hence the term “historiography,” which is often conflated with history itself. The anthropology of history requires new vocabulary, since “historiography” is manifestly inapplicable to dreaming, dancing, spirit possession, walking through newly reforested areas, or even collecting postage stamps. How shall we talk about these ways of relating to the past, and human consciousness of temporality and eventuation more generally? Terms such as historicization, “historical poiesis” (Lambek 2002), and neologisms such as “historification” come into usage to capture productions/representations of the past that do not necessarily take shape through conscious, rational reflection, or receive expression in writing. All of these terms refer to “the making of history”; not in the manner conceived by Marx, which involved decisive action on the ground, but rather as the a posteriori making of representations of what went on in the past, and how such past goings-on might relate to the world as people variously know it. The introduction of new vocabulary, the discovery of previously unrecognized forms of historical practice in and outside the West, and the probing of the assumptions underlying common sense about history—can these effect any change in “history”? To ask such a question is to ask if anthropological knowledge can affect society. The historicism within which we dwell and write these pages constrains us from predicting the future. On the one hand, the studies collected here might encourage those operating outside the paradigm of historicism to remain confident in their local practices because historicism is not consistently practiced, or even entirely different from what they do. But it might also bring new ideas into historicism and alter its sense of itself as the only correct form of history. It might further precipitate the recognition of its parochialism—something Chakrabarty (2000) and other postcolonial historians have been persuasively arguing for. In our view, historicism will change, when it does—and perhaps it is already changing—for the very reasons recognized in its own principles, namely that the [227]future is bound to differ from the past. As intellectual historians might be the first to point out: thought is historical. Concepts—and “history” is one such concept—are bound into genealogical relations of discursive productivity (Daston 2000; Hacking 2002). To be sure, the same can be said of the discursive grounds from which we—two anthropologists—launch our call “for an anthropology of history.” Yet the expectation for the anthropology of history, as we envision it, is not to instigate or engineer change in historical practice, but rather to study it as it happens. It is a call for empirical attention by anthropologists, historians, and practitioners of other disciplines. As we have contended above, “regimes of historicity” and their prevalent chronotopes are themselves subject to historical transformation. This is no contradiction in terms: past relationships have a history. As Boas might have said, our task is to chronicle the social history of the unfolding and transformation of humanity’s “secondary explanations”: the stories we collectively make up about who we are, how we came to be, and why this should matter (Bunzl 2004). An illustration of this issue can be seen in NAGPRA (the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), which provides Native American groups the right to reclaim and bury the remains of their ancestors when graves are found on federal or tribal land. This framework enables Native Americans to rehistoricize commercial American real estate, as happened in Port Angeles, Washington (Boyd 2009). Building work on a new dry dock was suspended when construction workers unearthed the remains of a 2700-year-old Coast Salish community containing some three hundred graves. During the process of excavation, several of the Native American archaeological workers were visited by their ancestors (what many Americans would call “ghosts”). Ultimately the construction of the industrial harbor was abandoned and the land redeveloped to hold an archaeological site and museum as well as the reinterred graves. Here we have a state-legislated rewriting of the terms on which previously nonsanctioned past relationships may attain not just historical salience, but politically binding force. The legal system of the dominant culture ruled against its own rationalist historicity. For the disgruntled townspeople, ghosts and ancestors stood in the way of progress. The Port Angeles case shows that other historicities may not be disregarded the way they used to be (imagine the Maori erecting poles and reclaiming parts of New Zealand under the law!). But such reassertion of “other” historicities is only one part of a larger spectrum of transformations of historical praxis and experience underway in Western societies. The emergence of new technologies such as digital platforms for simulating and interacting with the past, and social trends such as historical reenactment and the cresting popularity of historical fiction, historical film, TV documentaries, and infotainment have fed the emergence of alternative historicities in the West, and eroded some of the bedrock from under standard historicism. Perhaps we are witnessing the creation of a hybrid historicism. Video games such as JFK Reloaded or Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 immerse players in pasts where they make choices in real time. The Robben Island video game currently under development by the Serious Games Institute in Coventry enables students to visit the island virtually and interactively to approximate the experience that Mandela and other prisoners may have had.22 The written mediation of history, and the framing of the past as an object located in a [228]different time frame from that of the historian, are replaced by direct, visual, sensory engagement with the past; an active, affective mode of historicization. As Rigney (2010: 116) has pointed out, the Internet search engine and web-generated pathways are replacing the logic of narrative connection in popular historical thought. Equally indicative are the disputes over the school history curriculum in the United Kingdom, in particular those over “child-centered learning,” which broke out in 2013. Introduced in the 1970s, “child-centered learning” became the bête noire of conservative critics, who argue that it is one of the reasons why people were not completing school with an adequate history education. Child-centered learning involves, among other things, experiential exercises such as imagining oneself as a soldier in the trenches of World War I, or standing packed tightly together to experience what conditions were like on a slave ship making the Atlantic crossing. Conservative reformers sought to curtail this form of pedagogy in favor of a better understanding of chronology, key political figures, and major events.23 History teaching, as the opponents of such reform argue, becomes impossibly reduced to a boot camp for an “ultra-orthodox” historicism that most academic historians would reject. From the perspective of the anthropology of history, this is a disagreement between a restrictive version of historicism and other versions of historicism. It is a civil war within historicism. But it should also be noted that those on the side of child-centered learning stand on a continuum with practices of experiential and affective historical practice outside the boundaries of historicism, and, indeed, sometimes at odds with historiography. Historical reenactors in the United States told researchers (Handler and Saxton 1988) that history books are not authenticating reference points for them; it is rather their personal experience of the past during reenactments that makes history meaningful. Proof by reference to external evidence is, for them, secondary to personal experiential witnessing. Ranke’s dictum that we should understand the past “as it really was” has generally been taken as an incitement to the fullest scholarly documentation possible. But it has also been understood within the hermeneutic tradition (surveyed by Gadamer [1960] 1994: 173–264) as trying one’s best to establish the internal lifeworld of the past—basically trying to understand the past from the point of view of those who lived in the past. To this day, this tension has not been resolved, let alone properly theorized, within the discipline of history (but see Robinson 2010 for a rare attempt to do so). One suspects that many historians began with an affective fascination for past events, personages, and places, and many probably do still have their own quasi-shamanic imaginary methods for envisioning the past to go along with their dispassionate scholarship.24[229] The advent of popular visual and digital technologies, then, did not create experiential modes of accessing the past. Instead, these new technologies have remediated this type of past relationship and given it new vitality, just as cell phones have redelivered a social connectedness more reminiscent of Melanesian dividuality than Western individuality. Technologies do not solely increase modernity. They have reenergized long-standing historicities and perhaps made “us” more like everyone else. Ironically, then, it may be through the mediation of IT that the West reveals itself to be not as modern as it purports to be; in fact, it looks to be retreating from some former expectations of modernity that may now be transforming into “futures past” (Koselleck 2004). The time for dancing, singing, and acting histories interactively may arrive sooner than we imagine. In conclusion, the recognition of this plurality of historicities and their fusions here in the West might give us a better platform from which to see our commonality with the repertoires of historicity found in other societies around the world. Rather than engineering the sudden importation of their principles into ours, we can recognize that much of what they do we also already do. To say so, as anthropologists, is by no means to diminish the work of our colleagues in history departments, many of whom are engaging similar questions from their own disciplinary vantage points. It is to say that the anthropology of history—like any form of anthropology—attends to all these practices and orientations and attempts to capture their inner worlds of thought and experience. References Abrams, Philip. 1972. “The sense of the past and the origins of sociology.” Past and Present 55: 18–32. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Ankersmit, Frank. 2005. Sublime historical experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ardener, Edwin. 1989. The voice of prophecy. Oxford: Blackwell. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The dialogic imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barr, Mark L. 2006. “Prophecy, the law of insanity, and the [First] Book of Urizen.” Studies in English Literature 46: 739–62. Beard, Charles A. 1934. “Written history as an act of faith” American Historical Review 34: 219–29. Becker, Carl. 1932. “Everyman his own historian.” American Historical Review 37: 221–36. Berlin, Ira. 2004. “American slavery in history and memory and the search for social justice.” Journal of American History 90: 1251–68.[230] Bernheim, Ernst. 1908. Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie. Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot. Bloch, Ernst. 1977. “Nonsynchronism and the obligation to its dialectics.” New German Critique 11: 22–38. Bohannan, Paul. 1958. “Extra-processual events in Tiv political institutions.” American Anthropologist 60: 1–12. Boyd, Colleen. 2009. “‘You see your culture coming out of the ground like a power’: Uncanny narratives in time and space on the Northwest Coast.” Ethnohistory 56: 699–731. Boyer, Paul. 1992. When time shall be no more: Prophecy and belief in modern American culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Braudel, Fernand. 1980. On history. Translated by Sarah Matthews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bunzl, Matti. 2004. “Boas, Foucault, and the ‘native anthropologist’: Notes towards a neo-Boasian anthropology.” American Anthropologist 106: 435–42. Burke, Peter. 1987. The historical anthropology of early modern Italy: Essays on perception and communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. “Western historical thinking in a global perspective—10 theses.” In Western historical thinking: An intercultural debate, edited by Jörn Rüsen, 15–30. New York: Berghahn. Butler, Judith. 2002. “What is critique? An essay on Foucault’s virtue.” In The political, edited by David Ingram, 212–28. Oxford: Blackwell. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1992. Fragmentation and redemption. New York: Zone. Carrier, James. 1992. “Occidentalism: The world turned upside-down.” American Ethnologist 19: 195–212. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Christian, William, Jr. 1996. Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the reign of Christ. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collingwood, R. G. 1946. The idea of history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Comaroff, John, and Jean Comaroff. 1992. Ethnography and the historical imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Conklin, Beth. 2001. Consuming grief: Compassionate cannibalism in an Amazonian society. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. N.d. “Burning memories: Ontoecological attunement in Amazonian death rituals.” Unpublished manuscript. Danto, Arthur. 1965. Analytical philosophy of history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daston, Lorraine. 2000. “The coming into being of scientific objects.” In Biographies of scientific objects, edited by Lorraine Daston, 1–14. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[231] de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The writing of history. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Archive fever: A Freudian impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dirlik, Arif. 1994. “The postcolonial aura: Third World criticism in the age of global capitalism.” Critical Inquiry 20: 328–56. Domanska, Ewa. 2006. “The material presence of the past.” History and Theory 45: 337–48. Dorman, Jacob. 2013. Chosen people: The rise of American black Israelite religions. New York: Oxford University Press. Dray, William H. 1964. Philosophy of history. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Duara, Prasenjit, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori, eds. 2014. A companion to global historical thought. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the other. New York: Columbia University Press. Fasolt, Constantin. 2004. The limits of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. “The limits of history in brief.” Historically Speaking 6: 5–10. Faulkner, William. (1951) 1996. Requiem for a nun. London: Vintage. Fausto, Carlos, and Michael Heckenberger, eds. 2007. Time and memory in indigenous Amazonia: Anthropological perspectives. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Feierman, Steven. 1999. “Colonizers, scholars, and the creation of invisible histories.” In Beyond the cultural turn, edited by Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, 186–216. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ferguson, Niall. 2013. “On the teaching of history, Michael Gove is right.” Guardian, February 15. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/history-teachingcurriculum-gove-right/print (accessed June 14, 2016). Foucault, Michel. 1997. “What is critique?” In The politics of truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, 41–81. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Frye, Northrop. 1981. The code of codes. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1960) 1994. Truth and method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. Second revised edition. New York: Continuum. Gardener, Patrick. 1961. The nature of historical explanation. New York: Oxford University Press. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1980. “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and scientific method.” History Workshop 9: 5–36. Goldberg, Jeffrey. 1999. “Israel’s Y2K problem.” New York Times Magazine, October 3. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/03/magazine/israel-s-y2k-problem.html. Gow, Peter. 2001. An Amazonian myth and its history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gruzinski, Serge. 2002. The mestizo mind: The intellectual dynamics of colonization and globalization. New York: Routledge.[232] Hacking, Ian. 2002. Historical ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1955. Culture and experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hamann, Byron Ellsworth. 2008. “Chronological pollution.” Current Anthropology 49: 803–46. Hamilakis, Yannis. 2007. The nation and its ruins: Antiquity, archaeology and national imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Handler, Richard, and William Saxton. 1988. “Dyssimulation: Reflexivity, narrative, and the quest for authenticity in ‘living history’.” Cultural Anthropology 3: 242–60. Harrison, Simon. 2004. “Forgetful and memorious landscapes.” Social Anthropology 12: 131–51. Hartog, François. 2015. Regimes of historicity: Presentism and experiences of time. Translated by Saskia Brown. New York: Columbia University Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into cultural change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1991. “Introduction.” In Other histories, edited by Kirsten Hastrup, 1–13. London: Routledge. Hill, Jonathan. 1988. Rethinking history and myth: Indigenous South American perspectives on the past. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hirsch, Eric, and Charles Stewart. 2004. “Introduction: Ethnographies of historicity.” History and Anthropology 16: 261–74. Hodgen, Margaret. 1964. Early anthropology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hodges, Matthew. 2013. “Illuminating vestige: Amateur archaeology and the emergence of historical consciousness in rural France.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55: 474–504. Howell, Signe. 2001. “Self-conscious kinship: Some contested values in Norwegian transnational adoption.” In Relative values, edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 203–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Iggers, Georg. 1995. “Historicism: The meaning of the term.” Journal of the History of Ideas 56: 129–52. Ingold, Tim 1986. Evolution and social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, John, Jr. 2013. Thin description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Linguistics and poetics.” In Style in language, edited by Thomas Sebeok, 350–77. Boston: MIT Press. Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the social analysis of material things.” Language and Communication 23: 409–25. ———. 2007. Christian moderns: Freedom and fetish in the missionary encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press.[233] Klein, Kerwin Lee. 2000. “On the emergence of memory in historical discourse.” Representations 69: 127–50. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1988. Critique and crisis: Enlightenment and the pathogenesis of modern society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2004. Futures past. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. 1980. Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French village, 1294–1324. Translated by Barbara Bray. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Lambek, Michael. 2002. The weight of the past. New York: Palgrave. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levi, Edward H. 1948. An introduction to legal reasoning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1983. “Histoire et ethnologie.” Annales ESC 38: 1217–31. ———. 1998. “Retours en arrière.” Les Temps Modernes 53: 66–77. Linse, Ulrich. 1983. Barfüssige Propheten: Erlöser der zwanziger Jahre. Berlin: Siedler. Lowie, Robert. 1937. The history of ethnological theory. New York: Rinehart. Lucas, Gavin, 2004. “Modern disturbances: On the ambiguities of archaeology.” Modernism/Modernity 11: 109–20. Mandel, Ruth. 2008. Cosmopolitan anxieties: Turkish challenges to citizenship and belonging in Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1952. “Historicism.” In Essays on the sociology of knowledge, Vol. 5. Edited by Paul Kecskemeti, 84–133. London: Routledge. McCall, John. 2000. Dancing histories: Heuristic ethnography with the Ohafia Igbo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McDonald, Terence J., ed. 1996. The historic turn in the human sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mink, Louis. 1978. “Narrative form as a cognitive instrument.” In The writing of history, edited by Robert H. Canary and Henry Kosicki, 129–49. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Murphy, Edward, David William Cohen, Chandra D. Bhimull, Fernando Coronil, Monica Eileen Patterson, and Julie Skurski, eds. 2011. Anthrohistory: Unsettling knowledge, questioning discipline. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nabokov, Peter. 2002. A forest of time: American Indian ways of history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nandy, Ashis. 1995. “History’s forgotten doubles.” History and Theory 34: 44–66. Needham, Rodney 1975. “Polythetic classification: Convergence and consequences.” Man (N.S.) 10: 349–69.[234] Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–25. Novick, Michael. 1998. That noble dream: The “objectivity question” and the American historical profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oakdale, Suzanne, and Magnus Course, eds. 2014. Fluent selves: Autobiography, person, and history in lowland South America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Oakeshott, Michael. 1933. Experience and its modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palmié, Stephan. 2006. “Thinking with ngangas: Reflections on embodiment and the limits of objectively necessary appearances.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48: 852–86. ———. 2010. “Slavery, historicism, and the poverty of memorialization.” In Memory: History, theories, debates, edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwartz, 363–75, 515–22. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2013a. “Historicist knowledge and its conditions of impossibility.” In The social life of entities, edited by Ruy Blanes and Diana do Espirito Santo, 218–39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013b. “Signal and noise: Digging up the dead in archaeology and Afro-Cuban Palo Monte.” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28: 213–39. Parfitt, Tudor. 2002. The Lost Tribes of Israel: The history of a myth. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Pocock, J. G. A. 1962. “The origins of study of the past: A comparative approach.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 4: 209–46. Popper, Karl. 1957. The poverty of historicism. London: Routledge. Prakash, Gyan. 1990. “Writing post-Orientalist histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian historiography.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32: 383–408. Price, Richard. 1983. First time: The historical vision of an Afro-American people. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and narrative, Vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rigney, Ann. 2010. “When the monograph is no longer the medium: Historical narrative in the online age.” History and Theory 49: 100–17. Robbins, Joel. 2007. “Continuity thinking and the problem of Christian culture: Belief, times and the anthropology of Christianity.” Current Anthropology 48: 5–38. Robinson, Emily. 2010. “Touching the void: Affective history and the impossible.” Rethinking History 14: 503–20. Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical metaphors and mythical realities: Structure in the early history of the Sandwich Islands kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1985. Islands of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004. Apologies to Thucydides. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[235] Schieffelin, Edward. 1985. “The retaliation of the animals: On the cultural construction of the past in Papua New Guinea.” In History and ethnography in Papua New Guinea, edited by Deborah Gewertz and Edward Schieffelin, 40–57. Sydney: University of Sydney Press. Schuetz, Alfred. 1945. “On multiple realities.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5: 533–76. Stewart, Charles. 2012. Dreaming and historical consciousness in island Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. In press. “Historicity and anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45. Stocking, George. 1965. “On the limits of ‘presentism’ and ‘historicism’ in the historiography of the behavioral sciences.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1: 211–18. ———. Race, culture and evolution: Essays in the history of anthropology. New York: Free Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. “Artefacts of history: Events and the interpretation of images.” In Culture and history in the Pacific, edited by Jukka Sikkala, 25–43. Helsinki: Finnish Anthropological Society, Transactions No. 27. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. “Connected histories: Notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia.” Modern Asian Studies 31: 735–62. Sutton, David. 1998. Memories cast in stone: The relevance of the past in everyday life. Oxford: Berg. Taylor, Anne Christine. 1993. “Remembering to forget: Identity, mourning and memory among the Jivaro.” Man (N.S.) 28: 653–78. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Boston: Beacon. Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. 2006. “Beyond comparison: Histoire croisée and the challenge of reflexivity.” History and Theory 45: 30–50. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1978. Tropics of discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Whitehead, Neil, ed. 2003. Histories and historicities in Amazonia. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press. Introduction: Pour une anthropologie de l’histoire Résumé : Bien que Sahlins l’a proposé il y a maintenant plus de trente ans, et en dépit de quelques contributions remarquables entretemps, aucun véritable mouvement vers une anthropologie de l’histoire n’a réellement émergé. Cette introduction, et les études de cas qui la suivent, révèlent les défis d’une telle entreprise en se référant à des études ethnographiques conduites à Cuba, Madagascar, en Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée, aux Etats-Unis, et dans l’espace Euro-Américain du début de l’époque moderne. L’anthropologie de l’histoire s’intéresse essentiellement à l’idée même d’histoire—ses présupposés, ses principes, les pratiques qui informent l’acquisition de savoir sur le passé, et les formes qu’elle prend dans l’espace social. Trouver les termes permettant de comprendre des formes alternatives de fabrication de l’histoire requiert une vision ethnographique et historique de la manière dont le concept occidental d’histoire (historicisme) fut développé, et de la façon dont cet historicisme réside en fait dans un ensemble de pratiques diverses au sein de communautés occidentales. On voit que l’anthropologie de l’histoire est appelée à être une vaste entreprise interdisciplinaire, incluant entre autres des archéologues et des historiens, afin de comprendre les possibilités de l’histoire comme pratique et comme méthode d’analyse Stephan PALMIÉ is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion (Peter Lang, 1991), Wizards and scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban modernity and tradition (Duke University Press, 2002), and The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion (University of Chicago Press, 2013), as well as the editor of several volumes on Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic anthropology and history. Stephan PalmiéDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of Chicago1126 E 59th StChicago, IL 60637USApalmie@uchicago.edu Charles STEWART is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. He has conducted long-term field research on the Greek island of Naxos and specializes in the anthropology of religion, dreaming, and theories of cultural mixture (creolization, syncretism). He is the author of Demons and the devil: Moral imagination in modern Greek culture (Princeton University Press,1991), Dreaming and historical consciousness in island Greece (Harvard University Press, 2012), and editor of Creolization: History, ethnography, theory (Left Coast Press, 2007). Charles StewartDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity College London14 Taviton StreetLondon WC1H 0BWUKc.stewart@ucl.ac.uk ___________________ 1. For an eclectic and woefully incomplete sample see, for example, Bernheim (1908); Becker (1932); Oakeshott (1933); Beard (1934); Collingwood (1946); Gardener (1961); Dray (1964); Danto (1965); White (1973, 1978); Mink (1978); Ricoeur (1984); Novick (1998); Ankersmit (2005). None of them are concerned with what we might, for the moment, call “non-Western” modes of knowing and representing the past. 2. To clear some analytical ground right away, we do not think that the debate—largely among historians—about “history and memory” that began to unfold internationally in the aftermath of Pierre Nora’s (1989) influential essay on the “lieux de mémoire” has done much to clarify these matters (see Klein 2000 for a useful critique; cf. Palmié 2010). If anything, we would argue that this debate represented a diversion from the issues on which an “anthropology of history” should focus: namely the consideration of any and all practices of establishing “past relationships.” Another development that we will not touch upon in this introduction is colonial and postcolonial history. Such scholarship has made important contributions towards a critique of non-Western historiographies whose tacit “theoretical subject” remained Europe (Chakrabarty 2000: 34; cf. Prakash 1990, but see Dirlik 1994 for a scathing critique). Still, but perhaps not surprisingly, history per se was not a concerted focus in these studies and debates: it was the medium in which they were conducted. 3. Sutton (1998) and Lambek (2002) would be two exceptions, both of which offer empirical studies of the poetics of history. There is no synoptic theoretical book on the anthropology of history, and there are no edited collections on the subject. South American specialists have perhaps come closest to the interrogatives posed here with their illuminating considerations of history vs. myth, and of Amazonian historicities (Hill 1988; Gow 2001; Whitehead 2003; Fausto and Heckenberger 2007; Oakdale and Course 2014). 4. This change of focus may be compared to the foundation of science and technology studies, which turned from the sociology and history of science in the vein of Merton or Kuhn to the work of, for example, Barnes, Bloor, Latour, Woolgar, Knorr-Cetina, Law, or Pickering. The crucial move involved in this transition was away from an agenda that sought social or intellectual explanations (often framed as either “externalist” or “internalist”) for the growth of scientific knowledge, and toward concerted empirical interrogations (initially often in the form of lab ethnographies) of what science is as a social praxis, and what it does in the world. 5. For convenience we list the main tenets of historicism: (1) the assumption of temporal linearity; (2) chronological code; (3) basis in objective evidence/objectivity; (4) intentionally produced on the basis of research, usually in writing (historiography); (5) the separation of temporal zones—past, present, future; (6) the assumption that events are contingent and unpredictable; (7) the avoidance of anachronism—the past must be understood on its own terms; (8) causality as a standard mode of explanation (see Iggers 1995; Chakrabarty 2000; Burke 2002). 6. “Ne postule pas entre les sociétés une difference de nature, elle ne les place pas dans des categories séparées mais se réfère aux attitudes subjectives que les sociétés adoptent vis-à-vis de l’histoire, aux manières variables dont elles la conçoivent.” 7. To eliminate any potential confusion with Popper’s (1957) use of the term “historicism,” we need to clarify that we consider the contingency and unpredictability of events to be a signature feature of modern historicism. In labeling Marx’s belief in historical destiny “historicism,” Popper was criticizing it for its teleology; hence his title, The poverty of historicism. From our perspective, Popper’s insistence that there is no pattern to history exemplifies and champions historicism. 8. This is by no means an idiosyncratic example culled from the “Mediterranean margins” of “modern Europe”: even if one wanted to apply similar scepticism to Christian’s (1996) encyclopedic inventory of visionary events during the second Spanish Republic, such critique would hardly stand up to Linse’s (1983) study of millenarian visionaries in historicism’s historical homeland, Weimar Germany, or Boyer’s (1992) extensive documentation of political prophecy in the post-World War II United States. That the state of Israel saw itself forced to take active precautions to rein in the flood of American Christians flocking to the Holy Land on the eve of Y2K (the secular cyber-apocalypse!) to await the Parousia speaks for itself (Goldberg 1999). 9. When the twentieth-century Naxos dreamers wrote in their notebooks, “I saw a sign in the sky,” they not only repeated a key theme from the Book of Revelation, they also did so in very nearly the same Greek words, thereby revealing a particular relationship to the past that required no translation (Stewart 2012: 91). 10. Further extending the analogy to biblical hermeneutics, we might say that just as John the Baptist is read as Christ’s “anti-type” (revealed as such through Christ’s life), for the Guhu-Samane, the ancient Hebrews have become the “anti-type” to which their own lives provide the “type” (Frye 1981). See Handman’s discussion (this collection) of this moment in light of Erich Auerbach’s concept of “figural representation.” 11. Itself arguably a secularized successor of a biblical historical matrix of dispersal and descent, as in the paradigmatic cases of the Noahides, the genealogies of the tribes of Israel, or the confusion of tongues at the tower of Babel. 12. Cf. Werner and Zimmermann (2006) for an exposition of the analytical concept of “histoire croisée” and Subrahmanyam (1997) and Gruzinski (2002) for useful exemplifications of the empirical promise of such approaches. 13. A curious exception to this is the legal fiction of “acts of God” in US insurance and tort law concerning unpredictable catastrophic events. 14. Indeed, Wirtz proposed this coinage in earlier drafts of her contribution to the collection. 15. With reference to Melanesian ethnography, Strathern (1988) offers an entirely different conception of events (such as first contact), which she likens to images. These images already contain meaningful relations with the viewer and the event is a performance where these relations become evident and receive interpretation. How is one implicated in the event? What has one done to provoke it? And thus, how does the event already pertain to one? In this Melanesian event concept, the meaning of the event is internal to it, while in Western models it is external to the event and derived by situating it against structure and time. 16. See http://www.kuntakinte.org. 17. As Carrier (1992) termed the still all too common tendency among anthropologists to contrast their richly nuanced ethnographies of non-Western worlds with deadly monolithic and essentialist accounts of “the West.” 18. The latter moment was vividly exemplified at an academic conference on “The Slave Trade in History and Memory” held at the University of Chicago in 1997. As one of the authors of this introduction vividly recalls, during a discussion period, an African American member of the audience asked to perform the “Song of the Sons and Daughters of the Pyramids” as a comment on the academic proceedings. Her request was granted, but what followed her intervention was awkward silence on the part of the majority of scholars assembled. See Berlin (2004) for a reflection on a conference gone comparatively badly awry owing to the expression of divergent visions of the past, unassimilable within the academic historicist frame. 19. The German notion of “Geschichtlichkeit,” which was crucial to Hegel’s notion of historical consciousness as a component of civic ethical life, “Sittlichkeit,” became key to Marx’s vision of historical emancipation. But in our present usage, it designates but one among many other “historicities”—a concept that we would urge ought to be taken to embrace a far wider range of “past relationships” than Marxist notions of “historical consciousness,” or the more common anthropological formulations recurring to it (if, shall we say, only “in the last instance”). 20. A case in point is that of “ethnohistory” as it came to prominence in the United States in the aftermath of the Indian Claims Act of 1946. Called in as expert witnesses in the readjudication of Native American treaties, well-meaning and often politically engaged anthropologists then mined Native American oral traditions for visions of the past that could be commensurated with the forensics of history inherent in the American legal system (on which see, e.g., Levi’s [1948] classic Introduction to legal reasoning), and so unwittingly “gave” Native Americans a version of their past that bore that ratifying stamp of academic historicism. 21. Even if the moment of mal d’archive that Derrida (1995) identified late in his life were a part of the human condition (and this is an empirical question, too), the sources of “archontic” power envisioned and desired in each instance are—shall we say—underdetermined. 22. http://www.seriousgamesinstitute.co.uk/applied-research/Mandela27.aspx. 23. At the height of these history battles, the historian Niall Ferguson (2013) laid blame for the decline of history learning at the feet of “child-centered” learning, which supplanted “source analysis.” The proponents of experiential and world history—as opposed to a history curriculum focused heavily on Britain—seem to have won this round. The minister of education who proposed the reforms was removed from his position in mid-2014, and the proposed reforms were softened. 24. Collingwood’s (1946) “historical imagination” covers the logical inferences historians need to make beyond what is given in the evidence. This can shade into more intuitive practices, such as the techniques of the famous Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos, which verged on a shamanistic communication with the underworld of the past (Hamilakis 2007: 162). We plan to take these questions forward in a future volume deriving from a conference we convened on “The Varieties of Historical Experience.”  

Turner: The social skin This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Terence S. Turner. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) The social skin Terence S. Turner, Cornell University   Man is born naked but is everywhere in clothes (or their symbolic equivalents). We cannot tell how this came to be, but we can say something about why it should be so and what it means. Decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in accordance with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty or solemnity, status or changes in status, or on occasion of the violation and inversion of such notions, seems to have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge. This objectively universal fact is associated with another of a more subjective nature—that the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well. As these two entities are quite different, and as cultures differ widely in the ways they define both, the relation between them is highly problematic. The problems involved, however, are ones that all societies must solve in one way or another, because upon the solution must rest a society’s ways of ‘socialising’ individuals, that is, of integrating them into the societies to which they belong, not only as children but throughout their lives. The surface of the body, as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual; becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted, and bodily adornment (in all its culturally multifarious forms, from body-painting to clothing and from feather head-dresses to cosmetics) becomes the language through which it is expressed. The adornment and public presentation of the body, however inconsequential or even frivolous a business it may appear to individuals, is for cultures a serious matter: de la vie sérieuse, as Durkheim said of religion. Wilde observed that the feeling of being in harmony with the fashion gives a man a measure of security he rarely derives from his religion. The seriousness with which we take questions of dress and appearance is betrayed by the way we regard not taking them seriously as an index, either of a ‘serious’ disposition or of serious psychological problems. As Lord Chesterfield remarked: Dress is a very foolish thing; and yet it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed, according to his rank and way of life; and it is so far from being a disparagement to any man’s understanding, that it is rather a proof of it, to be as well dressed as those whom he lives with: the difference in this case, between a man of sense and a fop, is, that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time that he knows that he must not neglect it (cited in Bell 1949, p. 13). The most significant point of this passage is not the explicit assertion that a man of sense should regard dress with a mixture of contempt and attentiveness, but the implicit claim that by doing so, and thus maintaining his appearance in a way compatible with ‘those he lives with’, he defines himself as a man of sense. The uneasy ambivalence of the man of sense, whose ‘sense’ consists in conforming to a practice he laughs at, is the consciousness of a truth that seems as scandalous today as it did in the eighteenth century. This is that culture, which we neither understand nor control, is not only the necessary medium through which we communicate our social status, attitudes, desires, beliefs and ideals (in short, our identities) to others, but also to a large extent constitutes these identities, in ways with which we are compelled to conform regardless of our self-consciousness or even our contempt. Dress and bodily adornment constitute one such cultural medium, perhaps the one most specialised in the shaping and communication of personal and social identity. The Kayapo are a native tribe of the southern borders of the Amazon forest. They live in widely scattered villages which may attain populations of several hundred. The economy is a mixture of forest horticulture, and hunting and gathering. The social organisation of the villages is based on a relatively complex system of institutions, which are clearly defined and uniform for the population as a whole. The basic social unit is the extended family household, in which residence is based on the principle that men must leave their maternal households as boys and go to live in the households of their wives upon marriage. In between they live as bachelors in a ‘men’s house’, generally built in the centre of the circular village plaza, round the edges of which are ranged the ‘women’s houses’ (as the extended family households are called). Women, on the other hand, remain from birth to death in the households into which they are born. The Kayapo possess a quite elaborate code of what could be called ‘dress’, a fact which might escape notice by a casual Western observer because it does not involve the use of clothing. A well turned out adult Kayapo male, with his large lower-lip plug (a saucer-like disc some six centimetres across), penis sheath (a small cone made of palm leaves covering the glans penis), large holes pierced through the ear lobes from which hang small strings of beads, overall body paint in red and black patterns, plucked eyebrows, eyelashes and facial hair, and head shaved to a point at the crown with the hair left long at the sides and back, could on the other hand hardly leave the most insensitive traveller with the impression that bodily adornment is a neglected art among the Kayapo. There are, however, very few Western observers, including anthropologists, who have ever taken the trouble to go beyond the superficial recording of such exotic paraphernalia to inquire into the system of meanings and values which it evokes for its wearers. A closer look at Kayapo bodily adornment discloses that the apparently naked savage is as fully covered in a fabric of cultural meaning as the most elaborately draped Victorian lady or gentleman. The first point that should be made about Kayapo notions of propriety in bodily appearance is the importance of cleanliness. All Kayapo bathe at least once a day. To be dirty, and especially to allow traces of meat, blood or other animal substances or food to remain on the skin, is considered not merely slovenly or dirty but actively anti-social. It is, moreover, dangerous to the health of the unwashed person. ‘Health’ is conceived as a state of full and proper integration into the social world, while illness is conceived in terms of the encroachment of natural, and particularly animal forces upon the domain of social relations. Cleanliness, as the removal of all ‘natural’ excrescence from the surface of the body, is thus the essential first step in ‘socialising’ the interface between self and society, embodied in concrete terms by the skin. The removal of facial and bodily hair carries out this same fundamental principle of transforming the skin from a mere ‘natural’ envelope of the physical body into a sort of social filter, able to contain within a social form the biological forces and libidinal energies that lie beneath. The mention of bodily hair leads on to a consideration of the treatment of the hair of the head. The principles that govern coiffure are consistent with the general notions of cleanliness, hygiene, and sociality, but are considerably more developed, and accord with those features of the head-hair which the Kayapo emphasise as setting it apart from bodily hair (it is even called by a different name). Hair, like skin, is a ‘natural’ part of the surface of the body, but unlike skin it continually grows outwards, erupting from the body into the social space beyond it. Inside the body, beneath the skin, it is alive and growing; outside, beyond the skin, it is dead and without sensation, although its growth manifests the unsocialised biological forces within. The hair of the head thus focuses the dynamic and unstable quality of the frontier between the ‘natural’, bio-libidinous forces of the inner body and the external sphere of social relations. In this context, hair offers itself as a symbol of the libidinal energies of the self and of the never-ending struggle to constrain within acceptable forms their eruption into social space. So important is this symbolic function of hair as a focus of the socialising function, not only among the Kayapo but among Central Brazilian tribes in general, that variations in coiffure have become the principal visible means of distinguishing one tribe from another. Each people has its own distinctive hairstyle, which stands as the emblem of its own culture and social community (and as such, in its own eyes, for the highest level of sociality to have been attained by humanity). The Kayapo tribal coiffure, used by both men and women, consists of shaving the hair above the forehead upwards to a point at the crown, leaving the hair long at the back and sides of the head (unless the individual belongs to one of the special categories of people who wear their hair cut short, as described below). Men may tease up a little widow’s peak at the point of the triangular shaved area. The sides of this area are often painted in black with bands of geometrical patterns. Certain categories of people in Kayapo society are privileged to wear their hair long. Others must keep it cut short. Nursing infants, women who have borne children, and men who have received their penis sheaths and have been through initiation (that is, those who have been socially certified as able to carry on sexual relations) wear their hair long. Children and adolescents of both sexes (girls from weaning to childbirth, boys from weaning to initiation) and those mourning the death of a member of their immediate family (for example, a spouse, sibling or child) have their hair cut short. To understand this social distribution of long and short hair it is necessary to comprehend Kayapo notions about the nature of family relations. Parents are thought to be connected to their children, and siblings to one another, by a tie that goes deeper than a mere social or emotional bond. This tie is imagined as a sort of spiritual continuation of the common physical substance that they share through conception and the womb. This relation of biological participation lasts throughout life but is broken by death. The death of a person’s child or sibling thus directly diminishes his or her own biological being and energies. Although spouses lack the intrinsic biological link of blood relations, their sexual relationship constitutes a ‘natural’ procreative, libidinal community that is its counterpart. In as much as both sorts of biological relationship are cut off by death, cutting off the hair, conceived as the extension of the biological energy of the self into social space, is the symbolically appropriate response to the death of a spouse as well as a child. The same concrete logic accounts for the treatment of children’s hair. While a child is still nursing, it is still, as it were, an extension of the biological being and energies of its parents, and above all, at this stage, the mother. in these terms nursing constitutes a kind of external and attenuated final stage of pregnancy. Weaning is the decisive moment of the ‘birth’ of the child as a separate biological and social being. Thus nursing infants’ hair is never cut, and is left to grow as long as that of sexually active adults: infants at this stage are still the extensions of the biological and sexual being of their long-haired parents. Cutting the infant’s hair at the onset of weaning aptly symbolises the severance of this bio-sexual continuity (or, as we would say, its repression). Henceforth, the child’s hair remains short as a sign of its biological separation from its parents, on the one hand, and the undeveloped state of its own bio-sexual powers on the other. When these become strong enough to be socially extended, through sexual intercourse and procreation, as the basis of a new family, the hair is once again allowed to grow to full length. For men this point is considered to arrive at puberty, and specifically with the bestowal of a penis sheath, which is ideally soon followed by initiation (a symbolic ‘marriage’ which signals marriageability, or ‘bachelorhood’, rather than being a binding union in and of itself). The discrepancy in the timing of the return to long hair for the two sexes reflects a fundamental difference in Kayapo notions of their respective social roles. ‘Society’ is epitomized for the Kayapo by the system of communal societies and age sets centred on the men’s house. These collective organisations are primarily a male domain, as their association with the men’s house suggests, although women have certain societies of their own. The communal societies are defined in terms of the criteria for recruitment, and this is always defined as a corollary of some important transformation in family or household structure (such as a boy’s moving out of his maternal family household to the men’s house, marriage, the birth of children, etc.). These transformations in family relations are themselves associated with key points in the process of growth and sexual development. The structure of communal groups, then, constitutes a sort of sociological mechanism for reproducing, not only itself but the structure of the extended family households that form the lower level or personal sphere of Kayapo social organisation. This communal institutional structure, on the other hand, is itself defined in terms of the various stages of the bio-sexual development of men (and to a much lesser extent, women). All this comes down to the proposition that men reproduce society through the transformation of their ‘natural’ biological and libidinal powers into collective social form. This conception can be found elaborated in Kayapo mythology. Women, by contrast, reproduce the natural biological individual, and, as a corollary, the elementary family, which the Kayapo conceive as a ‘natural’ or infra-social set of essentially physical relations. Inasmuch as the whole Kayapo system works on the principle of the cooption of ‘natural’ forces and their channelling into social form, it follows that women’s biological forces of reproduction should be exercised only within the framework of the structure of social relations reproduced by men. The effective social extension of a woman’s biological reproductive powers therefore occurs at the moment of the first childbirth within the context of marriage, husband and household. This is, accordingly, the moment at which a woman begins to let her hair grow long again. For men, as we have seen, the decisive social cooption of libidinal energy or reproductive power comes earlier, at the point at which those powers are publicly appropriated for purposes of the reproduction of the collective social order. This is the moment symbolically marked by the bestowal of the penis sheath at puberty. The penis sheath, then, symbolises the collective appropriation of male powers of sexual reproduction for the purposes of social reproduction. To the Kayapo, the appropriation of ‘natural’ or biological powers for social purposes implies the suppression of their ‘natural’ or socially unrestrained forms of expression. The penis sheath works as a symbol of the chanelling of male libidinal energies into social form by effectively restraining the spontaneous, ‘natural’ expression of male sexuality: in a word, erection. The sheath, the small cone of woven palm leaf, is open at both the wide and narrow ends. The wide end fits over the tip of the penis, while the narrow end has an aperture just wide enough to enable the foreskin to be drawn through it. Once pulled through, it bunches up in a way that holds the sheath down on the glans penis, and pushes the penis as a whole back into the body. This obviously renders erection impossible. A public erection, or even the publicly visible protrusion of the glans penis through the foreskin without erection, is as embarrassing for a Kayapo male as walking naked through one’s town or work place would be for a Westerner. It is the action of the sheath in preventing such an eventuality that is the basis of its symbolic meaning. Just as the cutting or growing of hair becomes a code for defining and expressing a whole system of ideas about the nature of the individual and society and the relations between the two, so other types of bodily adornment are used to express other modalities of the same basic relationships. Pierced ears, ear-plugs, and lip-plugs comprise a similar distinct complex of social meanings. Here the emphasis is on the socialisation, not of sexual powers, but of the faculties of understanding and active self-expression. The Kayapo distinguish between passive and active modes of knowing. Passive understanding is associated with hearing, active knowledge of how to make and do things with seeing. The most important aspect of the socialisation of the passive faculty of understanding is the development of the ability to ‘hear’ language. To be able to hear and understand speech is spoken of in terms of ‘having a hole in one’s ear’; to be deaf is ‘to have the hole in one’s ear closed off’. The ear lobes of infants of both sexes are pierced, and large cigar-shaped ear-plugs, painted red, are inserted to stretch the holes to a diameter of two or three centimetres (I shall return to the significance of the red colour). At weaning (by which time the child has learned to speak and understand language) the ear-plugs are removed, and little strings of beads like earrings are tied through the holes to keep them open. Kayapo continue to wear these bead earrings, or simply leave their ear-lobe-holes empty throughout adult life. I suggest that the piercing and stretching of these secondary, social ‘holes-in-the-ear’ through the early use of the ear-plugs for infants is a metaphor for the socialisation of the understanding, the opening of the ears to language and all that implies, which takes place during the first years of infancy. The lip-plug, which reaches such a large size among older men, is incontestably the most striking piece of Kayapo finery. Only males have their lips pierced. This happens soon after birth, but at first only a string of beads with a bit of shell is placed in the hole to keep it open. After initiation, young bachelors begin to put progressively larger wooden pins through the hole to enlarge it. This gradual process continues through the early years of adult manhood, but accelerates when a man graduates to the senior male grade of ‘fathers-of-many children’. These are men of an age to have become heads of their wives’ households, with married daughters and thus sons-in-law living under, their roofs as quasi-dependents. Such men have considerable social authority, but they wield it, not within the household itself (which is considered a woman’s domain) but rather in the public arena of the communal men’s house, in the form of political oratory. Public speaking, in an ornate and blustering style, is the most characteristic attribute of senior manhood, and is the essential medium of political power. An even more specialised form of speaking, a kind of metrical chanting known as ben, is the distinctive prerogative of chiefs, who are called ‘chanters’ in reference to the activity that most embodies their authority. Public speaking, and chanting as its more rarified and potent form, are the supreme expression of the values of Kayapo society considered as a politically ordered hierarchy. Senior men, and, among them, chiefs, are the dominant figures in this hierarchy, and it can therefore be said that oratory and chanting as public activities express this dominance as a value implicit in the Kayapo social order. The lip-plug of the senior male, as a physical expression of the oral assertiveness and pre-eminence of the orator, embodies the social dominance and expressiveness of the senior males of whom it is the distinctive badge. The senior male lip-plug is in these terms the complement of the pierced ears of both sexes and the infantile ear-plugs from which they derive. The former is associated with the active expression and political construction of the social order, while the latter betoken the receptiveness to such expressions as the attribute of all socialised persons. Speaking and ‘hearing’ (that is, understanding and conforming) are the complementary and interdependent functions that constitute the Kayapo polity. Through the symbolic medium of bodily adornment, the body of every Kayapo becomes a microcosm of the Kayapo body politic. As a man grows old he retires from active political life. He speaks in public less often, and on the occasions when he does it is to assume an elder statesman’s role of appealing to common values and interests rather than to take sides. The transformation from the politically active role of the senior man to the more honorific if less dynamic role of elder statesman is once again signalled by a change in the style and shape of the lip-plug. The simplest form this can take is a diminution in the size of the familiar wooden disc. It may, however, take the form of the most precious and prestigious object in the entire Kayapo wardrobe—the cylindrical lip-plug of ground and polished rock crystal worn only by elder males. These neolithic valuables, which may reach six inches in length and one inch in diameter, with two small flanges at the upper end to keep them from sliding through the hole in the lip, require immense amounts of time to make and are passed down as heirlooms within families. They are generally clear to milky white in colour. White is associated with old age and with ghosts, and thus in general terms with the transcendence of the social divisions and transformations whose qualities are evoked by the two main Kayapo colours, black and red. This quality of transcendence of social conflict, and of direct involvement in the processes of suppression and appropriation of libidinal energies and their transformation into social form which constitute Kayapo public life in its political and ritual aspects, is characteristic of the content of the oratory of old men, and is what lends it its great if relatively innocuous prestige. Once again, then, we find that the symbolic qualities of the lip-plug match the social qualities of the speech of its wearer. Before the advent of Western clothes, Kayapo of both sexes and all ages constantly went about with their bodies painted (many still do, especially in the more remote villages). The Kayapo have raised body painting to an art, and the variety and elaborateness of the designs is apt to seem overwhelming upon first acquaintance. Analysis, however, reveals that a few simple principles run through the variation of forms and styles and lend coherence to the whole. These principles, in turn, can be seen to add a further dimension to the total system of meanings conveyed by Kayapo bodily adornment. There are two main aspects to the Kayapo art of body painting, one concerning the association of the two main colours used (red and black) on distinct zones of the body, the other concerning the two basic styles employed in painting that part of the body for which black is used. To begin with the first aspect, the use of the two colours, black and red, and their association with different regions of the body reveal yet another dimension of Kayapo ideas about the make-up of the person as biological being and social actor. Black is applied to the trunk of the body, the upper arms and thighs. Black designs or stripes are also painted on the cheeks, forehead, and occasionally across the eyes or mouth. Red is applied to the calves and feet, forearms and hands, and face, especially around the eyes. Sometimes it is smeared over black designs already painted on the face, to render the whole face red. Black is associated with the idea of transformation between society and unsocialised nature. The word for black is applied to the zone just outside the village that one passes through to enter the ‘wild’ forest (the domain of nature). It is also the word for death (that is, the first phase of death, while the body is still decomposing and the soul has not yet forsaken its social ties to become a ghost: ghosts are white). In both of these usages, the term for black applies to a spatial or temporal zone of transition between the social world and the world of natural or infra-social forces that is closed off from society proper and lies beyond its borders. It is therefore appropriate that black is applied to the surface of those parts of the body conceived to be the seat of its ‘natural’ powers and energies (the trunk, internal and reproductive organs, major muscles, etc.) that are in themselves beyond the reach of socialisation (an analogy might be drawn here to the Freudian notion of the id). The black skin becomes the repressive boundary between the natural powers of the individual and the external domain of social relations. Red, by contrast, is associated with notions of vitality, energy and intensification. It is applied to the peripheral points of the body that come directly into contact with the outside world (the hands and feet, and the face with its sensory organs, especially the eyes). The principle here seems to be the intensification of the individual’s powers of relating to the external (that is, primarily, the social) world. Notice that the opposition between red (intensification, vitalisation) and black (repression) coincides with that between the peripheral and central parts of the body, which is itself treated as a form of the relationship between the surface and inside of the body respectively. The contrasting use of the two colours thus establishes a binary classification of the human body and its powers and relates that classification back to the conceptual oppositions, inside: surface: outside, that underlies the system of bodily adornment as a whole. Turning now to the second major aspect of the system of body painting, that is, the two main styles of painting in black, the best place to begin is with the observation that one style is used primarily for children and one primarily for adults. The children’s style is by far the more elaborate. It consists of intricate geometrical designs traced in black with a narrow stylus made from the central rib of a leaf. A child’s entire body from the neck to below the knees, and down the arms to below the elbows, is covered. To do the job properly requires a couple of hours. Mothers (occasionally doting aunts or grandmothers) spend much time in this way keeping their children ‘well dressed’. The style involves building up a coherent overall pattern out of many individually insignificant lines, dots, etc. The final result is unique, as a snowflake is unique. The idiosyncratic nature of the design reflects the relationship between the painter and the child being decorated. Only one child is painted at a time, in his or her own house, by his or her own mother or another relation. All of this reflects the social position of the young child and the nature of the process of socialization it is undergoing. The child is the object of a prolonged and intensive process of creating a socially acceptable form out of a myriad of individually unordered elements. It must lie still and submit to this process, which requires a certain amount of discipline. The finished product is the unique expression of the child’s relationship to its own mother and household. It is not a collectively stereotyped pattern establishing a common identity with children from other families. This again conforms with the social situation of the child, which is not integrated into communal society above the level of its particular family. Boys cease to be painted in this style, except for rare ceremonial occasions, when they leave home to live in the men’s house. Older girls and women, however, continue to paint one another in this way as an occasional pastime. This use of the infantile style by women reflects the extent to which they remain identified with their individual families and households, in contrast to men’s identification with collective groups at the communal level. The second style, which can be used for children when a mother lacks the time or inclination for a full-scale job in the first style, is primarily associated with adults. It consists of standardised designs, many of which have names (generally names of the animals they are supposed to resemble). These designs are simple, consisting of broad strokes that can be applied quickly with the hand, rather than by the time-consuming stylus method. Their social context of application is typically collective: men’s age sets gathered in the men’s house, or women’s societies, which meet fortnightly in the village plaza for the purpose of painting one another. On such occasions, a uniform style is generally used for the whole group (different styles may be used to distinguish structurally distinct groups, such as bachelors and mature men). The second style is thus typically used by fully socialized adults, acting in a collective capacity (that is, at a level defined by common participation in the structure of the community as a whole rather than at the individual family level). Collective action (typically, though not necessarily, of a ritual character) is ‘socialising’ in the higher sense of directly constituting and reproducing the structure of society as a whole: those painted in the adult style are thus acting, not in the capacity of objects of socialisation, but as its agents. The ‘animal’ quality of the designs is evocative of this role; the Kayapo conceive of collective society-constituting activities, like their communal ceremonies, as the transformation of ‘natural’ or animal qualities into social form by means of collective social replication. The adult style, with its ‘animal’ designs applied collectively to social groups as an accompaniment to collective activity, epitomises these meanings and ideas. The contrasts between the children’s and adults’ styles of body painting thus model key contrasts in the social attributes of children and adults, specifically, their relative levels of social integration or, which comes to the same thing, their degree of ‘socialisation’. The greater part of Kayapo communal activity consists of the celebration of long and complex ceremonies, which generally take the form of collective dances by all the men and boys or all the women and girls of the village, and occasionally of both. These sacred events are always distinguished by collective body-painting and renewed coiffures in the tribal pattern, as well as by numerous special items of ritual regalia, such as feather head-dresses, elaborate bracelets, ear- and lip-plugs of special design, belts and leg bands hung with noise-making objects like tapir or peccary hooves, etc. The more important ceremonies are rites either of ‘baptism’, that is, the bestowal of ceremonially prestigious names, or initiation. Certain items of regalia distinguish those actually receiving names or being initiated from the mass of celebrants. In a more fundamental sense, the entire repertoire of ceremonial costume marks ceremonial activity in contrast to everyday activities and relations. In the ceremonial context itself, the contrast is preserved between the celebrants of the ceremony and the non-participating spectators, who wear no special costume. An important group in the latter category are the parents of the children being named or initiated in the ceremony, who may not take a direct part in the dancing but must work hard to supply the many dancers with food. In this role they are treated with great rudeness and disrespect by the actual celebrants, who shout at them to bring food and then complain loudly about its quantity and quality. Kayapo bodily adornment in its secular and sacred forms constitutes an integral system of differentiated categories of social status, together with the roles, or modes of activity and relationship characteristic of each status. This comprehensive social classification is represented in Table lA. The various forms of bodily adornment that distinguish each category, together with the roles or modes of activity they symbolise, are summarised in Table 1B. Note that the distinctions among the various forms of sacred and secular ‘dress’ in Table 1B generate the full structure of Table 1A. Table 1A: Kayapo Social Classification: Status Table 1B: Kayapo Classification of Roles (Qualities and Modes of Social Activity) With ‘Dress’ Indicators The names bestowed in the great naming ceremonies belong to a special class of ‘beautiful’ names which are passed down from certain categories of kinsmen (mother’s brother, and both maternal and paternal grandfathers for boys, father’s sister and both grandmothers for girls). In keeping with the ritual prestige of the names being transmitted to them, the children being honoured in the ceremony are adorned with special regalia, notably elaborate bracelets with bead and feather pendants. Initiands are similarly distinguished by bracelets, although they are so huge as to cover the whole forearm, and are exceptionally heavy and bulky in construction. The initiation ceremony itself is named after these bracelets; it is known as ‘the black bracelets’, or literally ‘black bone marrow’. The name at first strikes one as odd, since the bracelets are painted bright red. It may be suggested that the symbolic appropriateness of bracelets as the badges of initiands and baptisands derives from the same set of ideas about the connotations of different parts of the body and the associated colour symbolism. If the extremities of the body represent the extension of the psycho-biological level of the self into social space, and if the hands are in a sense the prototypical extremities in this regard, elaborate bracelets are an apt symbol for the imposition of social form upon this extension. This is, of course, what is happening in the ceremonies in question. In the case of initiation into manhood, which involves a first, symbolic marriage, both the repression of childish, merely individualistic libido and the accentuation of sexuality and procreativity in the service of social reproduction are involved. Black and red, as we have seen, are the symbols of repression and sensory accentuation, respectively, and the accentuation of sexuality and procreativity in the service of social reproduction are involved. That what is ‘blackened’ or repressed is the inner substance of the bones aptly conveys the idea of the suppression of the pre-social, biological basis of social relatedness, while the actual redness of the so-called ‘black’ bracelets through which this is achieved simultaneously expresses the activation of this basis in the social form represented by the bracelets themselves. The initiation bracelets thus condense within themselves a number of the fundamental principles of the whole system of bodily adornment and the social concepts it expresses. Among the ordinary ritual celebrants, there is considerable variation within the standard categories of ritual wear, such as feather head-dresses, ear-plugs, necklaces, bracelets and belts or leg bands already described. Many of these variations (for example, the use of feathers from a particular sort of bird for a head-dress, or distinctive materials such as wound cotton string or perhaps fresh-water mussel shells for ear-plugs, or the breast plumage of the red macaw for bracelets, etc.) are passed down like names themselves from uncle or grandfather to nephew or grandson (or the corresponding female categories). They thus denote an aspect of the social identity of the wearer that he or she owes to his or her relationship with a particular kinsman. These distinctive items of ritual dress make up the ‘paraphernalia’ mentioned above that is bestowed, in parallel to, but separately from, names, in the ritual setting. The Kayapo call such accessories by their general (and only) term for ‘valuables’, ‘wealth’, or ‘riches’. Ask a Kayapo why he is wearing a certain sort of head-dress for a ceremonial dance, and he will be likely to answer, ‘It is my wealth.’ Ask him why he dances, or indeed why the ceremony is being performed, and he will almost certainly answer, ‘To be beautiful’ (‘For the sake of beauty’ would be an equally accurate Englishing of the usual Kayapo expression). Wealth and beauty are closely connected notions among the Kayapo and both refer to aspects of the person coded by items of prestigious ritual dress. Certain ‘beautiful’ names are, in fact, associated with specific forms of adornment (that is, with certain types of ‘wealth’) such as ear-plugs. ‘Beautiful people’ (those who have received ‘beautiful’ names in ceremonies) generally possess more ‘wealth’ than ‘common people’ who have not gone through a ritual baptism, and thus possess only ‘common’ names. The connection of ‘beauty’ with ‘wealth’ in the form of bodily adornment is strikingly expressed in the lyrics of the choral hymns sung by the massed ritual celebrants as they dance, with uniform steps which vary with each song, the successive rites that constitute a ‘great’ or ‘beautiful’ naming ceremony. These songs are almost invariably those of animals, especially birds, the muses of Kayapo lyric and dance, who have communicated them to humans in various ways. Two verses from the vast Kayapo repertoire may serve as examples. A bird proudly boasts to his human listener, Can we [birds] not reach up to the sky? Why, we can snatch the very clouds, Wind them round our legs as bracelets, And sit thus, regaled by their thunder. Another calls out a stirring summons to earthbound humanity: I fly among the branches [rays] of the sun; I fly among the branches of the sun. I perch on its branches and Sit gazing over the whole world. Throw yourselves into the sky beside me! Throw yourselves into the sky beside me! Cover yourselves with the blood and feathers of birds And follow after me! The admonition about blood and feathers refers to the technique of covering the body of a dancer with his or her own blood, which is then used as an adhesive to which the breast plumage or down of macaws, vultures or eagles is fixed. This is perhaps the most prestigious (‘beautiful’) form of sacred costume. These verses may help one to grasp the connotations of the fact that dancing (and by extension, the celebration of any ritual) is called ‘flying’ in Kayapo, and of the term for the most common item of ceremonial adornment, the feather head-dress, which is the ritual form of the word for ‘bird’. Birds fly, and ‘can scan’ the whole world. They are not confined by its divisions, but transcend them in a way that to a Kayapo seems the supreme natural metaphor for the direct experience of totality, the integration of the self through the perception of the wholeness of the world. This principle of wholeness, the transcendental integration of what ordinary human (that is, social) life separates and puts at odds, is the essence of the Kayapo notion of ‘beauty’. Two aspects of this notion, as embodied in items of ritual costume and the sacred activities in which they are worn, seem incongruous and even contradictory in the context of what has already been said about everyday Kayapo ‘dress’ and its underlying assumptions. First, whereas everyday bodily adornment stresses the imposition of social form upon the ‘natural’ energies and powers of the individual, ritual costume (such as feather head-dresses, body painting with ‘animal’ designs or the covering of the body with blood and feathers) seems to represent the opposite idea: that is, the imposition of natural form upon social actors engaged in what are the most important social activities of all, the great sacred performances that periodically reconstitute the fabric of society itself. Secondly, sacred costume, together with the notion that the ritual songs and dances themselves originate among wild animals and birds, seems to reverse the meaning of everyday bodily-adornment. The latter is implicitly based upon a relation between a ‘natural’ core (the human body, or on the sociological level, the elementary family) and a ‘social’ periphery (the space outside the body in which social interaction takes place, or in the structure of kinship, the more distant blood relations outside the immediate family who bestow names and ritual paraphernalia upon the child). Ritual space, in contrast, seems based on the relationship between a ‘natural’ periphery (the jungle beyond the village boundary, as the abode of the birds and animals that are the sources both of ritual costume and of the rituals themselves) and a ‘social’ centre (the central plaza of the village, where the sacred dances are actually performed). This inversion of space and the fundamental relationship of nature to society encoded in sacred costume turns out upon closer examination to parallel two other inversions in the organisation of everyday social relations which form the very basis of the sacred ceremonial system. The first of these involves the types of kinship relations involved in the key ritual relations of name giving and the best owing of ritual ‘wealth’ (such as special paraphernalia), as contrasted with those involved in the transformations of family relations marked by the everyday complex of bodily adornment (penis sheath, ear- and lip-plugs, etc.). The latter typically involve immediate family relations like parent-child, husband-wife, or the key extended-family relationship of son-in-law to father-in-law. These relations have in common that they directly link status within the family, or two families by marriage; they may therefore be thought of as direct relations. Ritual relations, on the other hand, connect grandparents and grandchildren, uncles and nephews, aunts and nieces: they skip over the connecting relatives (the parents of the children receiving the ritual names or paraphernalia, who are themselves the children or siblings of the name-bestowing relatives) and may thus be described as indirect relations. The structure of direct relations functions as a sort of ladder or series of steps up which the developing individual moves from status to status within the structure of the families, extended families and households to which he or she belongs in the course of his or her life. The first step in this process is the ‘natural’ domain of immediate family relations, within which the individual is at first defined as merely an extension of his or her parents’ ‘natural’ powers of reproduction. The course of the life cycle from there on is a series of steps by which the individual is detached from this primal ‘natural’ unity and integrated in to the social life of the community. As a corollary of this process, his or her own ‘natural’ powers develop until they can in turn become the basis of a new family. The highest step in the socialisation process, however, comes when this second ‘natural’ family unit is dispersed, and the individual becomes a parent-in-law, thus moving into the prestigious role of extended family household head at home and, in the case of men, political leader in the community at large. Each major step in this process is marked, as we have seen, by modifications of bodily adornment of the ‘everyday’ sort. The overall form of the process is that of a progressive evacuation of ‘natural’ energy and powers from the ‘central’ sources of body and elementary family and its extrapolation into social forms and powers standing in a ‘peripheral’ relation to these sources in physical and social space. The result is that ‘social’ structure is created at the expense of the evacuation and dispersal of the ‘natural’ powers and relational units (elementary families) that comprise its foundation. The ‘natural’ at any given moment is the socially unintegrated: embodied at the beginning of the process by the newborn infant or new family, as yet not completely absorbed into the wider community of social relations, by the end of the process it is represented by the scattered members of dispersed families, whose younger members have gone on to form new families. The integration of society made possible by this transformation is achieved at the cost of the dis-integration of the primal natural community of the immediate family and the externalisation and social appropriation of the ‘natural’ powers of the individual. Seen in this perspective the ritual system represents a balancing of accounts. The dispersed direct, ‘natural’ relations of the parents (their parents and siblings from the family they have left behind) now become the key indirect relations whose identification with the children of these same parents becomes the point of the ritual. I use the term ‘identification’ deliberately, for this is what is implied by the sharing of personal names and idiosyncratic items of ritual costume. The point of this identification is, of course, that it reasserts a connection between, or in other words reintegrates, the dispersed, dis-integrated or ‘natural’ relations of the parents’ previous families with the not-yet-socially-integrated relations of the parents’ present family (their children). This integration, however, is achieved, not on the basis of direct relations as is characteristic of ‘natural’ groups like the elementary family, but on a new, indirect footing with no natural basis; in short, on a purely ‘social’ basis. The new integrated ‘whole’ that is established through ritual action is thus defined simultaneously as reintegrating and transcending the ‘natural’ basis of social relations. It therefore becomes the quintessential prototype of ‘social’ relationship, and as such, the appropriate vehicle of the basic components of individual social identity, personal names, distinctive ritual dress and other personal ‘wealth’. In terms of social space, what has happened from the point of view of the central name-receiving individual and her or his family is that ‘socialisation’ has been achieved through the transference of attributes of the identity of ‘natural’ relations located on the periphery of the family to the actor located at its centre. In terms of the equilibrium of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ forces and qualities, the prospective evacuation of natural powers from the individual and family has been offset (in advance) by an infusion of social attributes, which are themselves the products of the reintegration, through the social mechanism of ritual action, of elements of the ‘natural’ infrastructure dispersed as the price of social integration. The symbolic integration of ‘natural’ attributes from the periphery of social space as aspects of the social identity of actors located at its centre, can now be understood as a metaphorical embodiment of the integrative (‘beautiful’) structural proper ties of the social relations evoked by the rituals. The regalia, of course, does more than simply encode this process. It is the concrete medium (along with names) through which the identity of the ritual celebrants is simultaneously redefined, ‘socialised’, and infused with ‘beauty’. The foregoing analysis should help to clarify the full meaning of the Kayapo notion of beauty as wholeness, integration or completion. In its primary context, that of sacred ritual, it is the value associated with the creation of a social whole based on indirect (mediate) relations, capable of reintegrating the dismembered elements of simpler natural, wholes (elementary families) constituted by direct (immediate) relations. ‘Beauty’ is an ideal expression of society itself in its holistic capacity. It is, as such, one of the primary values of Kayapo social life. Just as the value of beauty is associated with the complex of social relations and cultural notions involved in ritual action, so the complex of relations and categories that constitutes the social structure of everyday life is focused upon another general social value. This value is in a sense the opposite of beauty, since it pertains to relations of separation, opposition, and inequality. We may call it ‘dominance’, meaning by that the combination of prestige, authority, individual autonomy and ability to control others that accrues in increasing measure to individuals as they move through the stages of social development, passing from lower to higher status in the structure of the extended family and community. It is doubtless significant that the Kayapo themselves do not name this intrinsically divisive value with any term in their own language, whereas they continually employ the adjective ‘beautiful’ in connection with the most varied activities, including those of a divisive (and thus ‘ugly’) character which they wish to put in a better light. The lack of a term notwithstanding, there can be no doubt of the existence of the value in question and its importance as the organising focus of Kayapo social and political life outside the ritual sphere. It reaches its highest and most concentrated expression in the public activities of senior men, for example their characteristic activity of aggressively flamboyant oratory. The lip-plug, and particularly the senior man’s lip-plug as the largest and most spectacularly obtrusive in the entire age-graded lip-plug series, is directly associated with this value as a quality of male, and particularly senior male, social identity. ‘Dominance’ is, however, to be understood as a symbolic attribute, a culturally imputed quality expressing a person’s place in the hierarchy of extended family and community structure, rather than as a relation of naked power or forcible oppression. It is, as such, an expression of the whole edifice of age, sex, family and communal status-categories marked by the whole system of everyday bodily accoutrements described earlier. Younger men and women can acquire this quality in some measure within their own proper spheres, making due allowance for the fact that in the context of community-wide relations they are subordinate to the dominant senior males. These two values, ‘dominance’ and ‘beauty’, inform the social activities and goals of every Kayapo, and constitute the most general purposes of social action and the most important qualities of personal identity. The identity of social actors is constituted as much by the goals towards which they direct their activities, as by their classification according to status, sex, age, degree of socialisation, etc. I have tried to show that bodily adornment encodes these values as well as the other sorts of categories; it may thus be said to define the total social identity of the individual, meaning his or her subjective identity as a social actor, as well as objective identity conceived in terms of a set of social categories. It does this by mediating between individuals, considered both in their objective and subjective capacities, and society, also considered both in its objective capacity as a structure of relations and its subjective capacity as a system of values. I have attempted to demonstrate that the symbolic mediation effected by the code of bodily adornment in both these respects is, in the terms of Kayapo culture, systematically and finely attuned to the nuances of Kayapo social relations. The structure of Kayapo society, including its highest values and its most fundamental conceptual presuppositions (such as the nature-culture relationship, the modes of expression and understanding, the character of ‘socialisation’, etc.) could be read from the paint and ornaments of a representative collection of Kayapo of all ages, sexes, and secular and ritual roles. Bodily adornment, considered as a symbolic medium, is not unique in these respects: every society has a number of such media or languages, the most important among which is of course language itself. The distinctive place of the adornment of the body among these is that it is the medium most directly and concretely concerned with the construction of the individual as social actor or cultural ‘subject’. This is a fundamental concern of all societies and social groups, and this is why the imposition of a standardised symbolic form upon the body, as a symbol or ‘objective correlative’ of the social self, invariably becomes a serious business for all societies, regardless of whether their members as individuals consciously take the matter seriously or not. It may be suggested that the ‘construction of the subject’, is a process which is broadly similar in all human societies, and the study of systems of bodily adornment is one of the best ways of comprehending what it involves. As the Kayapo example serves to illustrate, it is essentially a question of the conflation of certain basic types of social notions and categories, among which can be listed categories of time and space, modes of activity (for example, individual or collective, secular or sacred), types of social status (sex, age, family roles, political positions, etc.), personal qualities (degree of ‘socialisation’, relative passivity or activity as a social actor, etc.) and modes of social value, for example, ‘dominance’ or ‘beauty’. In any given society, of course, these basic categories will be combined in culturally idiosyncratic ways to constitute the symbolic medium of bodily adornment, and these synthetic patterns reveal much about the basic notions of value, social action, and person- or self-hood of the culture in question. In the case of the Kayapo, three broad synthetic clusters of meanings and values of this type emerge from analysis. One is concerned with the Kayapo notion of socialisation, conceived as the transformation of ‘natural’ powers and attributes into social forms. The basic symbolic vehicle for this notion, after the general concern for cleanliness, is the form of body painting by which the trunk is contrasted with the extremities as black and red zones, respectively. This fundamental mapping of the body’s ‘natural’ and ‘social’ areas is inflected, at a higher level of articulation, by hair style. The contrast between long and short hair is used to mark the successive phases of the development and social extension of the individual’s libidinous and reproductive powers. Finally, the penis sheath (correlated with the shift to long hair for men) serves to mark the decisive point in the social appropriation of male reproductive powers and, perhaps more important, the collective nature of this appropriation. A second major complex concerns the distinction and relationship between the passive and active qualities of social agency. The basic indicator here is again body painting, in this case the distinction between the infantile and adult styles. This basic distinction is once again inflected by the set composed of pierced ears and ear-plugs, on the one hand, and pierced lips and lipplugs on the other. This set adds the specific meanings associated with the notions of hearing and speaking as passive knowledge and the active expression of decisions and programmes of action, respectively. Finally, both these clusters are crosscut by a broad distinction between modes of activity. The most strongly marked distinction here is between secular and sacred (ritual) action, with the latter distinguished from the former by a rich variety of regalia. This distinction, however, may be considered a heightened inflection of the more basic distinction between individual or family-level activities and communal activities, not all of which are of a sacred character. Secular men’s house gatherings or meetings of women’s societies, for example, may be accompanied by collective painting and perhaps the wearing of simple head-dresses of palm leaves, even though there is no ceremony. An important structural principle emerges from this analysis of the Kayapo system—the hierarchical or iterative structure of the symbolic code. Each major cluster of symbolic meanings is seen to be arranged in a series of increasingly specific modulations or inflections of the general notions expressed by the most basic symbol in the cluster. A second structural principle is the multiplicative character of the system as a whole. By this I mean that the three basic clusters are necessarily simultaneously present or conflated in the ‘dress’ of any individual Kayapo at any time. One cannot paint an infant or adult in the appropriate style without at the same time observing the concentric distinction between trunk and extremities common to both styles. The conflation first of the levels of meaning within each cluster, secondly of each cluster with the others, and finally of the more basic categories of meaning and value listed above that are combined in different ways to form each cluster, is what I mean by ‘the construction of the cultural subject’ or actor. (It is sometimes necessary to speak in terms of collective subjects, such as the class of young men, or of workers, but for the sake of simplicity I shall leave this issue aside here.) It is, by the same token, the construction of the social universe within which he or she acts (that is, an aspect of that construction). As the Kayapo example suggests, this is a dynamic process that proceeds as it were in opposite directions at the same time, towards equilibrium or equilibrated growth at both the individual and social levels (it goes without saying that in speaking of equilibrium I am referring to cultural ideals rather than concrete realities, either social or individual). In the Kayapo case, the externalisation of the internal biological and libidinous (‘natural’) powers of individuals as the basis of social reproduction, and the socialisation of ‘external’ natural powers as the basis of social structure and the social identity of actors otherwise defined only as biological extensions of their parents, are clearly metaphorical inversions of one another. Each complements the other, just as the social values respectively associated with the two aspects of the process, ‘dominance’ and ‘beauty’, complement each other; a balance between the two processes and their associated values is the ideal state of Kayapo society as a dynamic equilibrium. It is also, and equally, the basis of the unity and balance of the personality of the socialised individual, likewise conceived as a dynamic equilibrium. The point I have sought to demonstrate is that this balance between opposing yet complementary forces, which is the most fundamental structural principle of Kayapo society, is systematically articulated and, as it were, played out on the bodies of every member of Kayapo society through the medium of bodily adornment. This finding supports the general hypothesis with which we began, namely that the surface of the body becomes, in any human society, a boundary of a peculiarly complex kind, which simultaneously separates domains lying on either side of it and conflates different levels of social, individual and intra-psychic meaning. The skin (and hair) are the concrete boundary between the self and the other, the individual and society. It is, however, a truism to which our investigation has also attested, that the ‘self’ is a composite product of social and ‘natural’ (libidinous) components. At one level, the ‘social skin’ models the social boundary between the individual actor and other actors; but at a deeper level it models the internal, psychic diaphragm between the pre-social, libidinous energies of the individual and the ‘internalised others’, or social meanings and values that make up what Freud called the ‘ego’ and ‘super-ego’. At yet a third, macro-social level, the conventionalised modifications of skin and hair that comprise the ‘social skin’ define, not individuals, but categories or classes of individuals, (for example, infants, senior males, women of child-bearing age, etc.). The system of bodily adornment as a whole (all the transformations of the ‘social skin’ considered as a set) defines each class in terms of its relations with all the others. The ‘social skin’ thus becomes, at this third level of interpretation, the boundary between social classes. That the physical surface of the human body is systematically modified in all human societies so as to conflate these three levels of relations (which most modern social science devotes itself to separating and treating in mutual isolation), should give us cause for reflection. Are we dealing here with a mere exotic phenomenon, a primitive expression of human society at a relatively undifferenti-ated level of development, or is our own code of dress and grooming a cultural device of the same type? Bibliography Bell, Quentin. 1949. On human finery. New York: A. A. Wyn. Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and praticai reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Terence S. 1978. “The Kayapo of Central Brazil.” In Face values: Some anthropological themes, edited by Anne Sutherland, 245–79. London: BBC Publications.   Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Terence S. Turner, 1980. “The Social Skin.” In Not work alone: A cross-cultural view of activities superfluous to survival, edited by Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, 112–140. London: Temple Smith. We are very grateful to Terence Turner for granting us the permission to reprint it. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original.

Trust and moral passion, poetics and practical criticism This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Richard Werbner. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.031 BOOK SYMPOSIUM Trust and moral passion, poetics and practical criticism Comparative analysis Richard WERBNER, University of Manchester Response to HAU Book Symposium on Werbner, Richard. 2015. Divination’s grasp: African encounters with the almost said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. This symposium brings HAU readers into the company of outstanding ethnographers whose work—Frederick Klaits (2010) on moral passion in Botswana’s time of AIDS, David Coplan (1994) on the poetics of Sotho migrants’ songs in South Africa, and Sónia Silva (2011) on the creativity in basket divination by Angolan refugees in Zambia—has been path-finding for my own work in Divination’s grasp (Werbner 2015). Their generous reviews strengthen an important claim we all make as ethnographers. Our claim is comparative: that we pursue broad, theoretically informed interests through open, crosscultural discovery of likeness along with difference in the worlds of others. Hence the turns in this HAU return of my ethnography: because each reviewer grasps it comparatively from a distinctive vantage ground, the object of our dialogue, Divination’s grasp, surprises even me, its author. Even more encouraging is the need for its sequel, now in hand and tentatively titled, “Moral imaginaries: From Freud’s couch to the Africa of empathy and sympathy” (for preliminary reflections, see Werbner 2014, n.d.). I find also that the comparative ethnographic challenge in this symposium tempts me to make a simple wish. Prosthetic ritual endows diviners in many parts of Africa with a double-voiced capacity. Consuming the diaphragm of another creature, commonly a specially cooked cock, is perceived to give the Central and Southern African diviner the ability to speak with another’s voice, as well as his own. If I had my wish—to become double-voiced—I would speak to the reviewers [434]in turn with a more ambient resonance, the better to pitch their fresh perceptions to and against each other. With this wish as in practice at best an ideal, I want to address at least one comparative issue for each reviewer, Klaits, Coplan, and Silva, in that order, and my hope is to spell out how taken together they broaden and deepen Divination’s grasp. Further, my intent is to introduce a “tensive discourse,” which my work in hand advances. By a “tensive discourse,” I mean one that carries forward Paul Ricoeur’s dialectical approach. Ricoeur introduces it to illuminate the opposed yet complementary relations between psychoanalysis and phenomenology: “the meaning of each is clarified by the meaning of further [component] figures or categories” (Ricoeur 1970: 342). Through a series of reflective steps, Ricoeur’s dialectical exploration of difference tries to grasp an interrelation ever on the horizon, somewhat beyond reach. Of all the reviewers, Klaits is remarkably the insider. His fine command of idioms in Tswana lets him alert readers, as I did not, to the meanings of “grasping” (in Setswana, go tshwara), which “help us rethink some aspects of our analytical languages and comparative frameworks.” Klaits elucidates the reach of “grasping” to a fusion of the somatic and the moral imagination. On this basis, Klaits discerns an absence. Nowhere in Divination’s grasp are Tswapong or Tswana terms and ideas of trust made explicit. They are missing even from the index. In a book about encounters with “the almost said,” the ethnographer circles, almost hypnotically, round the engagement with doubt in questioning as to whether a person or thing is good, truthful, or reliable—in Tswana, tshepa, ikanya, and in the missing English word: trust. Klaits is right, and by neglect, I am wrong. The challenge Klaits advances is to proceed from the vernacular idioms to an encompassing discourse, which includes Peter Geschiere’s wide-ranging exploration in “Witchcraft, intimacy and trust” (2013). His book appeared, unread by me, while my book was making its difficult years of uphill, demanding progress into print. However, there is a good thing about that, I am happy to say. Given Geschiere’s stimulation, especially in his regard for Freud and Simmel on “the suspension of doubt” in trust, we are at an opportune moment for reanalysis and debate. The time has come to think again about our own intellectual legacy in the light of diviners’ practice with small things and poetry. We reach even beyond the suspension of doubt to problems of the suspension in doubt. For Coplan as well as Klaits this takes us to issues of comparison with Freudian psychoanalysis along with Western psychiatry. For too long, the critique of Freud on meaning and language, on the superabundance of his written exegesis of free association, on his theorizing of the uncanny, has distracted our attention from the customary in Freud’s actual practice. My own approach in the sequel to Divination’s grasp will enter into the everyday little world of his psychoanalytic suite in Vienna. It is in order to illuminate, somewhat from a diviner’s perspective, at least three things: The first is Freud’s creative theatrics, around some 2,500 small things, mainly grave-robbed figures from ancient Egypt. Visually dazzling, always with a gaze in their own eyes, these memorabilia brought back, from the dead to the living, Freud’s overwhelming concern for the archaic, for the peril of sedimentation; that is, for active retrogression in what Freud held to be our universally shared human archaeology. The second is his arousal of [435]synesthesia in his patients’ experience by rewarding them with addictive, sensuous smoke and appealing props, such as his velvety, luxurious Persian rugs with primordial scenes. Finally, the third represents his involvement with his patients in artful, transformative performance on a stage elaborately designed around himself and his own problematic subjectivity, never resolved in a complete analysis, but ever in doubt (and perhaps also, the subject of doubt by others). And it was a characteristically playful stage, having a back-drop of Jewish jokes and puns, half-hidden behind Freud’s own back, though apparent to the reclining patient, and written like dreams and cuneiform (which Freud studied at the British Museum) in coded images (Werbner n.d.). If we grasp all this in the Tswana way of grasping, as Klaits would encourage us to try doing with our own moral imagination, we come up against something that unmistakably moves and worries Coplan. Few doubt that Freud’s vision is profoundly pessimistic. But what vision prevails in wisdom divination, and how are we to appreciate that in comparative terms? Poisonous pessimism shocks us in Coplan’s rendition of the landmark monograph, Witchcraft and a life in the new South Africa, by Isak Niehaus (2012), which serves the comparison Coplan draws. This study makes “horrific but fascinating” reading because it sensationalizes “a hell of terror, sickness, and death at forty-one in the handbasket of the occult.” Given this fascination, Coplan hints at something similar in Lesotho and other African communities where, in Camus’ phrase, “Hell is other people.” Nevertheless, in a rare account of diviners’ engagement in pilgrimage in southern Africa, Coplan documents something positive, perhaps an expression of optimism, also, in diviners’ extraordinary fostering of radical ecumenism through cooperation with visionary prophets, Christian healers, and traditional healers, all of whom, together, venerate their ancestors at shared shrines (Coplan 2003). Klaits seems painfully aware of that pessimism in his very sensitive account of “the moral terrain of love, jealousy, care and scorn” (2010: 7) among Christians in Botswana. They wanted him to say as much as possible about love, but he found he had to say a great deal about envy, lefufa, while making us understand an ethos, common in Botswana, which calls for civility and decorum. Perhaps even for these Christians, “Hell is other people,” but if the devil is the diviner—and their church does forbid divination—then he is hardly the source active in generating among them the “suspicion, mistrust, fear and ill-feeling” that Coplan recognizes among many other Africans. The problem is one that Silva too takes very seriously in her own study of divination, where she asks a diviner why he felt compassion for people whom he did not know personally or socially; was he not just doing his work, anyway? First he agreed with me just to be polite, then he explained that he and they were both sufferers, caught up in the same ruthless world, trying to do their best. (Silva 2011: 80) Allowing for the diviner’s personal perception of his human bond of shared suffering, Silva is reluctant to take that at face value. Instead, she goes on to argue for her own view that minimizes the relative importance of compassion in divination: “Basket divination, however, is not about the feeling and practice of compassion. Basket divination is about ritual efficacy, ontological shifts, truthful knowledge, [436]and coping: four things that intrinsically are neither good nor bad” (Silva 2011: 80–81). So what is the answer to Coplan’s worry? Or rather, what is my own argument about pessimism or optimism in wisdom divination and about the diviner’s influence, malignant or otherwise? A diviner plays many parts, I argue. To document and analyze how a diviner does so, I devote two chapters to the caseload of my mentor Moatlhodi. In the first, “Family Séances: Rhetoric, Deliberations and Decisions,” I follow this diviner’s practice with his own family throughout a long series of their family quarrels, and I include his divinations for his own personal affairs. My conclusion is this, and I quote at length to set in relief the contrast to the more sensational portrayal of the occult terrorist in South Africa: Perhaps the most striking outcome was not the spread of odd rumors or even shouted complaints about witchcraft, or even the deflection of accusation beyond the family to outsiders or others at a distance, but the stoic effort to fend off the dead, Again and again, the dead were asked not to trouble the living and to be assuaged by the pious ritual for blowing water. There were continual reminders of the obligation for care among kin, re-enforced by the rehearsal of their concern for petty and forgivable faults, rather than malicious acts of envy or greed. The séances navigated a fine course between the ambivalences and the obligations of close kin. (Werbner 2015: 168) The second chapter, “Cosmic and Personal Understandings: Diviners, Headmen, Strangers,” presents a further contrast. Again, I summarize my view of how the moral peril facing a client was clarified: Usually, it was enough to authorize treatment for the protection of the patient’s whole body or goods against witchcraft and for undoing the traps in the way of the patient’s well-being and prosperity. Often, the approach to witchcraft was less muted, less oblique than in the family cases, but there were none of their challenging moments of open argumentation about counter-possibilities with citations from familiar exegesis and shared poetics. Each séance with a stranger, however, was not ordinarily an occasion for closure. What the patient and/or client went away with was the invitation to return, after success in good fortune, and be endowed with powerful capacity, usually from a goat, from the vital substances of an offering they would bring the diviner. The consultation was the beginning, not the end of a prescribed course of recovery of well-being under the diviner’s guidance. (Werbner 2015: 179) Here I must make a confession, and it bears on Silva’s doubts about my claim that in Divination’s grasp my approach fully abandons an old dynamic or clarity paradigm, which as it happens, she still finds helpful in her fine account of basket divination. In my earlier work—along with Michael Jackson (1989) and David Parkin (1991)— the paradigm I recognized in divination represented a passage from confusion to understanding, from “baffling complexity to intelligible complexity” (Werbner 1989: 59–60). I confess that the more I read, reread, and reflected uneasily about many wisdom divination cases and at least half-a-dozen diviners’ comments and [437]clients’ post-séance retrospection, the less useful I found this paradigm. Admittedly, in Jackson’s version of the paradigm, the divinatory move is closer to what I now grasp: Jackson sees a move in a path toward a “clearing” as a tentative moment, “a break in a journey—to take stock, to get my bearings” (1989: 1). When Silva herself takes up the paradigm in her monograph, she is tempted to say, “the divinatory journey begins with mystery, uncertainty and passivity, and it progresses gradually toward revelation, certainty, and resoluteness” (Silva 2011: 129). Against that view of a journey from obscurity to clarity, remarkably, is the way a diviner tells it as a journey that sometimes strays, turns back on itself, risks stumbling, halts at new discoveries, has to keep a fast (possibly too fast) pace, and proverbially exposes participants to the danger of ending up exposed in an open plain (Silva 2011: 128–29). With her informant, Silva takes us well beyond the “Twenty Questions” comparison that captivated Victor Turner in his educated guess about divination, in the absence of observed séances (Turner 1975). More significantly, we might well ask whether the obscurity-to-clarity paradigm is sensitive enough to the diviner’s own account. Further, Silva’s actual séance record documents what I suggest is “ a locational rhetoric of a highly orderly kind from the very start without initial confusion” (Werbner 2015: 293). Only after the diviner verbally recreates a cosmic journey from far to near, calling upon great dignitaries and tracking down to familiar objects at home with the client, does he turn to the icons in his divining basket. With these shaken bits and through their silent language of things, he tracks back and forth, while he engages in call and response with his client. Hence my revisionist argument: the old paradigm, poor even from diviners’ own perceptions, is too certain and yet not a model for highly methodical, deliberate, and carefully designed practice; it is too easy in closure and thus fails to appreciate truth-on-balance, as well as irresolution in the face of ever ongoing retrospection after séances. There is a second debate that Silva opens for comparative analysis. Very broadly, she reconsiders my view of a spectrum in modes of divination across Africa, which in part I offer in order to locate Tswapong wisdom divination as a variation relative to a good number of other modes. For Silva’s purposes, a useful comparative approach would recognize a spectrum from divination that is word-rich, in one sense or another, to modes that stress moments of wordlessness, as in the West African examples I give (Werbner 2015: 298). Silva’s preference is understandable. Silva seeks to rescue basket divination from being boxed up as if it were so much about objects that there is neither convention nor creativity in its rhetoric, despite the fact that it persuades through highly stylized language, proverbs, gnomic pronouncements, and cosmic allusions. Seen in between the wordless and the word-rich, basket divination turns out to be a hybrid of the silent language of things and the rich rhetoric. But the question is this: Might Silva herself be boxing basket divination in, understating the hybridity, and thus underestimating the significance of her contribution as an advance beyond Victor Turner’s? After all, Angolan diviners do not put all their trust merely in one basket. Instead, they play off highly distinctive devices, in turn, over the course of a divination. One device is a binary switch, having alternative colors, which registers opposites. Another device mirrors not alternatives but fluid states, ripples as fleeting images in a bottle or pool of water. A diviner calls it a thermometer. It allows for moments of meditation, the silent inward reflection between the microdramatic displays of the small things in the [438]basket with commentary in rhetoric or plain speech: “Using each device provides its own clue, insight or qualifying check” (Werbner 2015: 293). I suggest, and perhaps Silva would agree, that the knowledge practices involved over the course of a séance presume that truth is highly elusive, to be known not absolutely but only on balance. Where I would continue to differ with Silva, however, is in my view that we need an approach to comparison that distinguishes between competence in any rhetoric or conventional speech and the oral archiving, criticism, and interpretation of highly fixed texts, in particular the praise poetry of wisdom divination. One reason for a strong regard for the highly textual divination is historical, though speculative. Highly textual modes are most prominent in the areas of north, west, and east Africa that for many centuries have been in contact with Arabs and their textual mode of divination (Abimbola 1976; Bascom 1969; Brenner 2000; Maupoil 1943; Peel 2001; Vérin and Rajaonarimanana 1991). Some scholars—including most prominently Bernard Maupoil (1943), Wim van Binsbergen (1995, 1996) and Louis Brenner (2000)—argue that Muslim divination has not merely been an influence but an origin for much African divination. Brenner traces a long history of Muslim divination: it spread from origins in the ninth or tenth century, it reached much of the Mediterranean and parts of Asia by the fourteenth century, and it prevailed in Africa from the sixteenth or at least the eighteenth century in every region of the continent where by then Muslims had arrived (Brenner 2000: 49–52). The second reason takes us from history to literary criticism. For once poetry commands our attention in the understanding of divination, we are drawn into issues of poetics that dare ethnographers to engage with literary critics (for the quickening of interest in this engagement, see Guyer 2013, 2014). Unlike the first speculative reason for our special interest in the highly textual divination, which I footnote too briefly in Divination’s grasp (2015: 218, notes 1, 3), the second reason is basic, and its challenging importance—to appreciate the aesthetics and acrobatic stylistics of divinatory verse—looms large in my work, including a forthcoming article on “The poetics of wisdom divination: Renewing the moral imagination” (Werbner 2017). In his insightful comparison of text-based modes of divination, David Zeitlyn makes this point: “The textual criticism of diviners is significantly different from that of literary criticism in Western academic traditions” (Zeitlyn 2001: 231). How and why that has to be true is a critical problem in itself. Here I want to say that I have found it a labor of many years to work out a good form of literary criticism for an oral literature, the archaic verse in wisdom divination, and I adopt the label “practical criticism” in the hope that this form is appropriate for the poetics of closely textual practice in my ethnography yet recognizably and admittedly not the same as diviner’s indigenous literary criticism, some of which I present as “exegesis.” Among our reviewers, Coplan is the one who pioneers in exploring the issues of oral literary criticism. Here he reminds readers of chiasmus, that complex, dynamic figure of speech—it flips between two parts—which significantly affords divination moments for the suspension of certainty about appearance. I much welcome his call for the readers, encountering my practical criticism, to go first and directly to the texts and performances. In immediate and, indeed, obedient response, I want to offer this praise poetry in which a fetus is overheard talking with one who saw it sleeping in its mother’s womb:[439] The fetus of thunder, I cannot be handled.If handled, I slip from the hands.If eaten, I slip from the mouth.If cuddled, I slip between the thighs. Through practical criticism, I unpack and appreciate this example of chiasmus and compare its surprising force in praise poetry with its familiar closure in popular narrative, particularly in the light of Jackson’s seminal insights into chiasmus in narratives by Kuranko of northeastern Sierra Leone (Jackson 1998: 62; Werbner 2015: 54–56). Where the narrative reaches a conclusion, the poetry suspends it, “It is as if to offer for thought and experience a spiral in which one holds one’s breath, wondering: Is truth escaping?” (Werbner 2015: 56). Jackson’s own poetry elicits this, remarks Jane Guyer, “The poetic voice evokes the sense of suspension in stillness” (2013). Suspension in disquiet is more active in the praise poetry of divination, I suggest. “To suspend doubt,” rightly argues Klaits in his critique of Geschiere’s approach to trust, “would be to forestall the impulse to question.” And without appearing to do that, I want to offer my recognition of the true spirit of surprise in this HAU exchange. The generous criticism in these reviews of my book leads me to believe that the almost said has indeed brought us together, thankfully, in a very open-ended exchange of understandings on the way to further unexplored critical questions of practice in divination and ethnography. Acknowledgments I wish to thank the Association for Africanist Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association for the award—an Honorable Mention for the 2016 Elliott B. Skinner Prize—for Divination’s grasp. References Abimbola, Wande. 1976. Ifa. Ibadan: Oxford University Press. Bascom, William. 1969. Ifa Divination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Binsbergen, Wim van. 1995. “Four tablet divination as trans-regional medical technology in southern Africa.” Journal of Religion in Africa 25 (2): 114–40. ———. 1996. “Regional and historical connections of four tablet divination in southern Africa.” Journal of Religion in Africa 26 (1): 2–29. Brenner, Louis 2000. “Muslim divination and the history of religion of Sub-Saharan Africa.” In Insight and Artistry in African Divination, edited by John Pemberton III, 45–62. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Coplan, David B. 1994. In the time of cannibals. Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press.[440] ———. 2003. “Land from the ancestors: Popular religious pilgrimage along the South Africa-Lesotho Border.” Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (4): 976–93. Geschiere, Peter. 2013. Witchcraft, intimacy, and trust: Africa in comparison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Guyer, Jane I. 2013. “The quickening of the unknown: Epistemologies of Surprise in Anthropology.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 283–307. ———. 2014. “On poetry and positivism: ‘The quickening of the unknown.’” In The locations of African literature: Humanists and social scientists in dialogue, edited by Eileen Julien and Biodun Jeyifo. Trenton: Africa World Press. Jackson, Michael. 1989. Paths towards a clearing: Radical empiricism and ethnographic enquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Klaits, Frederick. 2010. Death in a church of life: Moral passion during Botswana’s time of AIDS. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maupoil, Bernard. 1943. La géomancie a l’ancienne Cote des esclaves. Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie. Niehaus, Isak. 2012. Witchcraft and a life in the new South Africa. Cambridge: International African Institute. Parkin, David. 1991. “Simultaneity and sequencing in the oracular speech of Kenyan diviners.” In African divination systems: Ways of knowing, edited by Philip M. Peek, 173–91. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peel, John. 2000. Religious encounter and the making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Silva, Sónia. 2011. Along an African border: Angolan refugees and their divination baskets. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Turner, Victor. 1975. Revelation and divination in Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vérin, Pierre, and Narivelo Rajaonarimanana. 1991. “Divination in Madagascar: The Antemoro case and the diffusion of divination.” In African divination systems: Ways of knowing, edited by Philip M. Peek, 53–68. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Werbner, Richard. 2014. “Empathy and sympathy: Reflexivity in Christian charismatic filmmaking.” Archiva di Etnografia 1 (2): 24–46. ———. 2015. Divination’s grasp: African encounters with the almost said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2017. “The poetics of wisdom divination: Renewing the moral imagination.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24 (1): 1–21. ———. n.d. “From Freud’s couch to the diviner’s lots.” Unpublished manuscript. Zeitlyn, David. 2001. “Finding meaning in the text: The process of interpretation in text-based divination.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7 (2): 225–40.[441]   Richard WerbnerSocial AnthropologySchool of Social SciencesArthur Lewis BuildingUniversity of ManchesterManchesster M13 9PLUnited KingdomRichard.Werbner@manchester.ac.uk  

What terms to use? This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Andrew B. Kipnis. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.2.026 MEDITATION What terms to use? A response to Stephan Feuchtwang and Magnus Fiskesjö Andrew B. KIPNIS, Chinese University of Hong Kong and Australian National University Response to comments on Kipnis, Andrew. “Governing the souls of Chinese modernity” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 217–238. It is always a privilege to have one’s work read carefully. I thank the readers for their appreciative comments but focus here on their questions or criticisms. Many of them have to do with the use of grand terms, like analogic and naturalist; ontology and ideology; modernity, nature/culture, and singularity. Any set of categories can be deconstructed, and the ones under consideration here have been ruthlessly criticized in a variety of ways. But without categories we cannot think at all. So the question must be what is gained and what is lost when using a particular set of terms. If we completely abandon a set of categories, what questions do we no longer ask? Is the loss really worth it? Is there something to be gained by attempting to use the terms in a more flexible manner? Stephan Feuchtwang asks what is naturalist and analogic in the death rituals I discuss. The distinction to me, to rephrase Philippe Descola, is the way in which the interiority and physicality of the soul is imagined. In the naturalist imagination, the only thing about the soul that lives on is a subjective spirit that can be embodied by other human beings. We might consciously emulate or, especially in the case of our own parents, unconsciously reproduce the subjective habits of those who have passed away. But in an analogic imagination, other modes of continuity are possible. If ignored, the dead may become ghosts and then wreak [250]death and destruction on both those who ignored them and innocent bystanders. The dead also might become gods, as in the case of Mao Zedong, or ancestors. Gods, ghosts, and ancestors, which come in a huge variety of forms, have material effects on the world by means of alternative physicalities, material ways of operating in the world that differ from the ways in which ordinary living humans affect the world. Feuchtwang argues that the ancestor does not “have an effect, she or he is the effect.” Try telling that to a geomancy (fengshui) master working at a Chinese graveyard. For a fee, these experts will tell you how to locate a grave to enable the ancestor to bring good fortune to his or her descendants. The good fortune is the effect. In the naturalist imagination there is no alternative physicality. The spirits of the dead may be embodied by the living, but in that case the physical processes by which they influence the world are the same as with all other living mortals. Souls in the analogic and naturalist imaginary do share something, however. In both imaginaries, the living proclaim the souls permanent. I am not certain that this would be the case in the animist and totemist cultures that Descola explores. Thus, part of what captures my imagination in Descola’s categorization is the way in which it allows us to consider what distinguishes analogism and naturalism, what they share, and how what they share may not be accepted by everyone and thus still be “cultural.” A similar problem can be seen in Thomas Laqueur’s (2015) treatment of the history of burial in Europe. He discusses in great detail the shift from burial in churchyards to burial in cemeteries. He mentions in passing that burial in churchyards allowed clergy to pray for the soul of the deceased, thus increasing its chances of going to heaven. But in his conclusion he emphasizes the great continuity in the different ways humans have treated mortal remains across history. Whether one is a secular humanist or a devout Christian, remembering the dead is about connecting the past with the future and constructing a sense of continuity in human society. I agree, but I also feel that Laqueur does not give enough emphasis to the difference between a Christian focus on whether a particular soul goes to hell or heaven, and a secular humanist sense of passing on the cultural spirit of a deceased loved one. They are not the same thing. Of course, some modern Europeans (who bury their loved ones in cemeteries) remain concerned with problems of souls reaching heaven. Such historical continuities raise the question of whether we should bother using the term modernity or not. Both Feuchtwang and Magnus Fiskesjö seem to accept my use of the term in general, but point out the historical continuities that cross the premodern/modern divide in China. Yes, there were crafts-people and hence “careers” in premodern China. Yes, there were debates about lavish funerals and the existence of ghosts in premodern China. Yes, the state in China has a very long history and many aspects of statecraft that are associated with modernity in Europe go back more than a millennium in China. But the onset of rapid industrialization, urbanization, time-space compression, high literacy rates, and demographic transition still mark a historical transformation. People have been reading and writing for a very long time in China, but it matters whether it is 5 percent or 95 percent of the population that does so. Not everyone farmed and lived in a village in premodern China, but more than 95 percent of the people did. Now, even if they do end up farming, [251]almost everyone faces the dilemma of first going to school and then having to decide what sort of work to do afterward. The point of using a term like modernity is that these shifts have consequences for the way many experience and think about the world, as Fiskesjö implies. Though analogic and naturalist conceptions of soul have existed together in China for quite some time, I suspect the manner in which they have been mixed and the percentage of people attached to one concept or the other has shifted. As Feuchtwang graciously mentions, I tried to theorize this view of modernity in my book, From village to city (2016). The question of singularities versus process and what William Matthews calls homologism are interesting ones. I agree that philosophical analyses of Chinese thought and practices derived from this thought (including much Chinese medicine, ritual, and divination) more often focus on processes of transformation than stable entities. Moreover, this focus on process can elide the distinction between interiorities and physicalities (resulting in homologism). Such monist thought might be quite common among philosophers of many traditions, including anthropologists such as us. But I am still not quite willing to give up on singularities. In practice, if not in philosophy, a process becomes a thing when the transformations it is undergoing proceed very slowly compared to other transformations. A god, ghost, or ancestor can be a stable entity for many ritual and practical purposes. I also suspect that dualist modes of thinking can reemerge for monist philosophers at various moments in their lives. The reemergence of dualist modes of thought brings me to my own relation to the nature/culture dichotomy. For a long time, even before I took my first course in anthropology, I found the nature/culture distinction spurious. Aren’t human beings and human culture a result of natural evolution? Aren’t all landscapes marked by the presence of humans? Aren’t all urban environments full of insects, plants, and animals? Anthropological critiques of the nature/culture dualism mostly echo what I already thought. But after reading Descola and writing this essay, I realized that I had never given up the dualism in at least two contexts. First, my anthropological interest in human culture forces its reemergence. Don’t I believe that humans everywhere are subject to the same natural, biological laws but are still able to look at the world in culturally diverse ways? Don’t you? Second, from my very secular humanist soul, when I think of the deaths of my own parents, relatives, friends, or teachers, I do not worry about whether they are in heaven or hell, or the form of their reincarnation, or whether they are a god, ghost, or ancestor, but I do think of their cultural legacy, of what they have passed on to me and others. As the article suggests, this is a very naturalist way of imagining their souls. That I might implicitly reproduce a nature/culture dichotomy in some circumstances while rejecting it in others raises the question of how we might blend or mix various ontologies. One form of mixture is to think and act in different ways in different contexts. But in this article, I tried to show how a certain ambiguity between analogic and naturalist souls was maintained in a single context: contemporary, urban, Chinese rituals of memorialization. In part, this mixing takes place under a deliberate veil of silence. To varying degrees in different urban contexts, open belief in analogic souls is politically stigmatized and must be veiled, or ameliorated by going to great lengths to pay homage to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But in addition to the political or social circumstances that enable or lead to [252]the blending of ontologies, there can be logical circumstances that blur the distinction between different ontologies. Animist and naturalist ontologies create clearer boundaries between interiority and physicality because the distinction between interiority and physicality is overlain with a distinction between plurality and unity. I suspect that totemism and analogism more easily slide into homologism because they do not reinforce the distinction between interiority and physicality in the same way. The blending of analogic and naturalist assumptions in China relates, in part, to a specific form of political repression there. My discussion of this repression marks the politics of this essay and I am not sure of the extent to which Fiskesjö and Feuchtwang agree with my stance. There certainly is common ground, but perhaps also a few distinctions. Fiskesjö is extremely critical of the CCP regime and its appalling human rights record. For the most part this criticism is fair enough, but I do think it possible to take it too far, thereby reinforcing cold war prejudice. Though I find some Chinese officials to be arrogant at times, I do not feel that all Chinese officials are always arrogant. The funeral Fiskesjö depicts from 1983, as he acknowledges, cannot be taken as representative of the majority of funerals today. Contemporary farewell meetings are conducted in a manner that is much more sensitive to the emotional condition of the grieving. This liberalization reflects both a less repressive attitude toward religious expression than existed in the Maoist decades and the commercialization of the funerary industry, which leads to better service for its customers. While 1983 is after Mao’s death, the socioeconomic conditions of the early 1980s reflected a Maoist ethos much more clearly than today’s conditions do. Fiskesjö also suggests that much could be gained by using the term ideology instead of merely pointing at the political manipulation of ontologies. I am not so convinced that this distinction is valuable, and further fear that it masks the fact that ontologies can be manipulated in a wide variety of ways for a great diversity of political purposes. I doubt very much that there can be any one-on-one mapping between particular ontologies and particular political stances. Moreover, however they are manipulated, ontologies are also tools for seeking truth and guiding ethical practice. Feuchtwang might be more sympathetic toward the CCP, but seems to worry about the effects of unrestrained commercialization on the funerary industry in China. I agree that the industry requires regulation, but worry more about political repression than commercial exploitation in the contemporary Chinese context. I also worry more about the social stigmatization of those working in the funerary sector than whatever strategies they may employ to increase their rates of remuneration. For the record, one-stop dragon entrepreneurs are not state-registered employees. They typically do not register their businesses (at least in Nanjing), and avoid state regulation and taxes as much as possible. References Kipnis, Andrew. 2016. From village to city: Social transformation in a Chinese county seat. Berkeley: University of California Press.[253] Laqueur, Thomas W. 2015. The work of the dead: A cultural history of mortal remains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.   Andrew KipnisDepartment of AnthropologyChinese University of Hong KongShatin, New TerritoriesHong KongAndrew.kipnis@anu.edu.au  

Title code{white-space: pre-wrap;} span.smallcaps{font-variant: small-caps;} span.underline{text-decoration: underline;} div.column{display: inline-block; vertical-align: top; width: 50%;} Title This is a filler document.

Evans-Pritchard: The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © E.E. Evans-Pritchard. The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan The Frazer Lecture, 1948 E. E. Evans-Pritchard   Introduction The central theme of The Golden Bough was the divine kingship, and it has seemed to me appropriate that a lecture established in its author’s honour and now dedicated to his memory should be on that subject. I propose, therefore, to examine one of the examples of divine kingship cited by Sir James Frazer, that of the Shilluk of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and to discuss it as a problem of social structure. It was recorded as early as 1905 that it was a Shilluk custom to kill their kings1 and much information about the Shilluk kingship in general has since been collected. Professor and Mrs Seligman studied the institution in 1909-10 and it was they who brought it to the notice of Sir James Frazer and into the main stream of ethnological theory. Apart from the writings of the Seligmans and a number of articles by other hands there are two monographs on the Shilluk, The [1] Shilluk People by Professor Diedrich Westermann, who conducted linguistic research among the Shilluk in 1910, and Father Wilhelm Hofmayr’s Die Schilluk, largely based on the observations of Father Banholzer and other of his fellow catholic missionaries, which date from the beginning of the century. Father Hofmayr himself worked among the Shilluk from 1906 to 1916. There has, indeed, long been a considerable body of knowledge about the Shilluk and I would not have considered it profitable to discuss the Shilluk kingship afresh were it not that new light has recently been shed on their social structure, and more particularly on the place of the kingship in it, by officers of the Sudan Political Service. It is significant that two of them studied anthropology before joining the Sudan Service, Mr P. P. Howell at Cambridge, from where he had carried out some research among the Shilluk before joining the Service, and Mr W. P. G. Thomson at Oxford. It is from this literature, and especially from the more recent accounts, that I have drawn the material for my lecture, for though the Shilluk live in a part of the world with which I am very familiar, my contact with them has been slight. The Shilluk are the most northern of the Nilotic peoples and have been for centuries in contact [2] with the Arab population of the northern Sudan. Their country was first subjected to intermittent taxation and raiding by the Turks about 1820 and was finally conquered by them in 1867 and became part of the Ottoman Empire. When the Turkish Administration succumbed to the Sudanese Mahdi the Shilluk were involved in a struggle against this new ruler and afterwards against his Khalifa. Lord Kitchener arrived in Shillukland at the end of 1898 and since that time the people have been under Anglo-Egyptian administration. I mention these political events because they have strongly influenced the Shilluk kingship for close on a century, during which the kings have been executed, exiled, deposed, and nominated, by foreign governments. The funerary rites of a dead king and the procedures of election and investiture of a new king were probably not performed in the full traditional manner during this period. Social structure The hamlets of the Shilluk, who number about 110,000 souls, are almost continuous, like beads on a string, along the west bank of the Nile from near Lake No to about lat. 12 N. with a number of [3] settlements on the east bank and along the lower reaches of the Sobat. Their country is treeless savannah but, unlike their cousins the Nuer and Dinka, they are predominantly agricultural and sedentary, for their long river frontage gives them adequate water and grazing in the dry season for the comparatively few cattle (about 25,000) they possess.2 The brief account I give of their social structure is mostly derived from articles in Sudan Notes and Records by Mr Pumphrey and Mr Howell.3 The hamlets (myer, sing. pac), built from 100 yards to a mile or so apart on high ground parallel to the river, vary in size from one to fifty homesteads; a homestead (gol), the residence of a family (gol), consisting usually of two huts encircled by a fence. Each hamlet is occupied by members of an extended family, or small lineage, with their wives, and the homesteads of this group are arranged in a rough horseshoe shape around a common cattle-byre, which shelters the animals in the rains and is used as a club at all seasons, and a common kraal. The headman of a hamlet (jal dwong pac) who is also the head of a lineage in [4] the settlement of which it forms part represents the hamlet on the council of the settlement and receives in consequence a robe of honour from the king or from the chief of the settlement. If his hamlet is only a subsidiary seat of a lineage in the settlement he is regarded merely as its senior member. The settlement to which I have just referred is called podh, a word which has a number of meanings but generally designates a group of hamlets, occupied by different lineages, which, though there may be much competition between them, unite for defence, for the ritual of age-sets (an institution otherwise of little political importance), and in intersettlement and national affairs, and have a common chief. There are about a hundred of these settlements in Shillukland, each having a population of from less than 100 to more than 600 adult males. They are structurally distinct groups of a political kind though the distance that divides a settlement from adjacent settlements may be no greater than that which separates a hamlet from its nearest neighbours in the same settlement. In every settlement there is a dominant lineage, the dyil, the owners of the soil, with whom the various stranger and immigrant accretions (wedh) identify themselves politically and with whom they [5] form a separate social community with its own corporate life. This lineage is generally dominant in numbers as well as in virtue of the prestige derived from its traditional association with the settlement site. The chief of the settlement is chosen from it and by its members, though the stranger lineages have some say in the election, which must be confirmed by the king (reth) of the Shilluk. Even when a stranger lineage, sometimes a branch of the royal clan (kwareth), becomes more numerous in a settlement than its dominant lineage and dispossesses its members of the chieftainship they still retain some prestige as owners of the soil. unity in a settlement and the authority of its chief are said to depend on its integration around a powerful dominant lineage. I must, therefore, say something here about Shilluk lineages. There has been, and still is, some obscurity about Shilluk descent groups. There are said to be in Shillukland about 100 groups designated by the word kwa (descendants) followed by the name of the ancestor of the group. These are often described in the literature as exogamous clans but many of them might perhaps be better spoken of as lineages. They have a typical lineage structure with its characteristic branching off in response to the formation [6] of new territorial units. Colonies of the same lineage are found in several settlements, so that in any settlement several different descent groups are represented, one of them, as I have already explained, being always dominant in it and identified with the settlement politically. Although the dispersed lineages of a clan do not intermarry, and sometimes acknowledge their common descent in other ways, a man generally thinks in terms of his localized lineage, reference being usually to the ancestor who founded the lineage in his settlement. it is interesting to note a further common feature of lineage systems: the descendants of a man who has settled with his wife’s people trace their descent through the wife to the lineage in whose home they live. This practice is, as among the other Nilotic peoples, one of the ways in which stranger lineages are grafted into the genealogical structure of the dominant lineage in a settlement. However, until we know more than we do at present about the distribution of lineages, about their genealogical structure, and about the part they play in inter-settlement relations it will not be possible to estimate fully their political significance. All the Shilluk settlements compose a common polity, the kingdom of Shillukland. They are [7] segments of an organization. It seems that in pre-Turkish times there was a tendency for contiguous settlements to combine for war against other settlements or under the leadership of an outstanding personality, but such combinations were not permanent, or even consistent enough for us to speak of them as political groups. The Turkish Administration tried to give greater consistency to them so that they could be used as administrative units, and the Anglo-Egyptian Government has done the same and calls them divisions and appoints a chief for each. Previously they appear to have been little more than districts or localities, and the only chiefs between the king and the chiefs of settlements were those of Ger, northern Shillukland, and Luak, southern shillukland, whose functions had, as we shall see, a ritual rather than an administrative character, and those of Muomo and Tonga, the settlements which are the northern and southern marches of Shillukland, whose functions were also partly ritual. In Shilluk speech Muomo and Tonga correspond exactly, Professor Westermann tells us, to the expression of the ancient Hebrews: from Dan unto Beersheba.4 [8] Northern Shillukland and southern Shillukland are the arches of the politico-religious kingdom of the Shilluk of which the kingship is the keystone. That segmentation has taken this particular form is doubtless due to the peculiar ribbon-distribution of the Shilluk settlements. The whole Shilluk people recognize a single head and we can therefore speak of the Shilluk nation and of their king, and it is with his place in the national polity that this lecture is particularly concerned. According to Shilluk tradition the present king is the thirty-first of his line. All the kings are believed to be descended from Nyikang, the leader of the Shilluk in their heroic age, who led them into their present homeland, conquering it from its inhabitants and dividing it among the lineages of his followers; and Nyikang, or, as we would say, the spirit of Nyikang, is believed to be in every king and to have passed from king to king down the line of his successors. Nyikang is thus a mythological personification of the timeless kingship which itself symbolizes the national structure, a changeless moral order. The rule of succession is that only a son of a king can be invested with the kingship. As many sons of kings have never succeeded to the throne, there [9] are today numerous and widely diffused branches of the royal clan whose members are ineligible for royal office and lack authority, unless they are also chiefs of settlements, although they are treated with deference by commoners in virtue of their descent. Indeed, the royal clan is easily the largest single clan in the whole country, being said to comprise perhaps a fifteenth of the nation. In some areas its members are more numerous than commoners and have supplanted commoner lineages in the chieftainship of settlements. This process, which continues today, has been going on for a long time, for it is said that Abudok, the eighth ruler (and only queen) of the Shilluk, prophesied that one day the royal clan would eat up the rest of the Shilluk.5 It results from the custom of sending pregnant wives of a king from the royal capital to bear their children in other, generally their natal settlements. Their daughters are not allowed to marry and therefore do not start lines of descent which would count as sisters’ sons to the royal house. Their sons are brought up by settlement chiefs, often their mothers’ brothers, and not in the capital. When a prince (nyireth) marries he builds a separate hamlet near that of the settlement chief [10] who has reared him and there his descendants live. Some lineages of the royal clan, the ororo, have been formally deprived of their noble status and can now intermarry with their parent clan. They are said to be descendants of Ocolo, the fifth king, who were degraded by his successor, but Father Hofmayr’s and Father Crazzolara’s accounts6 would suggest that some of them may be descended from the nobles degraded by other kinds, and furthur research will probably confirm this. They are few in number but they hold the important chieftainship of Tonga settlement and they play a leading part in the royal funerary and investiture rites. A king always has some of their daughters among his wives and it is said to be their duty to smother him in certain circumstances. The emergence of what may be called aristocratic status has been accompanies by the formation of numerous groups of persons of the category of bang reth, royal clients. They are descendants of retainers of past kings—captured enemies, certain homicides, persons who have become possessed by the spirit of Nyikang, and poor men who have [11] attached themselves to the court—and have been given the fictional collectivity of exogamous lineages. They are said to be rather more numerous than the royal clan. During a king’s lifetime his special band of retainers used, until the practice was discouraged by the Government, to live near the capital in a hamlet of their own, but when their master was buried in his natal settlement some of them moved there with his elderly widows, and their descendants remained there to tend his shrine. Also, when a prince was ‘planted out’, as the Shilluk say, in a settlement, his father sent some of his retainers to live there and these became bang nyireth, a prince’s clients. They served the prince during his lifetime, and after his death their descendants continued to live near the prince’s descendants as a fictitious lineage. consequently, where there is a branch of the royal clan in a settlement there is usually a lineage of clients in the same settlement. The clients are merged in the general category of commoners, colo, of which word ‘Shilluk’ is an Arabic corruption, though it is said of them that they have a slightly lower social status than members of other commoner clans because they have no traditional rights in the settlements in which they live. [12] The development of the Shilluk kingship has thus produced, though not in a very pronounced or rigid form, a social hierarchy of royal house, nobility (other members of the royal clan), and commoners (including persons of client origin). The kingship If we are to understand the place of the kingship in Shilluk society we must, I think, beware of attempts to define it in terms of judicial and administrative functions and view it rather as a ritual office and in a wider political context. in 1903 Father Tappi wrote that the authority of the king is ‘absolute’.7 Professor and Mrs Seligman have described the king as ‘absolute head—temporal and spiritual—of a state whose territory is divided into a number of provinces, each administered by a chief directly responsible to the sovereign and acting as his proxy’,8 and Professor Westermann has also written of the power of the king as ‘absolute’.9 Father Hofmayr says that ‘Mit dem Regierungsantritt ist der König Herr des Landes, das er nach Belieben vergeben [13] kann, und Herr sogar des Eigentums seiner Untertanen’.10 These statements would seem to require some modification. As Mr Pumphrey has pointed out, it is unlikely that the so-called ‘provinces’ were in fact more than districts or that they were in any sense administrative departments before they were made into something of the kind by foreign governments.11 Moreover, though doubtless the king exercised considerable influence in the country and may, have confirmed settlement chiefs in office, he did not nominate them. They were heads of settlements in virtue of their position as heads of lineages dominant in those settlements and although they had certain duties to the king it is, I think, wrong to describe them as being in any sense administrative officials. To use such terms as ‘state’, ‘government’, and ‘administration’ in speaking of the shilluk political system would appear to me, in the light of what is now known of it, to be a mistake. It is true that the more recent authorities imply rather than explicitly state what in their opinion is the position of the king. Mr Howell and Mr Thomson speak of the ‘theoretical omnipotence’ of the king and of a ‘theoretically omnipotent [14] monarchy’.12 Mr Pumphrey says that in the old days ‘justice was probably rough and large-scale fighting more prevalent than litigation’.13 Indeed, feuds appear to have been rampant in the past, and it is not very clear how they were composed. We are told that major disputes were sometimes brought before the king, but he can hardly be said to have tried such cases. If he intervened at all it was to support partially one side to a quarrel. We are told that when a settlement waged ‘unjustifiable’ war on another or refused persistently to listen to the king he might raise a ‘royal levy’ from the adjacent settlements and with this force and his own retainers raid the recalcitrants, seizing their cattle and burning their homesteads. He kept some of the cattle for himself and the rest were taken by those who supported his action. The raiding force would generally be strong enough to discourage resistance.14 Compensation for injury seems, therefore, to have been obtained by self-help, sometimes backed by royal intervention. Without confirmation I am not inclined to accept Father Hofmayr’s statement that compensation for homicide was [15] paid to the king alone.15 A different picture of the king’s part in the settlement of disputes is painted by Mr Oyler of the American Mission, who witnessed the settlement of a feud, which had been going on in a district for more than three years, by the joint intervention of the king and the Government. From his account it is evident that the king could not have imposed a settlement had the disputants not been ready to accept one, that the part played in it by the king was that of peacemaker and not of judge, and that his participation can better be described as sacerdotal than as governmenta1.16 The king of the Shilluk reigns but does not govern. The king’s sacerdotal role in the settlement of feuds gives us a clue to what is confirmed by a great weight of further evidence: his sacral position in Shilluk society. Our authorities, indeed, speak of the king as the ‘Hoherpriester des Landes’,17 of ‘the royal and priestly line’ and of its ‘priestly function’,18 and of the king as ‘the high priest of the tribal religion’.19 Both his functions and his status are primarily of a ritual order. He makes sacrifices on [16] important occasions, especially for rain and for victory in war, and it is his duty to provide cattle for the sacred herds of Nyikang at Nyilual and Wau and a canoe for Nyikang’s shrine at Nyibodho. Nyikang, the culture hero of the Shilluk, their first king, and the creator of their nation, is immanent in him and this makes him the double pivot of Shilluk society, the political head of the nation and the centre of the national cult. The kingship is the common symbol of the Shilluk people and, Nyikang being immortal, an abiding institution which binds past and present and future generations. The correspondence of political structure with religious cult can be seen at every point of the structure. The territorial segments of the nation and their association with lineages is, as we have noted, validated by the myth of Nyikang’s parcelling out of his conquests among the clans, the strands of which are, moreover, caught up into a single mythological point, Nyikang. Some trace their descent from his companions, some from his collateral relatives, others from the original inhabitants of the country conquered by him, and yet others from men who played some part in his saga. The lineage heads who are the chiefs of settlements have ritual duties to the kingship: in [17] particular, ceremonial services at the king’s investiture, the building of huts at Fashoda, which is both the royal capital and the cult centre of Nyikang, and the upkeep of Nyikang’s other shrines and those of past kings. These shrines are widely distributed throughout the country so that every section of it participates in the cult of Nyikang, who is, it must be borne in mind, not only the semi-divine hero of Shilluk mythology but also the king at every period of their history. Indeed, the shrines of Nyikang, what professor Seligman calls his cenotaphs, are indistinguishable from the tomb-shrines of dead kings and they have the same ceremonial functions in the life of the people: in the rain-making ceremonies, at harvest-time, and in times of sickness and pestilence.20 The religion and cosmogony of the Shilluk are bound up with the political system through the identification of Nyikang with the king. The kingship stands at the centre of Shilluk moral values. We can only understand the place of the kingship in Shilluk society when we realize that it is not the individual at any time reigning who is king, but [18] Nyikang who is the medium between man and God (Juok) and is believed in some way to participate in God as he does in the king. ‘Nyikang is the reth but the reth is not Nyikang.’21 The participation of Nyikang in the king raises the kingship to a plane above all sectional interests, whether local or of descent. All the Shilluk share in the kingship, however their loyalties may pull them apart in other matters, because in Nyikang are centred all those interests which are common to all the people: success in war against foreigners and the fertility and health of men, cattle, crops, and of those wild beasts which are of service to man. Professor Westermann tells us that ‘everything they value most in their national and private life, has its origin in him’.22 Mr Howell and Mr Thomson tell us that when a king died the Shilluk say piny bugon, ‘there is no land’23 —the centre of the Shilluks’ world has fallen out. It is restored by the investiture of a new king, for though kings may perish the kingship, that is Nyikang, endures. Mr Oyler tells us: ‘They say that if Nikawng should die, the whole Shilluk race would perish.’24 [19] Because of the mystical values associated with the kingship and centred in the person of the king he must keep himself in a state of ritual purity, by performing certain actions and observing certain prescriptions, and in a state of physical perfection. Our authorities say that the Shilluk believe that should the king become physically weak the whole people might suffer, and, further, that if a king becomes sick or senile he should be killed to avoid some grave national misfortune, such as defeat in war, epidemic, or famine. The king must be killed to save the kingship and with it the whole Shilluk people. This would seem to be the reasoning behind Shilluk statements that the king may be strangled, or suffocated, or walled up in a hut and left to die there, if he fails to satisfy his wives or shows signs of illness or senility. In view of the great importance Sir James Frazer and others have attached to these statements I must confess that I consider them of interest more as an indication of the mystical nature of the kingship than as evidence that the kings were, in fact, ever killed in the ways mentioned or for the reasons given. It is true that Professor and Mrs Seligman state categorically that ‘there is not the least doubt that kings of the Shilluk were killed with due ceremony when they began to show [20] signs of old age or ill health’,25 but I have failed to find convincing evidence that any Shilluk king was put to death in either circumstance, although some of the kings must have qualified long before they died for execution on the grounds alleged; and I am persuaded that the story of kings being walled up in a hut is a confusion arising from the usual walling up of the remains of a dead king, the bones being buried after decomposition of the flesh. In the absence of other than traditional evidence of royal executions in Shilluk history and in view of the contradictory accounts cited I conclude that the ceremonial putting to death of kings is probably a fiction. It possibly arises from the dual personality of the king, who is both himself and Nyikang, both an individual and an institution, which accounts also for the linguistic convention that a king does not die but disappears just as Nyikang is said not to have died but to have disappeared, in his case in a storm. I will return to this question of regicide after I have reviewed the procedures of election and investiture of kings to show what light they shed on the nature of the kingship. [21] Royal election and investiture The phases of the investiture of a new king were excellently described by Mr P. Munro26 of the Sudan Political Service, who was an eye-witness of the investiture of King Fafiti Yor, the twenty-ninth king, in 1918. However, the recent accounts by Mr Howell and Mr Thomson, who were able to make detailed observations on what happened on the death of King Fafiti Yor in 1943 and on the election and investiture of his successor, King Anei, in 1944 and again (Mr Thomson) on the death of King Anei and on the election and investiture of King Dak Fadiet in 1945, are descriptively fuller and analytically more illuminating and are therefore followed in the present summary. On the death of a king his corpse is walled for some months in a hut and his bones are then buried in his natal hamlet, and not in the royal capital. The remains are disposed of, and the mortuary ceremonies conducted, by royal clients, ororo, and members of the royal clan (the head of which is not the ruling king but the chief of Fadiang settlement). [22] It is more a clan, than a national, affair. The election of the new king, which takes place a few days after his predecessor’s death, is, on the contrary, an affair of the whole Shilluk people, who participate in the election through the chiefs of the north and the south, to whom I have already referred. These persons reflect in their roles in the election and in the ceremonies of investiture the structural dichotomy of Shillukland. We have seen that the Shilluk kingdom has a double configuration, political in its territorial setting, in its division into north and south and marches and settlements, and ritual in its religious setting, its arrangement in relation to the cult of Nyikang. In the ritual configuration the dichotomy is represented by the ceremonial division of the country into Gol Dhiang the northern division, and Gol Nyikang, the southern division, which correspond structurally to the political division of the kingdom into Ger, the northern half, and Luak, the southern half, though geographically they are not exactly coterminous. The chiefs of the ceremonial divisions in this ritual representation of the Shilluk polity are also the political chiefs of Golbany and Kwom, the two settlements which are to the north and south adjacent to the capital and cult-centre, [23] Fashoda, which is almost where the halves meet and is the focal point in the ceremonies of investiture. I wish to emphasize that the procedure of election ensures that the prince selected to be king must have the backing of the whole country. Mr Thomson tells us that ‘the choice rests entirely with the chiefs of Gol Dhiang and Gol Nyikang’27 and cannot take place unless they agree, and it is clear that agreement does not depend on the personal feelings of the two men but that they are spokesmen for the halves of the country they represent. The other members of what Mr Howell and Mr Thomsom call the ‘electoral college’ and which they say ‘is a very conscious survival of the traditional structure of the Shilluk tribe’28 have ‘only to listen to the decision’29 of these two men. The other members are the two influential chiefs of the northern and southern marches, Muomo and Tonga, nine chiefs of settlements who are descended from the original chiefs among whom Nyikang divided Shillukland when he conquered and settled his followers in it, and three important [24] chiefs of branches of the royal clan which have become dominant in powerful settlements in the country. Thus the backing, if only passive, of all parts of the kingdom is necessary before a prince can be invested with the kingship. The participation of the halves of Shillukland in the making of a king is further emphasized in the intense opposition between them expressed in the drama of the investiture, which at the same time enacts the conquest and settlement of the country by Nyikang and his followers. Without the collective participation of the halves of the country the investiture of a king, which takes place about a year after his election, cannot be held. The ceremonies would seem to have precisely this function, for the kingship represents the whole country and a king can only be made by rites in which the whole country takes part. Hence also in the investiture all sections of the population are represented. The royal clan, its dispossessed branch, the commoner clans, especially those whose ancestors were among the original followers of Nyikang, and the client clans, all have essential roles in the drama. Different settlements in different districts of Shillukland and different clans are responsible for performing various parts of the [25] ceremonial and for providing the various objects required in its enactment: silver and cloth from the Arabs of the north (presumably obtained by raiding in the old days), ostrich feathers for the effigies of Nyikang and his son, skins of the rare Mrs Gray antelope from Fanyikang island for the ceremonial robes of the king and the other more important participants in the ceremony, sacred spears, royal drums, fibre of the dom palm for ceremonial robes, cowrie shells, new huts, beasts for sacrifice, and so forth. I will recount briefly the chief phases by which the kingship envelops the king-elect. The effigy of Nyikang, which is kept in the principal of his provincial shrines, at Akurwa in the most northerly district of Shillukland, is brought out by his priests, to whom the king-elect has to make considerable gifts for their service in this matter, and together with the effigy of his son Dak is taken to beat the northern bounds of the kingdom and then southwards, supported by an army of the north, to fight the king-elect for possession of the capital. As the effigies pass through each district the people gather to pay their respects to Nyikang and to escort him to the next district, for it appears that during the interregnum the effigy is believed to contain the [26] spirit of Nyikang, to be Nyikang in fact. Nyikang’s army of the north meets in mock combat an army of the south, supporting the king-elect, at the Arepejur watercourse just outside the royal capital. In the words of Mr Howell and Mr Thomson, this meeting in battle of the two armies on the Arepejur, the boundary between north and south, ‘symbolizes the ceremonial division of the country into two moieties. The balance between them is strongly emphasized at all points.’30 The army of the king-elect is defeated and he is captured by Nyikang and taken by him to the capital. The kingship captures the king. There Nyikang is placed on the royal stool. After a while he is taken off it and the king-elect sits on it in his stead and the spirit of Nyikang enters into him, causing him to tremble, and he becomes king, that is he becomes possessed by Nyikang. The concluding ritual acts follow. The new king has married a girl, traditionally provided by a certain clan, and this girl has an important role in the ceremonies of investiture. After the king’s enthronement Nyikang seizes the girl and refuses to surrender her to the king on the ground that she was married with cattle from the royal herd, which is Nyikang’s herd, and is therefore Nyikang’s wife. [27] On this issue Nyikang and the king summon their supporters to a second mock battle, in which the king captures the girl. Nyikang thereupon pays the king a visit to make his peace with him. On the following morning the king receives the homage and exhortations of the chiefs and undertakes to be a good king. Nyikang does not again contest the king’s authority and some weeks later the effigies are sent back to the shrine at Akurwa. Even so brief a sketch as I have given enables us to perceive the basic symbolism of the events of investiture. Nyikang is always king of the Shilluk and when a king dies his spirit is conceived of as departing in some manner from the king’s body to take up its abode in the new effigy specially made for its accommodation at the shrine of Akurwa. By entering anew into the body of a prince Nyikang once again rules in his capital. The most adequate interpretation of the succession of rites of investiture would therefore seem to be that when the effigy and the king fight for possession of the capital the army of the effigy is victorious because Nyikang is in the effigy, but when they fight again over the king’s bride the army of the king is victorious because Nyikang is now in the king. Power has passed from the Nyikang of the [28] shrine of Akurwa to the Nyikang of the king in Fashoda. The king is now reverenced and the effigy is sent back to Akurwa. It is Nyikang, mark you, the symbol of the whole Shilluk people, who is the king-maker. The kingship belongs to all the people and not to the royal clan. Indeed, I think it significant that when Nyikang captures the king-elect the latter is ostentatiously surrounded by a block of his own clan. In this connection it is to be hoped that more will be learnt about the distribution now and in the past of the royal clan. The traditional home of Nyikang was Fanyikang, a settlement in the south, and the ritual equivalent to the southern half of the kingdom is Gol Nyikang. it seems likely on these, and on other, grounds that the royal clan was at one time found chiefly, perhaps only, in the south and spread from there to those northern settlements in which it is found to-day, as has happened among the closely related Anuak people. Hence in the ceremonies of investiture it seems as though the Shilluk people, represented by Nyikang and the army of the north, capture the king and take him away from his clan, represented by the army of the south, to be the head of the whole nation. The ritual, of investiture appears to be an [29] enactment of this central dogma, that it is not an individual who belongs to a particular clan or to a particular part of the country who is king, but Nyikang in whom are the continuity and welfare of the whole Shilluk people. Royal succession and regicide We may now examine, in the light of what we have learnt about the position of the kingship in Shilluk society and particularly about the polarity so clearly expressed in the ceremonies I have reviewed, the mode of succession to royal office and the tradition of regicide which is so closely connected with it. Although Professor and Mrs Seligman say, ‘We found no basis for the belief, common among Europeans in the Shilluk country, that there were two, or even three or four, branches of the royal house from which the kings were elected in turn’31 the early Sudan intelligence Reports make it clear that this was the case in recent decades and also that rivalry between claimants to the kingship in the second half of the nineteenth century was connected with the balanced opposition between north and south, for the halves of the kingdom fairly [30] consistently supported rival candidates. Moreover, it is difficult to believe that the practice of the present day, by which it is more or less understood that the surviving lines of kings take it in turn to provide the king,32 is new. A collateral royal line does not to-day contest an election on the understanding that they have next turn. The custom is for the reigning king to take under his wing a scion of a rival line and by so doing to indicate him as his successor, though he cannot nominate him and his choice may not be followed by the people. When this prince becomes king he takes under his wing a son of his protector. The reigning king insures by this convention against both rebellion by a rival line and his own line being excluded from the kingship in the future. There can be no doubt that in recent times there has been an alternation on the throne of branches of the royal house, nor that the alternation is related to the structural dichotomy of Shillukland. We are told that if the ceremonial chiefs of the north and south fail to reach agreement in the election of a new king the chiefs of the northern settlements follow their representative and the chiefs of the southern settlements follow their representative and the [31] issue is fought out. It would seem probable that when there is disagreement it is an expression not of divergence of opinion about the merits of the candidates but of local loyalties in which different members of the royal house are associated with different parts of Shillukland. Whether disputed succession in the past was a product of local rivalries cannot perhaps now be determined, but it seems likely in view of the fact that in earlier times the king ruled from the settlement in which he was brought up or moved from one settlement to another and did not have a fixed residence at the central and neutral point of Fashoda.33 I would also suggest that the association of princes with settlements and districts is clearly related to the custom by which they are brought up away from the capital. it is probable that the backing given by north and south to candidates for the kingship in past times arose from the fact that some princes were brought up in the north and some in the south. That this is the case is clear from Father Hofmayr’s detailed notes on each of [32] the Shilluk kings.34 It is easy to determine because the shrines of dead kings are still maintained today where they were born and brought up. I would further suggest that the maternal descent of princes may be of great significance in that it may be the association of maternal lineages with settlements which attaches local loyalties to a particular prince or to a particular branch of the royal house. it is therefore important that the maternal clans of the Shilluk kings should be recorded by some future observer. The Shilluk statement that kings should be put to death if they grow old or become sick and their further statement that any prince may at any time challenge the king to mortal combat, in which the king may not call for help, cannot, I think, like the mode of succession, be understood except in relation to the political structure as a whole. There is only traditional evidence that any king has ever been killed in either way but, as Mr Howell and Mr Thomson point out,35 the belief that kings have been, or might be, so killed has political implications. The assertion that a sick or old king should be killed probably means that when some disaster falls upon the Shilluk nation the tensions inherent [33] in its political structure become manifest in the attribution of the disaster to his failing powers. The unpopularity which national misfortune brings on a king enables a prince to raise rebellion. The belief that a king may legitimately be assassinated by a personal rival is not substantiated by recent Shilluk history any more than the belief that he may be put to death, but it draws some support from tradition and from anxiety on this score shown by the king and his attendants and from the precautions he takes to protect himself against assassination, especially between his election and investiture and during the ceremonies of investiture. However, the evidence suggests that the anxiety may not be expressed, nor the precautions taken, solely on account of the king’s feelings of insecurity but partly, if not chiefly, because he is compelled by tradition to act furtively. Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile the tradition that kings were killed in this fashion with the account we have of royal election and investiture. On the other hand there seems little doubt that Shilluk kings generally met a violent death. My own opinion is that we must interpret Shilluk statements about the matter as indicating not that any prince may slay the king on his own initiative, as [34] has been suggested,36 but that any prince may lead a rebellion as the candidate of discontent, particularly of the part of the kingdom to which the prince belongs. if the king has lost support in the part to which he belongs he will probably lose also both the resulting contest and his life in it. This is the conclusion I have drawn from Father Hofmayr’s involved chronicle of the Shilluk kings.37 it must here be remarked that Shilluk rebellions have not been made against the kingship. On the contrary, they were made to preserve the values embodied in the kingship which were being weakened, or it was believed so, by the individual who held office. They were not revolutions but rebellions against the king in the name of kingship. Conclusion The divine kingship, to one, perhaps the best known, of the examples of which I have devoted this lecture, has been extensively written about by ethnologists, particularly in reference to its occur- [35] rence in Africa.38 I cannot discuss their conclusions here though I feel that I must say about them that they are not, for me at any rate, well founded. In this lecture I thought that I could make a more valuable contribution by a detailed discussion of a particular instance than by what would necessarily have been a very general and superficial review of the whole field, especially as the case selected for discussion has been investigated by a number of gifted observers over half a century and still permits further and more systematic research. In discussing the Shilluk kingship I have not, as you will have noted, followed Sir James Frazer’s method of interpretation. In my view kingship everywhere and at all times has been in some degree a sacred office. Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote. This is because a king symbolizes a whole society and must not be identified with any part of it. He must be in the society and yet stand outside it and this is only possibly if his office is raised to a mystical plane. It is the kingship and not the king who is divine. But though I would insist that a sufficient explana- [36] tion of the sacral kingship can only be derived from a detailed and painstaking comparative study of a wide range of monarchical institutions, which implies a yet wider comparative study of types of political structure, I do not wish to maintain that because all kingship has some of the features of the divine kingship the divine kingship is not in respect of other features a distinct type of institution. It is to the credit of Sir James Frazer to have shown that it is; and I would suggest that it is an institution typical of, though doubtless not restricted to, societies with pronounced lineage systems in which the political segments are parts of a loosely organized structure without governmental functions. In societies of this kind the political organization takes a ritual or symbolic form which in polities with a higher degree of organization gives way, though never entirely, to centralized administration. I would further suggest that the acceptance of regicide in one form or another as customary can be explained in the same structural terms. The moral density is great enough for the segments to be represented by a common symbol in the kingship but not great enough to eliminate the powerful tendencies towards fission in the structure they [37] compose. These tendencies are expressed in relation to the symbol, and either the kingship itself, or the king himself, circulates through the competitive segments, as among the Anuak and in past times also in Shillukland, or the segments struggle for royal representation in the capital. In either case their particularist sentiments operate through dynastic rivalries. The kingship, that is Nyikang, is changeless and acknowledged as a supreme value by all the Shilluk. In that permanence and in that acknowledgement the unity of the nation is manifested. In the rebellions against the kings and in the regicides the segmentary structure with its opposed local loyalties is equally present to the view of the observer. The kingship tends in such societies to become identified, by the attachment of the king’s person to one locality, with sectional interests and when this happens other sections assert their rights, and by their action the common interest of all the Shilluk, in the kingship at the expense of the king’s person. The kingship embodies a contradiction between dogma and social facts, in a sense between office and person, which is produced by a combination of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in the national structure and this contradiction is solved by customary regicide. [38] Bibliography BANHOLZER, P. L. and GIFFEN, J. K. The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (ed. Count Gleichen), ch. VIII. 1905. CANN, CAPT. G. P. ‘A Day in the Life of an idle Shilluk.’ S.N. and R. 1929. CRAZZOLARA, P. J. P. ‘Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Religion und Zauberei bei den Schilluk.’ Anthropos. 1932. D.I. ‘Conspiracy against the Mek of the Shilluks in 1917.’ S.N. and R. 1922. HOFMAYR, P. WILHELM. ‘Zur Geschichte und sozialen und politischen Gliederung des Stammes der Schillukneger.’ Anthropos. 1910. HOFMAYR, P. WILHELM. ‘Religion der Schilluk.’ Anthropos. 1911. HOFMAYR, P. WILHELM. Die Schilluk. Geschichte, Religion und Leben eines Niloten-Stammes. 1925. HOWELL, P. P. ‘The Shilluk Settlement.’ S.N. and R. 1941. HOWELL, P. P. and THOMSON, W. P. G. ‘The Death of a Reth of the Shilluk and the Installation of his Successor.’ S.N. and R. 1946. MUNRO, P. ‘Installation of the Ret of the Chol (King of the Shilluks).’ S.N. and R. 1918. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘Nikawng and the Shilluk Migration.’ S.N. and R. 1918. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘Nikawng’s Place in the Shilluk Religion.’ S.N. and R. 1918. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘The Shilluk’s Belief in the Evil Eye. The Evil Medicine Man.’ S.N. and R. 1919. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘The Shilluk’s Belief in the Good Medicine Men.’ S.N. and R. 1920. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘The Shilluk Peace Ceremony.’ S.N. and R. 1920. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘Shilluk Notes.’ S.N. and R. 1926. OYLER, MRS. D. S. ‘Examples of Shilluk Folk-Lore.’ S.N. and R. 1919. PUMPHREY, M. E. C. ‘Shilluk “royal” Language Conventions.’ S.N. and R. 1937. PUMPHREY, M. E. C. ‘The Shilluk Tribe.’ S.N. and R. 1941. SELIGMAN, PROFESSOR C. G. ‘The Cult of Nyakang and the Divine Kings of the Shilluk.’ Report of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories. 1911. SELIGMAN, PROFESSOR C. G. and MRS B. Z. Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan, chs. II and III. 1932. TAPPI, P. C. ‘Notes Ethnologiques sur les Chillouks.’ Bull. Soc. Khediv. de Geog. 1903. TAPPI, P. C. ‘Le Pays des Chillouks.’ Bull. Soc. Khediv. de Geog. 1904. THOMSON, W. P. G. ‘Further Notes on the Death of a Reth of the Shilluk, 1945’. (Manuscript.) WESTERMANN, PROFESSOR DIEDRICH. The Shilluk People. Their Language and Folklore. 1912. Publisher’s note: We are very grateful to Prof. E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s family to have given HAU the permission to reprint this work. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original, and indicate in the text the original page number in square brackets. ___________________ 1. Banholzer, P. and Giffen, J. K., The Anglo-Egyyptian Sudan (edited by Count Gleichen, 1905), ch. VIII, p. 199. 2. I am indebted to Mr John Donald of the Sudan Political Service for the most recent figures of human and bovine population. 3. M. E. C. Pumphrey, ‘The Shilluk Tribe’, S.N. and R. (1941); P. P. Howell, ‘The Shilluk Settlement’, ibid. (1941). 4. Diedrich Westermann, The Shilluk People. Their Language and Folklore (1912), p. xx. 5. Westermann, op. cit. p. 149. 6. Wilhelm Hofmayr, Die Schilluk (1925), pp. 66, 83, and 261-2; P. J. P. Crazzolara, ‘Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Religion und Zauberei bei den Schilluk’, Anthropos (1932), p. 185. 7. P. C. Tappi, ‘Notes Ethnologiques sur les Chillouks’, Bull. Soc. Khediv. de Géog. (1903), p. 122. 8. Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan (1932), p. 39. 9. Op. cit. p. xlvii. 10. Op. cit .pp. 150-1. 11. Op. cit .pp. 18-19. 12. Howell, op. cit. p. 57; P. P. Howell and W. P. G. Thomson, ‘The Death of a Reth of the Shilluk and the Installation of his Successor’, S.N. and R. (1946), p. 8. 13. Op. cit. p. 19. 14. Ibid. p. 12. 15. Op. cit. p. 162. 16. ‘The Shilluk Peace Ceremony’, S.N. and R. (1920), pp. 296-9. 17. Hofmayr, op. cit. p. 152. 18. Banholzer and Giffen, op. cit. p. 197. 19. Pumphrey, op. cit p. 19. 20. Prof. C. G. Seligman, ‘The Cult of Nyakang and the Divine Kings of the Shilluk’, Report of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories (1911), pp. 221 and 225. 21. Howell and Thomson, op. cit p. 8. 22. Op. cit. p. xliii. 23. Howell and Thomson, op. cit. p. 18. 24. Rev. D. S. Oyler, ‘Nikawng and the Shilluk Migration’, S. N. andR. (1918), p. 115. 25. Report of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories, p. 221; also Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan, pp. 90-2. Howell and Thomson say (op. cit p. 19) that ceremonial strangulation is traditional for all members of the royal clan. 26. P. Munro, ‘Installation of the Ret of the Chol (King of the Shilluks)’, S.N. and R. (1918). 27. W. P. G. Thomson, ‘Further Notes on the Death of a Reth of the Shilluk, 1945’ (manuscript). 28. Op. cit. p. 29. 29. Thomson, op. cit. 30. Op. cit. p. 48. 31. Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan, pp. 44-5. 32. Westermann, op. cit. p. xlvi; Hofmayr, op. cit. p. 145; Howell and Thomson, op. cit. p. 27. 33. Seligman, Report of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories, p. 229, citing information given by Father Banholzer and Dr Lambie; Westermann, op. cit. p. 138; Hofmayr, op. cit. p. 76. 34. Op. cit. pp. 59-136. 35. Op. cit. p. 11. 36. Hofmayr, op. cit. p. 64; Prof. and Mrs Seligman, Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan, pp. 90-1. Howell and Thomson (op. cit p. 11 et passim) are more reserved. 37. Op. cit pp. 59-136. 38. Leo Frobenius, Atlas Africanus, Heft 2, Blatt 7, ‘Der König ein Gott’; C. G. Seligman, Egypt and Negro Africa (the Frazer Lecture for 1933), 1934; Tor Irstam, The King of Ganda. Studies in the Institutions of Sacral Kingship in Africa (1944).

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. On the contrary, such a concept could be inscribed in the body itself as a perspective (Viveiros de Castro 1996). So, this would not be the concept taken as a representation of an extra-conceptual body, but the body taken as a perspective internal to the concept: the body as an implication of the very concept of perspective. And if, as Spinoza said, we do not know what a body can do, how much less do we know of what such a body could do. Not to speak of its soul. References Alexiades, Miguel. 1999. “Ethnobotany of the Ese Eja: Plants, health, and change in an Amazonian society.” PhD diss., City University of New York. Clastres, Pierre. (1962) 1974. “Échange et pouvoir: Philosophie de la Chefferie Indienne.” In La société contre l’Etat: Recherches d’anthropologe politique, 25–42. Paris: Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles. 1969a. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1969b. Différence et répétition. Paris: PUF. ———. 1981. “Class on Spinoza.” February 17, 1981. http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=38&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2. ———. 1990. Pourparlers. Paris: Minuit. ———. (1979) 1995. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1991. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Minuit. Detienne, Marcel. 1981. L’invention de la mythologie. Paris: Gallimard. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1976. Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande. Edited by Eva Gillies, abridged from 1937. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1999. The art of anthropology: Essays and diagrams. London: Athlone. Horton, Robin. 1993. Patterns of thought in Africa and the West: Essays on magic, religion and science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ingold, Tim. 1992. “Editorial.” Man 27 (1): 694–97. ———. 2000. The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge. Jullien, François. 1989. Procès ou création: Une introduction à la pensée Chinoise. Paris: Seuil. Jullien, François, and Thierry Marchaisse. 2000. Penser d’un dehors (la Chine): Entretiensd’Extrême Occident. Paris: Seuil. Lambek, Michael. 1998. “Body and mind in mind, body and mind in body: Some anthropological interventions in a long conversation.” In Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, edited by Andrew Strathern and Michael Lambek, 103–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1991. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Paris: Découverte. ———. 1996a. “Not the question.” Anthropology Newsletter 37 (3): 1–5. ———. 1996b. Petite réflexion sur le culte moderne des dieux faîtiches. Le Plessis/Robinson: Institut Synthelabo. ———. 1999. Politiques de la nature: Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie. Paris: Découverte. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. ———. 1971. L’homme nu. Paris: Plon. Lipuma, Edward. 1998. “Modernity and forms of personhood in Melanesia.” In Bodies and persons: Comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, edited by Andrew Strathern and Michael Lambek, 53–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mimica, Jadran. 1991. “The incest passions: An outline of the logic of Iqwaye social organization (part 1).” Oceania 62 (1): 34–58. Moore, Henrietta. 1999. “Anthropological theory at the turn of the century.” In Anthropological theory today, edited by Henrietta Moore, 1–23. London: Polity Press. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1992. The apotheosis of Captain Cook: European mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Prado Jr., Bento. 1998. “Sur le ‘Plan d’immanence.’” In Gilles Deleuze: Une vie philosophique, edited by Eric Alliez, 305–24. Le Plessis/Robinson: Institut Synthélabo. Scholte, Bob. 1984. “Reason and culture: The universal and the particular revisited.” American Anthropologist 86 (4): 960–65. Schrempp, Gregory. 1992. Magical arrows: The Maori, the Greeks, and the folklore of the universe. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Simondon, Gilbert. (1964) 1995. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: Millon. Sperber, Dan. 1974. Le symbolisme en général. Paris: Hermann. ———. 1982. Le savoir des anthropologues. Paris: Hermann. Strathern, Marilyn. 1987. “The limits of auto-anthropology.” In Anthropology at home, edited by Anthony Jackson, 16–37. London: Tavistock. ———. 1988. The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1999a. Property, substance, and effect: Anthropological essays on persons and things. London: Athlone. ———. 1999b. “No limite de uma certa linguagem: Entrevista com Marilyn Strathern.” Mana 5 (2): 157–75. Tooker, Deborah. 1992. “Identity systems of highland Burma: ‘Belief,’ Akha zan, and a critique of interiorized notions of ethno-religious identity.” Man 27 (4): 799–819. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. (1966) 1996. “Raisons d’hier et d’aujourd’hui.” In Entre mythe et politique, 229–36. Paris: Seuil. Veyne, Paul. 1983. Les grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? Paris: Seuil. viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1993. “Le marbre et le myrte: De l’inconstance de l‘âme sauvage.” In Mémoire de la tradition, edited by Aurore Becquelin and Antoinette Molinié, 365–431. Nanterre: Société d’Ethnologie. ———. 1996. “Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo Amerindio.” Mana 2 (2): 115–44. ———. 1998. “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism.” JRAI 4 (3): 469–88. ———. 1999. “Etnologia Brasileira.” In O que Ler na ciência social Brasileira (1970–1995). Volume I: antropologia, edited by S. Miceli, 109–223. Sâo Paulo: Ed. Sumaré/ANPOCS. Wagner, Roy. 1981. The invention of culture (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1986. Symbols that stand for themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whitehead, Alfred N. (1920) 1964. Concept of nature. 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.”  

Culinary subjectification This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Adam Yuet Chau. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.2.007 Culinary subjectification The translated world of menus and orders Adam Yuet CHAU, University of Cambridge The idea for this article began with a couple of innocent questions: How would one translate the word “menu” (i.e., restaurant menu) into the native languages of people without any experience of restaurants and menus? And how would you explain to them how ordering from the menu works? It quickly became clear that translating the word “menu” entails not only translating the world of restaurant-going and ordering from the menu but also our (i.e., ideal-typically Western) very conceptual and social world, which is another way to say that what seems to be a humble piece of paper listing a certain number of dishes is itself made by the world in which it is found and in turn contributes in a significant way to making that world. In this article I examine the restaurant menu as a world-making social and translocutional/transinscriptional technology (the menu as menu-logic and cosmo-menu). As a kind of text act that is situated at but one of many “iterative/inscriptional stations” along an indeterminate and continuous chain of translocutions and transinscriptions, the menu highlights the temporal dimension of all kinds of translations (translingual, intralingual, transmodal, transcultural, etc.). Keywords: translation, iterative/inscriptional stations, translocution, text acts, the menu, culinary subjectification Introduction: Translating words and worlds Perhaps we can start with a thought exercise: How would you translate the word “menu” (i.e., restaurant menu) into the native language of an (imaginary) tribal people (with no writing and no restaurants)? And how would you explain to them how ordering from the menu works? Can we merely translate the restaurant menu into the native language as “a written list of dishes from which diners choose while dining in a restaurant”? It is my contention that we cannot explain the restaurant menu to these “prerestaurant” and “premenu” tribal people without explaining our whole conceptual and social world to them: What is a restaurant? What is eating out? What is a meal? What is dinner (or lunch)? Why would you need to make a reservation or queue in line for a table? What is a table? What is “getting seated”? Why is the eating area separate from the cooking area? What is a waiter? What is a cook? Why entrust a stranger to cook for you? Why trust food that you have not raised, grown, hunted, or caught yourself? Why are you eating with strangers sitting next to and around you? What is a course (appetizer, main course, dessert)? Why can’t we eat everything altogether? What is a portion? What is ordering and taking an order? Why can’t one order everything on the menu? What is choice? Why can you only eat food from the dish placed in front of you? Why are people eating in a group nevertheless eating different food? Why drink certain kinds of drink with certain kinds of dishes? Why do people talk while eating? Why is the restaurant so dark? Why is there a lit candle on the table? What is writing? What is a list? What is a price? What is money? What is a bill (or check)? Why do you have to pay for the food? What is a tip? What is a credit card? What is a receipt? Why are some dishes more expensive than others? Why can’t we sleep in the restaurant? To this list we might also add: What is a take-away? What is a takeaway menu? What is a children’s menu? What is a vegetarian menu?, And so on. Clearly, translating the word “menu” entails not only translating the world of restaurant-going and ordering from the menu but our very conceptual and social world (i.e., ideal-typically Western or Western-style), which is another way of saying that what seems to be a humble piece of paper listing a certain number of dishes is itself made by the world in which it is found and in turn contributes in a significant way to making that world. In this article I shall examine the restaurant menu as a world-making social and translocutional/transinscriptional technology. The article is divided into several sections. I begin by explaining what a menu is and briefly tracing its history before examining, in the second section, the role of the menu in terms of social practices that it entails in the worlds of restaurant cooking and dining. In the following section I explain how the menu embodies (culinary) choice as an ideology. The menu is then examined as a translocutional/ transinscriptional technology, and ordering from the menu is considered as a process of translating along a multitude of “iterative/inscriptive stations.” In the fifth section, I look at menu planning as a process of translating from the chef’s professional culinary language to the customers’ language, and how both are constantly being transformed because of these incessant acts of translation. I then propose the term “culinary subjectification” to examine how customers resonate their culinary world with that which is embodied in the menu. This is further explicated through two common practices: the seeking of the culinary Other (mediated by the “textographic Other” which is the menu proffering exotic-sounding dishes and even written in exotic scripts) and abandoning the menu altogether and surrendering oneself to the dictates of the chef. In the penultimate section I examine the waiter’s order slip as a specimen of “text acts,” which call forth and actualize the dishes ordered and the meal composed by the customer. Using the Daoist talisman as an analogy, I argue that the waiter’s order slip can be understood as a “potency tender.” In the conclusion I explore briefly the implications of this investigation, especially in relation to the intersemiotic connection between orality and the written in processes of translation (between different culinary languages, along iterative/inscriptive stations, etc.). Ultimately this article is an investigation of how worlds get translated (and made and transformed) as words get uttered, negotiated, inscribed, transcribed, translated, transmuted, acted upon, and even transsubstantiated (e.g., when an item printed on the menu magically materializes into an actual dish). If this largely theoretical essay lacks a specific “ethnographic context,” it is because I have presumed the cultural competence and complicity of the reader in order for the arguments of this essay to work. If you can provide adequate answers to all the questions evoked above (e.g., What is a restaurant? What is eating out? What is a menu? etc.), you will have been already equipped with the necessary “ethnographic” cultural backgrounds to “picture” the different scenes in subsequent sections (e.g., you will have plenty of your own “menu stories”). There are of course an enormous variety of restaurants, menus, and practices of ordering from the menu. For the purpose of this article I evoke what might be called a “model restaurant” (indeed, even a “modal restaurant,” in the statistical sense), a “model menu,” a “model diner,” and a “model menu-ordering experience” (see Eco [1979] 1984 on the “model reader”). What is a menu? There are three main usages of the word “menu” in modern social life.1 In the English language, a menu (the equivalent of la carte in French and die Speisekarte in German) is a list of itemized dishes from which diners choose for their meals, usually in a restaurant. A second, less common, usage of “menu” is a detailed listing of the dishes the diners will get in the course of a meal, especially at banquets and other formal dining occasions. For example, high-table dinners in Oxbridge colleges always have this kind of menu printed on cards, which are displayed on the dining table for the diners to consult—importantly, these menus also list, alongside the various courses, the accompanying wines. The expression “So what’s on the menu?” refers to this usage, inquiring about what is to be served for a meal. (It seems that “bill of fare” used to be the equivalent of “menu,” “fare” referring to “food and drinks.”) A third usage of “menu” is its pervasive application as a metaphor, usually in a menu-like list of services from which customers can select, in contexts such as course offerings in an academic degree program, different services in a hair or nail salon, “bundled” offers from an internet provider or mobile phone company, or “apps” on a smartphone (but also as in “a menu of disasters”). This article will be primarily examining the first sense of the menu, that is, the restaurant menu, a list of itemized dishes from which diners choose in order to “compose” their meals. Food historians have not ascertained when the restaurant menu was invented or where, but there are written testimonies to the existence of restaurant menus in the Song Dynasty (960–1279) in China about one thousand years ago.2 Apparently the menu did not appear in the West until quite recently, say as late as the eighteenth century, when eating out and restaurants became institutionalized (e.g., MacDonogh 1987: 111; Pembroke 2013: 134–35; but see Carlin 2008).3 Prior to the appearance of the restaurant menu, people of course also ate outside of their homes (e.g., when they traveled), but they would have to be content with whatever the inn or tavern owner had prepared for that day rather than ordering from a list of possible dishes.4 When the rich (e.g., aristocrats) traveled in the past, they would stay at the estates of other rich people and dine in, and sometimes they would bring their own cooks and kitchen staff; they did not eat in public (mixing with commoners or within their sight). The rise of the menu (and restaurants) resulted largely from the rise of the bourgeoisie in European history, when dining out among strangers in anonymous spaces became acceptable, and more and more prestige was attached to the pursuit of fine food, culinary diversity, mixed sociality, and the establishment of one’s taste or culinary distinction in a public manner (see Bourdieu [1979] 1984). What does the menu do? The menu as a social technology Just as the map is not the territory, the recipe is not the dish, and the blueprint is not the building, the menu is certainly not the meal. A menu facilitates the composition and production of meals. The menu is an inscribed space from which spring a great many possible meals through permutation. Even a modest menu with just a few items can potentially allow a very great number of possible meals, thanks to the structure of modular (see Ledderose 2001) and phased serving of dishes5. The menu interpellates the diners, spurs them into action, activates their culinary habitus and subjectivity, fires up their fantasy and appetite, and initiates a chain of actions—translocutional and transinscriptional, among others—that will eventually result in the ordered dishes appearing in front of the diners (more on this below). But the menu does not only interpellate forward. Even before the diners enter the restaurant, sit down and read it, the menu has already interpellated “backward” all the actions necessary to produce and present all the dishes that it promises. These actions include the hiring and training of the chefs and other personnel (including kitchen assistants, the wait staff, etc.), the procurement of all the necessary ingredients, the fitting of the cooking equipment (stoves, ovens, grills, cooking utensils, etc.), the fitting of the dining room (including tables and chairs, tableware, stemware, cutlery, tablecloths, decorations, etc.), and of course the design and printing of the menu itself. All restaurateurs know that the success and failure of one’s restaurant largely rests on the menu, and it is usually the chefs who have a decisive voice in its final range and shape. The menu also orchestrates the meal. When people dine in a group, they invariably order their dishes in implicit coordination with one another so that everyone orders the same combination and sequence of courses and eats in a more or less coordinated manner in order to avoid the awkward situation of some eating while others are not. Indeed, knowing how to order in such a situation is very much part of the “civilizing process” (Elias [1939] 1994). Proper table manners begin not with the arrival of the first dish but with the act of ordering the meal. The menu, choice, and “liberality” Being able to choose one’s own dishes and compose one’s own meal is one of the most important features and attractions of the menu. And this “choice,” though seemingly banal, is laden with ideological significance. It seems that this spirit of free choice based on a large number of possible dishes reached its zenith already in the nineteenth century in the United States of America, true to its image of the “land of the plentiful” (see Freedman 2011; Haley 2012). However, such boastful display of “liberality” sometimes drew amused comments and sharp criticisms. Below are some examples (italics added by this author for emphasis). The first comes from a British visitor to the United States in the late nineteenth century: I shall never forget my feelings when a waiter bluntly placed before me for the first time a list of the food provided for breakfast—I cannot call it a menu—at one of the great hotels in New York, and asked what I would take. Being of an experimental turn of mind, and doubting, moreover, whether all these various dishes could exist any where but in the “catalogue,” I used to amuse myself by testing the capabilities of the kitchen, but it never failed. (Cited in Hawkins and Fanning 1893: 206) US General Rush Christopher Hawkins, in the same period, reports on ordering from the menu as follows: To arrive at the third objective point involved a rest for one night at the most populous and popular resort in our whole country. For that purpose we selected the most “swell” and “quiet” hotel of the place, where the late dinner and breakfast proved to be quite the worst, as to quality, of the whole season. The dinner menu must have contained about one hundred and ten items, and the one for breakfast at least seventy-five. We were tempted to taste a certain “fancy dish,” entree in other words, which purported to have been made of capon and truffles. It proved to be a sort of a cold pressed hash of veal and beef tongue, with not a particle of capon or even chicken in it, while the truffles were a composition of a shining black substance of the texture of isinglass. . . . The general aim seems to be to hoodwink patrons with a show of great liberality—hence the dinner bill of fare with from eighty to one hundred and twenty-five items upon it, and the breakfast menu with from forty to seventy-five. Such a spread of printer’s ink looks large, panders to national vanity and convinces the native that he is not being swindled. . . . It is quite unnecessary to write that not one in ten of those products of the kitchen named in the bill of fare are properly prepared or decently served. The vegetables are usually cold and soggy, often slopped with a nasty- looking and worse-tasting sauce; the joints are usually tough and cold; the flesh made dishes [entries], with high sounding French names, neither taste nor smell like anything we have ever seen before; the sweets are often the better part of the dinner; but the fruits, in the majority of instances, are the cheapest and poorest that can be found. . . . When asked why the hotels in America do not adopt the Continental table d’hote dinner, the answer always is: “Americans won’t have it that way; they want more liberality.” . . . The American landlord applies the enforced theory of Colonel Sellers to the everyday actualities of hotel keeping. He has convinced himself that his guests do not need really palatable food; they only want the illusion, i.e., to see a certain liberal display of items with high-sounding names on the bill of fare, and dishes filled with some sort of a beyond-understanding substance, to correspond with a certain name, which can be supplied when ordered. No matter whether or not it is actual food fit to eat, it represents an item printed, and fulfils one part of the contract existing between the landlord and the guest. (Hawkins and Fanning 1893: 198, 200, 201) It seems reasonable that when the “liberality” of ostentatious menu display is not matched by cooking of reasonable quality, the restaurants should draw ridicule. And it should not surprise us that the menu increasingly resembled a “catalogue” (as derided in the above quotes) as the shopping catalogue itself was just becoming fashionable amidst the booming shopping paradise in late-nineteenth-century urban Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, the display of plenitude and the existence of real choice underlie the modern institution of the restaurant menu. As Hawkins pointed out in the above passage, the menu is like a contract between the restaurant and the diner. Once the diner walks into the restaurant, the restaurant has to, in theory at least, abide by what the menu promises. And once the diner has placed the order, the kitchen is supposed to deliver the dishes ordered. Of course, sometimes the kitchen runs out of certain ingredients and therefore the chefs can’t produce certain dishes, but this kind of situation should not happen too often or to too many dishes or else the menu would become a travesty. I will discuss the “high- sounding French names” of dishes below. One interesting episode in the 2010 film Never Let Me Go (based on a novel of the same title by Kazuo Ishiguro) is very revealing of not only the necessity of learning how to order from a menu but more importantly the connection between the ability to freely choose one’s dishes and one’s ontological status and fate. The three protagonists, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, have grown up in a boarding school called Hailsham. All Hailsham students are clones whose destiny is to donate their organs until they eventually “complete,” that is, die, despite rumors of being able to apply to opt out of the compulsory organ donor scheme. School life is very regimented and food is always served collectively, with everyone receiving the same meals. When Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy become teenagers they are transferred to a farm, still living a collective and quite regimented life. One day the threesome are brought to a restaurant. When they are presented with the menu, not knowing how to order, they all panic. To get out of the awkward and embarrassing situation, they all follow their more senior and experienced housemate and quickly order the same dish. Same dish, same destiny. From menu to order to dishes to check: The menu as a translocutional/transinscriptional technology The notions of translation and cultural translation interest me the most in their ability to evoke a family of senses relating to words such as transfer, traversal, transit, transfusion, transaction, transliteration, transmutation, transport, transpose, transcript, trajectory, trespassing, and so on. All these words of course suggest a gap between two points (mostly on a spatial plane), the bridging of this gap somehow, a sense of directionality in this bridging via the movement of objects (be they physical objects or concepts, etc.), and a sense of transformation in the process of this bridging. In studies of translations between languages or cultural translations between “cultures,” the spatial (real or metaphorical) gap and its bridging are usually emphasized. But it seems that the temporal dimension of linguistic and cultural translation has not received adequate attention. By temporal dimension I mean the mechanisms and processes of sustained articulation traversing the gap(s) between two or more “iterative/inscriptional stations” (“stations” since there is never any “terminal” or “final destination” for these continuous traversals), which are in turn defined as relatively stable (or momentarily “frozen” or “congealed”) synchronic configurations of a collection of thus-traversed objects (physical or conceptual). If such a temporal focus of translation were something new, I believe it would have very interesting implications for our understanding of all kinds of translations (translingual, intralingual, transmodal, transcultural, etc.). I will use the rest of this article to illustrate this approach with sociocognitive practices surrounding the restaurant menu. Let us first trace the trajectory of the multiple forms of iteration and inscription that the dishes on the menu traverse: ideas of dishes in the chef’s head (including consultation of other restaurants’ menus and deciding which would be the chef’s so-called “signature dishes” [note the inscriptional metaphor]) → draft menu (called “menu planning”)6 → finalized menu → designing the menu (i.e., how it will look on the dining table [paper? with lamination? cardboard? with or without pictures? which typeface? etc.]) → printed menu (on the dining tables as well as outside the main entrance or stuck against the glass door) → the construction of the daily “today’s specials” or “plats du jour” as an addition to the regular menu (to evoke the availability of freshly acquired ingredients or to suggest that there will always be something new at this restaurant) → diners’ reading of the menu → diners’ asking for the waiter’s recommendations or explanations of various dishes → the waiter’s recommending some dishes and explaining some others (e.g., difficult dishes such as “canard étouffé” or “Buddha jumps over the wall”) → diners’ selections of dishes (verbalized) → the waiter’s jotting down of the orders (usually in some kind of shorthand) → the waiter’s relaying of the order to the kitchen (e.g., by pinning the order onto a board in front of the chef) → the production of the actual dishes by the chef and his/her assistants (again often involving the verbalization of the names of the dishes) → the delivery of the dishes to the table (often accompanied by the waiter’s shouting out the dishes’ names to identify the right diners) → the diners consuming the dishes (the sequence from delivery of the dish to eating it repeated according to the number of dishes ordered) → the waiter’s bringing the check (with the names of the dishes inscribed, now as a computer printout rather than handwritten like the order) → the diners’ paying for the meal (the whole process repeated dozens of times depending on the total number of groups of diners) → foodie bloggers or food critics’ writing-up of their dining experience with the dishes and the restaurant, and so on.7 A great many instances of iteration and inscription take place during the course of such a menu-facilitated “culinary enactment,” not to mention the many social agents and “agents of iteration/inscription” involved. We can also see the multiple and intimate relationships between orality and writing. These verbal and inscriptional relays are acts of translation (intralinguistic, interlinguistic, and intersemiotic), not across different languages but across/between different “iterative/inscriptional stations” with a strong overarching forward temporal drive. Spatial gaps are traversed as well (from dinner table to kitchen, from kitchen to dinner table, etc.), but it is the temporal forward motion that best characterizes the overall “menu-logic.” In the next few sections I will examine a little more closely three of the key translocutional/transinscriptional processes mentioned above and how they exemplify important theoretical concepts: (1) menu planning; (2) ordering from the menu; and (3) the writing of the waiter’s order slip. Menu planning As can be seen in the above-mentioned schematic flow chart, constructing the menu for a particular restaurant is a complex process. The owner might have a vision for his restaurant, and this vision will reflect on what kind of head chef he is looking for (if he is not in fact himself the head chef). But ultimately it is usually the head chef who populates the empty template of the menu with names of dishes that he thinks he and his team in the kitchen can produce. The head chef brings to this menu-planning task an enormous background knowledge, training (from cooking schools, being a chef in previous restaurants), and a repertoire of management and cooking skills. He needs to reconcile the anticipated expectations of the customers with the availability of resources (personnel, ingredients, utensils, etc.), the calculation of cost-effectiveness and profitability (the restaurant has to make money), his own repertoire of dishes, and the identity he wishes to project to the world both for himself as the head chef and for the restaurant. But most importantly, the chef needs to translate the language of his profession (based on, among other things, recipes and professional understandings of culinary practices) into a menu language that the customers can understand and work with. When this process involves rephrasing, simplifying, and glossing in the same language, it is Jakobson’s intralingual translation. When it involves explicating in a different language (e.g., when an English gloss appears underneath a dish in French or transliterated Chinese or Thai), it is Jakobson’s interlingual translation (or translation proper). In his article for this special issue, William Hanks proposes to look at Spanish- colonial translation efforts through five principles or ideals (based on his study on the translation from Spanish into Maya during the colonial period and producing a new language, Maya*, in the process): interpretance, economy, transparency, indexical grounding, and beauty. I suggest that we can look at the chef’s construction of the menu through a similar set of five principles: Interpretance: any dish in principle can be expressed by a name that is understandable by the customer. Economy: the name of the dish should be concise rather than a mouthful; this facilitates not only the learning of the dishes by the customers but the handling of the orders by the waiters as well. Transparency: any menu neologism used to convey a culinary concept should have “morphosyntactic elements [that are] clearly distinguishable and relatable to discrete aspects of the target meaning” (Hanks, p. 31, this issue). Indexical grounding: “newly minted neologisms [are to be] bound to their canonical referents . . . so that their meaning [is] anchored in the cotextual elements” (Hanks, p. 31, this issue); this is particularly important for so-called “ethnic-fusion” menus, where there are a proliferation of fanciful and playful made-up dish names (the equivalent of neologisms). Beauty: dish names on the menu should achieve some kind of formal coherence and consistency (e.g., all dish names should be of a similar length) or even be poetic (many traditional Chinese dishes have poetic and evocative names). However, to the extent that the chef’s professional culinary language is a prestige language, it becomes inevitable that many features of this language will be introduced into the menu to assert superiority, authority, the mark of haute cuisine, and exoticism. The effect of such “difficult” menu language upon prospective customers is often anticipated and results from careful calculation; it should be challenging and thrilling but not overly challenging lest the customers lose face when they find themselves not being able to handle it at all or it necessitates an inordinate amount of intervention and explanation from the waiter, thus interrupting the smooth flow along the “iterative/inscriptional stations.” Culinary subjectification, menu literacy, and menu maneuvers as intersemiotic negotiations While the head chef and his team of cooks are bringing their professional culinary language to bear upon the menu, each one of the diners is also bringing his or her culinary knowledge and experience into the restaurant. The totality of one’s culinary exposure, which is of course constantly shifting (often perceived as “improving” or “expanding”), functions as a powerful force of what might be called “culinary subjectification.”8 In fact, we can paraphrase Mikhail Bakhtin and understand culinary subjectification as a process of individuals populating the culinary universe with their own intentions. Below I have included the relevant Bakhtin quote with the language-related words struck out (with a strike-through) and the cuisine-related words added (in square brackets): As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion [culinary construct], language [cuisine], for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language [dish in cuisine] is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker [diner] populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word [dish], adapting it to his own semantic [culinary] and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word [dish] does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language [culinary world] (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary [cookbook] that the speaker gets his words [dishes]!) but rather it exists in other people’s mouths [in other people’s kitchens, on other people’s tables], in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word [dish], and make it one’s own. (Bakhtin 1981: 293–94) Going to restaurants is for many one of the most crucial sites where one’s culinary subjectivity is formed (in addition to one’s family cooking traditions, watching cooking shows on TV, reading cook books and restaurant reviews, etc.). One acquires one’s own repertoire of culinary expertise, skills in “composing” an excellent meal in a carefully chosen restaurant, and, better still, a more-than-casual acquaintance with the chef (so that he comes out of the kitchen and sits down at one’s table for a chat). At the base of one’s culinary subjectivity is menu literacy (see Rice 20119), which is much more than just the ability to understand the individual words on the menu. One should not underestimate the cognitive skills and the learning process involved in ordering dishes from a restaurant menu. First of all, one needs to be quite literate (and know culinary French in the case of more “pretentious” restaurants) in order to feel at ease ordering food in a restaurant. In his entertaining memoir-cum-restaurant-history Growing in restaurants, the publisher James Pembroke relates how exhilarated and empowered he felt when he realized that he knew much better than his posher classmates how to order from the menu—he “grew up in restaurants” thanks to the fact that his mother hated cooking and his parents managed to claim all their family expenses, restaurant meals and the children’s school fees included, as business expenses (with perhaps a certain degree of exaggeration): Until my fifteenth birthday, when my parents took three friends and me out for dinner, I had no idea that my precocious menu knowledge was unusual for someone of my age. My three mates were from posher backgrounds than my own, but their parents had not managed to have their prep school fees tax deductible, so their menu knowledge was kindergarten standard. They had only ever eaten out in hotels on special occasions or at a Wimpy for a treat. All seventies menus were still in French due to a subservience to the Master Race of the Kitchen and the belief that the language of Shakespeare lacked the sophistication of the French, who gave us words like serviette, dessert and toilet. So, I translated virtually every line for them: crêpes Florentine, boeuf bourguignon, etc. It was the first time I realised I had been spoilt. And, God, did I rejoice in it. (Pembroke 2013: 8, italics added for emphasis) Among anthropologists, it was of course Jack Goody (1977, 1986, 1987) who first examined the broader sociocognitive impact of writing and literacy in a systematic manner. In his study on the corpus of writing by Ansumana Sonie, a man of the Vai people in West Africa, Goody suggests the interesting concept of “grapho-linguistic ability” in characterizing this man’s literacy and ability to produce certain kinds of writing (e.g., membership lists, membership due payment lists, organizational regulations, etc.). He notes that Sonie had been a cook before becoming the chairman of his Muslim brotherhood organization, and it was his role as a cook that gave him the opportunity to acquire basic literacy such as making a grocery list. Grapho-linguistic ability (or call it menu literacy) is certainly required of all diners ordering food from the menu (if they do not want to embarrass themselves by pointing to a neighboring table and saying, “I will have what she is having”). Indeed, the menu congeals a highly specialized vocabulary and has many unusual formal qualities, all of which takes some effort to get familiarized with and to master.10 Being menu-literate or restaurant savvy also means that one has to master the structure of the menu in relation to the structure of the meal (see Douglas [1972] 1999). Typically, children or people unfamiliar with dining out are (cognitively) overwhelmed by the amount of choices in each section of the menu. This is one of the reasons why some restaurants have a “children’s menu,” often accompanied by pictures of the actual dishes, as much to provide smaller portions as to delimit the number of choices and degree of complexity/sophistication for these culinary “savages.”11 One may also spend too much time pondering the menu, order either too little or too much, or be overly subversive with one’s orders (e.g., ordering chicken salad but sans chicken). In other words, ordering from the menu calls for not only cognitive skills but social skills as well (or let’s call them “sociocognitive skills”). The overall ensemble of sociocognitive practices around the menu can be called “menu maneuvers,” which includes menu planning, menu reading, and ordering from the menu involving interactions with the waiter—these potentially complex interactions are the major site at which the culinary worlds (and languages) of the chefs and the customers collide with, construct, and transform, one another. These practices are in fact complex intersemiotic negotiations and translations, resulting in the constant transformation of the culinary universes of both the chefs and the customers. One may go as far as to say that the menu and all its associated sociocognitive practices (i.e., the “menu maneuvers”) interpellate and produce the chefs, the waiters, as well as the diners. And we haven’t even discussed the diners’ (and of course also the cooks’ and the waiters’) “memories of past dishes” (a nod to Proust) (also complexly inscribed and constantly undergoing processes of translation). In search of the culinary Other and doing without the menu The formal standardization of the menu as a genre of text and the menu maneuvers as an ensemble of sociocognitive practices also encourage more adventurous diners to venture out of their comfort zone (though still armed with the reassurance of the familiar formal qualities of the menu, as a sort of Latourian “immutable mobile” [Latour 1986]) to seek the thrills of the exotic culinary Other. When people venture into culinarily unfamiliar territories, such as so-called “ethnic” restaurants (I heuristically include French and Italian restaurants in this category), they frequently encounter challenges of a “grapho-linguistic” nature. In fact, one may even say that many bourgeois diners deliberately seek out these grapho-linguistic challenges for the thrill of grapho-culinary adventure. In these situations, intralinguistic and translinguistic translations occur to an intense degree, and the waiter’s status is elevated to that of a Cuna shaman! But here it is not a difficult birth that the shaman is trying to ease or cure (see Lévi-Strauss [1958] 1963) but potentially interrupted iterative/transcriptional production. If the waiter can’t satisfactorily “channel” “canard étouffé” or “General Tso’s Chicken,” we might have a problem, that is, an interrupted coproduction of the meal. This is why I believe the menu is also “iconographic” (and is therefore a “chimera-object”) in the sense Carlo Severi proposes in the context of highlighting the importance of nonwritten but graphic modes of representation in their capacity to ground memories and enact narratives (Severi [2007] forthcoming). Occasionally, however, the grapho-linguistic challenge proves too much to bear for the culinary adventurer and voyeur. Calvin Trillin, an American writer and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, relates his discomfort (to put it mildly) when confronted with Chinese menus scribbled on restaurant walls intended only for those who can read Chinese: “The walls were covered with signs in Chinese writing—signs whose Chinatown equivalents drive me mad, since they feed my suspicion that Chinese customers are getting succulent dishes I don’t even know about” (2004: 111–12, cited in Rice 2011: 123). But perhaps it is precisely this grapholinguistic and culinary handicap (and hence challenge) that is drawing Trillin and other culinary thrill-seekers back again and again to these maddening Chinese, and other ethnic, restaurants.12 Some other culinary adventures take the form of completely abandoning oneself to culinary chance encounters and doing without the menu (thus sociocognitively returning oneself to a state of [culinary] infancy). The ethnomusicologist Steve Jones, who plays the violin in an early-music orchestral ensemble, relates (via a private email communication) the competitive bravado resulting from these culinary adventures: In the world of orchestral tours we have a kind of dream, an ideal, a spiel. As we split into various groups to look for a good restaurant, on our return we try to outdo the others with our report. It begins “Lovely little family-run place, very cheap, home-made wine . . . “ and in its extreme form will involve “no sign outside at all, looks like a hovel,” and “no menu, the cook just gave us what they were having,” “old lady treading the grapes as we ate,” “they wouldn’t take any money,” “they invited us to their daughter’s wedding tomorrow, there are gonna be three family bands of launeddas players,” etc., etc. As if to reassure me that these “(no-)menu stories” are not fantasies, Steve finished off his message to me with his own personal experience: “I did find a great restaurant in Rome once with no sign outside. In the hills near Verona I had an amazing lunch where the cook did indeed just tell us what he would be bringing us.” Similarly, diners in certain nouvelle-cuisine restaurants would also not have any menus, surrendering instead to the whims and expertise of the chef: These [dining] experiences induce a state of surrender. We cannot validate the existence of anything but the stream of improbable perceptions. Judgment is inoperative, as it has nothing to rely on. In such trance-like states, we are held, led, entrusting our experience to the chef’s expertise. That is why, I believe, some avant-garde restaurants (such as El Bulli) do not have any menus for us to choose from. That is also why we are sometimes instructed, like children being taught for the first time, how to eat our food. We succumb to the experience of being a newborn again, able to see only blurred spots and shades. We never know what this food is or where it came from. We just sit there, helpless and trustful as babes in arms, waiting for the impressions to flow through our senses. (Dudek 2008: 54) Living in a world with a seemingly excessive degree of culinary “free choice” and “menu liberality,” not exercising choice, and thus temporarily excusing oneself from the interpellation of the menu and its related sociocognitive practices, becomes strangely liberating.13 The waiter’s order slip as “text act” and “potency tender” One of the most curious and significant steps along the many menu-related iterative/transcriptive stations is how the waiter’s order slip, when brought from the diners’ table to the kitchen, will eventually yield the actual dishes. Clearly it is a case of Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation, or what Severi (this issue) calls “transmutation proper,” where translation takes place between and across entirely different existential modes. I have mentioned that the menu can be understood as a contract between the chef/restaurant and the diner; the restaurant has to honor the spread of choices promised in the menu. On the part of the diners, they also have to honor the choices they have made after they have composed their meals; they cannot change their mind once the order has been placed. What’s more, they must pay for the choices they have made!14 Inspired by speech-act theories (see Austin 1962), I propose to understand the menu as a “text act” (see Chau 2006: 92–98; 2008). A text act is an instance of writing that exerts its power more through its form (e.g., size, materiality, legibility, etc.) and performative context (e.g., placement, the source of enunciation, felicitous conditions, etc.) than through its referential meaning. Classic examples of text acts include Daoist talismans (with magical writing that is intended for the deities rather than humans), Maoist revolutionary slogan murals (usually immense in size), Qur’anic inscriptions around mosques (rarely for one to read), and so on. The “audience” (not so much readers) of these text acts are supposed to feel their power and act accordingly (e.g. to submit in awe, to respond with fervor, etc.). The fancier the restaurant, the more text-act qualities the menu takes on. Far from being simply a list of dishes, an haute-cuisine restaurant menu (together with the décor, the uniformed wait staff, and the often unusually long wine list, etc.) performs as an instrument of intimidation and culinary subjugation. The waiter’s order slip, inscribed with the dishes chosen by the diner, is a particular kind of text act, which is very similar in nature to the Daoist talisman in Chinese religious culture. Simply put, Daoist talismans (usually pieces of paper inscribed with magical signs by a Daoist priest) are symbolic weapons employed in magical actions commanding or combating invisible forces such as deities or demons.15 As opposed to the most common form of symbolic weapon found in almost all cultures, that is, incantations and curses, talismans are unique in their combination of material presence (e.g., paper, ink), visual representational form (the talismanic form), and the message contained in the talisman (e.g., “Demons be quelled!”).16 Talismans are often characterized as being tallies, whereby two halves of something are brought together to affirm authority. The etymology of the character fu (符) for talisman is indeed tallies. Yet the most common forms of talismans do not work as tallies at all; rather, they are more like a “potency tender” (the symbolic equivalent of legal tender, e.g., a money note) to effect some kind of divine interference in human affairs. To the extent that the waiter’s order slip can magically command the cooks to yield the dishes ordered by the customers, it, too, is a potency tender. Conclusions: Translocutional/transinscriptional processes Traditionally, anthropology tended to emphasize the spoken and orality, and treated texts mostly as dormant documents (or at best as “text-artifacts” that are mostly transcriptions and reproductions/recreations of once oral utterances; see Silverstein and Urban 1996), because most anthropologists studied nonliterate societies. In these societies, where the introduction of writing was recent and literacy not widespread, religious and political authorities were still most often anchored and expressed through oratory and the mastery of forms of utterance. In anthropology, the emphasis on orality is closely linked to the disciplinary desire to directly represent the natives’ voices. Verbal utterances denote immediacy, and verbatim transcriptions of verbal utterances denote faithfulness to the original. The highly sophisticated subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology deals with the oral almost exclusively (as evidenced, for example, by articles in linguistic anthropology journals). Because of its capacity to call forth multiple waves of iteration and inscription along “iterative/inscriptional stations,” the menu allows us to think more critically and creatively about the relationship between orality and the written, and how the written (i.e., inscriptions) can be incorporated more prominently into studies on linguistic and cultural translation (see, e.g., Hanks 2010 and this issue). More than merely a piece of paper (or cardboard), the menu is at once a parole (though the broader menu universe carries langue qualities), a cultural logic (or menu-logic?), a sociocognitive tool, a generative and structuring principle, a narrative, an organizational device (conceptual, taxonomic, as well as social), a civilizing machine, a conduit of (culinary) governmentality,17 an ideological vehicle (e.g., about choice, freedom, taste, culturedness, civility, cosmopolitanism, social class, etc.), an ideological state apparatus in the Althusserian sense, a textographic fetish or text act (Chau 2006, 2008), and so on. Each menu is a cosmo-menu (which is why in order to explain the menu to our imaginary premenu, prerestaurant tribal natives, we have to explain our whole world). But above all, and more specific to the theme of this HAU special issue on “translating worlds,” the menu is one of many “iterative/inscriptional stations” in the ensemble of acts of translation, or, more precisely, translocution and transinscription. Acknowledgments I thank Carlo Severi and William Hanks for their kind invitation to participate in the HAU-Fyssen workshop on “Translating Worlds,” which took place at the Fyssen Foundation in Paris on March 20–21, 2014. I am particular grateful to the four HAU reviewers of the first submitted version of this article for their critical and useful comments and suggestions (two of these reviewers made additional, stimulating comments and suggestions on the revised version). Thanks also to Carlo Severi, Geoffrey Lloyd, Giovanni da Col, Steve Jones, Roel Sterckx, Philippe Descola, Hideko Mitsui, the other HAU-Fyssen workshop participants, and many others who have recommended useful sources, shared “menu stories,” commented on earlier drafts, and discussed ideas with me. Justin Dyer at HAU improved this article’s readability with his expert copyediting. The title of the article had input from Giovanni da Col and Joel Robbins. References Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1979) 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carlin, Martha. 2008. “’What say you to a piece of beef and mustard?’: The evolution of public dining in medieval and Tudor London.” Huntington Library Quarterly 71 (1): 199–217. Chau, Adam Yuet. 2006. Miraculous response: Doing popular religion in contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. “An awful mark: Symbolic violence and urban renewal in reform-era China,” Visual Studies 23 (3): 195–210. ———. 2013. “Religious subjectification: The practice of cherishing written characters and being a Ciji (Tzu Chi) person.” In Chinese popular religion: Linking fieldwork and theory, edited by Chang Hsun, 75–113. Taipei: Academia Sinica. Coveney, John, Andrea Begley, and Daniella Gallegos. 2012. “’Savoir fare’: Are cooking skills a new morality?” Australian Journal of Adult Learning 52 (3): 617–42. Douglas, Mary. (1972) 1999. “Deciphering a meal.” In Implicit meanings: Selected essays in anthropology, 231–51. London: Routledge. Dudek, Nir. 2008. “Reading a plate.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 8 (2): 51–54. Eco, Umberto. (1979) 1984. The role of the reader: Explorations in the semiotics of texts. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Elias, Norbert. (1939) 1994. The civilizing process. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell. Freedman, Paul. 2011. “American restaurants and cuisine in the mid-nineteenth century.” The New England Quarterly 84 (1): 5–59. Freeman, Michael. 1977. “Sung.” In Food in Chinese culture: Anthropological and historical perspectives, edited by Kwang-chih Chang, 141–76. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Goody, Jack. 1977. The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1986. The logic of writing and the organization of society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1987. The interface between the written and the oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haley, Andrew P. 2012. “The nation before taste: The challenges of American culinary history.” The Public Historian 34 (2): 53–78. Hanks, William F. 2010. Translating words: Maya in the age of the cross. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hawkins, Rush C., and William J. Fanning. 1893. “The American hotel of today.” The North American Review 157. https://archive.org/stream/northamreview157miscrich/ northamreview157miscrich_djvu.txt. Kaufman, Cathy K. 2002. “Structuring the meal: The revolution of service à la Russe.” In The meal: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, edited by Harlan Walker, 123–33. Totnes, UK: Prospect Books. Lambek, Michael. 1993. Knowledge and practice in Mayotte: Local discourses of Islam, sorcery, and spirit possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Latour, Bruno. 1986. “Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands.” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6: 1–40. Ledderose, Lothar. 2001. Ten thousand things: Module and mass production in Chinese art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1958) 1963. “The effectiveness of symbols.” In Structural anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 181–201. New York: Basic Books. MacDonogh, Giles. 1987. A palate in revolution: Grimod de la Reynière and the Almanach des Gourmands. London: Robin Clark. McCawley, James D. 1984. The eater’s Guide to Chinese Characters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pembroke, James. 2013. Growing up in restaurants: The story of eating out in Britain from 55 Bc to nowadays. London: Quartet. Rice, Jeff. 2011. “Menu literacy.” Special issue, “Food theory,” PRE/TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 22 (1–4): 119–31. Severi. Carlo. (2007) Forthcoming. The chimera principle: An anthropology of memory and imagination. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: HAU Books. Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, eds. 1996. Natural histories of discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trillin, Calvin. 2004. Feeding a yen: Savoring local specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco. New York: Random House. Subjectivation culinaire: Le monde traduit des menus et des commandes Résumé : L’idée de cet article est issue d’une série de questions innocentes : Comment peut-on traduire le mot «menu» (c’est à dire, le menu d’un restaurant) dans la langue maternelle d’individus sans aucune expérience de ce qu’est un restaurant ou un menu? Et comment faudrait-il s’y prendre pour leur expliquer comment commander à partir du menu ? Il est rapidement devenu clair que la traduction du mot «menu» implique non seulement la traduction d’un certain monde contenant l’habitude d’aller au restaurant et de commander à la carte, mais aussi celle de notre monde social et conceptuel lui-même (c’est à dire, idéal-typiquement occidental) ; ce qui revient à dire que cette simple liste de plats présentée sur une feuille est elle-même conçue par le monde dans lequel on la trouve et contribue significativement en retour à la fabrication de ce monde. Dans cet article, j’examine le menu du restaurant comme une technologie trans-locutionnelle et trans-inscriptionnelle de fabrication du monde social (le menu comme une logique et cosmo-menu). En tant qu’acte de texte situé à l’une des nombreuses «stations itératives /inscriptionnelles” le long d’une chaîne de trans-locutions et de trans-inscriptions indéterminée et continue, le menu met en évidence la dimension temporelle de toutes sortes de traductions (translinguale, intralinguale, transmodale, transculturelle, etc). Adam Yuet CHAU (Ph.D. in Anthropology, 2001, Stanford University) teaches in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, and is a Fellow at St. John’s College. He is the author of Miraculous response: Doing popular religion in contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2006) and editor of Religion in contemporary China: Revitalization and innovation (Routledge, 2011). He is currently working on book projects investigating the idiom of hosting (zuozhu) and forms of powerful writing (“text acts”) in Chinese political and religious culture. Adam Yuet ChauDepartment of East Asian StudiesFaculty of Asian andMiddle Eastern StudiesSidgwick AvenueCambridge, CB3 9DAUKayc25@cam.ac.uk ___________________ 1. One of the reviewers objected to my “insouciant use of the word ‘modern’” owing to its “tacit deictic” meanings, and suggested that I “be more precise about the social range that [I am] attributing to this word.” Here I can only resort to the same “escape clause” mentioned in the previous section that invokes the images of the “model restaurant,” the “model menu,” etc., and so on, and plea for the complicity of the reader of this essay to bring their cultural/ideological upbringing and “prejudices” to bear. In my defense, I do not believe that the word “modern” is necessarily any more guilty of carrying with it “tacit deictic” meanings than are many other words used in this essay. 2. The following passage describes ordering from menus in the Song Dynasty (Northern Song with Kaifeng as capital and Southern Song with Hangzhou as capital): Wine and tea houses in both Kaifeng and Hangchow [Hangzhou] lured customers with such luxuries as paintings by famous artists, flowers, miniature trees, cups and utensils of silver or of porcelain, and of course, with fine food. . . . A Southern Sung source gives a “casual list” of two hundred and thirty-four famous dishes that such places served, a list from the Northern Sung has fifty-one. Dinners probably started with a soup or broth like “hundred-flavors” soup, which heads both lists. They could then choose from dishes made from almost any variety of flesh, fowl, or seafood—milk-steamed lamb, onion-strewn hare, fried clams or crabs. Several kinds of “variety meats,” lungs, heart, kidneys, or caul, were cooked in various manners. . . . Ordering was done in approximately the same way in Kaifeng and in Hangchow, where all restaurants had menus. “The men of Kaifeng were extravagant and indulgent. They would shout their orders by the hundreds: some wanted items booked and some chilled, some heated and some prepared, some iced or delicate or fat; each person ordered differently. The waiter then went to get the orders, which he repeated and carried in his head, so that when he got into the kitchen he repeated them. These men were called ‘gong heads’ or ‘callers.’ In an instant, the waiter would be back carrying three dishes forked in his left hand, while on his right arm from hand to shoulder he carried about twenty bowls doubled up, and he distributed them precisely as everyone had ordered without an omission or mistake. If there were, the customers would tell the ‘head man’ who would scold and abuse the waiter and sometimes dock his salary, so severe was the punishment. (Freeman 1977: 160–61; containing a passage in quotation marks translated from Chinese) 3. Since the main content of this article is not on the history of the menu, I beg readers’ forgiveness for my cursory treatment regarding this aspect. 4. This is the second sense of the menu as mentioned above, which has retained its use in restaurants as “dishes of the day” (“le menu” in French, as opposed to “à la carte”). 5. See Kaufman (2002) for a historical account of how the modern form of sequenced serving of courses was introduced (called service à la russe). 6. There are in fact specialized companies that help restaurants and restaurant chains with menu design (in senses broader than the one relating only to appearance). See, for example, the company called Menuology (http://www.menuology.com/). 7. I thank one of the Paris Fyssen workshop participants for alluding to “stations of the cross” in connection to “iterative/inscriptional stations.” For both kinds of stations, the temporal dimension is crucial. 8. See Chau (2013) for an elaboration on the concept of “religious subjectification.” 9. I am grateful to Jeff Rice for kindly sending me a copy of his essay on menu literacy. 10. One of the funniest scenes in cinema history concerns a lowly Japanese company employee who puts his stuffy bosses to shame by demonstrating his menu literacy at a fancy French restaurant where the menu is entirely in French. The film is Tampopo, a slapstick food-related comedy directed by Juzo Itami (released in 1985). The restaurant scene can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRVLqUpHDJE (in Japanese with English subtitles). 11. In fact, for the longest time, restaurants were the exclusive domain of adults. So-called “family-friendly” restaurants were a quite recent twentieth-century invention. 12. To help the linguistically perplexed and to heighten their culinary and grapho-linguistic joy, the University of Chicago linguist James D. McCawley even wrote The eater’s guide to Chinese characters (1984), replete with specimen menus from various kinds of restaurants. I thank one of the reviewers for bringing this book to my attention. 13. One of the reviewers also relates his/her experience of some restaurants deliberately not working with the printed menu: “In many trendy restaurants I’ve been to of late, waiters make a big deal about orally performing the menu, both during the moment of ordering (especially reciting elaborate daily specials that are not written on the menu) and again when the dish is brought out, reviewing all the exotic ingredients brought together on the plate. Indeed, it is often disruptive of conversation around the dinner table.” This practice obviously adds more dimensions to the orality-written iterative/ transcriptive relays. 14. Numeracy is indeed an important skill in the act of ordering dishes in a restaurant, as the diner is not simply ordering dishes that he or she likes but also mentally calculating if he or she can afford the eventual total cost of the meal thus composed. 15. Implicit in the use of talismans is a particular view on the sources of danger or misfortune. Unlike many societies where misfortune is perceived as originating from human agents (e.g., sorcerers), the Daoist talismanic world assumes an innocent human world and an unseen world full of evil spirits and baleful forces, and that humans are constantly in need of divine assistance to ward off evil spirits and noxious miasmas. Daoist priests are specialists whose training has endowed them with the ability to command divine help in expelling evil forces. And the talismans are their weapon of choice. Most importantly, people have come to recognize the power of the talismans as efficacious. Talismans come in a wide variety of forms and materials, but the most common form is some combination of graphic elements and writing written in red (vermillion) ink on one side of a thin piece of rectangular-shaped yellow paper. The dimensions vary widely as well, though usually talismans are about one foot in length and four or five inches in width. Talismans have a long history in the Daoist tradition. There are over three thousand basic talismans that have been preserved in the Daoist Canon (Daozang), an authoritative collection of Daoist scriptures and manuals. The use of talismans is still very popular in contemporary Chinese societies (mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world). 16. There are many parallels between Chinese talisman practices and Islamic and other “magical” practices, especially in the mixed use of incantation and writing. The anthropologist Michael Lambek describes Mayotte sorcery technique: You tell the spirit what you want done and you give it a gift of food. If it accepts the food, then you know it will do your bidding. You write your name, the name of the person to be attacked, and the wafaku (a spell in a grid diagram that indicates how you want the victim to be affected) on a piece of paper. Then you fold the paper and put it around the neck of a chicken like a hiriz (amulet), whispering over and over again the name of the person you wish to harm. You slaughter the chicken, drenching the sairy and the written message in its blood. The spirit comes to eat the blood, reads the message, and immediately rushes off in search of the victim. (Lambek 1993: 243–44) 17. See Coveney, Begley, and Gallegos (2012) for a discussion on “savoir fare” (i.e., food savvy) as a form of governmentality.  

Analogic asphalt This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Morten Nielsen. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.2.005 Analogic asphalt Suspended value conversions among young road workers in southern Mozambique Morten NIELSEN, Aarhus University This article explores the obviational process through which the value of salaries is continuously being transformed, based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among young road workers employed by a Chinese construction consortium to rehabilitate the N1 highway in the southern part of Mozambique. To the Mozambican workers, the value of salaries emerged by gradually dropping the traces of its own origin rather than indexing a fixed ratio between labor and money. Only when money received enabled the workers to supplant the fraught relationship to their Chinese superiors—for example, by buying construction materials for a projected cement house—was it considered as a proper salary that connected the present (purchase of building materials) to the past (road work) in a viable manner. Following this initial conversion, I then chart how the emergent temporal association (road work :: house building project) opened toward new images of altered and improved social positions for the young Mozambican road workers. The article proposes to consider value as an optimal way of supplanting (rather than confirming) existing forms of relational meaning by relating a process of suspended value transformations to an overarching temporal cosmology widespread in the southern part of Mozambique (tomorrowness). Keywords: Future, Mozambique, obviation, time, value conversions In May 2010, Ramón had finally gathered enough money to commence building the much-desired cement house that was to serve as the future home for his family. During the previous three years, Ramón had been living with his wife and two children in a small two-room reed hut on the outskirts of Xai-Xai in the southern part of Mozambique, but the coming construction project seemed to promise a significant improvement of their housing conditions. Ramón was working for CHICO,1 a Chinese construction consortium, to rehabilitate the N1 highway between the towns of Xai-Xai and Chissibuca. In general, all local workers were required to show up at the construction compound seven days a week but on this hot Sunday, Ramón had decided to stay at home with his family despite the cut in his already meager salary. While showing me where he would soon begin pouring a cement foundation for the house, Ramón told me about the recent occurrences that prompted the decision to commence the house construction project. Well . . . to tell you the truth, I actually don’t know how much I make at the construction site. They [i.e., his Chinese superiors at the road construction site] never tell us how they calculate our salaries so we don’t know how much we actually make. Ah! What they pay us cannot even be considered as proper salaries. . . . The way they treat us, it’s almost like being offered handouts as if we were simple beggars. It was only when I bought the first sack of cement that I got a proper memory (lembrança)2 of having carried out work at the road construction site. Somehow it seemed as if the value of Ramón’s salary changed at those precise moments when it sufficed for buying construction materials for his projected cement house. No longer the equivalent to “handouts” (which also indexed a problematic employee-employer relationship), it crystallized the work Ramón had previously carried out at the road construction site. Put somewhat differently, it appears from Ramón’s statement that the paid out money could be considered as a proper salary because it sufficed for buying building materials; its salary-ness, as it were, emerged as an after-effect of the use to which it was subsequently put. It is then interesting to note the continued value conversions even after the purchase of construction materials. After pacing out the house construction site, I sat down with Ramón in the shade outside his somewhat dilapidated reed hut located at the far end of the plot. In a soft voice, Ramón explained the complicated process he was now facing. I am not sure (não tenho certeza) whether I will ever complete the house building project; we Mozambicans like to build “little by little” (pouco a pouco) and hope that we might get lucky. Also . . . whether I will actually be able to build a house at all depends on the aesthetics, you know. A well-rooted house (casa de raiz) is located three meters from plot limits and is erected according to a construction plan. If I don’t follow the plan, I remain a poor squatter and I’ll never build a house. The construction process that Ramón embarked upon when he bought the first sack of cement seemed to be oriented by the end result—that is, the cement house in which he will hopefully come to live with his wife and children. Still, as Ramón acknowledged during our prolonged conversation, it is only after having completed the construction process that he will know for sure whether he has, in fact, built a house. If the aesthetics of the building do not adhere to a set of seemingly welldefined standards (e.g., a fixed location three meters from plot limits and a continuous adherence to a construction plan), Ramón cannot obtain status as legitimate occupant and the construction project will never result in a proper house. Many urbanites living on the outskirts of Mozambican cities, such as Ramón, occupy land illegally and can therefore—at least potentially—be removed with force by the government (Carrilho et al. 2008: 130–58; Jenkins 2009). Still, provided that periurban (and illegal!) residents build houses that imitate state-authored urban aesthetics, their occupations are often pragmatically, if not legally, accepted by official authorities (Nielsen 2010, 2011). In a nutshell, if Ramón succeeds in building in accordance with officially sanctioned standards, his previous status as illegal squatter is most likely transformed into that of a legal urban citizen and he will know that he has, in fact, erected a proper house. In this article, I chart the intricate process whereby the value of paid out money received by a group of young Mozambican road workers from their Chinese superiors is undergoing continuous transformations. To the Mozambican workers, rather than indexing a fixed ratio between labor and money, the value of salaries emerged by gradually dropping the traces of its own origin. Only when money received enabled the workers to supplant the untenable relationship to their problematic Chinese superiors (for example, by buying construction materials for a projected cement house), was it considered as a proper salary that connected the present (purchase of building materials) to the past (road work) in a viable manner. The emerging house construction project thus transformed its own origin, as it were, by eliminating the Chinese counterpart as the source of the paid out money. Still, although having cancelled the employee :: employer relationship, the road :: construction project constellation did not ipso facto remain stable. If a housebuilder succeeded in building a cement house, his status was fundamentally transformed from illegal squatter into (potentially) legal urban citizen. If we consider these two value transformations schematically, we end up with the following figure: Figure 1. The sequence of suspended value transformations As might be noticed from the figure, the sequence of suspended value transformations closes when it returns to its beginning point—that is, the image of the Mozambican road worker. Whereas in the first constellation, the young Mozambicans such as Ramón are caught in fraught working relationships with their Chinese superiors, in the last one, they have achieved secure occupancy within the urban domain. Hence, as will also be the argument of this article, the sequence described above (potentially!) resolves a fundamental problem, which is that of connecting different value regimes in order for the road worker’s productive transformation to occur. And, as I shall soon describe, as a temporal configuration the sequence of suspended value transformations operate by connecting discrete occurrences in a nonlinear way so that a subsequent event, paradoxically, seems to precede (or counter-invent) the prior one from which it originated. Obviating Dumont In The fame of Gawa (1986), Nancy Munn gives an insightful account of Gawan value creation through long-distance kula-shell exchanges. For the Gawans, the value of a given act needs to be seen in relation to its “essential capacities” or possible outcomes. For instance, the giving of food to a stranger has the capacity to yield not only hospitality in return but perhaps also in the long run the acquisition of kula shells and renown. Value may therefore be “characterized in terms of differential levels of spatiotemporal transformation—more specifically, in terms of an act’s relative capacity to extend or expand . . . intersubjective spacetime—a spacetime of self-other relationships formed in and through acts and practices” (Munn 1986: 9). In short, value is ultimately the power to create social relations; a transformative capacity, as it were, to extend oneself in space and time beyond the here and now. In a sense, we might therefore see Munn’s analytical account as a form of labor theory of value given that objects, items, and artifacts become meaningful as crystallizations of the efforts that people put into a sequence of social processes (Graeber 2001: 45). What I take from Munn is her emphasis on value as a transformative capacity lodged in current acts. As David Graeber put it (and here he is contrasting Munn with Marilyn Strathern’s Melanesian work), “(r)ather than value being the process of public recognition itself . . . it is the way people who could do almost anything . . . assess the importance of what they do, in fact, do, as they are doing it” (2001: 47). Still, by focusing on the value effects of current acts, it seems as if Munn is suggesting that any act ultimately has a singular meaning ascribed to it that can be read from, say, the extension of a person in space and time. Basically, in Munn’s work, value emerges as an effect of how an intentional act in the present is extended outward so that a spatial and temporal environment is aligned with its interior properties (e.g., the fame of an important person). What happens, then, when transformative capacities lodged in current acts become suspended in time? Do present acts, in fact, maintain singular values that are then merely folded outward in space and time? Might we not imagine temporal inversions where values elicited through current acts are encompassed by subsequent but contrary ones? We would then have a temporalized version of Louis Dumont’s classic hierarchical scheme where pairs of values are always encompassed by their contrary (1980). In its temporalized version, it would be a subsequent act (rather than a higher level of values) that comes to stand for both itself and its contrary (that is, the former act). In Roy Wagner’s obviational analyses of Daribi mythology, we find one of the most convincing anthropological attempts at charting temporal value conversions (1979, 1981, 1986). According to Wagner, obviation constitutes the recursive and processual form of tropes when a series of consecutive symbols act upon each other as innovative elaborations on a conventional background. Hence, through a mythical narrative, the initial premise is gradually developed and expanded upon so that, by the end, it invariably collapses. This expansion occurs through a series of metaphorical substitutions where previous ones are dissolved into something else in illuminating ways. A new and self-contained tropic image is thus constituted as an innovation upon some conventionally recognized usage that is supplanted by the former, as it is unfolded through the latter. It is this process of inserting novel elements “in the way of” existing relations that Wagner defines as obviation. “Obviation is the effect of supplanting a conventional semiotic relation with an innovative and self-contained relation” . . . “The result is a novel expression that intentionally ‘deconventionalizes’ the conventional (and unintentionally conventionalizes the unconventional): a new meaning has been formed (and an old meaning has been extended). The novel expression both amplifies and controverts the significance of the convention upon which it innovates” (Wagner 1979: 31, 28). It might be relevant to ponder, then, to what extent other (nonmythical) processes might be considered as sequences of tropic substitutions through which new meanings are formed that “conventionalizes the unconventional and deconventionalizes the conventional”? Indeed, according to Wagner, although myth does imitate “the forms and situations of secular and religious life . . . it could equally well be argued that kinship, subsistence, magic and ritual imitate the forms and situations of myth” (Wagner 1979: 54). A myth gives an origin account emerging retrospectively from the substitutions that gradually allow new and often paradoxical meanings to be everted from former ones. As such, the potential meanings of the myth are projected backward from the ongoing series of substitutions toward a moment of origin that nevertheless seems to continuously displace itself. It might be argued that in order for a sequence of events to exhibit mythical qualities, it is first and foremost a question of manifesting certain temporal traits so that each subsequent event “differentiates the character of the whole beyond anticipation, assimilating what has preceded it into its own relation, a ‘now’ that supercedes rather than extends, its ‘then’” (Wagner 1986: 81). Hence, whereas it is often assumed that a given value is predicated on a capacity to retain history, say, as the elicitation of a sequence of exchanges (Mauss 2005; Strathern 1988, 1992) or even as the social biography of an object (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986), what the obviational analysis affords is a quite different account where values emerge from the capacity to supplant history. In the following, I will examine suspended value conversions as they take place among young Mozambican road workers hired by a Chinese construction consortium to rehabilitate the N1 highway. After an initial account of nonlinear time in the southern part of Mozambique, I proceed to chart the intricate sequence of substitutions through which the value of paid out money is continuously being transformed. Inspired by Roy Wagner’s obviational analysis, it will be my overall argument that suspended value conversions potentially resolve the seemingly insoluble temporal conundrum of connecting discrete events in a nonlinear way in order for productive transformations to occur. As such, the value of paid out salaries emerges from its continuous substitutions; that is, from the particular ways in which salaries drop the traces of their own origin. Tomorrowness Among the young Mozambican road workers, a frequent leisure activity during their days off was to watch poor DVD versions of American action movies. Besides allowing for a much-needed escape from the hot backyards (quintal) where most of our quotidian conversations took place, these movie sessions also provoked a series of puzzling questions regarding my friends’ understanding of linear time. While sitting in the shady living rooms, I was always amazed at how my young friends seemed to completely spoil the plot for each other by continuously revealing what would come next. Hence, if the lead character in a movie was about to experience, say, a surprise attack, one of the viewers would almost certainly let us know what was about to happen—even when knowing that he was the only person to have seen the movie. Still, these plot spoilers never really seemed to constitute a problem. In fact, after having had subsequent scenes revealed, a heated and very lively discussion would follow where plot spoilers were debated and explained in greater detail and when my fellow viewers finally saw the scene in question they would loudly express their satisfaction that the story unfolded as promised. Notwithstanding the annoyance of having the plot spoiled, these afternoon movie sessions did reflect an interesting understanding of time that was widespread in the southern part of Mozambique. Generally, a sequence of consecutive scenes in an action movie would seem to indicate a narrative connection based on conventional chronology; that is, scene A is either before or after scene B if understood on a linear scale. And from this perspective, the plot is logically spoiled if subsequent scenes are prematurely revealed to the viewer. However, if we bracket the proclivity for understanding time as chronology, we might consider a slightly different temporal account that affords an alternative reading of the afternoon movie sessions and, more crucially, will serve to orient the analysis of suspended value conversions among the young road workers. Many if not most Mozambicans living in the southern part of the country believe that life does not end at the time of physical death; people live on as spiritual forces who guide the lives of their descendants (Granjo 2012; Honwana 1996; Nielsen 2012; see also Junod 1962). According to Bento Sitôe who is professor in linguistics at the Universidade de Eduardo Mondlane, Many people have difficulties understanding their lives in terms of the future because here (in the southern part of Mozambique) time doesn’t operate with the limit that the moment of death constitutes elsewhere. As we see it, life doesn’t stop. We might die but we go on living in the heart of our family (no seio da nossa familia). So, this thing about the future being something that only pertains to me . . . that’s not quite right. (Personal communication, May 2012) When life ceases to have a final conclusion, the significance of the future changes accordingly. Basically, a person’s future cannot be considered merely as the remaining part of his or her physical life given the continued presence in the lives of descendants. In xiChangana,3 the future is generally considered using the term vumundzuku (Portuguese: amanhecidade) that might best be translated as tomorrowness. In order to coordinate, say, the process of constructing a cement house, it is logically necessary to plan ahead; to decide when to purchase building materials, when to contract a bricklayer, when to order wooden doors and window frames, and so forth. And indeed, such planning activities are carried out by prospective housebuilders, many of whom seek to improve an unstable socioeconomic situation through a transformation of their housing conditions (Nielsen 2008:130–58). What is interesting, then, is that these planning activities do not necessarily imply the actual realization of the desired outcome. Given the fragile economic situation in Mozambique, a housebuilding project often requires continuous financial investments that exceed the capacity of the housebuilder. Hence, although the process of building a cement house might be initiated, the prospective house owner also acknowledges that the project will most likely fail. And even so, the somewhat utopian qualities of these endeavors rarely lead to their cancellation. During my first visit to the road construction site in Chissibuca, I talked to Chico, a 23-year-old road worker originally from Inhambane, about his ongoing housebuilding project. “When I started the project, I really didn’t know whether I would ever finish it. Initially, I didn’t even have money for buying cement so I had to wait until I had enough [money] in order for me to begin making cement blocks. It’s important to do these things in phases . . . little by little (pouco a pouco), you know. . . . But I believe in the project. I always believed (sempre tinha esperança) that my life would change from one day to the next.” Tomorrowness (vumundzuku) might perhaps best be described as this transformative potential of the future lodged in the present. Despite its likely failure, the future inserts itself in the present as an organizing tendency that connects multiple entities (persons, ideas, things) in a momentary durational assemblage. As such, it instills in the present a certain open-endedness that points forward while still maintaining the role of the accidental, change, or the undetermined in the unfolding of time (cf. Grosz 1999: 18–19). According to a widely known Changana proverb, “only if you know the depth of the river will you enter” (a xiziva vacambeta hicupela); that is, if one knew everything about all dangerous crevices and gorges at the bottom of sea, the likelihood of entering would be minimal. As if referring to the Changana proverb, my good friend Nelson argued that, The idea of, say, a finished house is fixed (fixa), but we don’t know whether we will ever see its conclusion. We’ve got an idea . . . but what’s an idea? We might make a blueprint with three rooms, but this does not give us the idea that we might conclude the house because the (necessary) money doesn’t exist. But as soon as there is an idea, we start on the house (a gente começamos a casa). Considered as tomorrowness, the future affords a certain transformative potential in the present by outlining a possible trajectory without the anticipation of a final destination. Whether pertaining to the act of crossing a river or building a house, plans that seem to orient one’s path into an unknown future are thus developed and acted upon while knowing that their successful completion is uncertain if not unlikely. In this regard, tomorrowness reflects the fundamental cosmological understanding that a person’s life transcends conventional temporal boundaries, such as death or even the time frame that guides a house-building project. With a phrase borrowed by Constantin V. Boundas, we might argue that tomorrowness makes the present not really present to itself, guided as it is by a future “that it is in the mode of not yet being it” (1996: 101). Only at the moment of its full realization will it be possible to know how the future is connected to the present and thus also how to understand the meaning of ongoing activities, such as receiving salaries from Chinese superiors or building houses that imitate state-authored urban aesthetics. Before continuing the discussion of suspended value conversions, let me briefly return to the movie sessions that were introduced at the beginning of this section. If we consider the plot spoilers in terms of tomorrowness rather than merely as a premature (and annoying!) exposure of subsequent scenes, they seem to add to current scenes a certain transformative potential. Operating as detached (or even deterritorialized) futures within the present they indicate a momentary becoming of ongoing activities without the promise of reaching the point of their realization (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 232–309). To be sure, it was in this middle space between a future unhinged from linear chronology (by being inserted within the present) and a present that was no longer present to itself (by being infused by the future) that the intense debates between my fellow viewers took place. Having thus outlined certain primary temporal qualities of tomorrowness, I shall now proceed to explore in detail the sequence of suspended value conversions as they take place among a group of Mozambican road workers. It will consequently be my overall argument that the sequence of obviational transformations potentially resolves the fundamental problem of connecting discrete events in a nonlinear way in order for the road workers’ productive transformation to occur. Forgetting the Chinese by remembering the road In December 2008, CHICO, a Chinese construction consortium, won the contract to rehabilitate and upgrade 96 km of the N1 highway between the cities of Xai-Xai and Chissibuca in the southern part of Mozambique. Funded by the International Development Association (IDA), the project was undertaken as part of the Government of Mozambique’s Integrated Road Sector Programme with an agreed contract sum on MZM 1,269,447,739 (40,557,400 USD). Work began in January 2009 and with only few setbacks the construction project was completed in March 2011 and delivered to the National Road Administration (ANE)4 the following month (Club of Mozambique Lda 2011). During the most intense periods, the construction team was composed of 56 Chinese and 261 Mozambicans who were hired directly by CHICO (Scott Wilson Ltd. 2010). As an important third party, ANE assigned Scott Wilson Ltd, an international construction consultancy, to supervise the project and throughout the process twenty-one full time staff members accompanied the construction team while working on the road. During my last visit to the road construction site in 2011, I met up with Matías and Celso, two young road workers from Xai-Xai whom I had known since 2009. At the time of our encounter, the project was rapidly reaching its conclusion and aside from the important task of painting lines on the new asphalt, there were few major work activities left to do apart from cleaning up in the materials compound. We had therefore plenty of time to evaluate the construction project while also discussing potential plans for the future. “If they [the Chinese superiors] were proper persons, we would have real memories (lembranças) of having worked here. . . . But we don’t have anything; the only thing we’ve got is back pain.” I had asked Celso whether the already problematic relationship to their superiors had improved since my last visit a year earlier but it appeared that little had changed. Matías nodded. “Salaries are sacred, you know. It’s important that you receive something that shows that you’ve been working . . . it’s the work that creates the memory so that afterward when I buy cement I’ll know that I worked for this company.” “Yes, yes!” Celso intervened. “That’s right. If we were treated correctly and the money was sufficient for us to start building our houses, then we would consider it as a memory (era lembrança para nós).” As I had come to understand during my conversations with the young road workers, if considered as a conventional salary, paid out money would objectify a mutually recognized social relationship between employer and employee. While sitting by the roadside waiting to commence the laborious work of mixing the layers of sand, cement, and gravel to stabilize the asphalt road, Ináncio summed up the relational significance of proper salaries: “It’s important to be paid properly because I will then feel that my boss is valuing (valorizar) me like a person. Not like he is offering me something but rewarding me for my efforts.” According to Marilyn Strathern, a reciprocal exchange is “based on the capacity for actors . . . to extract or elicit from others items that then become the object of their relationship” (1992: 177). It logically follows, then, that a donor (say, an employer) must be compelled to perceive a recipient (say, an employee) as the cause of a debt that is momentarily eliminated by the reciprocal exchange. However, as Ináncio and his peers saw it, their superiors were incapable of engaging in meaningful reciprocal relationships. Even minor mistakes made by the Mozambican workers ignited the short-tempered Chinese and more than once had it resulted in serious beatings. Equally worrying, the monthly wages were paid out without the Chinese explicating how it was calculated. To be sure, only small variations in income were potentially detrimental to the basic subsistence level of individual households and so Ináncio and his colleagues anticipated with anxiety the monthly payment date when they would line up and be called forth by the Chinese official responsible for counting the money. “It’s almost like they are offering us money . . . as if we were simple beggars,” Alex wryly told me. Through the exchange of labor and salaries, each party comes to give something of themselves. At an interactional, everyday level, we might define this something as the recognition of the other as a social person with whom interaction is not only possible but also desirable. When the interaction is successful, proper salaries “eclipse” the originating relationship between employer and employee out of which they emerge (Strathern 2005: 121). In a nutshell, the salary objectifies and thereby makes visible the interaction between the Mozambican worker and Chinese superior through which the identity of the other is read (cf. Gell 1998: 13–15). To the Mozambicans, however, the problem was precisely that money paid out did not eclipse a relationship between employer and employee based on mutual recognition of the other as a social person with whom interaction was desirable. Received money sufficed only for buying basic foodstuff, which made it no different from picking up a few banknotes from the street or being offered alms (esmolas) like a simple beggar who receives something that is essentially of little or no importance to the donor. It could never be considered as a salary and so, consequently, the sand, gravel, and asphalt mixed together in layers failed to convey the qualities of a road. Of course, this argument might equally be formulated in an inverse manner: The significance of paid out money was predicated on the extent to which it could catapult the young Mozambicans beyond the untenable conditions at the construction site. Only then could money received be considered as proper salaries and the hardship endured as outcome of a viable social relationship. However, given the lack of mutual recognition, paid out money only seemed to acquire proper value when it did not index a reciprocal relationship. In fact, the real value of salaries seemed to be their potential capacities for obviating the untenable connection to the Chinese superiors. “With a salary, I would start building a house in order to live in a better way,” Alex explained. “It could be a cement house or just a ‘bedroom and living room’ (quarto e sala) in order for me to have a memory (para ter uma lembrança) of having worked in this place. That would enable me to have a life until I die.” I asked him whether the money received from the Chinese could also be considered as a memory. “It might become a memory (ia tornando lembrança).” Alex nodded several times before continuing. “We consider it as a memory only when the money can be used for commencing a construction project.” In other words, the material trace (such as a construction project) that proper salaries produce were logically predicated on the amount of money that the Mozambicans received from their Chinese superiors. Given the assumed lack of recognition from their employers, however, the (future) memory would no longer eclipse a mutually recognized relationship. Rather, at the moment when paid out money would suffice for buying construction materials; a new connection would be established between the housebuilding project and the road they had previously worked on. As Alex explained, We wish that we had had a memory (nós desejíamos que nós teíamos uma lembrança). What would we then remember? The road! . . . That we have a great road here in Mozambique. I would have a memory of living in a house that I built . . . living a quiet life knowing that I purchased these things while working on the road. In a sense, the value of paid out money emerged by moving backward from its current manifestation toward a grounding moment. Only when the money received enabled the workers to supplant the untenable relationship to the problematic Chinese superiors by realizing alternative temporal horizons was it considered as a memory that connected the present to the past in a proper way. Although we might imagine the initial moment when the money was first received as indexing the employee :: employer relationship, this was subsequently dissolved by the road :: construction project constellation that was unfolded from the former as the real manifestation of salaries. The emerging construction project thus transformed its own origin, as it were, by eliminating the Chinese counterpart as the source of the paid out money. Stated somewhat differently, we may argue that the transposition of the failed reciprocal relationship between the Mozambican workers and their Chinese superiors was gradually dropping the traces of its own invention. The emergent qualities of cement houses As Wagner tells us, obviational transformations imply a double process of invention and convention in which each mode of symbolization precipitates or counterinvents the other as a form of figure-ground inversal. Hence, We invent so as to sustain and restore our conventional orientation; we adhere to this orientation so as to realize the power and gain that invention brings. Invention and convention stand in a dialectical relationship to one another, a relationship of simultaneous interdependence and contradiction. (Wagner 1981: 52, italics in original) The innovative effect emerges when some symbols act upon others in order to elicit new meanings from prior ones (Wagner 1979: 31). To achieve this innovative effect, it is necessary that the symbols being acted upon be accepted as a conventional context that is “perfectly self-evident, natural and innate, when in fact it is just as much a symbolic construct as the figure upon which it is built” (Weiner 1995: 34). The conventional context is consequently that collection of meaningful tropes that is held steady as a taken-for-granted background (Wagner 1981: 51). Still, as James Weiner also reminds us, irrespective of whatever interpretation might be made, any (conventional) symbolic image is always open to doubt and reformulations. It has “the power of eliciting (causing to perceive) all sorts of meanings in those who use and hear it” (Wagner 1987: 56). Inventions that subvert an interpretation occur when a symbolic trope is extended beyond its seemingly self-evident connection to a given reference by some motivating force that comes from beyond the conventional domain. In this regard, the roadwork was counterinvented as source of the paid out money at the moment when the young Mozambicans managed to buy construction materials for their house-building project. If we briefly return to the discussion of tomorrowness (vumundzuku), it might be argued that the house construction project did, indeed, assert itself as a particular transformative potential in the present. Rather than merely indicate a predefined (but unlikely) endpoint on a linear scale, it suggested new ways of structuring social life here and now. In other words, the potency of the future derived from the recursive elimination of the untenable employee :: employer relationship that was clearly detrimental to the young Mozambican road workers. It could be imagined that the purchase of cement would “cut” the flow of inventions, as it were (cf. Strathern 1996). By commencing a housebuilding project, the value of salaries seemed to stabilize as a viable medium to connect the past (road) with the present (house-building project) and, further on, with the imagined future (the completed cement house). However, keeping in the mind that the future is actualized backward through the recursive transformation of a moment of origin, the event of purchasing cement essentially eliminated its immediate temporal importance (in the present) at the precise moment of its occurrence. In a nutshell, the future never really managed to become present to itself, as it were, because of its transformative “commitment” to its past. Rather than examine whether the purchase of construction materials did, in fact, result in the completion of a cement house, it is consequently more relevant to ask what presents were counterinvented by the latter future (that is, the completion of a cement house). With the exodus of the Portuguese colonizers after Mozambique’s independence in 1975, the already fragile urban administration was completely incapable of tackling the insurmountable problems caused by the increasing number of inhabitants who were seeking shelter and better opportunities in the cities. Rooted in a nationalist socialist ideology with an explicit antiurban bias that neglected broad-ranging urban development in favor of grand agricultural visions, the urban population was seen as parasitical and therefore in need of removal (Trindade 2006: 42). The limited involvement of the wider urban population during colonial rule thus continued after independence. Although it was now an indigenous political group in power, “its response to the needs of the urban majority was seriously constrained by an over-reliance on past socialist models and lack of capacity” (Jenkins 2006: 120). Thus, out of the 86,300 new housing units built from 1980 to 1997, it is estimated that as few as 7 percent were provided by the state or private sector (4,000 and 1,500 respectively). The remaining more than 80,000 housing units were built without state assistance (Jenkins 1999: 23–24). The explicit state-dominated approach to urban management was gradually loosened after 1987 with the World Bank / IMF-initiated restructuring of the Mozambican economy. In 1990, the first ever national housing policy was approved, which, in accordance with the emphasis on free market forces, assigned the state a facilitatory role and introduced the liberalization of real estate activity and thereby the basis for a housing market (Jenkins 1998). The emergence of private activities notwithstanding, the state continued to play a key role in the allocation of plots, as the nationalization of land remained an inviolable pillar for the Frelimo government. Without any improvement in its administrative capacities, however, its ability to maintain this policy remains limited. Thus, between 1990 and 1999, the state and other institutions developed forty-eight plot layouts without overall coordination or land registration (Jenkins 2001: 637). Although state agencies have proven incapable of implementing coherent urban policies, many settlers who live on the fringes of the city have found alternative ways to access land. According to Paul Jenkins, in Maputo 75 percent of all access to land occurs informally, that is, through local leaders or civil servants illegally parceling out plots that are later sold (2000: 145). Bearing in mind the weak administrative capacities at state and municipal levels, it is perhaps no surprise that urban governance is de facto carried out by residents who occupy land illegally. What is interesting, however, is that illegal occupations are pragmatically if not legally accepted provided that residents build houses that imitate those urban standards (e.g., regarding plot size and location and aesthetics of the house) that the state ought to have implemented (Nielsen 2011). In other words, if peri-urban residents manage to complete housebuilding projects that seem to adhere to official norms, they will probably never be removed—irrespective of its apparent illegality. During a fieldtrip in Maputo in 2005, I spoke with Sambo, a municipal architect, about the weak urban administrative structures. “We are a poor country,” Sambo said with a smile. “Therefore it doesn’t make much sense to remove a house which could easily stay there.” Cândido, a young Mozambican road worker, bought his plot on the outskirts of Xai-Xai from a primary school teacher who wanted to move to Maputo. Since Independence in 1975, all transactions in land have been illegal and Cândido had therefore no official documents that proved that he was the owner of the plot. Still, the lack of formal ownership rights did not necessarily constitute a serious problem to Cândido’s occupancy if only he managed to construct the house in the appropriate manner. “If I get fined by the community chief (secretário do bairro) for not having a construction plan, I’ll know for sure that I won’t move. Hey, I might even open up a bank account like a real person . . . (laughs).” As Cândido told me, only formal residents were fined for building cement houses without construction plans whereas illegal squatters would eventually be removed with force by some (unknown) official authority. In other words, the fine would effectively validate Cândido’s status as formal resident and thereby confirm that a proper cement house had been built. Still, with a weak administrative system without sufficient human and financial capacities, validation of formal occupancy does not happen overnight and many residents continue to occupy land informally for extended periods of time irrespective of whether they have completed a housebuilding project or not. From my conversations with the road workers, it was clear that those of them whose status as formal citizens were not yet validated seemed to evaluate their houses differently—even in those instances where the construction projects were already (or nearly) completed. “Ah! This is no wellrooted house (casa de raiz). I’m just trying to hide my head (esconder a minha cabeça),” Nelson noted when I asked him about his recently completed housebuilding project. “Why don’t they just give me the papers?” he continued. “Am I not a proper person?” With a monthly salary on less than the minimum wage,5 not all of the young Mozambican road workers managed to gather sufficient money to buy construction materials for their much-desired housebuilding projects. Those who did, however, seemed to consider the completed cement house not as the eventual outcome of an ongoing building project (as would probably seem most likely) but, rather as an effect of their potentially altered status. Hence, rather than continue to occupy land as illegal squatters, the completed house would confer to them the status of legitimate urban citizens; or, more precisely, the result of the construction project could only be considered as a proper house provided that their social status changed significantly. As Nelson reminded me, the inverse relation (urban citizenship from a completed cement house) was not equally likely. On the outskirts of Xai-Xai and many other places throughout Mozambique, illegal squatters commence housebuilding projects but only legitimate citizens can have well-rooted houses (casas de raiz) built in accordance with officially sanctioned urban standards. Conclusion With the first obviational substitution, paid out money came to constitute salaries if they sufficed for buying construction materials. Rather than eclipse an untenable relationship between employee and employer, a productive temporal connection was established between the roadwork and the anticipated (or commenced) houseconstruction project. By everting or counterinventing a new symbolic relationship from the employee :: employer configuration, the completed house emerged as a potential future associated with the event of purchasing construction materials. However, as a paradoxical effect of the prior temporal inversion, this future fundamentally lost its chronological attachment to its past (that is, the purchase of cement). As we have seen above, the prior temporal relationship (road :: construction project) was obviated by the future (completed house) lodged in the present as a transformative potential that outlined a new durational configuration. Rather than serve to indicate a possible but unlikely endpoint on a linear scale, the completed house suggested new tropic images of a transformed social status for the young Mozambican workers. In a nutshell, the building that they imagined to be occupying in the future would only come to constitute a proper cement house if their status was transformed from illegal squatters to that of legitimate citizens. In their discussion of Levi-Strauss’s analysis of the canonical myth, Pierre Maranda and Elli Köngäs Maranda argue, “(i)n effect, myths are made to solve contradictions . . . and the formula can only be understood if it is read backwards, as the inversion of the first term” (1971: 30; see also Marcus 1997; Mosko 1991). Without claiming to imitate the progression of the canonical myth, the obviational analysis presented above does seem to correspond to the overall description. Hence, with the final image (urban citizen), we return to the starting point (the employee) but in a significantly altered form. No longer caught in a problematic social relationship with their Chinese superiors, the young road workers are gazing toward viable futures that seem to hold promises of legitimate occupancy and improved housing conditions. As I have tried to outline above, the process entailed a sequence of conversions where different temporal configurations were progressively obviated in order for new and meaningful images to be elicited from inside their point of origin. These radical transformations were made possible within the temporal horizon of tomorrowness (vumundzuku) as a particular orientation toward the future without the anticipation of a final destination. By bracketing the conventional understanding of a future moment as the endpoint of a predefined trajectory, the future was unhinged, as it were, from its chronological linearity and could thereby serve as connector between (and obviator of) different temporal configurations. It might be argued, then, that value essentially came to constitute the appropriate obviation of different temporal configurations in order for the optimal productive transformation of the road workers’ status to occur. In Expectations of modernity, James Ferguson famously claimed that “Zambia’s recent crisis is not only an economic crisis but a crisis of meaning, in which the way that people are able to understand their experience and to imbue it with significance and dignity has (for many) been dramatically eroded” (1999: 14). Through a series of detailed case studies, Ferguson convincingly shows how the modernization project in Zambia fundamentally failed to capture the predicament of those urbanites living in the Copperbelt even during the heyday of the mining industries. It is, Ferguson claims, best considered as a “modernization myth,” which, although it might be false or factually inaccurate, “lays down fundamental categories and meanings for the organization and interpretation of experience” (Ferguson 1999: 13–14). In this article, I have introduced a parallel but nevertheless radically different version of mythical realities, if you like, in contemporary sub–Saharan Africa. Whereas Ferguson charts the “full house” of urban variation in a social setting that undergoes continuous transformations (Ferguson 1999: 102), my analytical strategy has been to emphasize how a Mozambican crisis as meaning might best be considered as myth through and through. Among the young Mozambican road workers, present experiences of extreme work conditions gradually collapsed and gave way to future scenarios wherein their Chinese superiors played little or no part. It might thus be argued that the recursive process of obviational transformations constituted a particular kind of temporal hypothesis that emerged as the after-effect of its own creation. As a reflection of tomorrowness, it allowed for a certain speculative or even experimental exploration of the future without necessarily expecting its actual realization. Mythical obviation needs to be understood, Wagner tells us, as an autonomous expressive medium that subsumes elements from experiential (outside!) domains to its own form (1986:85). As such, a mythic narrative makes particular situations and objects more than analogies; it makes them real, as it were, at the cost of merging them into the scheme of the myth. By gradually dropping the traces of its origin, the sequence of obviational transformations occurring among young Mozambican road workers did seem to establish an “autonomous expressive medium” that cannot be understood merely as a metaphorical effect of other more fundamental (i.e., social, political, economic) factors. The sequence of obviational transformations is, indeed, both ontologically and socially real; the paradox being, of course, that its effects can only be detected as an ongoing supplanting of history. This is the paradox, I argue, that constitutes the predicament of young road workers seeking to chart viable futures at a road construction site in the southern part of Mozambique. Acknowledgments This article is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2009 and 2012 as part of the collective research project “Imperial potentialities.” Besides the author, the project team is composed by Morten A. Pedersen and Mikkel Bunkenborg, University of Copenhagen. The research project is fully funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research, Social Sciences (Forskningsrådet for Samfund og Erhverv). I am grateful for the excellent comments from James Weiner and Tony Crook and the three anonymous reviewers from HAU on previous versions of this article. In particular, I have to thank Tony Crook for coming up with the (cool!) title (Analogic asphalt). References Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boundas, Constantin V. 1996. “Deleuze-Bergson: An ontology of the virtual.” In Deleuze: A critical reader, edited by Paul Patton, 81–106. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Carrilho, Júlio, Luis Lage, João T. Tique, Albino Mazembe, and Anselmo Cani. 2008. Mozambique urban sector profile. Nairobi: UN-Habitat. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix, Guattari. 2005. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo hierarchicus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of modernity: Myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: The false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave. Granjo, Paulo. 2012. “O que é que a Adivinhação Adivinha?” Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 22: 65–93. Grosz, Elizabeth, ed. 1999. Becomings: Explorations in time, memory, and futures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Honwana, A. 1996. “Spiritual agency and self-renewal in Southern Mozambique.” PhD dissertation, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. Jenkins, Paul. 1998. “National and international shelter policy initiatives in Mozambique: Housing the urban poor at the periphery.” PhD thesis. Edinburgh, Heriot Watt University, Centre for Environment and Human Settlements, School of Planning and Housing. ———. 1999. “Mozambique: Housing and land markets in Maputo.” Research paper no. 72. Edinburgh College of Art/Heriot-Watt University, School of Planning and Housing. ———. 2000. “City profile Maputo.” Cities 17 (3): 207–18. ———. 2001. “Strengthening access to land for housing for the poor in Maputo, Mozambique.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25 (3):629–48. ———. 2006. “Image of the city in Mozambique: Civilization, parasite, engine of growth or place of opportunity?” In African urban economies: Viability, vitality, or vitiation?, edited by Deborah Fahy Bryceson and Deborah Potts, 107–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2009. “African cities: Competing claims on urban land.” In African cities: Competing claims on urban spaces, edited by Francesca Locatelli and Paul Nugent, 81–108. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Junod, Henri Alexandre. 1962. The life of a South African tribe, volume II: Mental life. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books Inc. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. “The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process.” In The social life of things—Commodities in cultural perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maranda, Pierre, and Elli Köngäs Maranda. 1971. Structural models in folklore and transformational essays. The Hague: Mouton. Marcus, Solomon. 1997. “The logical and semiotic status of the canonic formula of myth.” Semiotica 116 (2/4): 115–88. Mauss, Marcel. 2005. The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge. Mosko, Mark S. 1991. “The canonic formula of myth and nonmyth.” American Ethnologist 18 (1): 126–51. Munn, Nancy. 1986. The fame of Gawa. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Nielsen, Morten. 2008. “In the vicinity of the state: House construction, personhood, and the State in Maputo, Mozambique.” PhD dissertation, University of Copenhagen, Department of Antropology, ———. 2010. “Mimesis of the state: From natural disaster to urban citizenship on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique.” Social Analysis 54 (3): 153–73. ———. 2011. “Inverse governmentality: The paradoxical production of peri-urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique.” Critique of Anthropology 31 (4): 329–58. ———. 2012. “Interior swelling: On the expansive effects of ancestral interventions in Maputo, Mozambique,” Common Knowledge 18 (3): 433–50. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1992. “Qualified value: The perspective of gift exchange.” In Barter, exchange, and value: An anthropological approach, edited by Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones, 169–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. “Cutting the Network.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (3): 517–35. ———. 2005. Kinship, law and the unexpected: Relatives are always a surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trindade, João Carlos. 2006. “Rupture and continuity in political and legal processes.” In Law and justice in a multicultural society: The case of Mozambique, edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, J. C. Trindade, and Maria Paula Meneses, 31–62. Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. Wagner, Roy. 1979. Lethal speech: Daribi myth as symbolic obviation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1981. The invention of culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1986. Symbols that stand for themselves. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1987. “Figure-ground reversal among the Barok.” In Assemblage of spirits: Idea and image in New Ireland, edited by Louise Lincoln and Tibor Bodrogi, 56–62. New York: George Braziller. [Reprinted in 2012. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 535–42.] Weiner, James F. 1995. The lost drum: The myth of sexuality in Papua New Guinea and beyond. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Asphalte analogique. Conversions de valeur en suspens parmi des jeunes travailleurs de la voirie (Mozambique sud) Résumé : Cet article explore le processus de conversion (obviation) par lequel la valeur des salaires est sans cesse transformée. Pour ce faire, l’article se fonde sur un travail de terrain ethnographique mené auprès de jeunes travailleurs de la voirie employés par un consortium chinois de la construction pour la réhabilitation de l’autoroute N1 dans la partie sud du Mozambique. Pour les travailleurs mozambicains, plutôt que l’indexation d’un rapport fixe entre le travail et l’argent, la valeur des salaires a émergé en abandonnant progressivement les traces de sa propre origine. Ce n’est que lorsque l’argent reçu a permis aux travailleurs de supplanter la relation tendue à leurs supérieurs chinois (par exemple en achetant des matériaux de construction pour la construction d’une maison) qu’il fut considéré comme un salaire correct qui reliait le présent (achat de matériaux de construction) au passé (travaux routiers) de façon viable. Suite à cette conversion initiale, je retrace comment l’association temporelle émergente (travaux routiers :: projet de construction de maison) ouvre de nouvelles images de positions sociales altérées et améliorées pour les jeunes travailleurs de la voirie au Mozambique. L’article propose de considérer la valeur comme un moyen optimal de supplanter (plutôt que de confirmer) les formes existantes de sens relationnel en rapportant le processus de transformation de la valeur en suspens à une cosmologie primordiale temporelle répandue dans la partie sud du Mozambique, et qualifiée de demainitude. Morten NEILSEN is Associate Professor at Aarhus University. His first major fieldwork project was in Recife, Brazil (2000–2001) among community leaders in poor urban neighborhoods. Since 2004 he has been working in Mozambique doing ethnographic research in peri-urban areas of Maputo as well as in rural areas of Cabo del Gado, the northernmost region. Based on his fieldwork in Brazil and Mozambique, he has published on issues such as urban aesthetics, time and temporality, materiality, relational ontologies, and political cosmologies. He is currently involved in a comparative ethnographic research project on Chinese infrastructural interventions in Mozambique and Mongolia. In 2013 he commenced a new research project on land rights and “collapsed futures” in Islay, the southernmost island of the Inner Hebrides. Recent publications include articles in the following publications: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Theory, and Critique of Anthropology. Department of Culture and SocietySection for Anthropology and EthnographyAarhus UniversityMoesgård Allé 20Building 4236, Room 1428270 HøjbjergDenmarketomn@hum.au.dk ___________________ 1. China Henan International Cooperation Group. Co Ltd. (CHICO). 2. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are between Portuguese and English. 3. A Bantu language spoken widely in the southern part of Mozambique. 4. Administração Nacional de Estradas (ANE). 5. The minimum wage for construction work in Mozambique is currently 2,435 MZM (79 USD) per month.  

What Pehuenche blood does This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Cristóbal Bonelli. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.004 What Pehuenche blood does Hemic feasting, intersubjective participation, and witchcraft in Southern Chile Cristóbal BONELLI, Amsterdam University Among the Pehuenche, blood is extracted from humans and animals and shared and eaten among people, offered as food to land spirits and deities, as well as devoured by evil spirits and witches. Through an ethnographic analysis of eating and feeding practices involving a variety of blood eaters, this article argues that blood (Ch. mollvün), as it functions in rural Pehuenche people’s practices in Southern Chile, indexes the capacity to create relationships and is itself the result of relationships. By focusing on what mollvün does as well as on the practices through which it is collectively made and maliciously unmade by witches, I show how mollvün challenges, interferes with, and reconfigures current anthropological conceptualizations of blood as substance. Keywords: blood, substance, inter-stance, eating, feeding, Pehuenche, capacity I will never forget the first time I met Marta, a Pehuenche woman in her forties who was my neighbor when I lived in the town of Ralko in Southern Chile. In the very first week of my fieldwork, Marta introduced herself while I was walking around town. She told me we were neighbors and invited me to her house to see the woollen socks she was working on. She told me I should buy them since winter nights were extremely cold in the mountains. One thing that really struck me that day was the way she referred to her husband. She told me that she was married to a man who had the same type of blood as me. She also mentioned that he was a non-Pehuenche person who had heard about my arrival and wanted to meet me too. We spoke about many things that day, and she also mentioned that recently, a young man had died on the road that ran along the Queuko River. Most people considered this death to be due to a tragic encounter between the man and an evil spirit. “His blood was eaten,” she said, “his body was without blood when he was found.”1 Yet, she warned me not be worried about that since I had “good defenses.” It took me some time to understand that I was immune to such attacks because of my particular blood type: according to many people in Southern Chile, evil spirits do not like to eat winka blood, namely blood that is not Pehuenche. Before my arrival in Alto Bío Bío, I could not have foreseen how important eating blood is, not only for Pehuenche spirits, but also for Pehuenche people. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out among Pehuenche people living in Alto Bío Bío, this article seeks to account for Pehuenche practices in which blood, or mollvün in the Pehuenche language, is not simply a good substance to think with (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 1969) but also an exquisite matter to nourish and devour.2 In order to offer an ethnographic theory that emerges from the data (rather than the other way around), in this article I will use the Pehuenche concept mollvün rather than the English term “blood.” My argument in this article resonates with recent anthropological vocabularies dealing with kinship experiences and the transpersonal unities of bodies (see Stasch 2009; Sahlins 2013). I suggest that among the Pehuenche, eating and feeding practices concerning mollvün might be regarded as particular practices of “intersubjective participation” (Sahlins 2013). More particularly, and through the ethnographic description of eating and feeding practices concerning mollvün, I seek to reveal how in Pehuenche understandings, mollvün can be regarded as the very capacity needed to activate such a participation or shared existence (cf. Lévy-Bruhl 1949). By focusing on what mollvün does as well as on the practices through which it is made and unmade, I show how mollvün challenges and interferes with current anthropological conceptualizations of blood as substance. Pehuenche mollvün beyond unsubtle connections A widespread approach to blood in anthropology is to use the term “substance” as a suitable term to convey indigenous understandings of blood, on the grounds that substance is a good concept to think with because of its semantic flexibility and its multiple meanings (see Carsten 2001). Whereas the semantic flexibility of the term “substance” has allowed the destabilization of traditional analytical dichotomies within kinship analytics between the “biological” and the “social,” the ambiguities of the concept have also made it difficult to deploy in a rigorous and clear comparative approach within different ethnographic scenarios (ibid.). To cut a long story short, blood has been anthropologically considered as a bodily substance plus its particular extensive symbolic repertoire (Wade 2002; Carsten 2004, 2011) or symbolic potential (Copeman 2009a, 2009b; Carsten 2011; Hugh-Jones 2011).3 More importantly, the semantic flexibility of the term “substance” has made it possible to gloss over the separating distinction of material and symbolic properties of blood. In fact, various authors have argued that the term “substance” allows the material and metaphorical properties of blood to merge. Whereas Carsten (2011) and Mayblin (2013) have suggested that blood can function as both metaphor and metonym, Weston (2013) has recently offered us the concept of the “meta-materiality” of blood to refer to how the symbolic attributes of blood are not separable from the material ones, making explicit that what blood invokes goes beyond both metaphor and the material.4 Inspired by these scholars’ contributions with regard to the problematic distinction between material and symbolic properties of blood, in this article I would like to show how even the idea that material and symbolic properties of blood “merge” does not accurately resonate with what Pehuenche mollvün is, because for the Pehuenche these categories are not separated in the first place. Following from this—and rather than focusing on how substance has been used in the analysis of kinship, or on what substance does to kinship (Carsten 2001)—in this article I explore how Pehuenche mollvün challenges hackneyed notions of substance.5 My intention in what follows is not to offer an extensive review of the remarkable body of literature on blood and kinship. Rather, and considering recent understandings of kinship as forms of mutual belonging that extend beyond common substance (Sahlins 2013), I wish simply to suggest that a precondition for engaging in the quest of describing Pehuenche mollvün ethnographically is to make room for the direct interference of indigenous concepts with anthropological conceptualizations of such common substance. My intention in doing so is not to dismiss the fruitfulness of the term “substance” within anthropological debates on kinship, but to suggest that Pehuenche understandings of mollvün as the matter responsible for constructing relatedness (see Wagner 1977) destabilize the separation, and even the distinction, between material and symbolic properties of blood. In fact, Carsten herself has cautioned that the connection “between what we might think of as the literal qualities of bodily substances and their metaphorical associations” is rather “unsubtle” and “becomes immediately more complex if we explore the relational dimensions of how they are apprehended” (2011: 24). Carsten makes apparent the epistemological risks anthropologists might face when dividing blood into what I suggest are now three conceptual containers: the literal qualities of bodily “substances,” blood’s metaphorical associations, and its relational dimensions. Rather than distinguishing my ethnography among the Pehuenche from an anthropological analytic of blood that considers how material and symbolic properties merge in the case of blood, in this article I aim to demonstrate how mollvün does not assume the discrete existence of a symbolic world apart from a material one in the first place. In fact, the distinctions between the literal, metaphorical, and relational dimensions of mollvün are not simply unsubtle among the Pehuenche, but rather are nonexistent.6 I should add here that my argument is not a critique of the entirety of symbolic anthropology and its efforts to address indigenous conceptual repertoires, but rather to suggest that the conceptual separation between material and symbolic properties of blood, and more particularly its interpretation of blood as symbol, should not be imputed to Pehuenche understandings of mollvün. In a nutshell, thinking about Pehuenche mollvün in terms of the literal, metaphorical, and relational dimensions of blood involves the risk of committing “epistemocide” (Scholte 1984)—or, in Lévi-Strauss’ terms (1955), a destruction of the object of our attachment and its replacement with another that might be homonymous but pragmatically behaves quite differently. The argument I wish to put forward in this article is constituted by the simple ethnographic description of Pehuenche eating and feeding mollvün practices as paradigmatic events of the local construction of Pehuenche consubstantiality (Pitt-Rivers 1973) that not only extend beyond the notions of common substance (Sahlins 2013), but also go beyond the separation between (and so the “merging” of) material and symbolic properties of blood. Eating mollvün: Niachi Among all the things about which I was ignorant concerning life in Alto Bío Bío, the fact that I had not eaten the blood of freshly killed animals, or niachi, was one of the things I was most often teased about. In what follows, I would like to suggest that eating animals’ blood implies eating the result of generative relationships, and in turn generates the capacity for those relationships to be recomposed.7 Among the Pehuenche, eating blood makes one’s blood stronger, therefore enriching a person’s capacity for establishing productive relationships. My neighbor Marta was particularly surprised that I had never tried niachi, and it was not long before she invited me to the primary school graduation party of one of her daughters. This celebration was very important, she told me, and her husband Ronaldo was going to kill a goat or a sheep and share the meat and blood with their friends. When the day of the graduation arrived, Marta’s youngest daughter hurried over to my house to tell me that they were about to kill the animal, and she invited me to join them. Once in their house, I noticed that Ronaldo was putting off killing the sheep since Marta was still preparing the bowl into which the animal’s blood would be poured. In the bowl, Marta mixed some coriander, a pinch of salt, and, most importantly, a very spicy chili pepper (Ch. trapi) which, I discovered some months later, helps keep evil spirits away. Once Marta was ready, Ronaldo finally slaughtered the sheep using his knife, twisting it in the animal’s neck for a quick death. While the sheep was bleeding, Marta placed the bowl close to the animal’s neck in order to collect the warm, red liquid. Once the blood was in the bowl and the animal was dead, Marta added some lemon and oil, stirring the concoction a bit. She then poured a spoonful of it out the window, looked at me, and said: “We always feed the püllü spirit, the land spirit. By doing so, the püllü will always help us by bringing food for the family. You will always have food if you feed the püllü.” By pouring this spoonful out of the window, Marta was feeding the püllü, and thereby creating a relationship between her family and the spirit. We then waited a while for the blood to coagulate before cutting the niachi into little squares and finally eating it. “This is always the prize after having worked hard,” Marta said. “It gives you strength, good luck, so you can keep on working.” Each of us using our own spoon, we shared the niachi from one bowl.8 Wasting niachi A few months afer the graduation party, I again experienced of the importance of niachi when I was invited to accompany the health workers from the main health clinic in Alto Bío Bío on one of their trips. For the past ten years, workers at the Ralko healthcare clinic have been undertaking preventative health campaigns in the highest parts of the Andes. In January 2010 I accompanied the public health team on their journey to Cochico, one of the veranadas or summer locations in the high pastures. In this place, the Pehuenche communities of Trapa Trapa and Butalelbun spend their summers. After several hours on horseback we arrived at the first makeshift construction of planks of wood (Sp. puesto). Our host Edwin was a man in his forties, who allowed us to set up camp by his family’s puesto. He arrived at the camp after us, accompanied by a friend of his. Both of them had spent the whole day taking care of their animals (Sp. campeando). After some friendly greetings and conversation, the chief of the health team spoke to Edwin about buying a goat to eat that night. Edwin said he would be happy to sell us a goat, adding, “Well, yes, that’s my job, to feed them, not like yours that is just pencilwork ….9 Yes, you are just a pencil. Not me, I take care of animals the whole day.” Edwin then left, and as it was becoming dark, he returned with a white goat. “How do you want it? Alive or dead?” Edwin asked. “Dead,” said the chief of the healthcare team. Edwin killed the goat using his knife, twisting it in the animal’s neck in the same manner as Ronaldo had done with the sheep. While the goat was bleeding from its neck, Edwin fretted about the animal’s blood being wasted. “No one wants to eat niachi?” No one responded. “We wasted the niachi,” he said, frustrated, as he proceeded to carnear (En. to butcher) the animal. As Edwin’s comments to the chief of the health team demonstrate, the practices related to the caring and feeding of shared animals and the subsequent collection of animal blood are much more significant than “pencil” work, since pencils, like health workers, do not socially interact with animals: health workers are useless and herders are useful caretakers. To say that health workers are “just pencils” is another way of saying that those people are very distant from the significant practices taking place in veranadas. Indeed, the health workers did not even show any interest in the valuable niachi pouring out in front of them. I heard the sentence “We wasted the niachi” on countless occasions. It was always uttered by Pehuenche people engaged in affinal economic transactions undertaken between themselves and foreigners, the latter being either tourists or public health workers who did not want to eat the animal blood.10 For the Pehuenche, wasting niachi is forbidden. Furthermore, and in contrast to the witches’ eating practices of blood that I will describe below, niachi is never eaten individually and has to be shared and distributed properly. It entails an eating practice that is more than individual. In this sense, niachi might be conceived of as a precious food that composes transpersonal interactions, and intersubjective participation, between real people, or che: eating mollvün entails and affords the composition of “a moral position of being ‘unitary, solidary, amicable with someone’” (Stasch 2009: 133).11 After that primary school graduation party given by Marta’s family, during which I ate niachi for the first time, Marta began calling me lamngen, which is a kinship term used reciprocally between women and men who consider each other real or classificatory siblings (see Isla 2005). To some extent, my own relation with Marta was recomposed through eating practices concerning mollvün, and resonates with Salihns’ approach to kinship as a “manifold of intersubjective participations, founded on mutualities of being” (2011: 12). But where does the mollvün come from that plays such a central role in enacting intersubjective participations? Cultivating mollvün The Alto Bío Bío landscape is shaped by a system of altitudinal zones that allow for the development of distinct stockbreeding and agricultural practices that, most importantly for this discussion, are bound up in particular ways with mollvün—in this case the collective cultivation of animal blood.12 The Alto Bío Bío’s zones comprise two different types of regions, known as the invernadas and the veranadas. The invernadas are the winter stations in the low valleys. The veranadas, summer stations in the high pastures, are particularly important regions because, as a Pehuenche herbalist, Flora, once explained to me, “our food is in the veranadas; there is food for everyone there, animals and people.” Because food and consumption are not simply instrumental practices, but involve mollvün as the very capacity to establish relationships, Flora’s assessment also speaks to the centrality of mollvün in the herding activities that take place in the veranadas. Residence in winter and summer stations is dictated by seasonal weather changes and is dependent upon the presence or absence of snow. The rearing of cattle (kullin in Chedungun) takes place through seasonal migration practices, and the main activity of herders in the veranadas is usually referred to as campear (En. to go to graze), a Spanish word that is used when herders, riding on their horses, spend their days looking for the cattle that have moved around while grazing.13 During the day, animals can eat and move freely through the mountainous fields, but when night approaches, herders have to help the cattle get back to the enclosures situated near each family’s puesto. Occasionally, when the area where animals are grazing is not the best in terms of the available vegetation, herders bring all of the animals together before relocating the cattle to a more suitable place. The most important outcome of the time spent in the veranadas, as Rene once told me, is the fattening up of animals (Sp. engordar los animales). While this outcome may appear to be simply material—in the sense of producing sustenance—Rene told me that the fattening of animals means that “everyone is happy, animals and people.” “Fattening” refers not only to increased meat or weight, but also to the fact that, as Flora and several other herders told me many times, “the more animals eat, the stronger their blood becomes.” Thus, stock-breeding practices and human–animal interactions are crucial for the cultivation of the precious animal blood. Herders’ practices serve to cultivate mollvün, which in turn grants a capacity for producing further relations between people. To further elaborate how mollvün is bound up with the capacity to establish relationships, I will address the nguillatun ritual. Considering that animals’ blood is important in this ritual, I should make explicit from the outset that, even though there is a sort of a predominant anthropocentrism in Pehuenche conceptions of mollvün, and even though some people say that animal blood has more force than that of humans, Pehuenche people are not really concerned with defining similarities or differences between the constitution of human blood as compared to animal blood.14 Like people, animals are the result of the assemblage of different components, and mollvün is the capacity that keeps these components related. Every time someone who is awake sees the invisible form of another person or animal, they refer to this as an am: an invisible double that manifests itself as a fleeting visible appearance, able to be seen but not touched. The relation between the person or animal and the am is not stable, however, as I came to understand through stories related to me by my host Pedro. He told me that when he was a child, he and some other children once saw a little calf near the river while they were looking for their cow, which was eating grass somewhere in the area. After having found their cow, they came back to the place where the little calf had been. They could not find it, and there were no visible traces of the animal at all. On another occasion, in that same place, they heard the loud roaring of a bull. When they looked for the bull, ready to catch it with a rope, there was no sign of it anywhere. Pedro told me that these animals that appear and disappear are called “enchanted animals” (Sp. animales encantados), also referred to as an animal’s am (Ch. am kullin). The children had seen the visible form of the animal or person, but it had disappeared in its form as am. I will show how feeding or eating mollvün serves to compose not just persons or animals, but also relationships, since relations themselves are composed and decomposed through mollvün. These binding capacities of mollvün became apparent to me when I participated in the prayer performed at the nguillatun ceremony, which takes place over three days. On the first day, shelters are constructued in a U-shape, so the activities of each family are easily visible from the shelters of all the other families. This infrastructure offers perhaps the only occasion in Pehuenche life in which Pehuenche people are visible as constituting a collective entity. Chavid, a drink-food made of pewen pinenuts, is collectively prepared on the second day of the three-day ritual.15 In a big pot hanging over their shelter’s open fire, each family boils several kilos of pinenuts collected from the most elevated areas of the nearby mountains. (In the days preceding the ritual, it is very common to hear people wondering whether or not they are prepared [Sp. estar preparado] to proceed with the forthcoming ritual with enough pinenuts.) Once the water has boiled, the pinenuts are taken out of the pot and carefully peeled. Afterward, they are put back into the same pot until the water begins to boil again. Then, the pinenuts are taken out of the pot once more and ground with a manual grinding machine in order to remove any water remaining from the boiling process. Each family puts their ground pinenuts in a container made of wood (Ch. dalka) or pottery (Ch. menkul), where they are left to ferment until the next day. The prayer, which occurs on the third day, is at the core of the ritual, because it is a moment of extended commensality in which this food is offered collectively to Ngenechen, the Mapuche supreme being.16 The chavid prepared by each family is blended with the chavid of the others. The ritual involves mixing the mollvün of a sacrificed animal with the collected chavid. The mixture of chavid with mollvün might be regarded as the paradigmatic matter of relatedness, where mollvün is a crucial element in the establishment of the fertile relation between the Pehuenche as a unitary group and their supreme being. More particularly, the mixing of the mollvün with the chavid entails the powerful mingling of foods that are not only the result of relationships, but are also endowed with the capacity for producing and reinforcing intersubjective participation. As many people told me, after the ritual people are closer to each other. This does not refer simply to an emotional sense of companionship, but rather to consubstantiality, as the Pehuenche refer to themselves as being a unitary composition. Notably, this Pehuenche emphasis on consubstantiality as the basis of relatedness is linguistically embedded: to be “accompanied” or to be “together” can be expressed in Chedungun as “to be one” (Ch. kiñewün), which also means “to be many.” This expression is often used within the nguillatun ritual (Ch. Kiñewünküleygün ngillatun mew). In this sense, I suggest, mollvün is a particular kind of food that creates relationships not only between people but also between people and Ngenechen through a series of linked relations that, once again, are themselves constituted by relations and constitute still other relations in turn. Animals are fed by people, and as they grow, the animals’ mollvün is cultivated through those interactions. Animals’ eating practices strengthen the animals’ mollvün, which in turn, when offered as food, actualizes the relation between the Pehuenche and their supreme being Ngenechen. The relations established between people and animals (in herding), and between animals and the food they eat in that process, collectively generate and strengthen the further relation between people and their god. Following from this, I suggest that mollvün is not simply the end product of interactions between people and animals, but it is also the capacity needed for, in the case of nguillatun, the relationship between the Pehuenche and Ngenechen to take place. Let’s remember that the practice of giving “thanks to the supreme deity Ngenechen for past providence and to request continued providence for the future” (Course 2012: 3) is performed through feeding practices concerning mollvün and chavid. These thanks are offered materially through the mixing of the two fluids, each of which issues from the collective experiences of intersubjective work: the cultivation of animal mollvün, the collection of pinenuts, and the collective preparation of chavid. Yet, as I have already mentioned, it is not only Ngenechen who feeds on mollvün; Pehuenche people also derive great value from eating animal blood. In fact, during the ritual, on the same day in which the main prayer takes place, each family sacrifices an animal (a sheep or a goat) in their small shelter to be eaten and shared with the other families.17 Before eating and sharing the animal’s meat, each family eats the animal’s blood or niachi, which helps, as I was told many times, to strengthen the mollvün of the eater. Küme mollvün, weya mollvün In Alto Bío Bío, mollvün also constitutes morality, or moral behavior—it is a moral substance.18 Mollvün refers to the morality of people’s actions in the sense that people’s actions themselves are grounded and depend on the type of mollvün they have—or exhibit. In fact, Pehuenche theories of action are premised on particular capacities or incapacities attributed to mollvün. People act, see, and take care of others (or not) in particular ways depending on what their mollvün is like. When people speak about these moral aspects related to the quality of mollvün, they are not only speaking metaphorically, or making a transference in the semantic space; they are rather using mollvün as itself constitutive of moral actions. In this respect, mollvün is something like a “literal metaphor” (Cochetti 1995), namely a kind of metaphor that not only stands for itself, but actually embodies itself (see West 2007).19 A Pehuenche person can be defined by others as having either weak-bad blood (Ch. weya mollvün) or good-strong blood (Ch. küme mollvün). Just as blood constitutes morality, so too moral action can generate (good) blood. For example, having good-strong blood is strongly related to practices of generative commensality (eating like and with someone). In fact, the strengthening of good blood must be achieved through daily, as well as more ritualized, practices of commensality.20 And at the same time, again, one cannot only reinforce küme mollvün through practices of commensality, but practices of comensality are afforded by küme mollvün. It is very important for people in Alto Bío Bío to always be well fed and to share food with others, exchanges that generally take place in the kütralwe. Kütralwe literally means the place of the fire, usually translated into Spanish as fogón (fire) or cocina (kitchen). This is the place where daily activities such as cooking and sharing food and telling stories take place. Once, while having breakfast with the herbalist Flora in her kütralwe, her small nephew Juan complained that he did not want to eat. Flora responded by referencing her brother, who had been “grabbed by the devil,” and committed suicide (Ch. kidu lamwvun, literally “killed himself alone”). She said: “If you don’t want an evil spirit to come get you and kill you like your uncle, it is better that you eat.… You need to have strong blood (Ch. küme mollvün) if you want to go to the mountains.”21 The point I would like to emphasize here again is that in Alto Bío Bío, mollvün indexes the capacity, or incapacity, to establish protective relationships of mutual belonging. Moreover, the generative aspects of mollvün are themselves the result of such relationships.22 In this respect, good blood is both the source and outcome of a person’s productive relationships with others. Conversely, as my host Pedro once told me: “Those who have bad thoughts or evil thoughts and want to fight and kill someone, that is evil, that’s bad blood (Ch. weya mollvün), that is arrogant blood.” Having weya mollvün refers to someone’s inability, or failure, to establish generative interactions and mutual belonging (Sahlins 2013). The capacity to establish such relations, furthermore, is itself a form of morality. For example, one of my hosts’ elderly sisters was often referred to as having weya mollvün because she had failed—refused—to raise her daughter Nadia. But the most powerful expression of this negative moral position is the existence of witches. In the words of my host Pedro: “What witches want is to destroy people, because they do not have the heart that allows them to look at other people as equals. (Sp. No tienen el corazón para mirar a otras personas de igual a igual.) They have weya mollvün.” As Pedro had said, witches are not able to look at other people as equals and are always characterized by feelings of envy, a negative moral intentionality that threatens the nondestructive composition generated among people of good blood, the relationships between those who are able to see each other as equals. The one time I met Marianela, a supposed witch from Pitril, she confessed to me that she was extremely upset with the people who were organizing the nguillatun ritual, because they had not invited her to participate with the rest of the community. For this reason, she had conducted her own ceremony with her family, but without friends.23 When I told my host family about this encounter, admittedly feeling a general sensation of unease, they advised me not to talk to Marianela again, because she had bad blood (Ch. weya mollvün) and bad thinking (Ch. weya rakiduam). Hence, it was necessary to keep away from her and her evil intentions. To sum up: those who do look down on people are considered to have bad blood, or weya mollvün. This is the case for witches, who are not only defined by their bad blood, but are also infamous for their nocturnal blood-eating practices. Nguken, or sucking mollvün out In Alto Bío Bío, stories about people whose mollvün has been sucked out are very common. In fact, uncanny blood-eating practices are generally associated not only with supernatural evil spirits such as the one mentioned by Marta at the beginning of this article, but also, and mostly, with witches’ nocturnal attacks.24 These Pehuenche manifestations of witchcraft are known as nguken.25 The invisible nocturnal predators at work in these situations are not eating a material substance: what is eaten in nguken situations is the very capacity for relationships to be composed, including those properties deemed to constitute or compose a person. As the following discussion will suggest, nguken experiences may be considered paradigmatic situations through which to think about Pehuenche understandings of relatedness precisely because they imply a disruption, or weakening, of such forms of relatedness.26 As night approaches, Pehuenche people usually gather around the kütralwe before going to sleep. Privacy is of the essence; for the Pehuenche it is critical to close their curtains properly. I remember how uncomfortable one particular woman became when I sat near a window facing the road during a visit to her home, unwittingly preventing her from closing the curtains. After a while, she anxiously asked me to close the curtains myself because it was very dangerous not to do so. Someone, an evil spiritual visitor, could be watching us, planning a visit, she argued. The threat of an unwelcome visit by an evil spirit is always related to the (absent) presence of a kalku, a polysemic term which might refer to (a) a person who has the capacity to perform witchcraft; (b) a harmful device or instrument used by witches; (c) an evil spirit owned by a witch.27 This polysemic use of the word kalku can be also understood by considering the profound intertwinement between witches and particular evil spirits involved in nguken. In fact, it is not always possible to clearly separate the evil spirits executing nocturnal attacks from the witches themselves. Evil spirits are usually named through ambiguous terms, categories that are nothing more than names used to designate an unknowable source of evil. Even when an evil spirit manifests itself, this manifestation is never fixed or definitive and can instead be repeatedly transformed. Samuel, an evangelical Pehuenche, once explained that evil spirits “can turn themselves into cats, dogs, chickens, roosters, people, male goats … thousands of things.”28 At the same time, in many cases these transformations are considered to be the witch herself who has turned into an evil spirit. The evil bird chonchon, for instance, infamous for its capacity to eat the blood of sleeping people, is known by Pehuenche people as the flying kalku’s head.29 Following from this, the nocturnal eater of blood is bound up with the uncanny personal composition of a witch: the chonchon is a witch in another form. Nguken is a concept that Pehuenche people regard as impossible to translate into Spanish. Most simply, it refers to nocturnal events during which sleeping people are the targets of predatory attacks and their blood is slowly sucked out. In the vernacular, people refer to the nocturnal attackers as “visitors” (Sp. visitas, Ch. witran), that is, eaters who temporarily inhabit the domestic space. The defining feature of these nocturnal attacks is the predatory performance in which sleepers’ mollvün is enacted as food by the eater.30 When the victims are not literally killed by this bloody feast, they become sick. After unbearable nguken-nights, my host Pedro spent most of the following day in silence, being apart, without wanting to work, and fearing that he would finally be killed. His capacity for speech was reduced, as were his personal strength and his ability to take care of other humans and animals. Persons whose blood has been partially sucked out during nocturnal attacks undergo an apparent decrease in their capacity to establish relationships with others. While it is possible to describe the events in the terms I have used so far, nguken situations can only be fully understood by considering Pehuenche notions of personhood. As I have shown elsewhere (Bonelli 2012a, 2012b), a Pehuenche person can be thought of as a personal composition made up of a corporeal support, an invisible double that inhabits the corporeal support and is known as am, and a protector spirit called püllü. To simplify somewhat, a person is considered to be the result of the assemblage of these different components. When considering nguken, it is necessary to keep in mind that during sleep, the components of the personal composition are highly dislocated. While sleeping, the corporeal support is situated far away from its am, its invisible double. However, sleeping, although it is a moment of personal dislocation, is not one of disintegration. Put differently, even though sleeping entails a particular detachment of the components of a person, the sleeper is still a person. Even though the personal composition undergoes a dislocation, these components are still tied together through the binding capacities of mollvün, as I will demonstrate. The binding capacity of mollvün is invisible. However, this invisibility cannot be described in terms of the allegedly symbolic property of blood that merges with the material aspects of Pehuenche mollvün. Instead, it refers to a capacity to compose persons that nguken in turn has the capacity to disrupt. Whereas the temporary state of separation occurring between the am and the corporeal support is at the core of Pehuenche sleeping and dreaming (see Bonelli 2012a, 2012b), and of nguken, a permanent state of nonrelating between these components is the central aspect of Pehuenche understandings of death. In extreme cases, nguken can itself actually cause the victim’s death, understood as the final irrevocable decomposition of the person: the total consumption of persons’ mollvün destroys the link between their visible corporeal support and their invisible am. Thus, in addition to deteriorating a person’s capacity to establish further productive relationships, witches’ eating practices simultaneously undermine the relations between the different components of a person, sometimes to the point of death. In what follows, I will show how nocturnal attacks imply an experience of personal decomposition strongly related to the extraction of mollvün that can be understood as the alteration of mutualities of belonging. The nocturnal visitor waits for a person to sleep before initiating a visitation. In the words of my host Pedro, this ensures the person’s greatest vulnerability: “Witches tell their evil spirits that they have to go and kill that particular person, to weaken him, to beat him at night when he is in bed. So the evil spirit waits to take advantage.” Evil spirits “take advantage” of the situation during which the personal composition no longer holds; this defines the state of sleep. In particular, the separation of the püllü, or caretaker spirit, in the state of sleep, offers the eater a unique opportunity: “That thing waits until I am in a deep sleep, then it frightens my püllü spirit, and the truth is, there is nothing one can do against him. That is the problem. If I could, I would grab him. I’d grab him and beat him with a stick.”31 In other words, the decomposition of the relations composing a person generates a situation in which a person is not capable of (re)acting. Yet, there is one more task the evil spirit must carry out before it can eat the blood of a sleeping victim. Once a person is decomposed, so to speak, the evil spirit has to penetrate the sleeper’s corporeal support: “The evil spirit arrives at the body, and I don’t know how it enters. I don’t understand how it enters if my body is all closed. If the head is all closed, how does it enter?”32 The stages of a nocturnal visitation are thus the following: first, the person needs to be asleep. Once the am has left the personal composition, the nocturnal visitor then takes advantage of the situation and tries to frighten away the püllü spirit. After the visitor has successfully further “decomposed” this part of the personal composition, the third stage of nocturnal visitations takes place: the evil spirit enters the sleeper’s corporeal support. It is only then that the sleeper’s mollvün is finally reached and eaten. During my time in Alto Bío Bío, I hoped (in vain) to come across visual evidence of these predatory attacks. What was striking for me was that nocturnal visitors left no sign whatsoever of their bloody feast. In its visible and tangible properties, the corporeal support remained untouched. This fact was not a paradox for the Pehuenche, however, precisely because blood (what they call sangre in Spanish and mollvün in Chedungun), which is sucked out by the evil spirit, is not a material bodily substance traveling within bounded bodies. The absence of any visible trail of consumption can be explained not in terms of the nocturnal visitors’ eating of mollvün as a symbolic act, but rather as something radically different. The separation between the material and the symbolic properties of mollvün was nonexistent in these eating practices. Instead, the absence of visual signs indexes a blood-object that “exists” here but in the form of a substance that is neither material nor symbolic, nor some form of “merged” relation between the two. Mollvün as inter-stance All of the ethnographic situations highlighted above shed light on the various ways Pehuenche people and relations are composed (and decomposed) through mollvün. More particularly, these materials show how mollvün can be understood as a substance of relatedness with the capacity to assemble different kind of relationships within Pehuenche life. Nguken situations and witches’ eating practices illustrate (negatively) how a personal composition coheres through the binding capacities of mollvün. Mollvün links visible and invisible components of a person; it is therefore (to put it simply) at once a visible fluid and an invisible capacity in between the spiritual soul and the corporeal support. Moreover, mollvün both determines how people act, see, and take care (or not) of others, depending on what their blood is like; and also grants a capacity for producing further relations between people, between people and püllü spirits, and between people and Ngenechen. Last but not least, eating animals’ blood or niachi helps to strengthen the mollvün of the eater, therefore enriching a person’s capacity to establish further productive relationships. Bearing in mind that among Pehuenche people, witches are always thought of as being responsible for nguken events, Amazonian research concerning eating people might appear as a suitable parallel literature to think with. In a remarkable article taking into account the more productive relational schema of Amazonian contexts which are strongly characterized by predation, Fausto (2007) makes a distinction between two modes of human consumption: cannibalism and anthropophagy. The former refers to eating practices in which the other is eaten in his or her personal condition as a person, whereas the latter takes place on those occasions where eating involves “desubjectifying the prey” (504).33 The procedures through which anthropophagy practices are performed entail a series of shamanic and culinary operations that avoid cannibalism: the game animal (which is considered human) needs to be produced as food and “be reduced to the condition of an inert object” (503).34 Taking into account these conceptualizations, one might be tempted to think of nguken as situations configuring a particular kind of opportunistic anthropophagy, in the sense that a person is already apparently “desubjectified” in the state of sleep such that the evil spirit only needs to wait for the opportunity of sleep to attack. However, sleepers are not fully desubjectified prey since their mollvün sustains the relationship between component parts. Nguken situations cannot be thought of as cannibalistic either, however, since sleepers are also not fully composed as persons. This Amerindian theoretical framework becomes a helpful tool with which to think about nguken insofar as eating mollvün involves eating an entity situated somewhere on the subject–object continuum. However, the Pehuenche materials presented in this article index a rather different type of eating relation that goes beyond the clear distinction between eater-as-subject and bodily substances as parts of subjects that should be objectified in order to be eaten. Marilyn Strathern’s (2012) recent reexamination of her material on Hagen eating and feeding may be helpful in thinking about this eating relating in a different way. She writes that “[w]hat agents eat of others are the outcomes of those others’ actions, the things they have grown and nurtured” (11, emphasis added), much as the mollvün eaten among the Pehuenche is (variously) the outcome of their labors with animals as well as their moral labors (or lack thereof). Just as “work is an index of strength” (9) for the Hagen, “good blood” is an index of moral rectitude and relational capacity for the Pehuenche. However, in Strathern’s account, substance analogizes and is substitutable (Strathern 1988; see also Carsten 2001), such that items of consumption consist of “substitutes” (Strathern 1988) for others’ previous acts. This idea resonates with Pehuenche materials but does not fully account for what mollvün -eating practices make (or do not make) Pehuenche agents do. Even if mollvün has to do with people’s actions (and the very capacity for those actions to take place), it would be fairer to say that it works as the capacity that affords such intersubjective work, and not as its substitute. Furthermore, mollvün is not only the material effect of such intersubjective work; it is also the capacity that affords interactions, and commensality, between human and nonhuman agents such as püllü spirits and Ngenechen.35 Mollvün, in Pehuenche terms, is not, once again, a substance in which material and symbolic properties merge, but rather a nonparadoxical visible-invisible connecting capacity between the personal composition, between people and püllü spirits, between people and Ngenechen, and even between true people, or che, and witches.36 Taking these Pehuenche propositions seriously necessarily implies the betrayal of one’s own language (see Viveiros de Castro 2003). In the current context, this betrayal implicates the distinction (merged or otherwise) used widely among anthropologists between material and symbolic properties of blood. I have sought to show through the above ethnographic analysis that there is no foundational material substance with symbolic potential in the case of Pehuenche mollvün, however much the language we use to analyze it might suggest otherwise. In considering eating and feeding practices among the Pehuenche, my aim has been to utilize the language that belongs to anthropological reflections on blood in order to generate a divergence internal to it (see Strathern 1998; da Col and Graeber 2011).37 By considering the relational capacities of mollvün, I have attempted to preserve the ethnographic uniqueness of the concept of mollvün by showing how this notion embeds a connecting matter in between personal components, in between people, and in between people and püllü spirits, as well as in between people and Ngenechen. As such, mollvün invites us to rethink the concept of “substance.” Despite its sematic flexibility, the term substantia refers to being, essence, or material, and derives from the word substans, the present participle of substare, meaning “to stand or to be under.” This article attempts to show that mollvün is not a sub-stance (or an under-stance) in which material and symbolic properties merge, but rather a capacity to construct relationships: Pehuenche mollvün is more an inter-stance than a sub-stance. I have attempted to show how Pehuenche mollvün, as a connecting capacity, interferes with previous anthropological analyses of blood: whereas ethnographically mollvün connects different entities of Pehuenche life in intersubjective participation, analytically it creates a disruptive link between ethnographic facts and wider anthropological reflections on substance, as a conceptual container for the merging of material and symbolic properties of blood. Thus, as an inter-stance, Pehuenche mollvün not only extends beyond the notions of common substance, but also goes beyond the separation between material and symbolic properties of blood. In showing how different eating and feeding mollvün practices constitute a particular Pehuenche compositional existence both within persons and between them and their worlds of people, animals, and spirits, this article has offered an ethnographic inter-stance in which there is a merging of negative and positive aspects of this compositional form of shared existence. Acknowledgments I would like to express my thanks to the many people in Alto Bío Bío who helped me begin to understand mollvün, in particular to Narciso Vita Gallina, Jose Carihuentro Millaleo, and Nolfa Pavián Montre. I gratefully acknowledge the three reviewers for HAU for their careful readings and encouragements. I am also grateful to Filippo Bertoni, Janet Carsten, Claudia Castaneda, Magnus Course, Giovanni da Col, Piergiorgio di Giminiani, Peter Geschiere, Marcelo Gonzalez, Tjitske Holtrop, Annemarie Mol, Marcelo Pakman, Emilia Sanabria, Laetitia Smoll, Daniela Vicherat-Mattar, Else Vogel, and Antonia Walford for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article. This article was written thanks to an ERC grant (AdG09 Nr. 249397), the research project “The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory,” led by Annemarie Mol, and support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies—ICIIS, Conicyt/Fondap/15110006. References Albert, Bruce. 1985. “Temps du sang, temps des cendres.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Paris X, Nanterre. Alonqueo, Martín. 1979. Instituciones religiosas del pueblo Mapuche. Santiago: Ediciones Nueva Universidad. Ashforth, Adam. 2005. Witchcraft, violence, and democracy in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Augusta, Felix José. [1916] 1991. Diccionario araucano. Temuco: Editorial Kushe. Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella. 1997. “Las múltiples máscaras de Ngünechen: Las batallas ontológicas y semánticas del ser supremo Mapuche en Chile.” Journal of Latin American Lore 20 (1): 173–204. ———. 2001. La voz del kultrun en la modernidad: Tradición y cambio en la terapeutica de siete Machi Mapuche. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile. ———. 2007. Shamans of the foye tree: Gender, power, and healing among Chilean Mapuche. Austin: University of Texas Press. Belaúnde, Luisa. 2006. “The strength of thoughts, the stench of blood: Amazonian hematology and gender.” Tipití: Journal of the Society for Anthropology of Lowland South America 4 (1–2): 57–80. Bengoa, José. 2000. Historia del pueblo mapuche: Siglo XIX y XX. Santiago: Lom. Bonelli, Cristóbal. 2012a. “Visions and divisions in Pehuenche life.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh. ———. 2012b. “Ontological disorders: Nightmares, psychotropic drugs and evil spirits in Southern Chile.” Anthropological Theory 12 (4): 407–26. Canals Frau, Salvador. 1953. Las poblaciones indígenas de la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Carsten, Janet. 2001. “Substantivism, anti-substantivism, and anti-anti-substantivism.” In Relative values, edited by Sarah McKinnon and Susan Franklin, 29–53. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2004. After kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. “Substance and relationality: Blood in contexts.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 19–35. ———. 2013. “Introduction: Blood will out: Essays on liquid transfers and flows.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19 (Issue Supplement S1): S1–23. Chaumeil, Jean-Pierrre. 1983. Voir, savoir, pouvoir: Le chamanisme chez les Yagua du Nord-Est PÉruvien. Paris: école des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Citarella, Lucía, ed. 2000. Medicinas y culturas en la Araucanía. Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana. Cochetti, Stefano. 1995. “The Dogon sacrifice as a literal metaphor.” Paragrana 4 (2): 144–50. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1999. “Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: Notes from the South African postcolony.” American Ethnologist 26 (2): 279–303. Conklin, Beth A. 1996. “Reflections on Amazonian anthropologies of the body.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10 (3): 373–75. ———. 2001. “Women’s blood, warriors’ blood, and the conquest of vitality in Amazonia.” In Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An exploration of the comparative method, edited by Thomas A. Gregor and Donald Tuzin, 141–47. Berkeley: University of California Press. Copeman, Jacob. 2009a. Veins of devotion: Blood donation and religious experience in North India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2009b. “Introduction: Blood donation, bioeconomy, culture.” Body & Society 15 (2): 1–28. Course, Magnus. 2011. Becoming Mapuche: Person and ritual in indigenous Chile. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ——— 2012. “The birth of the word: Language, force, and Mapuche ritual authority.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 1–26. ———. 2013. “The apple is grown, the grape is given: Two modes of Mapuche exchange.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 18 (1): 1–13. Cox, Guillermo. 1863. Viaje en las regiones septentrionales de la Patagonia: 1862–1863. Santiago: Anales de la Universidad de Chile.  da Col, Giovanni. 2012a. “The poisoner and the parasite: Cosmoeconomics, fear, and hospitality among Dechen Tibetans.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18 (Issue Supplement S1): S175–95. ———. 2012b. “Introduction: Natural philosophies of fortune—luck, vitality, and uncontrolled relatedness.” Social Analysis 56 (1): 1–23. da Col, Giovanni, and David Graeber. 2011. Foreword: The return of ethnographic theory. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1 (1): vi–xxxv. de la Cruz, Luis. [1863] 1953. “Tratado importante para el conocimiento de los indios pehuenches segun el orden de su vida”. Revista Universitaria 38 (1): 29–59. Despret, Vinciane. 2004. “The body we care for: Figures of anthropo-zoo-genesis.” Body & Society 10 (2–3): 111–34. Douglas, Mary. [1970] 2002. Natural symbols: Explorations in cosmology. London: Routledge. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1155555 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1933. “Zande blood-brotherhood.” http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=afrijinteafriins Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 6 (4): 369–401. Fausto, Carlos. 2007. “Feasting on people: Eating animals and humans in Amazonia.” Current Anthropology 48 (4): 497–530. Foerster, Rolf. 1993. Introducción a la religiosidad mapuche. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The modernity of witchcraft: Politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 2013. Witchcraft, intimacy and trust: Africa in comparison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gonzalez Galvez, Marcelo. 2012. “Personal truths, shared equivocations: Otherness, uniqueness, and social life among the Mapuche of Southern Chile.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Gow, Peter. 1991. Of mixed blood: Kinship and history in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: The false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Guevara, Tomás. 1908. Psicologia del pueblo Araucano. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Cervantes. Hugh-Jones, Stephen. 2011. “Analyses de sang.” Terrain 56: 4–21. Humphrey, Caroline. 2012. “Hospitality and tone: holding patterns for strangeness in rural Mongolia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18 (Issue Supplement S1): S63–75. Isla, Jose. 2005. “Un lugar en el mundo: Notas para un sociología Pehuenche de la distancia.” Unpublished manuscript. Jones, Katherine. 2000. “Warfare, reorganization, and readaptation at the margins of Spanish rule: The southern margin, 1573–1882.” In Cambridge history of the native peoples of the Americas: South America, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz, 138–87. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lagrou, Els. 2000. “Homesickness and the Cashinahua self: A reflection of the embodied condition of relatedness.” In The anthropology of love and anger: The aesthetics of conviviality in Native Amazonia, edited by Joanna Overing and Alan Passes, 152–69. London: Routledge. Latcham, Ricardo. 1924. La organización social y las creencias religiosas de los antiguos araucanos. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Cervantes. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “What is given in experience? A review of Isabelle Stengers’ Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts.” Boundary 2 32 (1): 222–37. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. Tristes tropiques. New York: Basic Books ———. [1962] 1969. Totemism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1949. Les carnets de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Mayblin, Maya. 2013. “The way blood flows: The sacrificial value of intravenous drip use in Northeast Brazil.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19 (Issue Supplement S1): S42–56. McCallum, Cecilia. 2001. Gender and sociality in Amazonia: How real people are made. Oxford: Berg. Mol, Annemarie. 2008. “I eat an apple. On theorizing subjectivities.” Subjectivity 22 (1): 28–37. Molina, Juan Ignacio. 1795. Compendio de la historia geográfica natural y civil del reyno de Chile. Madrid: Sancha. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 1973. “The kith and the kin.” In The character of kinship, edited by J. R. Goody, 89–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prytz Johansen, Jørgen. [1954] 2002. “The Maori and his religion.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1 (1): 1–295. Rival, Laura. 1998. “Androgynous parents and guest children: The Huaorani couvades.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 4 (4): 619–42. Sahlins, Marshall. 2011. What kinship is (part one). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 17 (1): 2–19. ———. 2013. What kinship is—and is not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sanabria, Emilia. 2009. “Alleviative bleeding: Bloodletting, menstruation and the politics of ignorance in a Brazilian blood donation centre.” Body & Society 15 (2): 123–44. Santos Graneros, Fernando. 2011. The virtuous manioc and the horny barbasco: Sublime and grotesque modes of transformation in the origin of Yanesha plant life.” Journal of Ethnobiology 31 (1): 44–71. Scholte, Bob. 1984. “Reason and culture: The universal and the particular revisited.” American Anthropologist 86 (4): 960–65. Seeger, Anthony, Roberto da Matta, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 1979. “A construção da pessoa nas sociedades indígenas brasileiras.” Boletim do Museu Nacional 32: 2–19. Stasch, Rupert. 2009. Society of others: Kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2012. “Eating and feeding.” Cambridge Anthropology 30 (2): 1–14. Turner, Victor. 1967. The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. New York: Cornell University Press. Valenzuela, Rodrigo. 1981. “El sistema culinario Mapuche: Una aproximación estructural.” Unpublished undergraduate dissertation, Universidad de Chile. Viegas, Susana. 2003. “Eating with your favorite mother: Time and sociality in a Brazilian Amerindian community.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 9 (1): 21–37. Vignati, Miciades. 1960. “Dos comidas araucanas en el ambito Pama-Patagonia.” Cuadernos del Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Folkloricas 1: 143–49. Vilaça, Aparecida. 2000. “Relations between funerary cannibalism and warfare cannibalism: The question of predation.” Ethnos 65 (1): 83–106. ———. 2002. “Making kin out of others in Amazonia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 8 (2): 347–65. ———. 2009. “Bodies in perspective: A critique of the embodiment paradigm from the point of view of Amazonian ethnography.” In Social bodies, edited by Helen Lambert and Maryon McDonald, 129–47. New York: Berghahn. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2003. “(anthropology) AND (science).” After-dinner speech “Anthropology and Science,” the 5th Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Great Britain and Commonwealth, 14 July. Published in Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology 7. Waag, María. 1982. Tres entidades “wekufu” en la cultura mapuche. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires. Wade, Peter. 2002. Race, nature and culture: An anthropological perspective. London: Pluto Press. Wagner, Roy. 1977. “Analogic kinship: A Daribi example.” American Ethnologist 4: 623–42. West, Harry. 2007. Ethnographic sorcery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weston, Kath. 2013. “Lifeblood, liquidity, and cash transfusions: Beyond metaphor in the cultural study of finance.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19 (Issue Supplement S1): S24–41. White, Luise. 2000. Speaking with vampires. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whitehead, Alfred. 1920. The concept of nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, Neil, and Robin Wright. 2004. In darkness and secrecy: The anthropology of assault sorcery and witchcraft in Amazonia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ce que le sang pehuenche fait: festin sanguin, participation intersubjective et sorcellerie dans le sud du Chili Résumé : Parmi les Pehuenche, le sang est extrait des humains et des animaux, partagé et mangé entre humains, offert comme nourriture aux esprits et divinités de la terre, ainsi que dévoré par les esprits malveillants et les sorcières. Grâce à une analyse ethnographique des pratiques alimentaires et de nourrissement impliquant une variété de mangeurs de sang, cet article soutient que le sang (Ch. mollvün), tel qu’il fonctionne dans les pratiques des Pehuenche ruraux du sud du Chili, indexe la capacité de créer des relations et est lui-même le résultat de relations. En se concentrant sur ce que le mollvün produit ainsi que sur les pratiques par lesquelles le mollvün est collectivement fait et défait malicieusement par les sorcières, je montre comment le mollvün défie, interfère avec, et reconfigure les conceptualisations anthropologiques habituelles du sang en tant que substance. Cristóbal BONELLI is a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), at the University of Amsterdam. He received his Ph.D. from Edinburgh University in 2012 for a thesis on Indigenous healing and visual practices in Southern Chile, and is currently preparing a book manuscript based on this research. His research explores the relations between land, eating practices, language, and the body. Since October 2012, he has been one of the members of “The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory” research team, led by Professor Annemarie Mol. He also collaborates with the Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies (ICIIS), at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His most recent publication is entitled “Ontological disorders: Nightmares, psychotropic drugs and evil spirits in Southern Chile,” Anthropological Theory 12 (4). Cristóbal BonelliAfdeling Sociologie en AntropologiePostbus 155081001 NA Amsterdam, The NetherlandsC.R.Bonelli@uva.nl ___________________ 1. Marta’s original sentences were uttered in Spanish, but the word for blood was uttered in Chedungun, the Pehuenche language. The original code-switching sentences were: “Sp. le comieron el Ch. mollvün”, and “Sp. Encontraron su cuerpo sin Ch. mollvün.” 2. This discussion is based on eighteen months of fieldwork carried out in the district of Alto Bío Bío, where more than 80 percent of the population are Pehuenche. Nowadays, the Pehuenche are considered Mapuche people residing in the mountains, even if originally the Pehuenche people did not belong to the Mapuche ethnic group (see Bengoa 2000). 3. This distinction resonates with some of the foundational insights of symbolic anthropology (Turner 1967; Douglas [1970] 2002) and has played a strong role in shaping the premises on which academic contributions concerning blood are made. For general reviews, see Carsten (2011, 2013). 4. Weston writes: “Meta-materiality goes beyond metaphor to enlist the material, beyond the material to figure substance through metaphor, analogy, and whatever other historically situated heuristic devices people find available” (2013: 37). 5. Building on the seminal work of Seeger, da Matta, and Viveiros de Castro (1979), Amerindian scholars have generally rejected such a substance–symbol divide, refusing the idea of the body as “a material substrate on which meaning can be encoded” (Conklin 1996: 373). For contributions of Amazonian hematology to understandings of blood as a bodily substance with particular relational qualities, see Conklin (2001); McCallum (2001); Belaúnde (2006). 6. The absence of this connection reminds us that the substance/symbol divide results in an isomorphic and renewed version of what Whitehead (1920) has called the “bifurcation of nature,” namely “the strange and fully modernist divide between primary and secondary qualities” (Latour 2004: 2). 7. For a more general reflection on the implicit and simultaneous temporalities that are merged in blood, see Carsten (2013). 8. The Chedungun term misako is used to refer to situations in which several people eat out of one bowl. For a description of how animal blood was consumed over 150 years ago, see Cox (1863). This author points out that every time an animal was sacrificed, its blood was eaten warm straight from the eater’s hands. 9. The target of this remark was health workers. The original Spanish sentence uttered by Edwin was “puro lapiz!” 10. Historically, cattle trading emerged from relations with others who were spatially, ethnically, and socially distant (see Jones 2000; Course 2013). Although this practice has spread among some rural non-Mapuche people throughout Southern Chile, the historical roots of niachi consumption are Mapuche tout court (Vignati 1960). 11. For a classic ethnography on Zande Blood Brotherhood and on how blood can guarantee amicable terms between groups or individuals, see Evans Pritchard (1933). 12. Historical records (Molina 1795; de la Cruz [1863] 1953; Canals Frau 1953) have considered Pehuenche people as hunter-gatherers, horticulture and agriculture being practices predominantly associated with the Mapuche of the Central Valley. According to these historical records, the Pehuenche diet was mostly animal-based. Practices associated with European cattle, as well as the incorporation of pastoral technologies, were gradually introduced throughout colonial history (see Valenzuela 1981). 13. In Despret’s terminology, campear, or taking care of animals, might be regarded as “a practice that constructs animal and human” (2004: 122): it is an anthropo-zoo-genetic practice. 14. I have no ethnographic evidence about gendered aspects of blood among the Pehuenche. For an analysis about gendered aspects of blood elsewhere in South America, see Sanabria (2009). 15. The production and mode of exchange of chavid resonate with the domestic production of cider (Sp. chicha) described by Course (2013). Both items are produced outside of market relations with white people, and their production mostly indexes relations of consanguinity. 16. For an extensive ontological and historical analysis of Ngenechen in Mapuche ontologies, see Alonqueo (1979), Foerster (1993), and Bacigalupo (1997). 17. These practices are known in the vernacular as konchotun, which in Augusta’s ([1916] 1991) definition refer to the activities of those who sacrifice animals for each other. 18. For a reflection on how substances that make persons are themselves moral substances, see Santos Graneros (2011). For a thorough analysis of the moral aspects of blood elsewhere, see Copeman (2009a) and his analysis on blood transfusions as “an operation with moral as well as physical consequences for recipients as well as for donors” (95–96). 19. I am grateful to Roberto Beneduce and Simona Taliani for bringing this to my attention. 20. For an analysis of commensality as producing kinship, see Gow (1991); Rival (1998); Lagrou (2000); McCallum (2001); Vilaça (2002); Viegas (2003); and Carsten (2004). For a general description of the relationship between eating good food and having good blood among the Mapuche, see Gonzalez Galvez (2012). 21. For an exploration of blood conceived of as the transformation of previously consumed food, see Mayblin (2013). 22. In this respect, mollvün might evoke the Maori transpersonal notion of mana, inasmuch as mollvün entails the capacity to activate fellowship of human being (see Prytz Johansen [1954] 2002). 23. For the importance of friends in the construction of true people, see Course (2011). 24. I hereby focus only on nocturnal witch attacks (Ch. nguken) which imply blood eating. In Alto Bío Bío, other witchcraft attacks are carried out through poisoned food (Ch. ilel). 25. There is no ethnographic evidence to consider nguken situations among the Pehuenche as events arising from within the discourse of modernity in postcolonial contexts, as some scholars working in Africa have argued (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1990, 1999; Geschiere 1997; White 2000). These reflections have attempted to demonstrate how discourses on witchcraft are intertwined with modern transformations, global capitalism, democracy, statecraft, and so on (see also Ashforth 2005). 26. For ethnographies that account for different failures of relatedness, see Stasch (2009); da Col (2012b). For a consideration of witchcraft as the dark side of kinship, or negative kinship, see Sahlins (2013). For an analysis of witchcraft as a practice deeply structured by intimacy and the powers it affords, see Geschiere (2013). 27. For historical accounts of kalku in Mapuche literature, see Guevara (1908) and Latcham (1924). For other South American ethnographies concerning dark shamanism and the moral ambiguity of shamans/witches, see Whitehead and Wright (2004). For an analysis of this ambiguity among the Mapuche people, see also Bacigalupo (2001, 2007). 28. I should make explicit here that Pehuenche people do not differentiate Pehuenche blood from Christian blood (see Foerster 1993). 29. For ethnographic descriptions of chonchon, see Waag (1982), Citarella (2000), and Bacigalupo (2007). 30. As has been suggested by da Col with regard to witchcraft situations and their malicious relations, these nocturnal visitations are mostly characterized by “perverted commensality” in which “the witch devours the vital force of neighbors and kin” (2012b: 13). For further analysis on perverted commensality, see also da Col (2012a); Humphrey (2012). 31. In other areas on the continent, predation against other humans through sorcery has been conceived of as hunting (Chaumeil 1983) or as invisible warfare (Albert 1985). 32. The use of the word cuerpo, “body,” as a space evil spirits can get inside of, coincides with the definition of kalül given by Augusta ([1916] 1881). Kalül is the body, or the stomach. Augusta also notes that kalülelkukalen is a shamanistic expression used to indicate that a spirit is “in” the body of the victim. Whereas kalül is a visible space, the am is an invisible capacity. 33. This processs has been described, for instance, by Vilaça (2000) in her analysis of Wari funerary events. 34. In my ethnography, however, goats were never considered to be human, even though both animal and human blood are capable of doing similar things to the eater and to his or her relations. 35. In this sense, Pehuenche blood should not be conceptualized through Strathernian lenses of “meaningful difference” within some larger system of categories (see Graeber 2001). 36. To put it in negative terms, just as nocturnal visitors are not “feasting on people” (Fausto 2007), niachi eaters are not “acquiring a perspective” (Vilaça 2009).To be more precise, and considering reflections on Amazonian hematology, niachi consumers are not acquiring “an operator of perspectives” (Belaúnde 2006: 145). 37. For philosophical reflections on the relation of the eating subject and its language of description, see Mol (2008).  

The matter of the unfetish This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Sasha Newell. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.013 The matter of the unfetish Hoarding and the spirit of possessions Sasha NEWELL, North Carolina State University In this article, I employ West African ideas of spirited materiality to rethink the semiosis of possession in North Atlantic societies. I investigate this ethnographically through the lens of storage—those things kept out of sight and unused in US attics, basements, closets, and storage units. Things contained in storage form a residual category of animated detritus that US society often pathologizes as “hoarding” when it makes public appearances in the visible space of the home or the television set. Arguing that the concept of fetishism is hopelessly tied to the “naturalist” divide of Western rationality and the dichotomy between persons and things, I argue that objects typically labeled as fetishes are not fetishized but rather reflect a cosmology of material entities as containers for spirit. By constructing an ethnographic model of the unfetish in West Africa, I explore the sociality of possessions as belongings that truly belong. Keywords: fetish, spirit, possession, materiality, semiosis, agency The point of attending to the spiriting of things as well as the thinging of spirits is to open the way to the study of reciprocal actions of spirits and things as they generate hybrid forms of possessive agency. —Paul Christopher Johnson, Spirited things The following article is a thought experiment generated by the kinds of associations an Africanist makes when spending too much time sorting through the molding debris found in the attics, basements, and garages of US households. Having observed (and participated in) the capacity of such kept but unwanted objects to compel human action, I investigate North Atlantic possessions through the lens of West African conceptions of how persons and things intermix.1 Rather than approaching the fetish as a product of misrecognition requiring my analytic demystification, I draw upon ethnographic descriptions of so-called fetishes in West Africa to produce a model for understanding what a sociality of things may look like. Let me begin with hoarding, a topic of unruly contemporary fascination that highlights the importance of the connection between thing-relationships and rationality in North Atlantic discourse. It is worth noting that a hoarder is precisely a person for whom the distinction between the home’s public space and storage space has collapsed—it is therefore socially troubling in a classically Douglasian (1966) sense of the sticky pollution that comes from boundary erosion.2 But hoarding has recently transitioned from a site of familial or neighborhood anxiety to a nationally televised preoccupation to the realm of official pathology. The new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published in 2013 (a document that deserves a great deal more scrutiny from anthropologists than it has received), has for the first time included hoarding as mental disorder, one that it is conjectured, “may have distinct neural correlates” (Ameringen, Patterson, and Simpson 2014: 489, emphasis added). Researchers estimate the problem affects between 2 and 5 percent of the population (much larger than the 1–2 percent of the population with OCD). While advocates including health workers, professional organizers, and psychologists believe that this will provide attention for people in desperate need of assistance, as Scott Herring argues in his recent genealogy of hoarding’s transformation from deviance to “disorder disorder,” this new definition will also be used to catalog millions of people as mentally unfit based upon their nonnormative relationship to their possessions. Given that the disorder is officially defined as “the acquisition of and failure to discard possessions regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions” (Ameringen, Patterson, and Simpson 2014: 489), many if not most Americans deserve the moniker as hoarders, leaving anthropologists to wonder about how normal, even normative, this “disorder” might be. One indication of just how prevalent such accumulative behavior has become is the ever-expanding self-storage industry, which claims to be the “fastest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the last 40 years and now provides approximately 21 square feet of rentable space per US household, enough for every American to stand in simultaneously. It has been considered by Wall Street analysts to be ‘recession resistant’ based on its performance since the economic recession of September, 2008” (Self Storage Association 2013), and in 2013 alone storage generated $24 billion in revenues. Thus, without saying that hoarding is never problematic or unhealthy, I am more interested here in thinking about the whys and wherefores of uncontrolled accumulation as an everyday mode of existence for many Americans. Rather than accept the irrationality of hoarding, I want to investigate what storing practices reveal about a magical mode of thinking that typically goes unnoticed in public life, largely because it has been systematically banished from public discourse. Since 2005 I have kept an eye to issues of storage, moving, and household organization in the United States, beginning with a series of interviews and house explorations in central Illinois,3 and including more focused fieldwork in North Carolina since 2011.4 My research has followed and incorporated my own pattern of movements across the country, but most of those I have interviewed (in part due no doubt to dynamics of self-selection in participants) have been white, middle-class homeowners living in large university towns or small cities. I have especially targeted the category of things that are kept out of sight, deleted from acts of self-construction in more public spaces of the household, but my process involves touring and cataloging things in the entire home, visible and hidden. Methodologically speaking, my investigation of US storage space has tried to capture the actual continuum of storage behaviors in American households, looking not only to hoarders but what I call “purgers,” those that feel compelled to rid their houses of personal objects. In between there were many “closeted” hoarders, who managed to conceal their often vast accumulations from the public eye (sometimes through the use of expensive self-storage units) and maintain a modicum of outward self-control. But their compulsion to keep things followed the same principles as “actual” hoarders, and many interlocutors were acutely aware of this problem. Indeed, my interviewees often expressed frustration and embarrassment at their inability to articulate why they were compelled to hold onto many of the things they kept in storage, indicating an affective range of mental activity walled off from their rationalist self-representation. Indeed, I found that many of the objects people stored were endowed with personhood, making them inalienable from the individual self and especially the collective identity of the family (Weiner 1985). The American Psychiatric Association’s decision to pathologize practices that are so imbricated within everyday American relationships with material objects leads me to invoke the concept of the fetish: the primary social theory employed when discussing “irrational” relationships to material things. Despite the rich intellectual history of this term, its function as a source of critical insight depends upon an implication of “primitiveness” within our own society, what Christopher Bracken (2007) calls “savage philosophy.” In other words, the discovery of fetishism is a work of demystication that reveals the human underpinnings beneath the animistic illusion that things are also beings (Bennett 2010: xiv). As David Graeber argues, part of the vehemence of European critiques of African cultural values surrounding fetishes came precisely from the threat of recognizing profound and intolerable similarities across cultural difference; fetish discourse displaced uncomfortable realizations about the arbitrariness of value as the fanciful ravings of irrational others (2005: 8). But recent waves of “new materialist” and “new vitalist” perspectives in anthropology have eroded the Great Divide between persons and things, spirit and matter, leaving open new ontological vantage points on what the fetish might be about (Bennett 2010; Harman 2002; Keane 2003; Latour 1993; Miller 2005; Santos-Granero 2009). Fetishism and hoarding merge as practices that grant things an overpowering agency over the person who is supposed to master their “possessions.” Thinking beyond the grand Cartesian dichotomy, I aim to reveal the act of possession as more of a negotiation between people and materiality, in which sometimes the thing possesses us, even as it is “possessed” by spirits or forces we cannot control. But there is another, less recognizable link between the fetish and the hidden spaces of American homes. For as Valerio Valeri argues, there is a relationship between the fetish and the residual matters overlooked by social order. Valeri juxtaposes examples of menstrual blood and cadavers from Akan sunsum with canceled postage stamps and famous paintings: The copy of a painting by Titian can be perfect or even better than the original, but the value of the latter is not aesthetic, but rather consists in being unique, in the fact that it is the real residue, not the mere symbol, of the unrepeatable situation in which the Titian produced it. (Valeri [1979] 2001: 28–9) The material and temporal specificity of the object (the residue of some moment or person that is “set apart” from the everyday) is the source of its value or efficacy because it reaches beyond that which is culturally conceivable. This same uniqueness and personal quality is essential to the seemingly random objects brought together in the construction of a fetish, bundled together to produce efficacy. The idiosyncrasy of how they are encountered, the dadaesque qualities of their construction out of the remains of things, their intercalation with individual (often amoral) motivations, and their unique and irreproducible quality as objects are all part of their role as embodying the powers and dangers of “blind spots in the order.” The attic is precisely this kind of a social blind spot, a collecting grounds for personal things, treasured moments that one would be embarrassed to share, and forgotten objects—it is perhaps best understood in this sense as a physical space that works as an extension of unconscious mental processes, or even makes possible ontological alternatives denied in conscious articulations of self and world. Spirit matters: The ontology of the unfetish In Latourian terms, the fetish is a Frankensteinian monster that threatens our key ideological distinctions, and so is repeatedly and ritually cast out in an effort to produce rationality (Latour 1993, 2012). The concept of the fetish seems to defy categorization—it is material yet spiritual, an object of exchange value and yet invaluable one moment and valueless the next, it is magic and yet also religion, self-made but also transcendent and overpowering, individual in construction and purpose yet capable of representing the collective, object yet subject, person and thing. This recalls Jacques Derrida’s insistence that “the fetish begins to exist in so far as it binds itself to contraries … the fetish oscillates like the clapper of a truth that rings awry” (1986: 227). This slippery quality of the fetish is at once the origin of its uncanny fascination and the cause of its continual use as the sign of the unmodern and irrational, as that which does not belong. William Pietz’s genealogy of the fetish concept (1985, 1987, 1988) traces it to an intercultural space of exchange between Europeans and West Africans, a chaotic cultural borderland in which incommensurate systems of value struggled for sovereignty, producing the “fetish” as a pidgin cultural hybrid from its inception. Pietz argues brilliantly against a purifying ethnographic particularism that aims to replace the fetish with a local concept like sunsum, but his reliance on colonial texts, even conceived of as products of cultural borderlands, never succeeds in depicting the African contribution to the pidgin term fetisso (Goldman 2009). One of the primary characteristics of the concept of the fetish comes from Charles de Brosses’ originary argument that fetishism is the worship of a material object in and of itself as opposed to idolatry, the worship of a symbolic representation of a god (Morris 2005: 821). Pietz maintains that the fetish is irreducibly material, and Peter Pels has similarly argued that we should think about the spirit of matter rather than the spirit in matter (1998: 101). But while I agree that the mysterious life of fetishes is inextricable from their material form, an attention to regional ethnography makes the presence of spirit agency and performative semiotic efficacy equally unquestionable (Goldman 2009; MacGaffey 1994). Philippe Descola’s typology of ontologies places West Africa in the category of analogism, in which unlike the orderly divisions between physical bodies and interiority among the other three, “every existing being thus appears as a particular combination of the material and immaterial elements that confer upon it an identity of its own” (2013a: 222).5 In other words, as a concatenation of elements that are each themselves hybrids of physicality and interiority, the fetish is ontologically unrecognizable by Euro-Americans— its force can only be explained away. Thus the concept of the fetish as misrecognition was itself the product of a European misrecognition of the kinds of entities populating West African social worlds. Rather than accept that fabricated objects that incarnate personhood and take on agency are “objectively” delusional, my research “repudiates a gap between what the ‘native’ thinks is there and what we ‘really know’ isn't” (Blanes and Espíritu Santo 2014: 7) and instead seeks to trace the social effects and pragmatic presence of “entities” in our collective lives regardless of their empirical verifiability. This paper joins a growing current in anthropology that combines an openness to ontological diversity with a focus upon the intersections between spirit and materiality (Blanes and Espíritu Santo 2014; Johnson 2014; Descola 2013a; Santos-Granero 2009; Viveiros de Castro 1998). In articulating a West African concept of spirited matter, therefore, I aim to reconstruct the ontological domain of these “objects formerly known as fetishes,” or what I will refer to here somewhat awkwardly as unfetishes. The choice of term reflects my interest in making use of the fetish concept while purging it of its central tenet of misrecognition, thus insisting that these animate things remain unfetishized. Indeed, since many African social actors employ the term pidgin fetish (to evoke both potency and misrecognition) the term itself is inescapable. But the prefix [un-] is a reminder that we should explore the possibilities of ontologies that allow for things that act upon other humans and the world at large rather than describing them as falsehood. As Michael Jackson wrote of the fetish, “it is only when we bracket out our essentialist notions of what is and is not a thing that we can fully explore modes of experience that practically transform objects into subjects and vice versa. The crucial point is not to define the fetish essentialistically but to describe the consequences of its use” (1998: 82). In that spirit, the unfetish can be characterized through the following qualities: Container: The unfetish is a material “container” for spirit, a capacity that objects share with human bodies, animals, and plants (making the classic category of the fetish extremely unstable). Not only are there a various kinds of physical bodies, there are many classes of spirits at work as well, sometimes in combination. Heidegger, and later Lacan, both use the metaphor of the vase to think of the prototypical material Thing as not the object itself but the void it contains, whose purpose is to be filled. The material vessel of the unfetish is thus a seductive hollowness calling out to be filled by the diverse fragments of dividual subjectivity that surround it. But we must also be attentive to the topologies of containers, to their openings and crevices and the channels through which, like Klein bottles, something can be at once inside and outside at the same time (Strathern [1998] 2013; Da Col 2013). Indeed, the interior surface of an empty vase is also its exterior carried around the contours of the object to the inside. Chiasmatic: Things absorb personhood (or spirit) and thus become persons with whom one engages in social relationships that carry moral weight. At the same time, persons are constantly rubbing off onto the things around them, such that their personhood is objectified and stored outside their bodies. This dialectical meshing reflects what Maurice Merleau-Ponty described as the “chiasm”—the reciprocal fold in perception that makes those who perceive perceptible by the very objects of their gaze: “Between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we may say that the things pass into us, as well as we into the things” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 123). Matter and spirit cannot be strictly extricated from one another, as in West Africa spiritual energy may have weight or transform the shape of the body that houses it, while the materiality seems to have efficacy in the doubled world of the spirits (for example, eating human flesh while in one’s doubled dream state will permanently transform you into a witch with irrepressible cannibalistic desires). This fits with Descola’s analogist ontology, in which every entity is a unique combination of various subjectivities and objectifications (2013a). Residual: Unfetish things incorporate material residues from places, people, and temporal moments. The qualia of these residues in turn animate the thing. Unfetish objects themselves also inhabit the space of the residual, at once valueless castoffs and at the same filled with limitless value, of a kind that is often difficult to articulate. Concealment: Unfetishes are “out of sight” but not “out of mind.” To see them is often considered dangerous, distasteful, or an overshare of intimacy. There is always some element of them that is masked or hidden from view, and yet such visual blocking is often combined with visibility: as with a mask you can see that something is hidden, or the object is taken out surreptitiously and temporarily, only to be locked up again. The hidden is partially revealed to alert its interlocutors to the potentiality of the unknown, a gap that invites semiotic proliferation. The surface of the container is at once a display and a device to obscure interiority and thereby grant it the potentiality of the unknown. Semiotic efficacy: The chiasmatic channels through which people and things pass into one another are semiotic.6 The social agency of things is produced through patterns of vital connections between things and people that are outside the control of human actors, but are called upon in constructing and evaluating objects. These causal connections are invoked by feticheurs constructing their efficacious things, following Frazer’s principles of “sympathetic magic.” Much as a musician in a possession ceremony must persuade particular spirits into bodies through rhythm and language, the feticheur lures the spirit through the aesthetic and semiotic content of the object, while directing their attention to other people and places through further manipulations of its material form. But semiotic pathways can also be forged and channeled in the manner of habit, accreting to objects they come in contact with regularly.7 Employing the above explications, the unfetish thus might be defined as a chiasmatic container filled with concealed residues, charged with semiotic efficacy and agentive personhood. Peter Stallybrass writes, “what was demonized in the concept of the fetish was the possibility that history, memory, and desire might be materialized in objects that are touched and loved and worn” (1998: 186). I hope to demonstrate such materializations have been going on all along behind closed doors. I should caution that in drawing a parallel with the category of West African unfetishes, I am not suggesting that most North Americans believe their possessions are inhabited by spirits but rather that they feel and often act this way about certain objects. Indeed, neither should we imagine West African actors relationship to spirited things in terms of belief, a word far too loaded with Christian heritage and committed collective schemas (Gable 2002; Pouillon [1979] 1982; Ruel 1982). Rather, people indicate the sensationof presence, felt but not quite perceived and certainly not always conceived. The unfetish as spirit container In West African cosmologies, human bodies and things are alike in being physical containers for spirit beings. In Abidjan, the street slang for fetish was bouei, glossed as “full.” Typically such objects are literally containers or have small receptacles incorporated that hold a variety of materials—but it is also precisely through such things that the spirit is enticed to enter the object. It is the activity of such interior spirits and their material manifestations that both affectively and effectively influences social realities—these spirits are the raison d’être of the unfetish, even as they are intertwined with its materiality. Wyatt MacGaffey argues that Kongolese objects are dwellings for spirit beings. The sculpture, constructed to attract the spirit to its material form, is explicitly described as a container, a container that accrues efficacy because of the spiritual entity inside rather than the material object itself. Indeed, they are quite literally containers, for in addition to the sculptural form that defines them they have pockets or cavities that are filled with a variety of substances and objects that connect them to both the spirit they belong to and the specific targets they employ that spiritual agency to affect. Nkisiare neither idols representing spiritual beings nor mere hunks of sheer materiality; rather, they are vessels through which spiritual agencies of various sorts can interact with, manipulate, and constrain social worlds. As containers, nkisiare not fundamentally different than humans, for within the Kongolese cosmology human bodies are also thought of as vessels for spirit (1977: 182). Indeed, MacGaffey writes: We observe a continuum of magically endowed “actors,” from the nkisi, an object endowed with a personality, through the mask, in which a human being disappears into the object, to the Kongo chief, a human being who is in certain respects objectified in the course of the ritual of investiture. All of them function to some extent as metaphorically constructed extra-human agencies … (1988: 203) Even gravesites are another form of “container” through which people could draw upon the power of the dead. If fetishes are irreducibly material, then they are also irreducibly spirited, and matter matters most when inhabited by spirit. What makes this cosmological perspective on material containers interesting to apply in a North American setting is the symmetrical approach to social entities (Blanes and Espíritu Santo 2014) that erases the line between animate and inanimate objects, focusing instead upon the kinds of “spirit” contained within each. Indeed, in the hidden spaces where people secrete their most personal possessions, one finds great numbers of objects inalienable from their former possessors, still vitally inhabited by their person.8 In the space of storage, we find insides and outsides folding into one another, as objects seemingly exterior to the person are embodiments of their most intimate interiorities, placed externally to a home’s social mapping and yet deeply internal to its architectural space. Like Russian dolls, storage containers (themselves spaces of rentable impersonal externality) are filled with containers of more containers, inside of which we find traces of personhood so intimate that their owners find them hard to face directly, and so excise them from their surroundings but not from their minds. Each level of containment would seem to distance them further from the very subject they constitute. Again, the Klein bottle image allows us to think about how “internal body parts are unfolded and externalized, while parts of the outside world are enfolded within bodies” (Jensen 2013: 311). The following stories are intended to exemplify objects that contain personhood, or what Robert Armstrong has called “affecting presence,” referring to an object that “sharing psychological processes with persons—sometimes seems as much to apprehend its witness as its witness apprehends it” (Armstrong 1981: 16). One woman in Illinois I interviewed had kept a “memory trunk” after one of her six-year-old twin daughters was hit by a car while walking home. Toni had placed all of her child’s things within this trunk, which she had kept unopened for well over thirty years, even when moving it from one home to another. Now turning eighty, she promised to open it with me when she had the emotional strength, but never found it. Daniel Miller and Fiona Parrot have discussed the practices surrounding objects after loss as “a complex pattern of accumulation, sorting and divestment that utilizes objects to help create a long-term processual relationship to loss” (2009: 510). Thus, people like Toni may accumulate objects associated with the deceased but find them too painful to look at, guarding them carefully in sealed and private storage spaces. These were things that could not be parted with, and yet Toni could not bear direct contact with them either. Even though the girl’s twin sister had lived on and now had teenage children of her own, the memory trunk preserved and contained the vitality of the daughter whose physical presence had been insensibly removed. Perhaps she feared that to open it would reveal mere lifeless objects and trinkets, and she would lose the residual life that remained in them so long as they remained concealed. In some cases storage is used as a kind of liminal space for such charged objects to “cool off ” before being reincorporated into the home on new terms (Hirschman, Ruvio, and Belk 2012). Sometimes such spirited things can never be allowed back into the house, but by containing them in a space outside of social definition until their spirit half-life becomes weak enough to “divest” from the self (McCracken 1988, it becomes possible to search for a new owner and provide a chance for the object to reconnect with life and gain new vibrancy. The effort to provide a new home for such unwanted things demonstrates a concern for the subjectivity of the object itself, like seeking a new home for a pet or relative whose need for care can no longer be met. In rural New England, Linda had lost her mother in the mid1980s, and at the time unable to cope with the process of sorting through her mother’s possessions, she boxed up everything (down to the toothpaste) and moved it into her own home, into which they had just built a large new storage space. Over twenty years later she continues the process of unboxing. In 2008 she brought out a large box containing the entire collection of shoes and asked each of her three daughters-in-law to take them. Many of the shoes were mildewed and bent out of shape, but like a latter day Cinderella, each daughter-in-law submitted to trying them on. The only one who fit left with twelve pairs after delicate negotiation. Even so, months later a final pair arrived in the mail, carefully restored with gold nail polish in places where its finish had worn away. Gretchen Herrmann (1997) has likewise described garage sale transactions as existing uncomfortably in the gift/commodity divide, as owners seek new shelters for possessions they can no longer take care of, but for whose future they continue to be concerned. My own dining room table is an example of such an exchange, in which the previous owner’s daughter wanted to be sure we were appropriate future owners for her mother’s cherished table before selling it to us. In a small city in North Carolina, I met a young, recently engaged couple that had moved into the man’s great-uncle Barrel’s9 house about a year before, and it was still full of his things. Rather than remove everything or put it into the storage areas of the house, Gillian and Michael chose to integrate his possessions with their own, as though he had never died and moved out. Neither of them knew him very well in life, but as they went through the labor of sorting through everything to make space for themselves, they felt they had come to know the previous tenants. Photos and other mementos of Uncle Barrel and Aunt Violet were placed lovingly around the house. Not only did they feel connected with these objects, they felt the presence of the former inhabitants on a daily basis and came to think of them as close kin. The sense of presence was increased by the fact that these objects were continually recontextualized by neighbors and family visiting the house and evaluating how Barrel would have appreciated the way they had rearranged the house or comparing their housekeeping. Gillian said, “so when I vacuum, I think about her! And when I'm doing things around the house, I think about her, and I'm like… . It feels like she’s here.” Gillian had even resized Barrel’s wedding ring so that Michael could wear it once they were married, and Barrel’s army uniform still hung in the living room closet. Objects that are passed between people, even people who don't know each other very well, carry an affective history with them, even if this history is largely imagined. The point is that these objects continue to vibrate semiotically with these former associations, and that older meanings are continually revived and invigorated by their new users, sometimes even to the point that a former owner seems to remain present within the space. By contrast, used things are often avoided precisely because of the possibility of such traces. Chloe, a young woman in her early 20s explained that she couldn't bear to have any used objects in her house—she felt the presence of others and was especially uncomfortable about objects associated with dead people. Indeed, the contents of her house were not only immaculate but absolutely devoid of personal history or expression. By contrast, in her parents’ home, a Victorian filled with antiques and family heirlooms, she found her skin crawling with the discomforting presence of death. She struggled with these feelings, knowing that they would be perceived as irrational: “I don't like having anything of theirs in my house. Like, that was theirs, things that have been passed down—it creeps me out. Because [in my parent’s house] we have a chair that belonged to my uncle who died. I just don't like it. So I won't sit in it …” For the same reason she had refused to accept the guitar of her closest friend from his parents after he committed suicide. In other words, the minimalists or “purgers” among us are not any more free from feelings of presence amongst objects than the hoarders. Similar principles were at work when a divorcée in her 40s ridded her home of every object that had been purchased during her time with the man in question—every kitchen tool, bath towel, and piece of furniture bore his trace and had to be replaced. Although she remained attached to her deceased dog’s toys and presents from her brother, she felt that the experience had left her lighter and free from a need for many personal possessions. It is important that none of the objects discussed here work as symbols in the classic Saussurian sense of something that arbitrarily and collectively encodes a meaning. It is the objects that speak, even when their voices are not wanted. Walter Benjamin wrote of the relationship between semiotics and materiality that, “There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents” (Benjamin 1996: 62) … “Language is thus the mental being [geistige Wesen] of things” (66). As Bracken points out, the phrase could have been translated as “spirit-being,” since Geist not only means mind but also spirit and even ghost, or as Kant put it “the animating principle of the mind” (Bracken 2007: 138–39). Benjamin’s perspective that objects have spirits that circulate in human communication corresponds to the Ivoirian theory of the double, in which not only people but all animals and material things have a spirit-double in the second world. Thus just as the Ivoirian conception of spirit possession is one in which an external spirit temporarily displaces one’s double and takes control of the corporeal human form (Newell 2007, 2013), one can think of possessed objects as having their geist-being replaced by an external spiritual agency that inhabits them. Possessions themselves can become bodies through which spirit takes on material form and engage the physical world. Furthermore, Ivoirian spirit is partially material: by consuming the double of things in the second world, a body in the first world can become both powerful and corpulent—whereas to have one’s double consumed by witches will lead to an inevitable if unpredictable death in the first world, such as a car accident or emaciating disease. It is in this space of the imaginary that some Ivoirian objects take on spirit dwellers and therefore magical efficacy, and it is in the unspoken imaginary of storage space (the space of haunting par excellence) that US possessions can absorb spirit and become inalienable social things. Thus the spirit-being of the thing is the intersubjective space of semiotic accretion and social contestation through which meaning is ever made and unmade. While in consumption theory possessions are typically thought of as “extensions of the self ” under the control of their master (Belk 1988), it is worth considering the reverse possibility, in which the spirits of things also get ahold of us and refuse to let go. It is in this sense that they objects assert their claim to “belonging” as members of the household, even when sequestered out of the space of sociality. As a mathematics professor I interviewed once told me, “Once it gets its hooks in you it’s hard you know? You can't get rid of it if it’s got a story now, can you? You know because then you might lose that piece of the story.” Things thus have agency not merely in the Latourian sense of resisting our efforts at cultural mastery but also in the sense that they engage us socially, obligating us to treat them in specific ways. The residual semiotics of the unfetish That people felt the presence of beings in many of the things they kept was ethnographically undeniable. But this raises the question of how spirit gets into objects and which kinds of objects absorb such personhood, especially in a society that denies this possibility. Recalling Valeri’s assertion about the residues of persons and events giving objects a unique irreplaceable status, it behooves us to remember that is precisely through such residues that Frazer’s contagious magic operates, incorporating fingernail clippings, hair, buttons, and so forth into charms that operate upon their unsuspecting victims. The mimetic copy too works to draw or direct the actions of spiritual agency through a performative image “making,” and all but a handful of my participants said that if they could only keep one thing it would be their photographs, indicating the ongoing presence-making capacity of the image. Through unsolicited semiotic associations of iconicity and indexicality, personhood enters into the object, haunts it even. But note that as in Benjamin’s assertions about the mental life of objects, these semiotic operations are not some kind of human code projected by the mind on a passive material world. Indeed, in the North Atlantic context the association of causal efficacies with semiotic connections is distinctly repudiated and the associations are not even always clearly articulated by their owners. Rather there is a kind of interface between the durable presence of materialities and the mobile worlds they encounter, whereby the qualia of the object itself directs its apperception into human sociality even as humans latch onto nearby material forms to contain the flux of memory through their residues in durable recipients. In attempting to tease out how unfetish objects are made powerful, I am moving toward the relationship between materiality and the space beyond encoded social meaning, such that the possession of things becomes a means for semiotically connecting to what we might call the space of death (Taussig 1984), that is, the space beyond knowable experience. In fact, it might be the very invisible uncategorizability of residual rubbish (Thompson 2003) that makes it so efficacious, drawing upon the space of the unseen and shadowy spaces lurking around the corners of public order to draw new associations and bind things together. David Todd Doris’ recent ethnography Vigilant things (2011) on Yoruban antitheft “devices” gives us particular insight into the connection between efficacious charms and residual possessions: residual in the double sense that they are valueless, used up things and that they have absorbed personal residue from their former owners. Ààlè are a specific class of things made to protect personal possessions from thieves. What initially caught Doris’ attention was the almost dadaesque construction of the ààlèout an assortment of seemingly cast off detritus of everyday life—including worn out shoes, rusty spoons, rags, dried corn cobs, and seed pods. These used up things, the use-value literally consumed out of them, were actually richly symbolic and “full” of spiritual presence and power. This collection of rubbish had typically been consumed (used up) by the ààlè makers themselves, and was thus intimately bound to their former owners, metonymic extensions of their being. As former (now useless) possessions they now stood guard over the valued present possessions of the owner. At the same time, the way in which they had been used up stood iconically for what would happen to the thief who transgressed their power. The worn out shoe transparently conveyed to a thief versed in this semiotic that they would be ground into the dirt repeatedly under the foot of the owner until worn down into nothing. A ritual specialist named Fágbade explains of his ààlè composed of a shoe, a rag, a broom, and a comb that A person in poverty will wear rags and worn-out shoes. Olódùmarè [a deity] has not allowed the suffering this shoe has experienced to come upon me. The shoe has stepped on the shit of goats and human beings. It has trekked the town until suffering has reduced it to this condition. Cloth is also used until it becomes a rag and torn. We know also that suffering has reduced this broom to what it is now. The broom can be used to sweep any place: it will sweep the toilet and sweep where we urinate. And the comb, on its own—the issue of suffering never departs from it. (Doris 2011: 52–53) Fágbade speaks of the subjective experience of suffering from the perspective of the objects themselves, a suffering that has indexically become a part of their being and that can now be transferred to a thief that ignores this warning sign. By bringing together these elements and suspending the artful combination from a string somewhere the thief is likely to see them, the object furthermore communicates its intentionality. Each of these objects, harmless on their own, when combined make legible the inner qualities and threat they contain. Doris writes that the creative energy put into this concatenation creates a dynamic relationship between the owner, the object, and the thief. Unfetish activity is thus at once an accumulation and projection of personhood, drawing together the remnants and detritus, the dividual offshoots of each objects social relations to produce its own interdynamic vital energy. Sometimes it is in the unforeseen juxtapositions of storage space that new self-awareness begins, as when I was helping Mary, a young, recently married business professional, to pare down her storage unit (1 of 4). She came across a note from her best friend in junior high, someone she had lost touch with close to fifteen years ago. Suddenly she was digging through the “throw away” pile to find a cassette she had previously discarded without a thought. She at that moment recalled that she and her friend had recorded letters to each other in the year after she moved out of town, and soon we were crouching by an old boom box in rapt embarrassment listening to their teenage musings on family, and school, and boys. People cannot resist storing all kinds of scraps of paper and detritus because they feel that they will lose the memory if they do not keep this impregnated material trace, a leftover piece of a singular event or person. Natasia’s daughter had saved the candy wrappers from the last time she went trick-or-treating for Halloween in a decorative bottle that remained in her childhood room, alongside a cheap trinket she received the night of her first kiss. She saved a newspaper from every birthday she ever had, and wrapping paper from every present (though she had managed to condense this collection into a representative collage). Though her daughter was now in her late 20s and no longer lived in the house, Natasia dared not disrupt these collections as she tried to pack the house up to move. Natasia theorized that her daughter’s obsessive relationship to such remnants came from the loss of all her personal possessions when the family emigrated from Russia with a 100 kilo weight limit for the entire family. The daughter had revealed to her therapist that she still thinks longingly about the treasured toys that she had to leave behind, as though she was still trying to replace these relations she had lost long ago. But Natasia herself had several large plastic tubs full of such scraps of paper, going back to hand-drawn notes from the night of her wedding, a marriage long since ended. She and I knelt in front of the box enchanted by these scraps as her rainy-day garage sale downstairs was left abandoned for over an hour. As Jonathan Culler noted, “One may secretly hope that if one has enough junk, the past it marks will become truly memorable. There is at least, a feeling that if we throw out this junk we are being disrespectful to the past it memorializes” (1985: 5). While Culler suggests that such worthless tokens are the spurious souvenirs through which we construct the past as an authentic original, there is a more radical possibility—that we actually store memory in things, like a kind of analog hard drive. That by throwing away such memory objects we might lose access to rich indeterminacy of memories that have not been completely encoded in linguistic narratives. If we follow Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ argument that human cognition makes use of external material tools such as calculators and computers as extensions of the brain for basic cognitive processes (Clark and Chalmers 1998), the attic could be considered a technology for the extension of memory, working to “think” outside of our own heads. This seems especially true of more diffuse experiences that have no particular narrative associated with them but may nevertheless contain powerful moments of affective awareness and interconnection. The object can restore complex bundles of perception and affect that were never clearly encoded into words. Melanie, a former musician in her late fifties who now worked in a small freelance company, was busy sorting through a living room stacked almost six feet high in cardboard boxes that belonged to her recently deceased mother, and that included family papers going back to the 1800s, an obligation passed on to her with quite explicit instructions from her mother, who had left notes throughout her possessions about their meaning, provenance, and destination after her demise. But it was what she had to say about a simple bird’s-eye maple kitchen table covered in potted violets that really illustrates the relationship between things and memory: My father’s family were coal miners, steel mill workers—they didn't have much. But that was the kitchen table in the farmhouse where I remember, as a little kid, having breakfast with my grandparents. Now, he died when I was very small. Grandmother lived to be 96. She moved with her daughters all over the country, but that table ended up with me, so that'll never go anywhere. Don't care about the chairs—it’s the table. When I touch it, I remember those mornings with my aunt holding the coffee pot in her lap, and the morning that I thought—I was a little girl, eight, and I wanted a pony so bad—and I looked up at the kitchen window, and there was a pony standing there. I was absolutely sure it was for me. It wasn't. But instead of my heart breaking, it put magic into the object—the table. Pietz’s invocation of Leiris on the fetish comes closest to describing this kind of personal engagement with materiality: “moments when the outside seems abruptly to respond to the sum of what we throw forth from within, when the exterior world opens to encounter our heart and establishes a sudden communication with it” (Pietz 1985: 12).10 Leiris describes a particular kind of memory that is at once valueless and of limitless value, without symbolic meaning. As Pietz argues, these crises each bring together an unrepeatable moment with a material object. But while I agree that these are not symbolic objects, their relationship to memory makes them clearly semiotic, as becomes clear in his own characterization of the fetish as a “material space gathering an otherwise unconnected multiplicity into the unity of its enduring singularity” (1985: 15). It is the tactile materiality of the object that allows for this aggregation of semiotic life, or what Heidegger calls the “gathering” of the Thing (Schwenger 2006: 28). Memories that serve to anchor selfhood and one’s relationship to past are recalled through the medium of a thing that itself witnessed and absorbed that moment of the past. The durable materiality of the Thing becomes a fixative, binding together the flux and abstraction of experience into the concrete and localized. But these are not mere souvenirs that recall individual events and bind us to memories that might otherwise be lost. Unlike mere memory objects, unfetish things contain an element of the intersubjective, binding the consciousness to something greater than itself and producing the kind of moral obligation that stems from social relationships. Objects as relations: The sociality of kin-things Many people find themselves unable to discard objects out of a feeling of obligation to the object itself. Anne, a recent college graduate living in a cramped and cluttered one-bedroom apartment that smelled strongly of cat pee, had vintage suitcases scattered decoratively about her living room. She began to open these for me, showing that each was filled with a random assortment of objects. One contained among assorted oddities an old RF modulator, a license plate, and a ceramic cherubic angel with a wing broken off—the latter, given to her by a teacher for good behavior, was designated as one of her three most cherished possessions. Such a juxtaposition of highly valued goods with actual rubbish is a classic pattern for the accumulations of unmonitored storage space, probably an effect of being kept in liminal space outside of meaningful frames of reference. She had difficulty articulating why she kept many of these things: I don't know. I mean, obviously the things that were my grandmother’s I love, because they were hers. And not even so much that the actual card was hers, but just that it was of a place where she grew up, and I love that… . But those silly, like, photographs and things that are not ones that are particularly, like, significant to me—they're just kind of things I had—I don't know, it feels like you're sort of throwing away a person. Throwing away that memory and that’s … [wrong]. On my fridge, I have a picture of my friend’s baby that’s incredibly old. The kid’s now—it’s from when it was a newborn, and the kid’s now thirty—and I cannot get rid of that picture, because you can't throw away a baby! (Laughs) That seems terrible! In such testaments, we see the very logic that causes accumulation to lose control in many households, as well as the motivation for those who purge their house of sentimental objects. Things that are associated with people, either through resemblance or contact, often cannot be discarded because it feels as though one is throwing away the person or the experience itself. But while the semiotic accretions produced Anne’s need to hold onto things, it was not that she saved these objects for the people they represented, nor even to satisfy her own memories, but rather because it felt morally wrong—it was the personhood of the object itself that she could not throw away. Melanie again provides a quite direct analysis of her feelings for the personhood of things: Do the objects have feelings? I know I treat them as such. I talk to the grandfather clock. He seems quite happy here… . So we've had that thing since the 30s in our family, and we always refer to him as “he.” The moose is [also] “he.” … I like him because when I was a little girl, visiting grandma and grandpa, my little bed where I slept was right under the moose. So I've known him since I was a girl. You get so attached. Note that in this family certain objects were addressees, and being treated as members of the group in this way led to them taking on third person pronouns. Following one of Nurit Bird-David’s finer points about animism, when people engage in relationships with things other than humans, they “make relatives by sharing with them and thus making them persons” (1999: S73). Interestingly, this empathy for the feelings of objects (such as the happiness of clock) are precisely the kinds of sentiments hoarders often describe concerning objects in their lives. Gail Steketee and Randy Frost quote a recovered hoarder discussing her struggle with throwing away a yogurt container: I remember feeling bad about not choosing “this” particular container as one that would remain at home with the others, and so I was feeling responsible for rejecting it and placing it in to the recycling bin to begin its long journey to eventual destruction. I felt responsible for giving it as comfortable a ride as possible, seeing as how I was rejecting it, and the thought of it having to endure a humid, long journey made me very anxious. (Steketee and Frost 2010: 273) Clearly this “container” held more than mere yogurt. Beneath its plastic logos resided another entity, one that by virtue of the very act of possession had taken on the role of relatedness, a coinhabitant of the house that she was forced to exclude from her intimate collectivity. As Michael Silverstein suggested (pers. comm.), there might be something to the very semiotics of possession, especially when articulated with kinship relations, that produces a “non-cancellable” or “rigid” indexicality making the object inalienable in just the way that kinship terminology renders certain people related regardless of volition. In Minima ethnographica, Jackson argues of Kuranko fetishes that they have the opposite efficacy of a gift—that while gifts open and forge intersubjective connections, the fetish binds, encloses, and protects a space of intimacy (1998: 75–82). He lists a set of fetishlike objects kept in a locked box under a Firawa friend’s bed: a padlock with pages of Koranic verse folded and wrapped around it that was used to render an opponent immobile and speechless through the locking action. Similarly, a rope with a knotted end that one tightens while saying the name of someone one desires tongue-tied and bound. Another device was placed over the threshold to keep enemies from entering an interior domestic space. Jackson argues that the (un)fetish is an active embodiment of human consciousness, an extension of personhood that exerts subjective influence and binding control over intersubjective space-time (Munn 1992) even in the absence of its maker. These fixative affordances of stored objects to capture intersubjective relations may have become a crucial mode of sociality in the contemporary United States, as neolocal residence and neoliberal employment practices regularly disperse families and make face-to-face relatedness increasingly difficult to maintain, except through nontactile techno-panacea of social media. Such spirited things seem to hover around kin relationships in a social world where spatial proximity and inter-generational intimacy have become luxuries only the most elite can afford—though as in Carol Stack’s classic (1974) the most impoverished also rely on such sociality to survive. Indeed, the socio-legal requirement to sort out the objects of the dead and redistribute them to dispersed family members has become a not-insignificant means of reactivating overextended kin relations and sealing them through the connective tissue of things that obligate (though it can also operate as wedge driving apart factions formerly held together only by their bond to the deceased). In both cases it is the sheer material weight that forces moral interaction with real social repercussions. Bea, a middle-aged woman who lived alone in a gorgeous bungalow in the historic part of town in a house filled with antiques, had become the self-appointed custodian of her family’s history. She had spent the most time of any of her siblings in her family home and took care of her mother when she was dying, and so because she had the closest relationship to the things in that home she became the one responsible for them: “I am a steward of it. It is stuff that has—that was important to the generation before me; it’s important to me; by golly it’s going to be important to my niece and nephew.” She found herself responsible for reuniting sets of china that had been split apart in former generations, as well as divvying up other objects, some of them to people who didn't necessarily want them. I had to deal with sorting her estate and … bringing sets, as I was telling you, back together. You know, doing distributions for my cousins. And so in that process, we reconnected… . This is the same family as the cousin who said, “Well, I don't really want the loveseat.” Sal, irrelevant! You, sister, are going to have it! But Bea’s intense relationship to her possessions was built on more than her feeling of responsibility to the humans in her family: “There are certain things that you keep and you have taken care of because they're in your family” (my emphasis). This is why Bea’s cousin Sally had no choice but to become the caretaker of the loveseat, whether she wanted to or not. Certain objects take on a collective importance greater than the individual desires of people to whom they belong, carrying with them familial obligation and becoming the very fabric of how family reproduces itself over time. Tragically, in many families when no one has the kind of moral force Bea seems to have over her kin, the moment of divestment is fraught with efforts to self-ancestralize by finding someone to take over and cherish belongings whose deeper resonance may not be communicable to people who no longer cohabit with such objects (Marcoux 2001). As Jean-Sébastien Marcoux elegantly writes, for those who succeed in passing along their belongings before or after death, a sense of continuity and ongoing relatedness is established, as though their former possessions were progeny who might reproduce the self after its corporeal absence. Hidden belongings Although in the United States some kin-objects stand as proud heirlooms in public spaces of living and dining rooms, such “durables” tend to have a provenance in the established capital that allows for the maintenance of stable kin relations, or even in some cases enforces it for the sake of holding the wealth intact. Though many people had one or two such things, public objectivations of kinship were relatively rare compared to the proliferation of such objects in storage, and I suggest that there may be a link between concealment and binding such that certain kinds of fragile relations dissolve when exposed to the light of public ideologies. In other words, since objects are “not supposed” to have “objective” capacities of personhood they cannot do the work of kinship in public, except when they have enough market or aesthetic value to justify their presence. Those who do live in public collectivities that include objects like this are often viewed with suspicion or even accused of borderline hoarding mentality by their peers. But returning to the concept of container, concealment itself can be the source of efficacy. Despite the fetish’s habit of eluding practically every effort at characterization, Valeri writes that “there is something relatively uniform in the way they are preserved and treated: they are very often packaged up, wrapped up in material, hidden … the gaze in some way impeded” ([1979] 2001: 29). Blocking the gaze produces a space of the unseen that is ripe with the capacity of the unknown, while at the same time preventing the exposure of such intimate and ambiguous connectivity between the self and an invisible world of relations. Unfetish objects are often secreted away, tucked into the folds of clothing or stuffed into the straw of a thatch roof. Sanasi, a nouchi player in Treichville, once became very serious when I asked him about magic. He was always dressed in urban style with clean, new jeans, t-shirt, and baseball cap and his comportment was one of urban savvy and fear-no-one toughness, so I was surprised when, looking about anxiously to make sure no one was looking, he pulled up his shirt to reveal several leather wrapped bundles strapped around his body. He explained they were for protection, grinning at the memory of when he had strapped these charms to a goat and asked tourists to shoot at it, demonstrating its bulletproof magic when they all missed. Unfetishes represent the hidden, invisible connections of relatedness radiating through the community and secretly structuring sociality. The witchfinding movements that periodically ransack villages across many regions of Africa are focused upon revealing these hidden forces buried in people’s private space (Smith 2005; Auslander 1993), much as a North Americans may try to purge their homes of objects whose psychic weight and cluttered material presence they can no longer bear. Indeed, the new class of “professional organizers” perform tasks remarkably like that of witchfinders, systematically (and publicly, in the case of reality television) overturning the contents of a home to reveal its irrational interiority and expel the unfetishes that have no place within Euro-American ontology. But from another perspective, concealment is not only the central function of storage space, it is the invisibility of stored things that allows its efficacy as a space of personal attachment and intersubjective connectivity to emerge. At the same time, it is only by periodically entering this hidden space and rearranging its contents, bringing some back out and relegating other formerly displayed objects to oblivion that the human owner makes contact with and appreciates the sociality of these things (Gregson 2011). There is something liminal about the set apart storage of the house, a space quite literally associated with the space of death as the clichéd connection between haunting and attics attests. As a space outside of public social categories, it exists but as a disconnected world that is unseen, and its very invisibility gives it the potency of the mask that takes on otherworldly life precisely because one cannot visually determine the human presence within. Graeber (2001) describes the concealed value as the site of hoarded capacity for action, as opposed to adornment in which the actor persuades those around them to action through dazzling displayed wealth. But what is most interesting is the way these categories slide into one another, as when Malagasy magic beads and coins worn as adornments to bring a desired future to fruition were when successfully transformed into hidden charms that were conduits to invisible sources of power. What becomes important then is to trace the slide between the visible displays of commodities in public into increasingly personal possessions used in intimacy, ending in the concealed and seemingly worthless goods that cannot be discarded despite their lack of market value. The topological perspective on containers helps conceptualize these transformations. In Mark Mosko’s seminal account of the Mekeo cosmology, the “abdomen of a human being is homologously conceived as inside the body only insofar as it is an inversion of space outside the body” (1985: 27): waste that collects there is already outside. Similarly, rubbish in the Mekeo village is swept into the center plaza of the village (an inverted outside) before being carried to the bush on the edge of the village (an everted inside). In this sense, the movement of things from storage to public space and back thus interconnects the inverted outside of the attic with the everted inside of domestic public space, the objects themselves being externalizations of internal states and internalizations of alien matter into subjective projects of self-construction. If as Marilyn Strathern writes, in Melanesian reciprocal exchange “the external other actually takes one’s externalized inside into his own inside” ([1998] 2013: 201), then here I am tracing how such exchanges happen in the social relations between persons and their possessions. Commodity unfetishism One might think that there is an obvious difference between the unfetish objects in West Africa and the agentive things in North American attics; the former are intentionally constructed things with magical agency, whereas the latter are objects that absorb personhood of their own accord and defy the ideological separation of persons and things. But in fact these two categories bleed into one another, making them much harder to distinguish than would first appear. For the African charm is constructed out of used up things, encountered things, personal detritus, in fact, of the very kinds of things that make their way so mysteriously into US storage space. And most of the objects found in American attics were once themselves commodities constructed with the precise aim of charming their way off the store shelf and into a shopper’s hands. It is in the second life of commodities as possessions that they gradually lose their “image” resonance (their “brand” value) and take on greater and greater indexical value. While Marx famously argued that capitalist society misrecognizes the human activity behind the value of commodities and sees instead social relationships between things, from a perspective that focuses on semiotic ideologies, the value of commodities is woven from metaphoric association with the lives of other similarly branded goods, visibly consumed by mediated celebrities as well as local friends and associates one emulates (McCracken 1988 2005). Indeed, like African charms, they were manufactured and marketed precisely with the charming effects of affecting presence in mind. Marx’s misrecognition of commodities does of course take place, as the indexical connections of commodities to their origination in human labor and particular structures of social relations are erased in favor of these glamorous and largely artificially produced iconic qualities of the object in relation to famous celebrity consumers and what Naomi Klein has referred to as the “spirit” of the brand, a kind of metaphorical personhood or lifestyle manufactured around the brand concept that often carries far more value than the material assets of the company producing them (Klein 2000: 7). Value is specified at the level of mimetic images metaphorically transferred rather than tangible contact—the plastic packaging surrounding a product is after all a guarantee that no person has physically come in contact with the product (a further erasure of the human process of manufacture). The consumer even feels discomfort purchasing an object whose packaging has been compromised. Thus the semiotic ideology of US consumption is primarily organized around the public display of iconicity. But I am most interested in what happens when the packaging comes off, initiating physical and affective contact between the possession and person. The glamorous preconstructed metaphoric relations of the “product” are gradually overdubbed by the metonymic accretion of everyday associations with persons and experiences the object comes in contact with. These often become the most central source of an object’s value for their owners and inheritors over time, as its market value is almost inevitably reduced to junk status (at least for a time). Nor should we consider these processes to belong solely to North Atlantic markets, and we find similar cases of this process of conversion from commodity to possession to unfetish in Africa. We have already seen examples of how postconsumer rubbish takes on new life just at the moment when it loses all value as a commodity, incorporated into magical objects to draw upon their subjective experiences and the intense personhood they have absorbed from former possessors. More research must be done into the intermediate phases of possession, but evidence of similar forms of consumer possessions taking on unfetish qualities is there for the finding in existent ethnography. Adeline Masquelier (2001) describes for example the strong association of a person with her possessions in Mawri society, such that when pregnant women die before childbirth, “the women’s belongings (clothes, cooking pots, or mats) had to be buried with them. Otherwise, they would forever haunt their families to reclaim the possessions from which they had been separated. I was told that if only a sewing needle was forgotten or given away to a neighbor or a relative, the dead woman would come back for it, needlessly scaring the entire village” (2001: 247). Typically such misfortune was the fault of the mother, whose indulgent overconsumption of sugar (symbolic of foreign commodities) had blocked her cervix, and her improper burial led to the production of dangerous “Maria” spirits that possessed Mawri women and often drove them into prostitution. What is fascinating is such spirits could be successfully contained, so long as every commodity associated with her was buried with her in a grave separated from the regular cemetery. Still more apropos is an article under development by Katrien Pype, who has been studying the broken radios and other defunct technology owned by older Kinshasans. She writes of one informant who had years ago been given a luxurious radio by his grandmother. Even though it no longer worked Papa Toma swore he would keep this radio until he died. As he claimed, cherishing the radio meant respecting the memory of his grandmother and of his ancestors—as his grandmother was a paramount chief. He was worried though that his children might “neglect” the radio once he would die. (Pype, n.d.) There was a great temptation to sell the radio or even its parts, and in some cases Pype found that children had done so against the will of their parents, but many like Papa Toma did their best to preserve it against such destructive forces. Here we see a precise parallel to the spirit life of commodities I have been describing in this article, in which an object becomes valued according to its past, to the hauit has built up along its path. In Pype’s stories the objects are proudly maintained in public space as heirlooms rather than concealed, but of course in urban African space there is very little space for stored things and too much demand for used goods to allow the inertia of stored things to get to the point of overwhelming social actors. Still, more ethnographic evidence of stored valuables, perhaps most especially in urban realms where there are both more readily available commodities and less space to keep them, will be important ground for further ethnographic investigation. Conclusion: The matter of mana The material “container” of the sign (even spoken words are material patterns of acoustic vibration) carries a bundle of qualia not directly associated with their intended meaning, and these can in turn affect the outcome of semiosis in unexpected and often uncontrollable ways. My interest in the semiotic life of objects does not imply a subjection of materiality to human subjectivity, for it is often the thing itself that arrests the subject with its sensorial presence in the first place. Semiosis is integrated into the very process of sensory reception and the communicative functions of the nervous system, and signs have real world efficacy in their ability to shape physical and mental reactions to sensory perception. In the chiasmatic “fold” between sensory perception and recognition lie semiotic pathways through which the vibrancy of things and the currents of collective representation mesh with one another in unpredictable ways. Thus the opposition new materialists make between “materiality” and “semiotics” is actually a reproduction of the very naturalist divide they claim to be escaping, as though by retreating entirely to “nature” they have overcome the divide itself. On the one hand the fixity, specificity, and location of objects in time and space are essential to the objectification of consciousness that allows not only publicly shared meaning but also self-recognition. On the other hand, the very materiality of objects is infinite in its specificity. Francis Ponge describes the material object as an abyss that opens up as soon as one fixes attention on it in hopes of finding stability: “One attentively regards the pebble in order not to see the rest. Now it comes about that the pebble gapes in its turn, and also becomes a precipice… . No matter what object, it’s enough to want to describe it, it opens itself up in turn, it becomes an abyss” (Schwenger 2006: 28). It is recognition of this “abyss” yawning between materiality and its representation that allows any object to connect to the space beyond language—it only takes a moment of intimate mutual apperception, as when Jane Bennett encounters a pile of debris caught in a storm drain in Baltimore and for some reason unknown to herself was transfixed, having “caught a glimpse of the energetic vitality inside each of these things” (2010: 5). This shiftiness in our encounter with “vibrant matter” is at the origin of an object’s animate agency. Like the magical efficacy of mana(Siegel 2004; Lévi-Strauss 1987), the unfetish takes on spectral qualities because its force comes from beyond the inherent limitations of signification but unlike mana, the unfetish is material, locked into the specificity of space and time, its stability a kind of reservoir to affix recollection. Through a combination of enduring sensuous concreteness and vibrating hollowness, some objects take on the role of semiotic magnets that draw in and absorb memories, persons, deities, other times, and places and hold them like external memory drives. Having described the shocking explosion of a Georgian sheep intended for sacrifice (and ritual consumption) that had unintentionally been soaked in gasoline, Paul Manning and Anne Meneley (2008) point the way to understanding relationship between materiality and the social agency of the unfetish in their use of Webb Keane’s bundling of qualisigns in the object, arguing that The sensuous qualities of objects imbricated in field of specifically religious meanings often allow the same objects to participate in other non-religious fields of meaning simultaneously. The object becomes, via the qualisigns that allow it to participate in different fields of meaning, a kind of condominium that is a potential zone of conflict as these different cosmological fields seek to establish unique sovereignty over that object. (2008: 287) The unfetish is not merely a dwelling for a spirit but a condominium of qualities, making it unconquerable by efforts at symbolic definition—there is always a residue that resists representation, a residue that is augmented by partial concealment suggestive of something undiscoverable. The materiality of a thing bubbling beyond the bounds of human determination, becoming the site for competing sovereignties and registers of value is at the heart of how things take on a life of their own. Descola’s portrait of the “Mandé and Voltaic” ancestor sculpture as “an eminent agent of the life of the collective” points toward the nexus between indexical chains of significance, the fixity of matter, and the inscrutable mobility of the multitude. The statue is not a symbol or an emblem but indeed a “little person,” that is, an artifact inhabited by a human who is neither completely dead nor fully alive, and endowed because of this with an agency of his own in spite of his apparent immobility. But this is an agency of which only the effects—whether prophylactic, vindicatory, or reparatory—are perceptible by those they affect, a means to give credit to a presence by the result it generates. The best way to ascribe this disposition to the effigy is thus to treat it according to an externalist approach, as an eminent agent of the life of the collective; for … these indexes, prominent in a medley of other indexes, offer to the gaze, in the darkness of the chamber of powers, the chain of affinities which bestows dynamism and substance to collective life. (Descola 2013b: 44) The sociality of the unfetish is not unlike a practice in Côte d’Ivoire in which a coffin suddenly begins to drag around its pallbearers, carrying them as fast as they can move around the village until it encounters the hut of the witch that terminated the spirit’s life like a giant and highly consequential Ouija board. This kind of animate agency is beyond the control of any human actor involved, a hybrid of uncharted Deleuzian becoming and Durkheimian “social current” made manifest in the personal life of the object. The very materiality of the unfetish in which humans seek fixity makes this indeterminacy possible; the richly bundled, potentially infinite qualities of the thing make its semiotic possibilities beyond social control but at the same time constitutive of sociality. So to return to the question of how the fetish concept became a means to project our own irrationality onto overdetermined others, when did North Atlantic societies lose a culturally explicit place for the personhood of things? Perhaps as North Atlantic societies became immersed within the capitalist market, indexical associations with personhood had to be ideologically cut out of the recognition of object value, because it interferes with the process of commoditization and fungible exchangeability of practically everything. Rather than commodities representing a “fetishistic” confusion of persons and things, one might say that it was the encroaching ideological radical separation of persons and things, the “Great Divide” that progressively masked the commodification of human labor through which capitalist hierarchy was built. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, unfetish objects were given a respectful place within historic sites and cabinets of curiosities (Stewart 1993; Pels 1998). Teresa Barnett’s history of Sacred relics (2013) describes how nineteenth-century American tourists, by sitting in the chair where Napoleon had once ruled, or the looking through spyglass Washington used to examine the countryside, or seeing themselves in William Penn’s mirror, would achieve contact with historical subjectivity. As a sign on Penn’s chair encouraged, “Fruitful Of Recollections—Sit And Muse” (2013: 68). This was not, Barnett tells us, a case of reenactment of history but rather a kind of “inner apprehension” through kinesthesia. Echoing the language of Pietz’s fetish encounter, Barnett describes how lovers at the moment of parting might exchange whatever random object came to hand: A particular bit of foliage or an item in a pocket was drafted as a token because it happened to be available, but its chance availability at just that time also meant it was indissolubly tied to that moment and served as its marker. Geranium leaves connected Kate Stone and her husband-to-be and also anchored the heightened emotional moment of their parting in a time-specific configuration of the physical world, preserving that moment through its material trace. (Barnett 2013: 59) It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that discourse surrounding museums began to counter an indexical approach to objects (characterized as “sentimental,” even “feminine”), seeking to collect things that were iconic or “typical” of a historical time period rather than specific mementos of historical events. Thus, at a 1910 meeting of the American Association of Museums historical relics were written off as “fetishes” good for little more than “idle sentimentality” (Barnett 2013: 167), and so indexicality was barred from the world of rational thinkers in favor of the hyperreal of mimetic reproduction. Nevertheless, many US subjects have gone on silently feeling as though certain kinds of things have a different kind of value akin to the Maori concept of hau, a deep-seated personhood that grants such objects membership and agency within our social lives. They find themselves unable to articulate these feelings within any kind of “rational” framework provided by the explicit ontology of so-called modern societies. Thus they increasingly secrete our personal and personified objects behind closed doors, accumulating things they cannot rationally recognize within their closets, attics, basements, garages, and storage units, often at great cost. Their cultural fascination with “hoarding” indicates it is more than a mental illness but rather a general social process produced by a cosmological order that shuts out understanding of fundamental modes of human sociality. Pietz documented the fetisso’s cross-cultural utility during the social chaos of the European slave trade’s incursion into West Africa, when few social forms could be relied upon to guarantee or “bind” value. Perhaps the accumulation of rubbish and corresponding escalation of the storage industry in the United States are the product of a similarly fungible society, in which a general process of commodification has increasingly encroached upon our very ability to construct and maintain human relations—leaving people grasping at their remnants in the form of old, often used-up things that speak of absent people and events. Spirit matter is the semiotic magic through which we maintain a semblance of belonging in a social world (even if it is locked away in storage) by cohabiting with belongings that belong not only to us, but with us. References Ameringen, Michael Van, Beth Patterson, and William Simpson. 2014. “DSM-5 obsessive compulsive and related disorders: Clinical implications of new criteria.” Depression and Anxiety 31: 487–93. Armstrong, Robert Plant. 1981. The powers of presence: Consciousness, myth, and affecting presence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Auslander, Marc. 1993. “Open the wombs: The symbolic politics of a modern Ngoni witch-finding movement.” In Modernity and its malcontents, edited by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, 167–91. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barnett, Teresa. 2013. Sacred relics: Pieces of the past in nineteenth-century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Belk, Russell W. 1988. “Possessions and the extended self.” Journal of Consumer Research15 (2): 139–68. Benjamin, Walter. 1996. “On language as such and on the language of man.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected writings, edited by Marcus Bollock and Michael W. Jennings, 62–74. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “Animism revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology.” Cultural Anthropology 40 (supplement): S67–S79. Blanes, Ruy, and Diana Espírito Santo, eds. 2014. The social life of spirits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bracken, Christopher. 2007. Magical criticism: The recourse of savage philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. 1998. “The extended mind.” Analysis 58 (1): 7–19. Culler, Jonathan. 1985. “Junk and rubbish: A semiotic approach.” Diacritics 15 (2): 2–12. Da Col, Giovanni. 2012. “The elementary economies of Dechenwa life: Fortune, vitality, and the mountain in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands.” Social Analysis56 (1): 74–98. ———. 2013. “Strathern bottle: On topology, ethnographic theory, and the method of wonder.” In Learning to see in Melanesia. Hau Masterclass Series 2: vii–xvi. Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Glas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Descola, Philippe. 2013a. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd with a forward by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013b. “Presence, attachment, origin: Ontologies of incarnates.” In A companion to the anthropology of religion. Edited by Janice Body and Michael Lambek. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Press. Doris, David Todd. 2011. Vigilant things electronic resource: On thieves, Yoruba anti-aesthetics, and the strange fates of ordinary objects in Nigeria. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and danger. London: Routledge. Gable, Eric. 2002. “Beyond belief: Play, skepticism, and religion in a West African village.” Social Anthropology10 (1): 45–56. Goldman, Marcio. 2009. “An Afro-Brazilian theory of the creative process: An essay in anthropological symmetrization.” Social Analysis53 (2): 108–29. Graeber, David. 2001. Towards an anthropological theory of value. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2005. “Fetishism as social creativity: Or, fetishes are gods in the process of construction.” Anthropological Theory 5 (4): 407–38. Gregson, Nicky. 2011. Living with things: Ridding, accommodation, dwelling. Herfordshire, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing. Harman, David. 2002. Tool-being: Heidegger and the metaphysics of objects. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Herring, Scott. 2014. The hoarders: Material deviance in modern American culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herrmann, Gretchen M. 1997. “Gift or commodity: What changes hands in the U.S. garage sale?” American Ethnologist 24 (4): 910–30. Hirschman, Elizabeth C., Ayalla Ruvio, and Russell W. Belk. 2012. “Exploring space and place in marketing research: Excavating the garage.” Marketing Theory 12 (4): 369–89. Jackson, Michael. 1998. Minima ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the anthropological project. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jensen, Casper Bruun. 2013. “Two forms of the outside: Castaneda, Blanchot, ontology.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 209–35. Johnson, Paul Christopher, ed. 2014. Spirited things: The work of “possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the social analysis of material things.” Language and Communication 23 (3–4): 409–25. Klein, Naomi. 2000. No space, no choice, no jobs, no logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies. New York: Picador USA. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2012. “Love your monsters: Why we must care for our technologies as we do our children.” Breakthrough Journal Winter: 1-17-2014. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1987. Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. MacGaffey, Wyatt. 1977. “Fetishism revisited: Kongo ‘Nkisi’ in sociological perspective.” Africa 47 (2): 177–84. ———. 1988. “Complexity, astonishment, and power: The visual vocabulary of Kongo Minkisi.” Journal of Southern African Studies 14 (2): 188–203. ———. 1994. “African objects and the idea of fetish.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 25 (Spring): 123–31. Manning, Paul, and Anne Meneley. 2008. “Material objects in cosmological worlds: An introduction.” Ethnos 73 (3): 285–302. Marcoux, Jean-Sébastien. 2001. “The ‘Casser Maison’ ritual: Constructing the self by emptying the home.” Journal of Material Culture 6 (2): 213–35. Masquelier, Adeline. 2001. Prayer has spoiled everything: Possession, power, and identity in an Islamic town of Niger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCracken, Grant David. 1988. Culture and consumption: New approaches to the symbolic character of consumer goods and activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2005. Culture and consumption II: Markets, meaning, and brand management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The visible and the invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———, ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miller, Daniel, and Fiona Parrott. 2009. “Loss and material culture in South London.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (3): 502–19. Morris, Rosalind. 2005. “Fetish: Overview.” In New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz, 821–26. New York: Charles Scribners and Sons. Mosko, Mark. 1985. Quadrapartite structures: Categories, relations, and homologies in Bush Mekeo culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munn, Nancy. 1992. The fame of Gawa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Newell, Sasha. 2007. “Pentecostal witchcraft: Neoliberal possession and demonic discourse in Ivoirian Pentecostal Churches.” Journal of Religion in Africa 37: 461–90. ———. 2013. “Brands as masks: Public secrecy and the counterfeit in Côte d’Ivoire.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 138–54. Pels, Peter. 1998. “The spirit of matter: On fetish, rarity, fact, and fancy.” In Border fetishisms: Material objects in unstable places, edited by Patricia Spyer, 91–121. New York: Routledge. Pietz, William. 1985. “The problem of the fetish, I.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring): 5–17. ———. 1987. “The problem of the fetish, II: The origin of the fetish.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring): 23–45. ———. 1988. “The problem of the fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment theory of fetishism.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (Autumn): 105–24. Pouillon, Jean. (1979) 1982. “Remarks on the verb ‘to believe.’” In Belief and transgression: Structural essays in religion, history, and myth, edited by Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, 1–8. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pype, Katrien. n.d. “‘To repair or not to repair’: Unusable communication objects and the experience of the ‘(once) modern.’” Forthcoming article. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, history, forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ruel, Malcolm. 1982. “Christians as believers.” In Religious organizations and religious experience, edited by John Davis, 9–31. London: Academic Press. Santos-Granero, Fernando, ed. 2009. The occult life of things: Native Amazonian theories of materiality and personhood. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Schwenger, Peter. 2006. The tears of things: Melancholy and physical objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Self Storage Association. 2013. “Fact sheet.” www.selfstorage.org. Siegel, James. 2006. Naming the witch. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Smith, James. 2005. “Buying a better witchdoctor: Witchcraft, globalization, and the crisis of sustainable development in Taita, Kenya.” American Ethnologist 32 (1): 141–58. Stallybrass, Peter. 1998. “Marx’s coat.” In Border fetishisms: Material objects in unstable places, edited by Patricia Spyer, 183–207. New York: Routledge. Stack, Carol. 1974. All our kin. New York: Harper and Row. Steketee, Gail, and Randy Frost. 2010. Stuff: Compulsive hoarding and the meaning of things. New York: Mariner Books. Stewart, Susan. 1993. On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. (1998) 2013. “Social relations and the idea of externality.” In Learning to see in Melanesia. Hau Masterclass Series 2: 179–205. Taussig, Michael. 1984. “Culture of terror—Space of death. Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the explanation of torture.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (3): 467–97. Thompson, Michael. 2003. “Time’s square: Devising cultural theory from rubbish theory.” Innovation 16 (4): 319–30. Valeri, Valerio. (1979) 2001. “The fetish.” In Fragments from forests and libraries, edited by Janet Hoskins, 15–32. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism.” JRAI 4 (3): 469–88. Weiner, Annette B. 1985. “Inalienable wealth.” American Ethnologist 12 (2): 210–27. La substance de l'anti-fétiche: De la syllogomanie et de l'esprit des biens Résumé : Dans cet article, j'ai recours à des idées ouest-africaines concernant la matière possédée pour repenser la sémiotique de la possession dans les sociétés nord-atlantiques. J’étudie ce sujet par une ethnographie du stockage—ces choses maintenues hors de la vue et inutilisées dans les greniers, les sous-sols, les placards et les garde-meubles. Les choses stockées forment une catégorie résiduelle de détritus animés que la société américaine pathologise souvent comme une accumulation “compulsive” ou “syllogomane” lorsqu'elle fait son apparition dans l'espace visible du foyer ou du petit écran. Je fais l'hypothèse que le concept de fétichisme est désespérément lié à la ligne de clivage “naturaliste” du rationalisme occidental et à la dichotomie entre les personnes et les choses, et soutiens que les objets typiquement désignés comme fétiches ne font pas l'objet d'un fétichisme mais reflètent plutôt une cosmologie d'entités matérielles contenant le fétiche. En construisant un modèle ethnographique de l'anti-fétiche en Afrique de l'ouest, je parcours la socialité des possessions en tant que biens qui nous tiennent et nous appartiennent. Sasha NEWELL is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at North Carolina State University. His recent book, The modernity bluff (University of Chicago Press, 2012), explores how Ivoirian youth produce themselves as modern citizens through a spectacle of illusive success and authentic brand consumption, ultimately arguing that modernity itself is a form of bluffing. He has also explored themes of migration, theft, witchcraft, and mixed language. His current research investigates the space of storage in US society and the sociality of concealed things. Sasha NewellCampus Box 8107Department of Anthropology and Sociology1911 BuildingNCSURaleigh, NC, 27604afnewell@ncsu.edu ___________________ 1. This is intended in the comparative spirit of Strathern’s efforts to reimagine personhood from a Melanesian sense of sociality, and concepts such as “American” or “North Atlantic” and “West African” are heuristic devices or ideal types built from ethnographic data rather than cultural labels describing coherent or consistent systems of thought. 2. One cannot speak of disorder without thinking of Mary Douglas, who forged the link between ritual purity and the ordering principles of sanitation and whose crusade against medical materialism can be seen as an inspiration for this work. Indeed, despite her British positivism and insistence on the utility of the word “primitive,” she more than most of her era placed “modernity” within an inclusive symmetrical scrutiny of ritual logics. 3. I was assisted in this work by two undergraduates at the University of Illinois: Theresa Rende and Katie Hargrave. Danielle Carr and Parker Mincey were undergraduate research assistants on this project between 2012 and 2013 at North Carolina State University. In our shared reading of theoretical and ethnographic literature on this topic, they also contributed to my own conceptualization of this material. Special thanks to Danielle Carr for introducing me to the Clark and Chalmers (1998) article. 4. In the following descriptions, I describe regional locations generally but do not reveal the precise cities and towns in which I worked in order to help preserve the anonymity of my participants. 5. However, I find the geographical prevalence of analogism quite suspicious, for by Descola’s own admission it seems to pop up everywhere, unlike naturalism (which seems to have only sprang up once in human history, and that quite recently), or the more limited range of totemism or animism. Furthermore, the chaos of infinite specificity (each entity unique) would seem to provide possibilities for a great deal of variation in just how analogy might be used to produce order, even if binary continuums and great chains of beings are logically useful and empirically common conceptual tools. The apparent equivalence of the visual four-way typology thus seems to mask a rather uneven geographic and historical distribution that begs for explanation. Da Col’s critique of Descola around the concept of containers may well provide the path to understanding why the most common ontology is the one that is least systematic—many societies may be much more attentive to porous qualities of containers whose topologies are not sealed but open, making distinctions between interiority and externality problematic (2012: 92). 6. Although he never completed the book, Merleau-Ponty’s The visible and the invisible (1968) was an effort to bridge his theory of the phenomenology of perception with semiotics. 7. My approach to semiosis eschews the simplicity of “symbolic meaning” as mental constructions walled off from “the real,” instead focusing in Peircian manner on the intertwining of material anchors and branching mental associations. Our very biology is dependent on neural signals that carry signals that are as semiotic as they are physical. In the same way, our sensorial apperception of objects is shaped by semiotic habit, and the whatever cortical traces we use to remember them in the brain must refer semiotically to content outside the brain (Ricoeur 2004). 8. Not all stored things were felt to contain personhood. Many seasonal things like Christmas and Halloween decorations are kept for purely utilitarian reasons, while others accumulate wantonly of their own accord simply because there isn't time to deal with them. Geena, a new mother in her 30s, told me that whenever they had guests coming over her husband would rush about their small home and shove everything that he didn't know what to do with, including piles of unopened mail, into the opening on the ceiling that lead to their attic. Such things remain Latourian “actants” in that they have to be dealt with even when shoved “out of mind,” but they do not have the affecting presence of personhood. 9. His nickname came from the rounded shape of his body, though embodying a container as he does makes him a provident source of spirit in this paper. 10. Unfortunately, Pietz has also harnessed this idea of the singularity and contingency of “fetishes” to the misconception that these African spiritual objects were themselves encountered willy-nilly and transformed into a fetish to record that unique moment. Bosman claimed he was told by his Ouidan informant that when someone needed to do something important, they would go outside, and “take the first creature that presents it self to our Eyes, whether Dog, Cat, or the most contemptible Animal in the World, for our God; or perhaps instead of that any Inanimate that falls in our way, whether a stone, a piece of Wood, or any thing else of the same Nature” (Pietz 1985: 8). Aside from the patronizing tone, MacGaffey argues that the Congolese nkisi (1994: 126–27), objects were often presented to their owners by the spirit who was seeking adoption (just as mediums are often chosen against their will by spirits), and the heterogenous elements included in the belly cavity followed careful and elaborate rules paying special attention to codified metaphorical and metonymic associations.  

The proof of details This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © AbdouMaliq Simone. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.3.014 BOOK SYMPOSIUM The proof of details AbdouMaliq SIMONE, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Comment on Obarrio, Juan. 2014. The spirit of the laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Prelude: A premise of collective life Once in a dispute over a purported theft, I stupidly called a shop owner in Fez a munafiq—a disbeliever. This resulted in the police being called and a subsequent appearance in a court as Moroccan law deems all of its citizens to be believers regardless of whether they consider themselves to be so or not, and reserves only for itself the right to question that status. Such questioning, if it ever takes place, is never a matter of construing from a person’s actions evidence deemed contrary to that of being a believer. In fact, in the law, being a believer or not is a matter of intent, not evidence; it is something beyond proof. Thus the infraction was not a matter of defaming a person who enacts his or her belief but rather of making a statement that before the law could not be made, not as a transgression but as impossibility. For even if the state of believing necessitates its opposite, and even if the Quran warns against the state of unbelieving, Moroccan law protects against this possibility by rendering it impossible. My attribution of the shop owner being a munafiq was thus not a violation of his rights, not a denigration of his status, but inflicting a violence that rendered his entire existence impossible. The power of the law here is to preclude something from being brought into existence by making existent a particular state as impossible. Fortunately reconciliation took place outside of the law in an urban context where people jokingly called each other munafiq all of the time. So in some sense the law here points to the construction of a void, or a process of voiding. The state creates a right for itself that can never really be applied, and if it had proceeded with “the case” would have done so on the basis of judging, not my actions per se, but whether or not they usurped the state’s right to render what [252]was implied as impossible. It was a matter of my coming before the law because my act could be construed as my coming before law, as if the law has existence prior to anything else. In Juan Obarrio’s analyses of the law in the Mozambican postcolony, the law invents sentences that it cannot finish and it reserves for itself the possibility of ellipsis and incompletion while it offers itself as that which is able to tie things up— all of the loose ends, all of the bits and pieces of deliberation, negotiations within a coherent state of things. It creates a state of its own impossibility through which it is able to “recede into society”—reach into the variegated details of everyday differences and “turn them around,” or, at least, turn them toward a consideration of themselves in the presence of something that exceeds them, even if this is largely absent, or impossible. Expendability and jurisdictions In much of the world, collective life has become a remnant, a string of inflated solidarities, provisional congregations, and reiterations of facile parochialism. Constituencies may come to the fore through political demands and negotiations but they too often live through ratios of apportionment—experiencing and comparing themselves as one of many recipients of services and access. At the same time there seems to be general recognition that individuals cannot go it alone, no matter their proficiency in refashioning themselves. The irony is that the possibilities of alliance—the intersection and coming together of people, things, and places—seem to multiply exponentially, despite the absence of official recognition, readily available vernaculars, and means of assessing potential outcomes. In the interstices of intensified individuation and the potentials of multiple collectivities, it is still important to consider how people stand before and with the law. Even though these positions—before and with—designate different modes of judgment, interrogation, and affiliation—they both convey fixity of orientation and the possibilities of recourse, even as the law finds its constitutive moments in the murkiness of disorientation and the forces unleashed through subsequent collisions. Obarrio’s detailed examination of the restructuring of Mozambican society through the technology of the law is an invaluable tool to think about the generalization of expendability and the increasingly arbitrary character of life trajectories. This is technology that sutures disjunctive times, invents space for the operation of a state increasingly groundless in its own convictions and choreographed by transnational interventions, yet able to recuperate the form of past subjections, that it once existed to undo, as a means of instantiating itself across contested jurisdictions. Obarrio’s ethnography is primarily located at the fuzzy interfaces of the concrete city and the mud-thatch urban periphery. No matter how much the law attempts to found or order territorial boundaries, to subsume rough-and-tumble socialities within the codes of exchange and formatted calculation, the urban at these interfaces generates evidence of something at the same time before, aside, and within the law that cannot be definitively scaled or embodied by particular formats.[253] Indeed, in a region ravished by material destitution and scarcity . . . unfinished, interrupted projects (government, local, personal) linger on and preside over these decaying spaces, these eroded memories and corroded socialities, yet they are also entangled within many minor, emergent processes, within a life unfolding as a constantly deferred circuit of unpaid debts . . . (and so) conflict resolution amounts to the submission of “life” not to the court of law but, on the contrary, to very materialization of the law by that “life,” which is the source from which it extracts its legal force. (Obarrio 2014: 199–202) For the conundrum of the law is that it is not crystalized into a coherent territory or set of functions but instantiates itself in the interstices of disparate intersections as a hinge, suturing objects to a specific locus of perception, to a series of apertures through which they can garner a sense of belonging and identity. Bodies to place, land to bodies, built environments to land, infrastructure to deliveries, deliveries to livelihoods. But this suturing process is all the more problematic as people live in the midst of an increasingly large volume of stories, populations, symbols, and energies. If the present requires an order to render things as more or less past (Garcia 2014), more or less present as objects to be paid attention to, taken into consideration, then the increasingly urbanized “now” does not seem to know how to “let things go.” Urban life is inundated with things to pay attention to, things that are potentially relevant for the ability of inhabitants to organize their lives (Smith and Hetherington 2013). How does one decide what to pay attention to, what to ignore, what is relevant, and what is not? These become increasingly arbitrary decisions, and so much of what remains of collective life congeals through a process of hesitation, of trying not to stand out too much even as the exigency to constitute oneself as a niche economic activity—as something singular and worth paying attention to intensifies. It becomes difficult to complete whole sentences, string together coherent narratives. The disposition of efforts appears all the more precarious—what and who decides whether any effort at self-attainment or management will be successful increasingly appears to be an arbitrary matter. This motivates the demand for accountability and transparency that the law seems to promise—an even playing field, a series of clear rules of the game. All of the opacities, deal making, multiple sovereignties, and confusions as to what things really are that characterize the contemporary urban polity are to be “cleaned up” through new sets of urban law and policy. The impact of various public rhetoric about rights to the city and strivings for equity and fairness are substantially diminished in the face of this hyperattentiveness of residents of all backgrounds to what appears to be the heightened arbitrariness of who makes it and who doesn’t. The language of deliverance and better lives has long dissipated into the staccato observations of hip-hop phrases and the need to see the evidence itself, to burrow down to the “real deal”—deliver the money, deliver the bodies. It is no wonder that many residents internalize their own expendability and that of others. But as Obarrio forcefully elaborates, the law requires jurisdiction—a space to operate and on which to be applied; it requires “a temporalization that connects the different spatial localities, materializing history” (2014: 118). Does this creation of [254]jurisdiction then provide the possibility of orientation and anchorage, a sense of belonging that lessens this sense of expendability? Here it is important to keep in mind that cities throughout the Global South largely worked, not to the extent to which they constructed a particular kind of person, inhabitant, citizen, but rather the way in which everyday practices availed spatially and materially heterogeneous environments with densities. These densities not only involved those of bodies but also ways of doing things and a wide range of technical devices that put things into a plurality of different relationships—with different scope, degrees of visibility, and duration. The sheer diversity of the overall built environment and the activities that took place within it, and in close proximity to each other, precipitated discussions, compensations, repairs, alliances, trade-offs, and short-term pooling of information, contacts, and resources that supplemented official income and earnings. At the same time, the composition of the built environment reiterated a sense of separateness among residents, the unavailability of any overarching reference point of easy commonality and, as such, these were localities of fractures that necessitated the constant reworking of lines of articulation (Benjamin 2008; Sundaram 2009; Perlman 2010; Chattopadhyay 2012; Dovey 2014). As Obarrio puts it, “the local in all of its multiple dissemination interrupts the law” (2014: 117). Sifting through the shards of collective life Still the making expendable of people and populations remains a predominant means of capital accumulation, reinforcing a desire for the law, even as the law is deployed as an instrument to dispossess those without formal employment, land title, or status. A disposable population is constituted not only to provide flexible labor for mobile and eventually transient capital investment but also to leverage the state’s access to enjoining the game of financial speculation. Here a disposable population is bundled in aggregate as that which can be offered as “wholesale life commodities” offered in advance through a state’s compliance with austerity measures, structural adjustment, debt repayment, and budget cuts in health, education, and social services (Tadiar 2013). “Put another way, the seemingly limitless resource that is the future (as part of the seeming limitlessness of life itself) is in actuality the lives of people whose own futures are offered up as exchange values extractable in the present” (Obarrio 2014: 30). Households have begun to compensate for the stagnation of real wages by financing necessary housing, food, transport, mobility, health, and education through credit (debt), with enormous effects and yet more deductions from wages, along with an increase in the social disciplinary mechanisms that come with the need for debt reduction. It is difficult to envision how the law will restore a viable social body under such circumstances—especially laws and policies that attempt to specify all of the rights to the city, as well as the right of the city itself to endure through all of the threats that social divisions, greenhouse emissions, and debilitating ecological footprints pose to its coherence. As Claire Colebrook (2012) has incisively argued, aspirations for a more organic attachment, one which downplays the centrality of human design as an overarching force in service of a more measured distribution of value [253]across many different things, living and nonliving, is always already infected by a violence that erases the specificity of everyday conditions in terms of a notion of life or the world in general. Getting beyond the condition where humans have such a hard time considering their own detachment and malevolence in relationship to an earth they continue to see as an environment for them always occurs through imagining some higher sense of “we,” some greater collective good. Thus Colebrook argues, “any ecological movement that aimed to vanquish man (as some accident that befell life) and did so in the name of a proper organic whole of life to which man ought to return would be another subjectivism (life or nature as an organizing ground)” (2012: 197). For the ways we have of considering the detriments of human detachment from the ecological relations—from the world— are the same as that which enabled humans to distance themselves from their own destruction. Given this, a certain detachment from convictions that the virtuous is restored through recognizing our proper place within complex ecologies or jurisdictions may be necessary in order to fully appreciate the ways in which cities are full of many different kinds of forces that do not necessarily rule out the ability of people to stay in place but that require such stability to be a function of circular dispersals and returns, of constant exiting and reentering through side doors. In other words, emplacement is a matter of constant recalibration, of ducking and diving, and riding waves, and not insisting upon particular grounds of propriety, property, or entrenchment. Perhaps the chest containing all the weird assortment of evidentiary materials in Obarrio’s otherwise barren community courtroom is the real archive for these efforts—a chest that comes before the law, because of the law, but whose potential narratives concealed within will outlast the law. While residents across the postcolony certainly desire some recourse to planning and decision-making processes that make sense to them, that posits an atmosphere of stability through which they can reasonably anticipate what the immediate future holds and then plan accordingly, the ability of government to constitute such stability does not inhere in the apparent solidity of its own sense-making. Rather, it is more a problem of performance. In other words, the ability of those who govern to take the heterogeneous elements and knowledge they work with to convey a persuasive connection between actions such as taxation, democratic procedure, land regulation, and budget allocations—to just cite a few—and make them indeed seem connected to each other. Such a performance of reasonableness provides an workable image of assurance that those who share a common residency in particular governmental jurisdictions are somehow then themselves connected to each other beyond the efforts they make, either as individuals or collectives, to constitute themselves as living “in the same boat.” But there is nothing definitive about urban government that necessitates a clear sense of normative procedure nor that requires “effective” government to be in place in order for residents to themselves, albeit within limits, create viable platforms for their existence, using some of the very same knowledge that government usually reserves for itself. After all, the details of what residents do with each other belongs to them, not just as a reflection of what takes place when they act but as components for making their own conclusions about what is possible or not. It is these details that are [256]the real stuff of the law of the community courts in Northern Mozambique. They are the entry point into any application of the law but also something that endures beyond the law’s interpretation of them—as litigants continue to pile up in front of the ramshackle chambers week in and week out. Government agencies and other large institutions may have the capacity to aggregate these details—provided they are paying attention—into specific overall patterns, which then inform planning and budgetary decisions. Yet, both formal and informal mechanisms of working with these details within localities themselves are critical aspects of governance, as the details always slip out of easy assemblage and even view. How these details can be made known, visualized, and accessed are matters of continuous inventive political practice, no matter the law. References Benjamin, Solomon. 2008. “Occupancy urbanism: Radicalizing politics and economy beyond policy and programs.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32: 719–29. Chattopadhyay, Swati. 2012. Unlearning the city: Infrastructure in a new optical field. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2012. “A globe of one’s own: In praise of the flat earth.” SubStance 41: 30–39. Dovey, Kim. 2014. “Incremental urbanism: The emergence of informal settlements.” In Emergent Urbanism: Urban Planning and Design in a Time of Structural and Systemic change, edited by Tigran Haas and Krister Olsson, 45–53. Surrey: Ashgate. Garcia, Tristan. 2014. “Another order of time: Towards a variable intensity of the Now..” Parrhesia 19: 1–13. Obarrio, Juan. 2014. The spirit of the laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Perlman, Janice E.. 2010. Favela: Four decades of living on the edge in Rio de Janeiro. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Robin James, and Kevin Hetherington, eds. 2013. Urban rhythms: Mobilities, space and interaction in the contemporary city. Sociological Review Monographs. Oxford: Wiley. Sundaram, Ravi. 2009. Pirate modernity: Media urbanism in Delhi. London: Routledge. Tadiar, Neferti, X. M. 2013. “Lifetimes of disposability within global neoliberalism.” Social Text 115 31 (2): 19–48.   AbdouMaliq SimoneMax Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic DiversityHerman-Foege-Weg 11Göttigen, Germany 37073abdoumaliqsimone@gmail.com  

Pitt-Rivers: The law of hospitality This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Julian Pitt-Rivers. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) The law of hospitality* Julian Pitt-Rivers   Prologue In an essay entitled The Odyssean suitors and the host-guest relationship1 Professor Harry L. Levy discussed the final scene of the Odyssey and took issue with those authors who find it out of character with the spirit of the work as a whole. The apparent anomaly introduced by the unmerciful slaughter of the suitors whose faults went hardly beyond a certain absence of decorum he explained by the hypothesis of an earlier folk-tale in the peasant tradition which is evident elsewhere in the poem, he says. This is intertwined with the courtly tradition of the warrior princes which dominates the greater part. The ideal of courtly largesse is contrasted with the more material concerns of frugal farmers whose customs of hospitality contain a provision forbidding the guest to overstay his welcome and impoverish his host. Leaving to classical scholars the task of unravelling the origin of its elements, the anthropologist is entitled to take the story as it stands and attempt to relate it to what he can discover of the law of hospitality in general and of the code of hospitality of ancient Greece in particular. It appears to me that, regardless of any historical disparities in the sources from which it originated, the tale of the home-coming of Odysseus may take its place among those exemplary epics which provide us with a key to the principles of social conduct. Indeed the whole work may be viewed as a study in the law of hospitality, in other words, the problem of how to deal with strangers. I In one of the earliest professional monographs we have, Boas describes the custom whereby the Central Eskimo tribes receive a stranger and the curious combat to which he is then challenged: If a stranger unknown to the inhabitants of a settlement arrives on a visit he is welcomed by the celebration of a great feast. Among the south-eastern tribes the natives arrange themselves in a row, one man standing in front of it. The stranger approaches slowly, his arms folded and his head inclined toward the right side. Then the native strikes him with all his strength [94] on the right cheek [sic] and in his turn inclines his head awaiting the stranger’s blow (tigluiqdjung . While this is going on the other men are playing at ball and singing (igdlukitaqtung . Thus they continue until one of the combatants is vanquished. The ceremonies of greeting among the western tribes are similar to those of the eastern, but in addition ‘boxing, wrestling and knife testing’ are mentioned by travellers who have visited them. In Davis Strait and probably in all the other countries the game of ‘hook and crook’ is always played on the arrival of a stranger (pakijumijartung). Two men sit down on a large skin, after haying stripped the upper part of their bodies, and each tries to stretch out the bent arm of the other. These games are sometimes dangerous, as the victor has the right to kill his adversary; but generally the feast ends peaceably. The ceremonies of the western tribes in greeting a stranger are much feared by their eastern neighbours and therefore intercourse is somewhat restricted. The meaning of the duel, according to the natives themselves, is ‘that the two men in meeting wish to know which of them is the better man’.2 We can hardly suggest that such a desire to measure oneself against the stranger is peculiar to people of simple social organisation and dispersed settlements, as one might at first be tempted to imagine, for the custom in spirit if not in form, is reminiscent of the age of chivalry when knights on meeting found it necessary to test the ‘valour’ or ‘value’ of their new acquaintance, and we may therefore surmise that it springs from something fundamental in the nature of relations with strangers, such as a necessity to evaluate them in some way or other against the standards of the community. Take the elements of the custom: The feast offered to celebrate the stranger’s arrival; The challenge, issued to determine the stranger’s worth; The forms of the combat which estimate it in terms of the strength in his right arm; His possible execution if he is proved inferior; and The peaceful conclusion which is generally achieved, and which we may suspect to have been the intended outcome. We are not told how often the right to execute the defeated stranger was, in fact, exerted. It is not essential that it should ever have been, for the belief that the right existed must surely have been enough to terrify the potential visitor from the East,particularly since duels inspired by vengeance also led to the execution of the loser. The existence of the right rather than the determination to exert it is all we require in order to understand the literal significance of the institution. [96] At the risk of appearing to throw my comparative net too wide, I would point out that the entry of an outsider into any group is commonly the occasion for an ‘ordeal’ of some sort, whether among British public schoolboys, freemasons or the initiates of the secret societies of Africa, but in these instances the character of the ordeal as a test of worthiness is less important than its character as an initiation rite. They might all be considered as ‘rites of incorporation’,3 a variety of the rites of passage through which an old status is abandoned and a new one acquired. In this case it is the status of stranger which is lost and that of community member which is gained. The social structure of Eskimo communities is notoriously flexible, yet it can hardly be supposed that a single occasion can admit a newcomer to full membership while he is still unacquainted with the other members of the settlement — the ‘ordeal’ of the British schoolboy lasts a whole year. The ordeal of the Eskimo would decide rather his right to remain, assuming he was either victorious or spared. Yet during the time he remained, what exactly would his status be? The combat enables the standing of the new member to be established within the hierarchy of prestige. From then on he is known to be a better man or not than his challenger. Unfortunately Boas tells us nothing more about the relationship which may have existed thereafter between the two men and it would be normal to assume, therefore, that it was in no way peculiar. Nevertheless, braving the bad name which speculation has rightly acquired in anthropology and on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, I should like to speculate on the relationship which subsisted between the stranger and his challenger, for such a guess would enable me to link up the Eskimo custom in this regard with that, so different in every way, of classical antiquity. The guess however does not claim to establish, but only at best to illustrate, the association between the two forms of custom which will be shown to derive from a common sociological root at a more abstract level. Fustel de Coulanges explains that in the city of antiquity a stranger possessed no status in law nor in religion and that it was necessary for him to have a patron in order to gain the protection of the local laws and Gods. To offend the newcomer was to offend his patron since by the code of hospitality the two were allied in this way. ‘L’étranger se rattachait par cet intermédiaire à la cité’.4 The provisions of Arab hospitality are not dissimilar in this respect; indeed, in many countries similar customs are found. In contrast to a member of the community whose status is identifiable by reference to its norms and is recognised by everyone, the stranger is incorporated only through a personal bond with an established member; [97] he has, as it were, no direct jural relationship with anyone else, no place within the system, no status save that of stranger (which is a kind of self-contradiction: the status of being statusless). On the other hand, in relation to his patron he possesses, however little may be known about him,5 a clearly defined status, that of guest or client, which makes any further evaluation of him unnecessary. The status of guest therefore stands midway between that of hostile stranger and that of community member. He is incorporated practically rather than morally. The essence of the stranger is, tautologically enough, that he is unknown. He remains potentially anything: valiant or worthless, well born, well connected, wealthy or the contrary, and since his assertions regarding himself cannot be checked, he is above all not to be trusted. For this reason the charlatan is always, must be, a stranger. In any case his social standing in his community of origin is not necessarily accepted by the people of another. For it is a matter of local pride that each community would set up its standards for itself rather than accept those which are dictated by foreigners. In this sense, every community aspires to autonomy. Therefore the status achieved in one is not directly transferable to another, nor is the status ascribed by one society necessarily recognised in another; indeed the possibility of finding an equivalent at all may very well be missing — you cannot be a Brahmin in the English countryside.6 The stranger therefore starts afresh as an individual insofar as he may be incorporated into the community. It must make its own evaluation of him in order to accept him. The simple logic of the Eskimo custom is apparent: lacking a wider society and a hierarchy of social status, the value of a man is no more than the literal strength in his right arm. The problem of the treatment of the stranger includes another aspect. Does he possess the necessary knowledge of the culture of the people among whom he comes to behave correctly and make evaluations of conduct by their standards? Can he, in a word, subscribe to the rules of their culture? As a newcomer he will never know from the outset how to behave towards individual personalities, but if he knows the rules he will quickly distinguish who is who. No knowledge of persons is required of the guest who has a patron to protect him, but to fulfil the role of guest he must at least understand the conventions which relate to hospitality and which define the behaviour expected of him. Hence the distinction which the Greeks made between Xenoi, strangers who were nevertheless Greeks, and Barbaroi, outlandish foreigners who spoke another language. Franz Boas does not tell us, stranger as he was to the Eskimo, that he was obliged to wrestle with his right arm for his life and we may assume that the ceremony to which he referred was limited to other Eskimos [98] who were practised in the art of such a combat and sensitive to the honour conveyed by a feast of walrus blubber, that is, to strangers capable of becoming incorporated, not ‘barbarians’. Let us suppose that the stranger’s appearance in the community where he had neither kin nor friends constituted in itself a challenge to which the local challenger was doing in reality no more than respond in the name of his group, its self-appointed champion. He is likely therefore to be the chief or the strongest man within it, or at least one who claims to be so. It would follow that if the stranger defeats him, he is proved superior to all and this fact would entitle him to be honoured by the whole community. The precedence accorded to a guest may here be paid by everyone to recognised worth. Honour is gained by all through the visit of a superior person, since in accordance with its paradoxical nature it is gained by being paid (and lost by being denied) where it is due. Moreover, it seems most improbable that the theoretical right to execute the defeated champion could be exerted where he was surrounded by his kin and the stranger was alone. On the other hand, in the instance where the stranger was defeated it seems unlikely that the right to execute him would be exerted unless he was suspected of coming with sinister covert intentions such as to avenge a blood-feud or commit a felony. Eskimos are known to change the affiliation of their community not infrequently, as Boas points out, and it hardly appears likely that this could be done only at grave mortal risk. Moreover they do not have the reputation of a bloodthirsty people who slaughter one another for glory. On the contrary their distaste for exhibitions of anger and violence has earned them the title of ‘The Gentle People’. Is it not likely that this right to execute the defeated stranger existed normally only to be waived, establishing the fact that subsequent to his defeat, he ‘owed his life’ to his conqueror? The fact would surely find some social recognition in a kind of bond; when one has fought for one’s life against someone, lost and been spared, one can hardly resume the relationship of mere acquaintances, especially in a society, like the Eskimo among so many others, where lives may be owed, avenged or commuted into payment. May I not infer that the defeated stranger became some kind of client to the man who had conquered him who became in this way responsible for him in the eyes of the community? Under such conditions his vanquisher would, in fact, have been literally responsible for his presence there, having preferred not to exert his theoretical right to kill him. The struggle, condemnation and pardon at the hands of his victor follow a well-known sequence of social death and rebirth into a changed status. My guess — or is it mere phantasy? — amounts to this: the stranger who was recognised as the better man was accorded universal respect [99] which posed no problem of his precedence within the community, whatever his subsequent relationship to his antagonist, while he who was defeated was thereafter ‘attached to the community by the intermediary’ of his victor. Those who know the Eskimo may have views about the the [sic] possible or probable existence of such a relationship which might conceivably, among a people so addicted to the notion of artificial kinship, have taken this form in the same way as war-captives are sometimes integrated into the lineage of their captors or as Dr Birket-Smith was adopted by his Eskimo host,7 but my aim is not to make any contribution to their studies. The purpose of this imaginary ethnography, embroidering the solid work of Boas, is only to offer an exercise in the logic of social relations, the scales which one may practise before attempting to interpret the infinitely complex score of reality.8 II We have dealt so far only with the social aspect of the problem posed by the stranger, unknown and perhaps unversed in the culture of the local community. The simplest solution of all — and one which was followed by many peoples while they were permitted to do so — was to refuse recognition to any person unable to claim an attachment of kinship with the tribe, that is, to treat the stranger simply as an outlaw who could be spoiled or destroyed with impunity. Such hostility towards him hardly requires an explanation since the threat which he represents to established norms and to the sanctioned order of society is patent, apart from any imagined dangers, natural or supernatural, which, in the absence of any knowledge of him, he may incarnate. Even when not suspect as a vampire or a child-stealer, the stranger is always potentially hostile. How then are we to explain that particular relationship, discussed by Professor Levy, between the stranger and Zeus? The idea that the chief of the Gods should choose to adopt such a disguise, that the most sacred of all should be allied to the outsider, must surely appear as something of an anomaly, especially to those who, following Malinowski, would expect to find in mythology a ‘charter’ for the social system. Taken at its face value the myth appears to contradict the first principle of social organisation: that every community must possess its own particular standards which are held sacred, ordained by the Gods and opposed to the customs of foreigners. Let us examine the possible interpretations of this belief. To begin with, the stranger is also the beggar, since they both belong to the category of persons to whom hospitality is due. The fact that the God took the form of the stranger or beggar ensured the enforcement of the moral [100] duty of hospitality upon which the free circulation of persons between Greek communities depended.9 It may be viewed, then, as a sanction supporting a system of undifferentiated exchange: do as you would be done by; receive the stranger well so that when you travel you may be well received. Taken in this sense the myth furnishes a charter for the code of hospitality, but such a teleological explanation can hardly be held sufficient to explain the existence of the belief since, quite apart from any methodological strictures, a similar code of hospitality towards the stranger exists in the Arab world unsupported by any such charter and is regarded there as a sacred duty none the less. The notion of hospitality derives in this instance from the sacredness of the womenfolk of the household.10 Moreover, in both the Arab11 and the Greek world, by dispensing hospitality honour was acquired within the community and allies outside it and considerations of personal advantage are thereby added to the general utility of the association between the stranger and the sacred. Yet they do not explain it. Granted the function of the association, the anomaly remains. For however convenient it may be in terms of the consequences to identify God with the stranger, whether as potentially the same person (Levy’s little tradition) or as patron and client (Levy’s great tradition), we can hardly suppose that a system of religious thought can be made to submit to anomalies uniquely for the sake of facilitating political and economic relations. Even the argument that the supreme God was the patron of all Greeks in opposition to local deities whose protection was geographically limited is insufficient, even were there no other objections to it, to account for the priority of the stranger in Zeus’ favour and his connection with the sacred. In fact the stranger was not necessarily Zeus, but any God in disguise. A more complete explanation can be deduced from a general consideration of the association between divinity and the unknown. Omniscience is a divine attribute and one which is jealously guarded. The moral lessons put forward in the Book of Genesis regarding the Tree of Knowledge or the myths of Icarus or Prometheus are quite unequivocal: the Gods possess knowledge which is forbidden to mankind and are prepared to punish any attempt to encroach upon their privilege. Their ineffability is the essence of their divinity. The esoteric character of communication with them and the mystery of their presence and their will (which follows none of the standards of human conduct) are the basis of the fear which they inspire. Once comprehended they would no longer be revered. Human knowledge desecrates by rendering known (and therefore secular) that which was mysterious (and therefore sacred), by reducing to the level of the known world that which is essentially [101] unknowable. The character of the sacred as the inversion of the secular is implicit in all mythologies, those which define the status of the Gods or those which recount the origins of the world.12 Both types of myth set the bounds of the mortal world and, doing so, establish the gradations of proximity to the Divine in space and in time. The mortal world is confined by an inversion of that which preceded it and that which lies beyond it. For this reason, we find Gods of foreign origin in so many parts of the world and for this reason also no prophet is accepted in his own country. In the light of this general principle the association between the God and the stranger appears generic, and the sacredness of hospitality and the honour which it confers derive not from any functional consequence of the belief but from the fact that the meeting with the stranger is a confrontation between the known world and the realms of mystery. The stranger belongs to the ‘extra-ordinary’ world, and the mystery surrounding him allies him to the sacred13 and makes him a suitable vehicle for the apparition of the God,14 the revelation of a mystery. Therefore, to put it in the phrasing of the popular epigram, it was not in the least odd of God to choose the Jews, but on the contrary exactly what the anthropologist should expect of Him. The ambiguity of their status, as at the same time belonging and not belonging, within the gates yet beyond the pale, and their reputation as the possessors of cryptic knowledge, the initiates of the mysteries of finance and of precious metals, made them strangers par excellence, perfectly endowed to be chosen both to provide the God in the beginning and to remain thereafter as his renegade kin. For this reason they were the ‘sacred of the left hand’ and the natural associates of the fallen angel. That these ‘internalised strangers’ should have served for centuries as the focus of the ambivalences of their Christian neighbours is in no way surprising; what is surprising is that psychological studies of anti-semitism should not all start with a profile of the mythological character of Jewry. The stranger derives his danger, like his sacredness, from his membership of the ‘extra-ordinary’ world. If his danger is to be avoided he must either be denied admittance, chased or enticed away like evil spirits or vampires, or, if granted admittance, he must be socialised, that is to say secularised, a process which necessarily involves inversion. His transformation into the guest means therefore that, from being shunned and treated with hostility, he must be clasped to the bosom and honoured and given precedence; no longer to be suborned, he must be succoured; from being last, he must be first,15 from being a person who can be freely insulted he becomes one who under no conditions can be disparaged. The inversion implies a transformation from hostile stranger, hostis, into guest, hospes (or hosts),’” from one whose hostile intentions are assumed [102] to one whose hostility is laid in abeyance. The word hostis claims therefore as its radical sense, not the obligation to reciprocal violence, but the notion of ‘strangeness’ which underlies this transition. The further extension to host is perfectly congruent, since strangeness is logically reciprocal, whether it enjoins distrust or hospitality. Both senses of the word, l’hôte, are conserved in French which must find other ways to distinguish between host and guest. While the behaviour enjoined by the relationship is essentially reciprocal, just as gifts are, there is a difference between reciprocal hostility and reciprocal hospitality: the first is simultaneous, the second can never be. Host and guest can at no point within the context of a single occasion be allowed to be equal, since equality invites rivalry. Therefore their reciprocity resides, not in an identity, but in an alteration of roles. Even the hostile hosts of the Kwakiutl observed this order. The hostility which underlies the relation of ‘hôtes’ which they express so explicitly (‘we fight with property’)16 can be vented, not in simultaneous combat, but (like the blows exchanged between the south eastern tribes of the Central Eskimo and their visitors) by turns. Reciprocity implies an alternation of roles, not an identity of roles. As Radcliffe-Brown saw in the case of avoidances and joking relationships, it is conflict which is prohibited; the laws of hospitality transpose the conflict to a level where hostilities are avoided. This prohibition of the equality which leads to conflict applies to the beggar as well as to the guest, the one who cannot pay and the one who is not permitted to do so — is not a beggar simply one who aspires to be a guest? But if he aspires too assiduously, then his insistence implies a threat and at that point the host is liberated of all moral duty and instead of gaining honour by his charity he loses it through submitting to duress, for freedom of will is the first condition of honour, Therefore the claim of the beggar is paradoxically one which is lost if it is asserted as a right and from the moment it loses its character as suppliance, it invites hostility. By pressing his claim too hard the would-be guest destroys its basis and falls back into the role of hostile stranger.17 By asserting his rights he denies his status, for even though a diffuse obligation exists towards the beggar, he is not endowed with any corresponding right. He establishes his status by humiliating himself in the admission of indigence and the reciprocity which he concedes in return is on behalf of God. The customs regarding begging in Andalusia may be taken to illustrate the matter. The beggar establishes his status by the demand for assistance in the name of God (por Dios). Once gratified he replies: Dios se lo pague (May God repay you). ‘May God repay you’ means ‘Because I cannot’. Here the association between the beggar and the Deity takes on a subsidiary meaning: the axis of ex- [103] change is no longer on the mortal plane. Repayment will only be made in Heaven; there will be none on Earth. The beggar is so to speak trading in the name of God, under His protection. The name by which he is known, pordiosero, rubs in the point. The refusal of alms is traditionally made in a formal phrase which carries the same import: ‘ Vd. perdone por Dios, hermano’ (Excuse me, in God’s name, Brother). The refusal to lay up store in Heaven and assume on Earth the honorific role of patron to the beggar, includes the assertion of equality with him (‘brother’), since inability to do so is the only excuse for refusal valid in the eyes of God. An alternative form, Dios le ampare, hermano’ (May God protect you, Brother) carries the same implication: ‘Because I am not going to.’ To beg is always and everywhere shameful for it implies a loss of personal autonomy which is the negation of honour. Hence those who are reduced to this expedient are regarded as the lowest and treated with the least respect of all the members of a community.18 This is not the case however, when they have sacerdotal status, for then they have not been ‘reduced to begging’; their personal autonomy has been, not lost, but wilfully renounced. A vow of poverty derives from the will and commits it; it is not the same thing as the failed aspiration to affluence. We should recognise therefore that the action of begging does not suffice by itself to define the status of a beggar; the moral basis on which the begging is undertaken must be considered. Every town in Andalusia possesses a certain number of habitual beggars. These are known persons rather than strangers and they prey upon the local population. A certain number are gypsies whose reputation for shamelessness fits them for the role of beggar. Such beggars adopt a style which makes their loss of all claim to honour patent. They cringe and display their infirmity or their misery in such a way that no man can deny his good fortune in comparison with them and therefore his obligation to help them. But they are not the only persons who depend in fact upon charity. Andalusia is a land of large farms. Its rural proletariat live in their home town normally but go away to work either sporadically or regularly on a seasonal basis. Their lives are precarious and when necessity threatens they move forth in search of work. Frequently they find themselves away from home and without means of support, so that they are forced to depend on charity. Their style of begging is very different, however, from that of the professional beggar. They stop at the farm to ask for work and if none is offered, they expect and are prepared to ask for food to continue their journey in search for it. They are not seen begging on street-corners in the towns; they do not tug the sleeve of the passer-by; they do not cringe nor attempt to evoke pity and the techniques of moral blackmail practised by the beggars are denied them by their claim to shame. They [104] tend on the contrary to adopt a gruff and manly style to differentiate themselves from the professional beggars, for they are strangers, not beggars, and they sacrifice their shame no further than the implied (but not stated) confession of indigence. They are not referred to as pordioseros, for they do not invoke charity in the name of God, but simply as pobres, persons who in better times at home would be prepared to reciprocate charity. The distinction is made clear in a telling passage in the memoirs of Juan Belmonte. When as a novice bullfighter he travelled round the countryside with a companion, they were accustomed to stop at the farms and contrive to be fed for nothing by asking to buy ten centimes’ worth of oil. But one morning at a farm in Utrera which today is my own, the only answer I got was a dry Dios le ampare, hermano.The conventional refusal to a beggar! My face fell with shame. Had I sunk to that? I was seized with a great depression and a terrible indignation against the good-for-nothing vagabond who had degraded my lust for adventure to such a level. At least the San Jacinto gang never begged its bread from door to do or. If we were hungry we robbed an orchard in gay defiance of watch-dogs and armed guards.19 The confusion between poor man and beggar is not commonly made, for the difference of status is usually clear from the style of begging. The distinction relates to the place of the supplicant within the social structure. ‘Endomendicity’ can promise no reciprocity other than through the Deity. ‘Exomendicity’ claims to be a system of undifferentiated exchange. The giver does not contemplate finding himself one day in the position of the endomendicant, for he has shame, but he may well expect to send his son off to seek work seasonally even if a change in his fortunes, the loss of his lease previously or of his post as bailiff, do not oblige him to take to the road himself. Therefore the response to the two types of supplicant are as different as their techniques. The honourable poor man may be received with honour (though this is not always the case); the professional beggar is treated with a disdain which the honourable man would not stomach. Moreover the former is a witness from the outside in whose eyes the reputation of the community is at stake, the latter is merely a nuisance and a threat. The former offers the opportunity of gaining honour through the role of patron, the latter is feared for her evil tongue and, as often as not, her evil eye. For there is a final difference between them: the former is more often a man, the latter more often a woman. Convention demands that every stranger be made a guest in Andalu- [105] sia. The unincorporated stranger cannot be abided. The plebeian etiquette with regard to eating illustrates this general sentiment. The act of eating supposes a higher degree of intimacy than mere presence and to eat in front of a stranger is to offend this sentiment. His status must be changed therefore to that of guest and this is done by the formality of offering food. The diner at a wayside tavern or modest restaurant invites the new arrival with a standard phrase, the workman eating his lunch uses the same phrase to the passer-by, the traveller in the third class railway carriage presses his travelling companions to share his provisions before he will begin eating. A similar custom is found in North Africa where it has been explained in terms of the magical danger of the envy of uninvited strangers who might well be possessed of the evil eye.20 My own experiences with regard to hospitality in the town which I have named Alcalá were not without significance. I was invited to a drink by persons of various social classes and it was not long before I was permitted to return such hospitality to members of the plebeian community and even to play the role of patron to those with whom I had formed an appropriate relationship, but I was never permitted to pay for wine we had drunk together by men of the upper class of the town, the señoritos, who insisted always on maintaining my status as a guest. (I found it necessary to search for reciprocity in other ways.) They would use various formulae to explain their refusal: ‘We shall all one day come to London and drink with you there. Then we shall ruin you’ (laughter); or they would simply remind me that I was a foreigner and that they would be ashamed to let me pay in their town; or they would promise that next time I should be allowed to pay — a ‘next time’ which never came. The fact that I was never allowed to return hospitality within the town was significant above all (since I was accepted as a social equal in other ways), in regard to their conception of the stranger. For I was not only a stranger to the local community but to the national community — a foreigner, and an inquisitive one at that. The threat which I embodied was represented in the belief that I was a spy, which was discarded only after months of evident ineptness in that role. While my presence was in itself honorific, my potential hostility was nevertheless very great. Therefore I was never allowed to escape from my status as guest, where I had no rights, into that of community member where I might assert myself, make demands and criticisms and interfere in the social and political system. This long-extended hospitality for which I remain ever grateful carried the covert significance of a status barrier whereby the leaders of local society protected themselves from the threat that my strangeness represented. It was even suggested, after a minor govern- [106] mental authority with whom I had had a slight altercation happened to be transferred to another town, that I was really in the pay, not of the British government, but of the Spanish government. Zeus in disguise? An ingenuous young man hastened to take advantage of his connection with me to ask for a letter of recommendation which would get him into the secret police. The extraneous example of my own experiences does not suffice to make clear the code of hospitality. The treatment of the stranger depends very much upon his social status. A person of high status honours the whole community by his presence and must be made a guest by a leading member, if he is not to be shunned as someone too suspicious to have any contact with. In fact, he can usually find someone with whom to establish at least a tie of common friendships. Persons of lower status frequently have similar contacts. There are also those who are glad to extend the range of their friendships as a source of prestige and with a view to an eventual reciprocity. The greatest overt distrust is that shown towards the groups of young men who come through the town on their way to the plains to seek work. The fact that they come in groups and that their destination is elsewhere makes them poor candidates for any form of hospitality. There is however one class of stranger towards whom hostility is shown, the young men who come courting a local girl. An ancient custom relates how such a visitor was received. If he were not driven away by stoning he would be captured by the local lads and ducked in the fountain. It was not clear whether this might be done more than once, but if he survived this ordeal and persevered with his suit he was allowed to do so unmolested. He was then believed to have formed an unbreakable attachment to the place through the effect of the waters. It is not difficult to see the symbolism of this custom. The water of each pueblo is its pride and none is so brackish that it will not be proclaimed exceptional in taste and health giving qualities (‘una agua riquísima, ‘una agua muy sana, etc.), superior to that of all neighbouring places. It is the source of the virtues of the inhabitants. Thestranger who has been submitted to the ordeal of ducking survives no longer as a stranger but as a member of the community, one who has been reborn from its ‘source’.21 (The word used is either pila or fuente. Pila means both ‘font’ and ‘fountain’, fuente means both the town fountain and also ‘source’ or ‘origin’. The town fountain is a white-washed edifice of great social importance as a meeting-place through which gossip is diffused and it is commonly surmounted by a cross). The hostile treatment is a prelude to acceptance at a level which is not attained by the guest. By presenting himself as a suitor the visitor denies his intention to depart; on the [107] contrary he asserts his aspiration to enter the kinship system as an affine, that is, to acquire rights in the community. III The law of hospitality is founded upon ambivalence. It imposes order through an appeal to the sacred, makes the unknown knowable, and replaces conflict by reciprocal honour. It does not eliminate the conflict altogether but places it in abeyance and prohibits its expression. This is true also of the avoidance and the joking relationship. But whereas the joking relationship suppresses the conflict by the prohibition to take offence, hospitality achieves the same end by the prohibition to give offence; one by forbidding respect, the other by enforcing it, or it might be put: the avoidance of respect and the avoidance of disrespect. Both relationships are placed outside the struggle for supremacy by a tacit agreement enjoined by custom, but, while the custom of the joking relationship invokes the desecrable and employs the language of pollution in the exchange of obscenities, the custom of hospitality invokes the sacred and involves the exchange of honour. Host and guest must pay each other honour. The host requests the honour of the guest’s company — (and this is not merely a self-effacing formula: he gains honour through the number and quality of his guests). The guest is honoured by the invitation. Their mutual obligations are in essence unspecific, like those between spiritual kinsmen or blood-brothers; each must accede to the desires of the other. To this extent the relationship is reciprocal. But this reciprocity does not obscure the distinction between the roles. It is always the host who ordains, the guest who complies. The guest must be granted the place of precedence and he must eat first, but precedence is defined in relation to the host, on his right hand as a rule. (only royalty takes the head of the table in the house of another, for the obvious reason that royalty always ordains, cannot comply.) The duty of ordering the precedence among guests is the host’s responsibility and the guest who is dissatisfied with his treatment has no recourse but to retire from his role altogether by walking out. An intermediary solution was once furnished in diplomatic etiquette by the convention whereby a guest, dissatisfied with his position at table, could call attention to an error of protocol of which he was the victim by the gesture of turning his plate over and thereby making it impossible to serve him. In this way he retired from his role until the error was corrected, or at least until his protest had been registered, without showing any discourtesy to his host. To complain openly would infringe the host’s prerogative in the placing of his guests, while to refuse the food would be impolite since refusal [108] implies distaste and depreciation and amounts therefore to an insult. The spanish peasantry, conscious of this implication, commonly uses the expression ‘para no despreciarlo’ (in order not to despise it) when accepting food or drink. In this way the guest exonerates himself from the implication of being greedy or demanding and maintains that he accepts only out of respect for the host. Thus tipsy farmers down their umpteenth glass with the righteous air of obligation. Whether it is mandatory to refuse or accept, or to refuse at first and then accept, is a particularity of custom. The logic of the law of hospitality provides a justification for either refusal or acceptance: whether honour is done best by dec1aring the offer of hospitality excessive (which might imply distaste) or by demonstrating it to be welcome (which risks the implication that it may be taken for granted) is something which can only be known by reference to local convention. To gobble the peasant’s lunch in the railway carriage in order not to show contempt for it is incorrect because there is no reason why he, rather than another, should play the host in such circumstances. To refuse the food he offers in his home is another matter. The roles of host and guest have territorial limitations. A host is host only on the territory over which on a particular occasion he c1aims authority. Outside it he cannot maintain the role. A guest cannot be guest on ground where he has rights and responsibilities. So it is that the courtesy of showing a guest to the door or the gate both underlines a concern in his welfare as long as he is a guest, but it also defines precisely the point at which he ceases to be so, when the host is quit of his responsibility. At this point the roles lapse. The custom of the desert Arabs made this abundantly clear. Such was the sanctity of hospitality that the host’s protection was assured even towards those for whom he felt enmity. To take advantage of a guest or fugitive was unthinkable. Yet hospitality bequeathed no commitment beyond the precincts of the domestic sanctuary, so his guest might become his victim the moment he stepped outside them. Hence it was the custom for the guest to leave silently and unannounced during the darkest hours of the night for fear he should be followed and struck down. The custom of the Kalingas shows by a curious variation the true nature of this sociological space defined by hospitality. When the guest of a Kalinga is a local man his host is responsible for his protection only within the confines of his property. His hurt or murder on the premises must be avenged by his host. But if the guest is a foreigner his host remains responsible for his protection throughout the entire region.22The range within which their complementary relationship holds good coincides with the territory where their mutual status is unequal. Where neither has a greater claim [109] to authority than the other their complementarity lapses. For, while a host has rights and obligations in regard to his guest, the guest has no right other than to respect and no obligation other than to honour his host. He incurs however the right and obligation to return hospitality on a future occasion on territory where he can claim authority. The reciprocity between host and guest is thus transposed to a temporal sequence and a spatial alternation in which the roles are reversed. Only then can the covert hostility be vented in customs such as the potlatch where rivalry takes the form of a hospitality which is more than lavish and where failure to reciprocate spells bankruptcy. The fable of the fox and the stork provides a model of the law of hospitality and an object lesson in its exploitation: an affront which masquerades as a generous and honorific gesture cannot be resented without violating the law of hospitality, since it is the host’s privilege to ordain, but it can nevertheless be avenged by a similar ploy once the tables are turned. For the same reason that the criminal is said to define the law the essentials of the law of hospitality can best be seen in the actions which constitute its infringement. How is the law of hospitality infringed? The detail varies of course from place to place. To inquire after the health of a spouse or child may be a requirement of good manners according to one code or a faux pas according to another. Yet a certain general sense informs them all, entitling us to talk about the law of hospitality in the abstract in contrast to the specific codes of hospitality exemplified by different cultures. There is, so to speak, a ‘natural law’ of hospitality deriving not from divine revelation like so many particular codes of law, but from sociological necessity. A guest infringes the law of hospitality: If he insults his host or by any show of hostility or rivalry; he must honour his host. If he usurps the role of his host. He may do this by presuming upon what has not yet been offered, by ‘making himself at home’, taking precedence, helping himself, giving orders to the dependants of his host, and so forth. If he makes claims or demands, he usurps the host’s right to ordain according to his free will, even where custom lays down what he should wish to ordain. To attempt to sleep with the host’s wife23 or to refuse to do so may either of them be infractions of a code of hospitality, but be it noted that the cession of the conjugal role always depends upon the host’s will, like the precedence which he cedes. His wife’s favours are always his to dispose of as he wishes. To demand or take what is not offered is always an usurpation of the role of host; If, on the other hand, he refuses what is offered he infringes the role of guest. Food and drink always have ritual value, for the ingestion [110] together of a common substance creates a bond. Commensality is the basis of community in a whole number of contexts. Therefore the guest is bound above all to accept food. Any refusal reflects in fact upon the host’s capacity to do honour; and this is what the guest must uphold. Therefore he may be expected to give thanks and pay compliments in order to stress that he is conscious of the honour done him. On the other hand it may be considered ‘bad form’ to do so since this implies that honour might not have been done and this in turn throws doubt on the host’s capacity. The Victorian hostess who answered a florid compliment to her cook with the withering words: ‘But did you expect to have bad food in my house?’ made the point effectively. Failure to know what should be taken for granted can amount to insult. Therefore the details of codes of hospitality may be contraries, but, as in the treatment of twins or smiths in Africa, the contraries contain a common element of sociological meaning, which derives in this case from the law of hospitality. A host infringes the law of hospitality: If he insults his guest or by any show of hostility or rivalry; he must honour his guest. If he fails to protect his guest or the honour of his guest. For this reason, though fellow guests have no explicit relationship, they are bound to forego hostilities, since they offend their host in the act of attacking one another. The host must defend each against the other, since both are his guests. If he fails to attend to his guests, to grant them the precedence which is their due, to show concern for their needs and wishes or in general to earn the gratitude which guests should show. Failure to offer the best is to denigrate the guest. Therefore it must always be maintained that, however far from perfect his hospitality maybe, it is the best he can do. It will be noted that, while the first clause is the same for both parties, the second and third are complementary between host and guest. This complementarity provides the systematic basis of the institution, which reaches its full symmetry in reciprocal hospitality when the roles of host and guest are exchanged. This is never the case with hospitality to a stranger whose chance of reciprocating necessarily remains in the blue. Lacking reciprocity between individuals, hospitality to the stranger can nevertheless be viewed as a reciprocal relationship between communities. The customs relating to the stranger therefore concern the degree to which he is permitted to be incorporated into a community which is not his own, and the techniques whereby this is effected. These may be divided into those which establish him as a permanent member of the local group and those which assume his departure in the future. [111] If he comes only to visit, the visit may be returned, but if he intends to remain and change his affiliation, the reciprocity between communities ceases to operate. An ‘ordeal’ implies permanence since its significance is essentially that it marks an irreversible passage: the element of hostility in the character of the stranger is destroyed and he is able to emerge from it in a more acceptable status. He is no longer unknown, he has been tried. He forfeits his association with the sacred and his call upon hospitality which derived from it. The passage of an ordeal entitles the stranger to remain in a new role, more nearly incorporated even if he is not granted the full status of community membership; he may still be subject to a personal bond with one of its members through affinity, artificial kinship or clientship. Yet whatever his subsequent status it pro vides him with a mode of permanent incorporation. Where an elaborate code of hospitality applies to the stranger and he is made a guest by the mere fact of his appearance without any ‘ordeal’, an impermanent relationship is implied. His hostile character is not destroyed but inverted through the avoidance of disrespect. A limit is frequently set upon the time such a guest is expected to stay and, even when this is not so, it is always recognised that it is an abuse to outstay one’s welcome. Thus while the mode of permanent incorporation solidifies in time, the status of guest evaporates. The one faces a potential assimilation, the other an eventual departure. While it lasts, the tenuous nature of the relationship of host and guest depends upon respecting the complementarity of their roles. Any infringement of the code of hospitality destroys the structure of roles, since it implies an incorporation which has not in fact taken place; failure to return honour or avoid disrespect entitles the person slighted in this way to relinquish his role and revert to the hostility which it suppressed. The sacred quality in the relationship is not removed, but polluted. Once they are no longer host and guest they are enemies, not strangers. Enemies do compete and it requires at least a tacit test of strength to determine which is the better man who will remain in possession of the field while the other takes his distance. The ordeal of the judicial combat may be appealed to so that Divine judgement may decide the matter or the struggle may be quite unformalised. The ‘ordeal’ which failed to take place on the way in takes place on the way out. Then the antagonists can part and become strangers again, in life or in death. This is why the process of reverting from guest to stranger in the Mediterranean follows a course reminiscent of that whereby the stranger was accepted in Eskimo society. Both represent variations on the theme of the ambivalence which underlies the law of hospitality. Both involve a combat which carries the host-guest relationship beyond that state of [112] suspended hostility in which the exchange of honour overlays the contrast of allegiances, but beyond it in one of two directions: it may lead either to incorporation or rejection. Yet the logical foundation of the problem is the same and it is this which explains, perhaps, the similarity between Boas’ ethnographical account and the last scene of the odyssey.24 Epilogue The feast has been going on for years when the old beggar turns up. He is not, as one of the guests suspects, a god in disguise but the host. Only the old dog knows and the discovery is too much for him. The place is in disorder: the master’s substance is wasting, the suitors plague his widow (who is not his widow), the guests play the host, abuse the maid-servants and plot the son’s murder. A challenge is issued to a test of strength to see which guest can string the master’s bow. The lady will espouse the winner, she says. Finally, when all have failed, the old beggar picks up the challenge amidst their scorn, and by the strength of his right arm triumphantly reveals his true identity. After that, of course, the slaughter begins. (How could one pardon guests who have so far usurped the role of host?) Anyway the gods see to it that no quarter be given, for it is justice which is at issue here, not sentiment. The world turns the right way up once more. Order and peace are restored. ___________________ * Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Julian Pitt-Rivers, “The law of hospitality”, 1977, from The Fate of Shechem or The Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean, Julian Pitt-Rivers, 94-112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. We are grateful to Françoise Pitt-Rivers for granting Hau permission to reprint the work. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original text. Original pagination is indicated in square brackets. 1. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Society, 1963. 2. F. Boas, The Central Eskimo (Washington, 1887), p. 609. Strangers are greeted with a feast in many parts of the world and are also frequently subject to a contest of skill or strength. 3. ‘Rite d’intégration’, in the words of A. van Gennep, Les rites de passage. Paris, (1909). 4. Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique (Paris, 15e éd., 1895), p. 232. 5. According to Fares, ancient Arab custom forbade asking the guest who he was, where he came from or where he was going (B. Fares, L’honneur chez les Árabes avant l’Islam, Paris, 1932, p. 95). Similarly Odysseus was asked such questions only as he was leaving Phaeacia. 6. Even within a single society whose communities are roughly similar in structure, an individual easily forfeits his status when away from home. The point was made tellingly by a plebeian member of the town of Alcalá; to a drunken summer visitor who attempted to patronise him he answered: ‘You may be Don Fulano de Tal in your own home, but here you’re just sh. .t’ (the story is probably apocryphal; I have only the testimony of the speaker that he actually said the words). In accordance with the same notions the system of nicknames in the townships of Andalusia seldom recognises an outsider by any identity other than the place of his origin. Only exceptionally and after many years of residence will he acquire a nickname which defines him as an individual, that is, as a member of the community. Since place of birth is what defines the essential nature of the individual, an outsider can never become totally incorporated. Cf. J. Pitt-Rivers, The People of the Sierra (London, 1954). 7. K. Birket-Smith, The Eskimos (London, 1959), p. 173. It is significant that the officiants at rites of passage frequently establish through them relationships of ritual kinships, as for example in the instance of godparenthood. 8. I admit none the less to a certain satisfaction when it was confirmed to me by Mr Keith Basso who was then immersed in Eskimo ethnography that there is indeed one tribe among whom the stranger, defeated in the ordeal of entry, is made the ritual kinsman of his victor. Here however the contest took the form of a wrestling match of which the object was to kick the opponents’ legs away from under him. Strength in the right leg, not arm, was the measure of superiority as indeed it is among the football fans of modern society. 9. ‘L’humeur voyageuse et sociale des Grecs, les fêtes, les besoins du commerce et très souvent aussi les exils politiques rendent toujours l’hospitalité nécessaire dans toutes les parties du monde grec’ (Ch. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, vol. III, Paris, 1900, p. 294). 10. Cf. A. H. Abou-Seid, ‘Honour and Shame among the Bedouins of Egypt’, J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: the values of Mediterranean Society (London, 1965). So powerful is this idea that every home becomes a sanctuary guarded by the honour of the owner who is in duty bound to receive any fugitive who ask for refuge. Even his own enemy can demand sanctuary of him, and rest assured of protection against himself, since his obligation to respect the sanctity of his own home takes precedence over his right and desire for vengeance. It should be noted however that the sacredness of the home makes it a sanctuary only to the stranger, not to the fellow-member of the community. Further instances of the association between the sacred and the stranger are given by A. M. Hocart, in ‘The Divinity and the Guest’, The Life-giving Myth (London, 1935). 11. Bishr Fares, L’honneur chezles Arabes avantl’Islam (Paris, 1932). 12. ‘The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane’ (M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, New York, 1959, p. 10). 13. ‘The sacredness of the stranger in many societies was recognised long before Van Gennep who refers to earlier discussions of this topic’ (Eliade, op. cit., p. 36). 14. ‘Le sacré n’est pas une valeur absolue, mais une valeur qui indique des situations respectives. Un homme qui vit chez lui . . . dans le profane . . . vit dans le sacré dès qu’il part en voyage et se trouve, en qualité d’étranger, à proximité d’un camp d’inconnus’ (Van Gennep, op. cit., p. 16; cf. also p. 36 et sq.). 15. The guest who is received in a house for the first time is given precedence over its habitual guests with whom a greater familiarity exists. In the same way diplomatic etiquette forbids placing a countryman of the host in the place of honour if foreigners are present. 16. R. Benedict, Patterns of Culture (London, 1952) p. 136. 17. The problem of the ‘sturdy beggars’ in sixteenth-century England revolved around this distinction of roles. The nursery rhyme preserves the terms of the choice which they imposed on the villagers: ‘some gave them black bread and some gave them brown, and some gave them a big stick and beat them out of town’. 18. Cf. M. Mauss, ‘Le don’, in Sociologie et Anthropologie, p. 258: ‘Le don non rendu rend encore inférieur celui qui l’a accepté . . .’; cf. also p.169. 19. J. Belmonte, Juan Belmonte, killer of bulls. The autobiography of a matador (New York, 1937), p. 109. 20. Havelock Ellis, The soul of Spain (London, 1908), p. 17. It might be noted that whereas the evil eye is a female attribute in Andalusia, it is also exerted by men across the straits. 21. A recent article by Susan Tax Freeman, ‘The Municipios of Northern Spain: a view from the fountain’ in Essays presented to Sol Tax (in press) examines in detail the symbolic value of the fountain and marks the analogy between pila, the baptismal font, and pila, the fountain. 22. R. F. Barton, The Kalingas (Chicago, 1949), p. 83. Regarding the status of stranger in Africa, see Meyer Fortes, ‘Strangers’ in Studies in African Social Anthropology: essays presented to I. Schapera, (eds.) M. Fortes and Sheila Patterson (London, 1975). 23. Cf. Van Gennep, op. cit., p. 47 et sq. 24. In order to demonstrate the universal validity of the logic of the law of hospitality, I have deliberately taken evidence from different spheres: ritual custom, the conventions of manners, habitual practice and the inventions of the poet. It is not intended to imply that there is no difference between them and that they must not be distinguished for other purposes.

Par-delà le structuralisme? This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Michael Lambek. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.006 LECTURES Par-delà le structuralisme? Response to Philippe Descola’s “Transformation transformed” Michael LAMBEK, University of Toronto Scarborough   It is a great honor and pleasure to comment on Professor Descola’s paper.1 He is a very gracious person as well as a brilliant and erudite scholar. I am grateful that, unlike Lévi-Strauss’ reading of his dissertation, he let me see his text ahead of time. There is great charisma attached to both their names, and I have to say that what Descola says of his mentor is also true of himself, namely that he is “someone who [is] able to deal with arcane social facts by showing how they followed a complex logical pattern, and doing this with the clear and incisive mind of a great philosopher and the elegance and sensibility of a great writer” (p. 33). Implicitly, then, Descola’s talk manifests succession between generations within a lineage of great scholars and also implicitly challenges any easy distinction between reproduction and transformation as ideal types. In other words, in elucidating how structuralism comprehends transformation, Descola’s talk enables us to ascertain the transformation of or within structuralism itself. The central ideas of structuralism are exemplified in the transformation from Saussure and Jakobson to Lévi-Strauss, and thence to Descola. I guess these intergenerational transformations could be analyzed as Goethean. I wonder, then, whether the relations between the ideas of those in the same generation as one another, namely between the models of Descola and Viveiros de Castro, are to be taken as Thompsonian?2 Likewise, [46]if we are to take a structuralist lesson in understanding what structuralism is, we can see it only in relations of difference to other models or theories of social phenomena, such as historical materialist or cybernetic ones. A key phrase in Descola’s talk offers a suggestion as to how to begin. “A structure,” he says, “is not a system” (p. 37). Descola’s paper is deceptively short, with a large number of complex ideas packed in, and if I don’t exercise some discipline myself I will write as long in response. I find myself most in agreement with him when he depicts Lévi-Straussian structuralism and less so the further he himself departs from it. Let me try to elaborate. Descola offers an extremely lucid exposition of structuralism. Since I have nothing to debate with him here—indeed how could I?—I simply remark on what I consider a blind spot of structuralism. This will provide an entrée to discuss Descola’s work. I begin with the method. As Descola says, structuralism proposes that no human phenomenon has a meaning in itself, that it only becomes relevant when it is contrasted with other phenomena of a similar kind – a system of marriage with other systems of marriage, a variant of a myth with other variants of a myth; so that the object of the inquiry is less the description of the phenomenon than the logic of its contrasts. (p. 37) Descola adds the incisive remark of Jean Pouillon that the structuralist method consists of ordering a set of differences. So, structuralism not only begins with relations rather than discrete objects or meanings, but takes the primary relations to be those that differentiate. It proposes in the first instance a structure of differentiations not of positive relations. These differentiations are generally composed by means of binary, contrastive features. But binary contrasts are not always evident. During my fieldwork among Malagasy speakers in Mayotte (Western Indian Ocean) I heard various words referring to members of a semantic domain or Wittgensteinian family of not generally visible and possibly nonmaterial beings I have called spirits. I was unable to discover clear binary contrastive features among all of them and hence to order them according to relations of difference. That was partly because the terms and concepts, coming from disparate historical and cultural traditions, were incommensurable to one another. By incommensurable, I mean, following Thomas Kuhn (1962), that they cannot be compared along a single yardstick or according to any neutral external measure. Translated with respect to structuralism, this means they cannot be ordered according to a set of binary differences. This was true not only between kinds of spirits but also between what I called the traditions of Islam, spirit possession, and cosmology in which they were located and that were all a part of life in Mayotte. Local practice entailed articulation of and among incommensurable forms of knowledge (Lambek 1993). Now, I can learn from Descola’s work that perhaps what these beings have in common is that they are all premised on having a similar interiority but different physicality from humans. And yet, if I look more closely, some emphasize similarities of physicality, and for some the interiority is more or less knowable. The relations are a matter of degree rather than mutual exclusion and the properties and criteria are generally left vague. (It’s doubtless analogism.) To ask too [47]many questions, to challenge the ambiguity, to insist on finding an order and create a typology or paradigm, would be an ethnocentric and destructive act on my part.3 I think that structuralism rests on commensuration. It is brilliant in showing commensurability where at first sight it is not evident, but it cannot readily address contexts where commensurability simply is not there. Incommensurability marks the limit of what structuralism can say. Thus, for Kuhn, it marks the limit of one paradigm and the impossibility of clearly establishing its relationship to a successive or adjacent one. Put another way, incommensurable paradigms cannot be derived as transformations of one another. There is a break between them. Incommensurable does not mean incomparable or untranslatable, but it implies that translation is not exact or self-evident and always leaves a residue. Lévi-Strauss has taught us that one of the activities of mind lies in making things commensurable to one another, structuring them, or, if the entities are not experienced prior to the thought, creating structures such that they will produce relations and secondarily the beings that are then in relation, and then enacting the kinds of transformations among them that Lévi-Strauss and Descola demonstrate. This has been described, with various levels of abstraction and theoretical consequence, as la pensée sauvage, generative grammar, structuring structures, and even rationalization in Weber’s sense, underlying everything from art through sentences to social hierarchy and bureaucracy. Nevertheless, if we “give sense to the world by detecting in it salient features that can be organized in contrastive sets” (p. 35), we also reach limits and have to make sense of those limits. These limits or aporia are more widespread than the sort of anomalies Mary Douglas (1966) talked about. One of the limits might be the very incommensurability between the world and language. By “the world” here I include what Descola lists as “animals, plants, physical processes, artifacts, images, and other forms of beings” (p. 35). You will perhaps notice the word that is not uttered here (see below). I admit I had to look up the definition of gnoseology, which, as you all know, is the philosophy of knowledge and cognition. Descola refers to “the assumption that there exists a physical continuity between, as [Lévi-Strauss] says, ‘the states of subjectivity and the properties of the cosmos’.” I take this as a credo of monism. However, I am suspect of monism taken tout court and I do think that Lévi-Strauss’ monism was always balanced by his repeated adversion to dualism. At the least, a tension between monism and dualism is characteristic of his thought and, I think, of Descola’s and of human existence more generally. (My own predilection is for a monism of the both–and sort, i.e., a monism that somehow encompasses dualism rather than a monism of the either–or sort that excludes dualism. Yet making that distinction itself operates dualistically . . . It is a paradox human thought cannot escape.) Descola suggests that the relations between language and world are not incommensurable, that there is “a vast array of meaningful differences between qualities and beings that can be systematically organized according to these differences” [48](p. 35). This organization is at first view a mental and human one, but he thinks that is merely a surface manifestation of something deeper and more widespread. I am enough of a naturalist to agree that human cognition is a part of nature, but that does not convince me that the products of mind are always fully commensurable with the world to which it attends. I am uneasy conflating structural order with ecological system, or language with world. (Remember, a structure is not a system.) It is not that they are inaccessible to each other, and not that they cannot be compared or related, only that they are incommensurable. There would be a lot more agreement if it were otherwise. I do think a tree falling in the forest makes a sound when there is no human being or even no animal to hear it, but I do not know in what sense the relations between trees and forest are part of a structure of commensurable differences until human thought and language make them so. I am also inclined to think, along with Wittgenstein, that if trees or forests were to speak, we would not be able to understand them. I do not think one can purify anthropology of its anthropocentrism, not only because by definition it is the study of humankind, but also because I take a Gadamerian hermeneutic position that we cannot fully escape our own prejudices. Just as there is no ethnographic study that is entirely purged of its ethnocentrism, or, let us say more charitably, purified of the subject position of the ethnographer (albeit that may have been one of Lévi-Strauss’ goals), so there can be no human assumptions that are not at some level anthropocentric. Descola himself speaks of “the affordances which the world offers to the specifically human dispositions” (p. 40). Anthropocentrism is not equivalent to Eurocentrism; animals are not the equivalent of people in other societies and domestication is not equivalent to colonization. More deeply put, without some level of anthropocentrism we would not be able to understand ourselves. Moreover, from what noncircular position could we confirm with authority that we had surpassed or transcended anthropocentrism? My position is not one of pure relativism; we can always broaden our horizons. Moreover, I acknowledge the importance of ecology and models that locate human beings within the ecosystem rather than outside or above it. Countless philosophers have also reminded us of the hubris of human reason. I also agree (with some caveats) with the remark of Lévi-Strauss that “the right of the environment, which everyone talks about, is the right of the environment in regard to man, and not the right of man in regard to the environment.”4 I have not read Kohn’s book (2013) and cannot—or, rather, should not—comment on it, but I don’t think it is original to turn to iconic and indexical signs. I quite agree that these processes move us beyond the “language-like properties of social life” (p. 35), but I would like to maintain the distinction between human language and communication. Gregory Bateson (1972) spoke of the communication of information, and defined information (structurally?) as the difference that makes a difference. It occurs at all levels, not only within ecosystems broadly conceived, but also at the infracorporeal and even the cellular level. The point about the symbol, for authors like Suzanne Langer (1942) and Leslie White (1949), was how it took human language and thought to a different level. The location of culture [49]in language and symbols was precisely to say it was neither internal nor material, neither mind nor body. Indexicality was described in the 1960s work on ritualization among animals and Roy Rappaport (1968) showed the cybernetic connections between ritual events of humans and the size of both human and pig populations in Papua New Guinea. Human language and social practice evidently depend on indexical and iconic functions as well as symbolic ones, and not only with respect to parole; the Mythologiques are full of iconic and indexical relations. Here we come to the relation between structuralism and semiotics, on which there are people in this conversation far more qualified than me to comment, but I would draw attention first to the concept of the interpretant and second to the question of whether indexical and iconic signs in nature always find themselves in structural relations, in sets of ordered differences, in the same way that symbolic signs are purported to do. I think that the urge to evade anthropocentrism can quickly slip into the projections of anthropomorphism, which are themselves displaced and mystified forms of anthropocentrism. (I am speaking here of certain Western thinkers, not Descola and not of the members of societies characterized by animism.) It is one thing to complement structuralism with ecology—which I applaud—and quite another to start talking about forests as being or having selves. We slip here into heady Nietzschean territory of the fluid transformation and ambiguity between the literal and the metaphorical. Communication is not the same as reasoning. I mean no disrespect to forests when I say I don’t think they think. (They are, of course, welcome to respond.) But the fact that we alone rely on symbols does not make us superior. I do love forests, and especially to lose myself within them. But that is also to say that I have never learned fully how to know the forest from the trees and I am not so sure that forests and trees know how to do so either. I take agency as including the possibility to do otherwise and to act knowingly. I accept that the tiger deploys strategy when he hunts me. But do glaciers exhibit agency when they melt? Melting ice has causal effects—on humans and also on polar bears and sea levels, and sinking or rising land masses, and so forth, and these have feedback loops. But I think it melts the concept of agency to extend it to melting. And in any case, Lévi-Strauss was uninterested in agency; what humans and other beings have in common was to be found by dissolving man, not by reconstituting other beings in man’s likeness. How we think about tigers or glaciers takes us directly to Descola’s four ontologies (2013). Thinking about shrinking forests in the Amazon or Madagascar, the question is how to articulate the knowledge from environmental science with what we know about human action and society and also with social justice to formulate a sound political ecology or ecological politics. Taking Descola’s four ontologies seriously, is the question how to recontextualize naturalism from the perspective of animism or totemism, how to articulate insights and practices taken from each of them, or how to formulate an animist politics? In any case, the middle part of Descola’s talk takes me back to the debates that characterized my graduate student days, debates between structuralists and materialists and the ways that the more powerful thinkers, such as Sahlins, along one track, and Rappaport, along a very different track, attempted to transcend them, [50]via dialectics and cybernetics, respectively. Perhaps the discussions today are more sophisticated or have taken a radically new turn, but I think they illustrate another lesson from Lévi-Strauss, namely that any mythological system—and here I include a tradition like anthropology—is built by adding layers around an intractable core, call that core mind and matter, language and world, stability and change, structure and history, or even culture and nature—to mention the unmentionable word.5 There are central oppositions around which human thought works itself and which it cannot give up. The core oppositions, those significant and complex enough to generate so much talk and argument, but also art, are likely to be incommensurable ones, not those easily placed in binary contrastive relations of difference. As for seeking the unconscious activity of mind in cultural constructions or by means of cognitive psychology, I do not think these projects need be mutually exclusive. Had cognitive psychology been as sophisticated in Lévi-Strauss’ day, he might have made use of it. But not all cognitive psychology is as sophisticated as it thinks itself, and without serious ethnographic work, like that of Rita Astuti (forthcoming), it remains highly susceptible to ethnocentrism or ontological bias and at the mercy of its techniques and methods. And no amount of cognitive psychology or MRI machines could compensate for Lévi-Strauss’ fascination with myth or for our fascination with what he has to say about and by means of myth, even if it does not provide the royal road into the unconscious, or even if that road is better conceived in psychoanalytic than cognitivist terms. I return to transformation. Descola is extremely insightful in pointing to the centrality of transformation for Lévi-Straussian structuralism and in showing how it takes two distinct forms, with respect to the work on kinship and myth, respectively. Here I have to admit my ignorance, not having read either Goethe or D’Arcy Thompson on the subject—so I hope you will forgive any misunderstanding that follows.6 One question is whether the two models of transformation are meant to show how we may best organize the diversity we perceive through empirical investigation or to model how diversity was and continues to be produced. Another question is how the two models of transformation address the relations of structure to history. Is restricted exchange prior to other forms of marriage exchange only logically or also temporally? The Goethean model is one of the unfolding of possibilities derived from an original form. While these possibilities are described as logical, there is also a hint that there might be a temporal or linear order to them such that one manifestation must be historically prior to another. Are they reversible in the sense that Lévi-Strauss describes marital exchange itself? Or perhaps irreversible in the sense in which Lévi-Strauss can remark in Tristes tropiques ([1955] 1973: 150), “I cherish the reflection . . . of an era when the human species was in proportion to the world it occupied”? The principle of reversibility is more straightforward in the D’Arcy [51]Thompson model, where there is no original form. In the Mythologiques there is only the continuous shuffling of the mythemes, which are equivalent to one another. There is no growth in complexity. Indeed, it is the severity and abstinence of this model in the face of our hegemonic ideologies of change and growth that is so wonderful. The problem is that it leaves intellectual successors to the model with nothing to do but further reshuffling. Finally, Descola offers us a guide to his magisterial book. This is a brilliant and stimulating model, and its capacity to illuminate is made evident by the wealth of ethnography and philosophy it encompasses. With the waning of primitive worlds to investigate, we witness replacement not only with the questionable romance with animals but also with the significant resurgence of armchair anthropology. In Descola’s book the Goethean core is not a principle or a golden bough but a primary opposition and the set of relations it establishes along two intersecting axes. In my commentary in a previous issue of HAU (Lambek 2014) I called it “the elementary structures of being.” It is constituted by what Descola in his essay calls “the awareness of a duality of planes between material processes . . . and mental states” (p. 40). Note the dualism here, which is actually a doubled dualism since each plane is set on an axis of same and different. Yet Descola does not want to identify his planes with Cartesian body and mind or with anthropological nature and culture. This is because he sees the latter two oppositions as manifestations of only one of the four ontologies his more abstract original pair can generate. I read the par-delà of his title to indicate “beyond” in the sense of moving forward from, enlarging or surpassing, rather than abandoning nature and culture. However, whereas the same and different distinction is both binary and commensurable and also understood as a continuum, a matter of degree of likeness, I suggest the material/mental distinction is an incommensurable one and hence that the two axes are not equivalent to one another. I admit that I am not sure what the consequences of my suggestion are, but they might preempt the following questions. What is the ontological status of Descola’s model of ontologies? Is it distinct from them? Do the ontologies form distinct worlds? If we think wild gorillas or pet cats share something with us, are we still in the ontology of naturalism or have we stepped into animism or totemism? In what sense is posthumanism also postnaturalism? Also, doesn’t analogism continue to hold everywhere, as, I think, Lévi-Strauss thought? Might Descola entertain the idea of ontological pluralism—or would that be an oxymoron? In any case, Descola counters all this with the magnificent “basic principle of structural analysis which holds that each variant is a variant of the other variants and not of any of them in particular which would be privileged” (p. 41). And he concludes with the brilliantly enunciated manifesto on symmetrization that reminds us why structuralism continues so profoundly to matter. References Astuti, Rita. Forthcoming. Cognition in the field. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[52] Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and danger. London: Routledge. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lambek, Michael. 1993. Knowledge and practice in Mayotte. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2014. “The elementary structures of being (human): Comment on Philippe Descola’s Beyond nature and culture.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 245–251. Langer, Susanne. 1942. Philosophy in a new key. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1955) 1973. Tristes tropiques. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape. Rappaport, Roy. 1968. Pigs for the ancestors. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Schatz, Adam. 2011. “Jottings, scraps and doodles,” review of Claude Lévi-Strauss: The poet in the laboratory by Patrick Wilcken, London Review of Books 33 (21): 3–7. White, Leslie. 1949. The science of culture. New York: Grove.   Michael LAMBEK holds a Canada Research Chair in Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2016–17). He has written a number of books, from Human spirits (Cambridge University Press, 1981) through The ethical condition (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and has been a frequent contributor to HAU. Michael LambekDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of Toronto Scarborough1265 Military TrailScarborough, OntarioCanadaM1C 1A4lambek@utsc.utoronto.ca ___________________ 1. The invitation came from Alejandro Paz and the commentary was delivered well before the author became interim coeditor of HAU. I am grateful to Amira Mittermaier for very helpful comments. 2. On Goethean and Thompsonian, see Descola’s essay. 3. I don’t mean to suggest that people in Mayotte don’t ask questions themselves. (For full discussion, see Lambek 1993.) 4. As cited by Adam Schatz (2011). Source and page numbers in Lévi-Strauss not given. 5. At the Collège de France, Descola does hold the Chair in Anthropology of Nature. 6. However, I have heard Goethe cited by contemporary alchemists and practitioners of complementary medicine in Switzerland, practices that in turn exemplify very neatly the analogism of the pensée sauvage.  

The original political society This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Marshall Sahlins. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.2.014 The original political society Marshall SAHLINS, University of Chicago Even the so-called egalitarian and loosely structured societies known to anthropology, including hunters such as Inuit or Australian Aborigines, are in structure and practice subordinate segments of inclusive cosmic polities, ordered and governed by divinities, ancestors, species-masters, and other such metapersons endowed with life-and-death powers over the human population. “The Mbowamb spends his whole life completely under the spell and in the company of spirits” (Vicedom and Tischner). “[Araweté] society is not complete on earth: the living are part of the global social structure founded on the alliance between heaven and earth” (Viveiros de Castro). We need something like a Copernican revolution in anthropological perspective: from human society as the center of a universe onto which it projects its own forms—that is to say, from the Durkheimian or structural-functional deceived wisdom—to the ethnographic realities of people’s dependence on the encompassing life-giving and death-dealing powers, themselves of human attributes, which rule earthly order, welfare, and existence. For, Hobbes notwithstanding, something like the political state is the condition of humanity in the state of nature; there are kingly beings in heaven even where there are no chiefs on earth. Keywords: Hocart, the state, metapersons, “egalitarian societies,” animism I am a Cartesian—a Hocartesian. I want to follow Hocart’s lead in freeing oneself from anthropological conventions by adhering to indigenous traditions. “How can we make any progress in the understanding of cultures, ancient or modern,” he said, “if we persist in dividing what people join, and in joining what they keep apart?” ([1952] 1970: 23). This essay is an extended commentary on the Hocartesian meditation encapsulated in Kings and councillors by “the straightforward equivalence, king = god” ([1936] 1970: 74). I mean to capitalize on the more or less explicit temporality entailed in the anthropological master’s exegesis of this equivalence, as when he variously speaks of the king as the vehicle, abode, substitute, repository, [92]or representative of the god (Hocart 1933, [1936] 1970, [1950] 1968). The clear implication is that gods precede the kings who effectively replicate them—which is not exactly the common social science tradition of cosmology as the reflex of sociology. Consider time’s arrow in statements such as: “So present was this divine and celestial character to the Polynesian mind that they called the chiefs lani, heaven, and the same word marae is used of a temple and a chief’s grave” (Hocart [1927] 1969: 11). Kings are human imitations of gods, rather than gods of kings. That was the dominant view in Christendom for a long time before the modern celestialization of sovereignty as an ideological expression of the real-political order. From Augustine’s notion of the Earthly City as an imperfect form of the Heavenly City to Carl Schmitt’s assertion that the significant concepts of the modern state are “secularized theological concepts” (2005: 36), human government was commonly considered to be modeled on the kingdom of God. Based on his own view of the ritual character of kingship, however, Hocart’s thesis was more far-reaching culturally and historically: that human societies were engaged in cosmic systems of governmentality even before they instituted anything like a political state of their own. From the preface of Kings and councillors: The machinery of government was blocked out in society long before the appearance of government as we now understand it. In other words, the functions now discharged by king, prime minister, treasury, public works, are not the original ones; they may account for the present form of these institutions, but not for their original appearance. They were originally part, not of a system of government, but of an organization to promote life, fertility, prosperity by transferring life from objects abounding in it to objects dependent on it. ([1952] 1970: 3) In effect, Hocart speaks here of a cosmic polity, hierarchically encompassing human society, since the life-giving means of people’s existence were supplied by “supernatural” beings of extraordinary powers: a polity thus governed by so-called “spirits”—though they had human dispositions, often took human bodily forms, and were present within human experience. The present essay is a follow-up. The project is to take the Cartesian thesis beyond kingship to its logical and anthropological extreme. Even the so-called “egalitarian” or “acephalous” societies, including hunters such as the Inuit or Australian Aboriginals, are in structure and practice cosmic polities, ordered and governed by divinities, the dead, species-masters, and other such metapersons endowed with life-and-death powers over the human population. There are kingly beings in heaven where there are no chiefs on earth. Hobbes notwithstanding, the state of nature is already something of a political state. It follows that, taken in its social totality and cultural reality, something like the state is the general condition of humankind. It is usually called “religion.” For example: Chewong and Inuit Let me begin with a problem in ethnographic perspective that typically leads to a cultural mismatch between the ancestral legacy of the anthropologist and [93]her or his indigenous interlocutors. I know this is a problem, since for a long time I lived with the same contradiction I now see in Signe Howell’s excellent study of the Chewong of the Malaysian interior. Although Chewong society is described as classically “egalitarian,” it is in practice coercively ruled by a host of cosmic authorities, themselves of human character and metahuman powers. The Chewong are a few hundred people organized largely by kinship and subsisting largely by hunting. But they are hardly on their own. They are set within and dependent upon a greater animistic universe comprised of the persons of animals, plants, and natural features, complemented by a great variety of demonic figures, and presided over by several inclusive deities. Though we conventionally call such creatures “spirits,” Chewong respectfully regard them as “people” (beri)—indeed, “people like us” or “our people” (Howell 1985: 171). The obvious problem of perspective consists in the venerable anthropological disposition to banish the so-called “supernatural” to the epiphenomenal limbo of the “ideological,” the “imaginary,” or some such background of discursive insignificance by comparison to the hard realities of social action. Thus dividing what the people join, we are unable to make the conceptual leap—the reversal of the structural gestalt—implied in Howell’s keen observation that “the human social world is intrinsically part of a wider world in which boundaries between society and cosmos are non-existent” (2012: 139). “There is no meaningful separation,” she says, “between what one may term nature and culture or, indeed, between society and cosmos” (ibid.: 135). So while, on one hand, Howell characterizes the Chewong as having “no social or political hierarchy” or “leaders of any kind,” on the other, she describes a human community encompassed and dominated by potent metapersons with powers to impose rules and render justice that would be the envy of kings. “Cosmic rules,” Howell calls them, I reckon both for their scope and for their origins. The metahuman persons who mandate these rules visit illness or other misfortune, not excluding penalty of death, on Chewong who transgress them. “I can think of no act that is rule neutral,” Howell writes; taken together, “they refer not just to selected social domains or activities, but to the performance of regular living itself” (ibid.: 140). Yet though they live by the rules, Chewong have no part in their enforcement, which is the exclusive function of “whatever spirit or non-human personage is activated by the disregard of a particular rule” (ibid.: 139). Something like a rule of law sustained by a monopoly of force. Among hunters. When Signe Howell first visited the Chewong in 1977, she found them obsessively concerned with a tragedy that happened not long before. Three people had been killed and two injured for violating a weighty taboo on laughing at animals: a prohibition that applied to all forest creatures, the breach of which would potentially implicate all Chewong people. The victims had ridiculed some millipedes that entered their lean-to; and that night a terrific thunderstorm uprooted a large tree, which fell upon them. Here it deserves notice that while the Chewong profess to abhor cannibalism, like animist hunters generally, they nevertheless subsist on “people like us,” their animal prey. Likewise similar to other hunters, they manage the contradiction by the ritual respects they accord wild animals: in this case, by the prohibition on ridiculing forest creatures—which also, by positioning the animals outside familiar human relations, apparently erases the cannibal implications from [94]overt consciousness (cf. Valeri 2000: 143). Since the forest animals are not really like us, we can beat the cannibal rap. The severe punishments for disrespecting forest creatures originated with certain immortals of the Above and the Below: the male Thunder God, Tanko, and the female Original Snake, whose abode is the primordial sea under the earth—and who is most responsible for maintaining rules of this type. There were never any humans the likes of Tanko and the Original Snake among Chewong themselves: no such human powers, whatever the conventional wisdom says about divinity as the mirror image of society. Tanko lives in the sky, whence the thunder he unleashes on taboo-violators is aptly said to be the sound of him laughing at the human predicament. His thunderbolts are also known to punish incest, causing severe joint pain and, if the behavior persists, death. On his frequent visits to earth, he indulges in contrasting sexual behavior—relations with distantly rather than closely related women—and with beneficial rather than fatal results: for without his sexual exploits there could be no Chewong people. Tanko descends to have intercourse with all human and animal females, which is what makes them fertile. Menstrual blood represents the birth of children he has sired, children unseen and unknown to their mothers, as they ascend to the heavens to live with their father. The semen of human males, however, is unable to procreate children until Tanko has copulated with the women concerned, which is to say until they have menstruated—from which it follows empirically that the god was indeed the condition of possibility of human reproduction. The Original Snake is sometimes identified as the sky-wife of Tanko, a culture heroine who gave Chewong fire, tobacco, and night; but in her more usual form of a huge snake dwelling in chthonian waters, she is especially known for her malevolent powers. Knocking down trees and houses, her breath creates the destructive winds that punish people who violate the ordinances on the treatment of animals. She may also be provoked into moving while in the subterranean sea, causing an upwelling of waters that drowns the offenders—upon which she swallows them body and soul.1 Not that the Original Snake is the only man-eater among the myriad indwelling and free-ranging metahumans whom Chewong encounter, more often for worse than for better. Without replicating the extraordinary catalogue compiled by Howell (1989), suffice it for present purposes to indicate the range: from female familiars who marry the human individuals for whom they serve as spirit guides; through various kinds of ghosts especially dangerous to small children and the creatures upon whose good will fruits bear in season; to the twenty-seven subtypes of harmful beings who were once human, and of whom Chewong say, “They want to eat us” (ibid.: 105). If there is indeed no boundary between the cosmos and the socius, then it’s not exactly what some would call a “simple society,” let alone an egalitarian one.[95] I hasten to reply to the obvious objection that the potent deities of the Chewong reflect a long history of relationships with coastal Malay states by noting that basically similar cosmologies are found among basically similar societies situated far from such influences. For an initial example the Central Inuit; thereafter, Highland New Guineans, Australian Aboriginals, native Amazonians, and other “egalitarian” peoples likewise dominated by metaperson others who vastly outnumber them. Of the Inuit in general it is said that a person “should never push himself ahead of others or show the slightest ambition to control other people” (Oosten 1976: 16), and in particular of the Netsilik of the Central Canadian Arctic that “there were no lineages or clans, no institutionalized chiefs or formal government” (Balikci 1970: xv). On the other hand, of the same Netsilik, Knud Rasmussen (1931: 224) wrote: The powers that rule the earth and all the animals, and the lives of mankind are the great spirits who live on the sea, on land, out in space, and in the Land of the Sky. These are many, and many kinds of spirits, but there are only three really great and really independent ones, and they are Nuliajuk, Narssuk, and Tatqeq. These three are looked upon as directly practicing spirits, and the most powerful of them all is Nuliajuk, the mother of animals and mistress both of the sea and the land. At all times she makes mankind feel how she vigilantly and mercilessly takes care that all souls, both animals and humankind, are shown the respect the ancient rules of life demand. Ruling their respective domains—Nuliajuk or Sedna, the sea and the land; Tatqeq, the Moon Man, the heavens; and Narssuk or Sila, the meteorological forces of the air—these three “great spirits” were widely known under various names from East Greenland to the Siberian Arctic—which affords some confidence in their antiquity and indigeneity. While always complementary in territorial scope, they varied in salience in different regions: the Moon Man generally dominant in the Bering Strait and Sila in Greenland; whereas Sedna, as Franz Boas wrote, was “the supreme deity of the Central Eskimos,” holding “supreme sway over the destinies of mankind” (1901: 119).2 The Central Inuit and Sedna in particular will be the focus here: “The stern goddess of fate among the Eskimos,” as Rasmussen (1930: 123) characterized her. In command of the animal sources of food, light, warmth, and clothing that made an Inuit existence possible, Sedna played “by far the most important part in everyday life” (ibid.: 62). She was effectively superior to Sila and the Moon, who often functioned as her agents, “to see that her will is obeyed” (ibid.: 63). Accordingly, in his ethnography of the Iglulik, Rasmussen describes a divine pantheon of anthropomorphic power ruling a human society that was itself innocent of institutional authority. So whenever any transgression of Sedna’s rules or taboos associated with hunting occurs,[96] the spirit of the sea intervenes. The moon spirit helps her to see the rules of life are daily observed, and comes hurrying down to earth to punish any instance of neglect. And both sea spirit and moon spirit employ Sila to execute all punishments in any way connected with the weather. (Rasmussen 1930: 63; cf. 78) Scholars perennially agonize over whether to consider the likes of Sedna as “gods.” Too often some promising candidate is rejected for failing to closely match our own ideas of the Deity: an act of religious intolerance, as Daniel Merkur observed (1991: 37–48), with the effect of promulgating the Judeo-Christian dogma that there is only one True God. But, “Why not call them gods?”; for it happens that Hocart thus posed the question in regard to a close analogue of Sedna among Winnebago people, a certain “immaterial being in control of animal species” ([1936] 1970: 149; cf. Radin 1914). More than just species-masters, however, Sedna, Sila, and the Moon had the divine attributes of immortality and universality. All three were erstwhile humans who achieved their high stations by breaking with their earthly kinship relations, in the event setting themselves apart from and over the population in general. Various versions of Sedna’s origin depict her as an orphan, as mutilated in sacrifice by her father, and/or as responsible for his death; the Moon Man’s divine career featured matricide and incest with his sister; Sila left the earth when his parents, who were giants, were killed by humans. Much of this is what Luc de Heusch (1962) identified as “the exploit” in traditions of stranger-kingship: the crimes of the dynastic founder against the people’s kinship order, by which he at once surpasses it and acquires the solitude necessary to rule the society as a whole, free from any partisan affiliation. And while on the matter of kingship, there is this: as the ruling powers of earth, sea, air, and sky, all of the Inuit deities, in breaking from kinship, thereby become territorial overlords. Transcending kinship, they achieve a kind of territorial sovereignty. The passage “from kinship to territory” was an accomplished fact long before it was reorganized as the classic formula of state formation. This is not only to say that the origins of kingship and the state are discursively or spiritually prefigured in Inuit communities, but since, like Chewong, “the human social world is intrinsically part of a wider world in which boundaries between society and cosmos are non-existent,” this encompassing cosmic polity is actually inscribed in practice. Like the Chewong, the Inuit could pass for the model of a (so-called) “simple society” were they not actually and practically integrated in a (so-called) “complex society” of cosmic proportions. In the territories of the gods dwelt a numerous population of metahuman subjects, both of the animistic kind of persons indwelling in places, objects, and animals; and disembodied free souls, as of ghosts or demons. “The invisible rulers of every object are the most remarkable beings next to Sedna,” Boas wrote: “Everything has its inua (owner)” ([1888] 1961: 591).3 All [97]across the Arctic from Greenland to Siberia, people know and contend with these inua (pl. inuat), a term that means “person of” the noun that precedes it. Or “its man,” as Waldemar Bogoras translates the Chukchee cognate, and which clearly implies that “a human life-spirit is supposed to live within the object” (1904–9: 27–29). (Could Plato have imagined the perspectival response of Chukchee to the allegory of the shadows on the wall of the cave? “Even the shadows on the wall,” they say, “constitute definite tribes and have their own country where they live in huts and subsist by hunting” [ibid: 281].) Note the repeated report of dominion over the thing by its person—“everything has its owner.” Just so, as indwelling masters of their own domains, the gods themselves were superior inuat, endowed with something akin to proprietary rights over their territories and the various persons thereof. J. G. Oosten explains: “An inua was an anthropomorphic spirit that was usually connected to an object, place, or animal as its spiritual owner or double. The inuat of the sea, the moon, and the air could be considered spiritual owners of their respective territories” (1976: 27). Correlatively, greater spirits such as Sedna, mother of sea animals, had parental relations to the creatures of their realm, thus adding the implied godly powers of creation and protection to those of possession and dominion. Taken in connection with complementary powers of destruction, here is a preliminary conclusion that will be worth further exploration: socially and categorically, divinity is a high-order form of animism. That’s how it works in Boas’ description of Sedna’s reaction to the violation of her taboos on hunting sea animals. By a well-known tradition, the sea animals originated from Sedna’s severed fingers; hence, a certain mutuality of being connected her to her animal children. For its part, the hunted seal in Boas’ account is endowed with greater powers than ordinary humans. It can sense that the hunter has had contact with a corpse by the vapor of blood or death he emits, breaking a taboo on hunting while in such condition. The revulsion of the animal is thereupon communicated to Sedna, who in the normal course would withdraw the seals to her house under the sea, or perhaps dispatch Sila on punishing blizzards, thus making hunting impossible and exposing the entire human community to starvation. Note that in many anthropological treatments of animism, inasmuch as they are reduced to individualistic or phenomenological reflections on the relations between humans and animals, these interactions are characterized as reciprocal, egalitarian, or horizontal; whereas often in social practice they are at least three-part relations, involving also the master-person of the species concerned, in which case they are hierarchical—with the offending person in the client position. Or rather, the entire Inuit community is thereby put in a subordinate position, since sanction also falls on the fellows of the transgressor; and as the effect is likewise generalized to all the seals, the event thus engages a large and diverse social totality presided over by the ruling goddess.4 In the same vein, the many and intricate taboos shaping Inuit social and material life entail submission to the metaperson-others who sanction them, whether [98]these prohibitions are systematically honored or for whatever reason violated. Of course, submission to the powers is evident in punishments for transgressions. But the same is doubly implied when the proscriptive rule is followed, for, more than an act of respect, to honor a taboo has essential elements of sacrifice, involving the renunciation of some normal practice or social good in favor of the higher power who authorizes it (cf. Leach 1976; Valeri 2000). In this regard, the existence of the Inuit, in ways rather like the Chewong, was organized by an elaborate set of “rules of life,” as Rasmussen deemed them, regulating all kinds of behavior of all kinds of persons. For even as the main taboos concerned the hunt, the disposition of game, and practices associated with menstruation, childbirth, and treatment of the dead, the enjoined behaviors could range from how one made the first cut of snow in building an igloo, to whether a pregnant woman could go outside with her mittens on—never (Rasmussen 1930: 170). Rasmussen’s major work on the “intellectual culture” of the Iglulik includes a catalogue of thirty-one closely written pages of such injunctions (ibid.: 169–204). As, for example: – The marrow bones of an animal killed by a first-born son are never to be eaten with a knife, but must be crushed with stones (ibid.: 179). – A man suffering want through ill success in hunting must, when coming to another village and sitting down to eat, never eat with a woman he has not seen before (ibid.: 182). – Persons hunting seal from a snow hut on ice may not work with soapstone (ibid.: 184). – Young girls present in a house when a seal is being cut up must take off their kamiks and remain barefooted as long as the work is in progress (ibid.: 185). – If a woman is unfaithful to her husband while he is out hunting walrus, especially on drift ice, the man will dislocate his hip and have severe pains in the sinuses (ibid.: 186). – If a woman sees a whale she must point to it with her middle finger (ibid.: 187). – Widows are never allowed to pluck birds (ibid.: 196). – A woman whose child has died must never drink water from melted ice, only from melted snow (ibid.: 198). Commented Boas in this connection: “It is certainly difficult to find out the innumerable regulations connected with the religious ideas and customs of the Eskimo. The difficulty is even greater in regard to customs which refer to birth, sickness and death” ([1888] 1961: 201–2). The greater number of these “rules of life” were considerations accorded to Sedna. When they were respected, the sea goddess became the source of human welfare, providing animals to the hunter. But when they were violated, Sedna or the powers under her aegis inflicted all manners of misfortune upon the Inuit, ranging from sicknesses and accidents to starvation and death. Punishments rained upon the just and the unjust alike: they might afflict not only the offender but also his or her associates, perhaps the entire community, though these others could be innocent or even unaware of the offense. As it is sometimes said that Sedna is also the mother of humankind, that is why she is especially dangerous to women and children, hence the numerous taboos relating to menstruation, childbirth, and the newborn. But the more general and pertinent motivation would be that she is the [99]mother of animals, hence the principle involved in her animosity to women is an eye-for-an-eye in response to the murder of her own children (cf. Gardner 1987; Hamayon 1996). Again, everything follows from the animist predicament that people survive by killing others like themselves. As explained to Rasmussen: All the creatures we have to kill and eat, all those we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls like we have, souls which do not perish with the body, and which therefore must be propitiated lest they should revenge themselves on us for taking away their souls. (1930: 56) Among Netsilik, Iglulik, Baffin Islanders, and other Central Inuit, the disembodied souls of the dead, both of persons and of animals, were an omnipresent menace to the health and welfare of the living. “All the countless spirits of evil are all around, striving to bring sickness and death, bad weather, and failure in hunting” (Boas [1888] 1961: 602; cf. Rasmussen 1931: 239; Balikci 1970: 200–1). In principle, it was the persons and animals whose deaths were not properly respected ritually who thereupon haunted the living. But in this regard, Rasmussen confirms what one may well have surmised from the extent and intricacy of the “rules of life,” namely that the gods often act in ways mysterious to the people: There are never any definite rules for anything, for it may also happen that a deceased person may in some mysterious manner attack surviving relatives or friends he loves, even when they have done nothing wrong. . . . Human beings are thus helpless in the face of all the dangers and uncanny things that happen in connection with death and the dead. (1930: 108) There is hardly a single human being who has kept the rules of life according to the laws laid down by the wisdom of the ancients. (1930: 58) In a way, the reign of the metaperson powers-that-be was classically hegemonic, which helps explain the seeming conflict between the common travelers’ reports of the Inuits’ good humor and their sense that “human beings were powerless in the grasp of a mighty fate” (ibid.: 32)—“we don’t believe, we fear” (ibid.: 55). The ambivalence, I suggest, represents different aspects of the same situation of the people in relation to the metaperson powers-that-be. What remains unambiguous and invariant is that for all their own “loosely structured” condition, they are systematically ordered as the dependent subjects of a cosmic system of social domination. Hobbes spoke of the state of nature as all that time in which “men lived without a common power to keep them all in awe.” Yet in Rasmussen’s accounts of the Inuit, a people who might otherwise be said to approximate that natural state, “mankind is held in awe”—given the fear of hunger and sickness inflicted by the powers governing them (1931: 124).5 If this accounts for the people’s anxieties, it also helps explain [100]the reports of their stoic, composed, often congenial disposition. This happier subjectivity is not simply seasonal, not simply due to the fact that times are good in terms of hunting and food supply, for that in itself would be because the people have been observant of Sedna’s rules, and accordingly she makes the animals available. There is a certain comfort and assurance that comes from the people’s compliance with the higher authorities that govern their fortunes—or if you will, their compliance with the “dominant ideology” (cf. Robbins 2004: 212). In the upshot, it’s almost as if these polar inhabitants were bipolar—except that, beside the fear and composure that came from their respect of the god, on occasion they also knew how to oppose and defy her. More precisely, if great shamans could on occasion force the god to desist from harming the people, it was by means of countervailing metapersons in their service: familiar spirits they possessed or who possessed them. Thus empowered, the shaman could fight or even kill Sedna, to make her liberate the game (upon her revival) in a time of famine (Weyer 1932: 359; Merkur 1991: 112). More often, the dangerous journeys shamans undertake to Sedna’s undersea home culminate in some manhandling of her with a view to soothing her anger by combing the sins of humans out of her tangled hair. Alternatively, Sedna was hunted like a seal from a hole in the ice in winter: she was hauled up from below by a noose and while in the shaman’s power told to release the animals; or she was conjured to rise by song and then harpooned to the same effect. The last, the attack on the god, was the dramatic moment of an important autumnal festival of the Netsilik, designed to put an end to this tempestuous season and ensure good weather for the coming winter. Again it was not just the stormy weather with its accompaniment of shifting and cracking ice that was the issue, but the “countless evil spirits” that were so manifesting themselves, including the dead knocking wildly at the huts “and woe to the unhappy person they can lay hold of” (Boas [1888] 1961: 603). Ruling all and the worst of them was Sedna, or so one may judge from the fact that when she was ritually hunted and harpooned, the evil metahuman host were all driven away. Sedna dives below and in a desperate struggle manages to free herself, leaving her badly wounded, greatly angry, and in a mood to seize and carry off her human tormenters. That could result in another attack on her, however, for if a rescuing shaman is unable to otherwise induce her to release the victim, he may have to thrash her into doing so (Rasmussen 1930: 100). Although the shamans’ powers to thus oppose the god are not exactly their own, may one not surmise there is here a germ of a human political society: that is, ruling humans qua metapersons themselves? A word on terminology. Hereafter, I use “inua” as a general technical term for all animistic forms of indwelling persons, whether of creatures or things—and whether the reference is singular or plural. I use “metaperson” preferably and “metahuman” alternately for all those beings usually called “spirits”: including gods, ghosts, ancestors, demons, inua, and so on. Aside from direct quotations, “spirit” will appear only as a last resort of style or legibility, and usually then in quotation marks—for reasons to which I now turn, by way of the life story of Takunaqu, an Iglulik woman: One day I remember a party of children out at play, and wanted to run out at once and play with them. But my father, who understood hidden [101]things, perceived that I was playing with the souls of my dead brothers and sisters. He was afraid this might be dangerous, and therefore called upon his helping spirits and asked them about it. Through his helping spirits, my father learned . . . there was . . . something in my soul of that which had brought about the death of my brothers and sisters. For this reason, the dead were often about me, and I did not distinguish between the spirits of the dead and real live people. (Rasmussen 1930: 24) Why call them spirits? Sometime before Hocart was asking, “Why not call them gods?” Andrew Lang in effect asked of gods, “Why call them spirits?” Just because we have been taught our god is a spirit, he argued, that is no reason to believe “the earliest men” thought of their gods that way ([1898] 1968: 202). Of course, I cannot speak here of “the earliest men”—all those suggestive allusions to the state of nature notwithstanding—but only of some modern peoples off the beaten track of state systems and their religions. For the Inuit, the Chewong, and similar others, Lang would have a point: our native distinction between spirits and human beings, together with the corollary oppositions between natural and supernatural and spiritual and material, for these peoples do not apply. Neither, then, do they radically differentiate an “other world” from this one. Interacting with other souls in “a spiritual world consisting of a number of personal forces,” as J. G. Oosten observed, “the Inuit themselves are spiritual beings” (1976: 29). Fair enough, although given the personal character of those forces, it is more logical to call spirits “people” than to call people “spirits.” But in either case, and notwithstanding our own received distinctions, at ethnographic issue here is the straightforward equivalence, spirits = people. The recent theoretical interest in the animist concepts of indigenous peoples of lowland South America, northern North America, Siberia, and Southeast Asia has provided broad documentation of this monist ontology of a personalized universe. Kaj Århem offers a succinct summary: As opposed to naturalism, which assumes a foundational dichotomy between objective nature and subjective culture, animism posits an intersubjective and personalized universe in which the Cartesian split between person and thing is dissolved and rendered spurious. In the animist cosmos, animals and plants, beings and things may all appear as intentional subjects and persons, capable of will, intention, and agency. The primacy of physical causation is replaced by intentional causation and social agency. (2016: 3) It only needs be added that given the constraints of this “animist cosmos” on the human population, the effect is a certain “cosmo-politics” in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s sense of the term (2015). Indeed, the politics at issue here involves much more than animist inua, for it equally characterizes people’s relations to gods, disembodied souls of the dead, lineage ancestors, species-masters, demons, and other such intentional subjects: a large array of metapersons setting the terms and conditions of human existence. Taken in its unity, hierarchy, and totality, this is a cosmic polity. [102]As Déborah Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017: 68–9) very recently put the matter (just as this article was going to press): What we would call “natural world,” or “world” for short, is for Amazonian peoples a multiplicity of intricately connected multiplicities. Animals and other spirits are conceived as so many kinds of “‘people” or “societies,” that is, as political entities. . . . Amerindians think that there are many more societies (and therefore, also humans) between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy and anthropology. What we call “environment” is for them a society of societies, an international arena, a cosmopoliteia. There is, therefore, no absolute difference in status between society and environment, as if the first were the “subject” and the second the “object.” Every object is another subject and is more than one. In what follows I offer some selected ethnographic reports of the coexistence of humans with such metapersonal powers in the same “intersubjective and personalized universe”—just by way of illustration. But let me say here, and try to demonstrate in the rest of the essay, the implications are world-historical: for if these metaperson-others have the same nature as, and are in the same experiential reality with, humans, while exerting life-and-death powers over them, then they are the dominant figures in what we habitually call “politics” and “economics” in all the societies so constituted. In the event, we will require a different anthropological science than the familiar one that separates the human world into ontologically distinct ideas, social relations, and things, and then seeks to discount the former as a dependent function of one of the latter two—as if our differentiated notions of things and social relations were not symbolically constituted in the first place. Not to separate, then, what peoples of the New Guinea Highlands join: surrounded and outnumbered above, below, and on earth by ghosts, clan ancestors, demons, earthquake people, sky people, and the many inua of the wild, the Mbowamb spend their lives “completely under the spell and in the company of spirits. . . . The spirits rule the life of men. . . . There is simply no profane field of life where they don’t find themselves surrounded by a supernatural force” (Vicedom and Tischner (1943–48, 2: 680–81). Yet if the “other world” is thus omnipresent around Mt. Hagen, it is not then an “other world.” These people, we are told, “do not distinguish between the purely material and purely spiritual aspects of life” (ibid.: 592). Nor would they have occasion to do so if, as is reported of Mae Enga, they conducted lives in constant intersubjective relations with the so-called “spirits.” “Much of [Enga] behavior remains inexplicable to anyone ignorant of the pervasive belief in ghosts,” reports Mervyn Meggitt. “Not a day passes but someone refers publicly to the actions of ghosts” (1965: 109–10). Or as a missionary-ethnographer recounts: For the Central Enga the natural world is alive and endowed with invisible power. To be seen otherwise would leave unexplained numerous events. The falling tree, the lingering illness, the killing frost, the haunting dream—all confirm the belief in a relationship between the physical world and the powers of earth, sky, and underworld. (Brennan1977: 11–12; cf. Feachem 1973) Such metapersonal powers are palpably present in what is actually happening to people, their fortunes good and bad. Hence Fredrik Barth’s own experience among [103]Baktaman in the Western Highlands: “The striking feature is . . . how empirical the spirits are, how they appear as very concrete observable objects in the world rather than ways of talking about the world” (1975: 129, emphasis in original). Supporting Barth’s observation from his own work among nearby Mianmin people, Don Gardner adds that “spirits of one kind or another are a basic feature of daily life. Events construed as involving ‘supernatural’ beings are commonly reported and discussed” (1987: 161).6 Mutatis mutandis, in the Amazonian forest, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro comes to a similar appreciation of the gods and dead as immanently present for Araweté. Listening to the nocturnal songs of shamans summoning these metaperson-others to the village, the ethnographer came to perceive the presence of the gods, as the reality or source of examples, in every minute routine action. Most important, it was through these that I could discover the participation of the dead in the world of the living. (1992: 13–14) The presence of maï [‘gods’] in daily life is astonishing: for each and every purpose, they are cited as models of action, paradigms of body ornamentation, standards for interpreting events, and sources of news . . . . (1992: 74–75)7 The general condition of the cohabitation of humans and their metapersonal-alters in one “real world” is their psychic unity: their mutual and reciprocal status as anthropopsychic subjects. The venerable anthropological premise of “the psychic unity of mankind”has to be more generously understood. For as Viveiros de Castro says, “There is no way to distinguish between humans and what we call spirits” (ibid.: 64). In effect, the so-called “spirits” are so many heterogeneous species of the genus Homo: “Human beings proper (bide) are a species within a multiplicity of other species of human beings who form their own societies” (ibid.: 55).8 As is well known, the statement would hold for many peoples throughout lowland South America. Of the Achuar, Philippe Descola writes that they do not know the “supernatural as a level of reality separate from nature,” inasmuch as the human condition is common to “all nature’s beings. . . . Humans, and most plants, animals, and meteors are persons (aents) with a soul (wakan) and individual life” (1996: 93). In speaking of the “own societies” of the metaperson-others as known to Araweté, Viveiros de Castro alludes to the “perspectivism” that his writings have done much to make normal anthropological science. Well documented from Siberia as [104]well as Amazonia, the phenomenon offers a privileged instance of the coparticipation of humans with gods, ghosts, animal-persons, and others in the same complex society. In consequence of differences in their perceptual apparatus, both people and animals live unseen to each other in their own communities as fully human beings, bodily and culturally; even as each appears to the other as animal prey or predators. In this connection, the common ethnographic observation that because the non-human persons are as such generally invisible, they must inhabit a different, “spiritual” reality, is a cultural non sequitur for Araweté and other perspectivists. In Lockean terms the differences are only secondary qualities: due to perception—because of the different bodily means thereof—rather than to the thing thus perceived. In practice, moreover, the socius includes a variety of metapersonal communities: not only those of the animal inua, but also the villages of the gods, the dead, and perhaps others, all of them likewise cultural replicas of human communities. Accordingly, the human groups are engaged in a sociological complexity that defies the normal anthropological characterizations of their simplicity. A lot of social intercourse goes on between humans and the metahuman persons with whom they share the earth, as well as with those who people the heavens and the underworld. Apart from shamans, even ordinary humans may travel to lands of the metaperson-others, as conversely the latter may appear among people in human form. Human and nonhuman persons are often known to intermarry or negotiate the exchange of wealth—when they are not reciprocally eating one another. Social relations of people and metaperson-others A woman sits in a corner of the house, whispering to a dead relative; a man addresses a clump of trees. . . . When an illness or misfortune occurs, a father or neighbor will break knotted strips of cordyline leaf, talking to the spirits to find out which one is causing trouble and why. (Keesing 1982: 33) This passage is one of many that exemplify how Roger Keesing makes good on the introductory promise of his fine monograph on the Kwaio people of Malaita (Solomon Islands): namely, “to describe Kwaio religion in a way that captures the phenomenological reality of a world where one’s group includes the living and the dead, where conversations with spirits and signs of their presence and acts are part of everyday life” (ibid.: 2–3; cf. 33, 112–13). Likewise, the human world of the Lalakai of New Britain is “also a world of spirits. Human beings are in frequent contact with non-human others, and there is always the possibility of encountering them at any time” (Valentine 1965: 194). Yet beyond such conversations or passing encounters with metaperson-others, from many parts come reports of humans entering into customary social relations with them. Inuit know of many people who visited villages of animal-persons, even married and lived long among them, some only later and by accident discovering their hosts were animal inua rather than Inuit humans (Oosten 1976: 27). A personal favorite is the Caribou Man of the northern Algonkians. In one of many similar versions, Caribou Man was a human stranger who was seduced by a caribou doe, went on to live with and have sons by her, and became the ruler of the herd (Speck 1977). [105]French-Canadian trappers were not off the mark in dubbing Caribou Man “le roi des caribou,” as the story rehearses the archetypal stranger-king traditions of dynastic origin, down to the mediating role played by the native woman and her foundational marriage to the youthful outsider. Besides the hierogamic experiences of Chewong women and the marriage of the gods with dead Araweté women, there are many permutations of such interspecies unions: some patrilocal and some matrilocal, some enduring and some ended by divorce due to homesickness. A Kaluli man of the New Guinea Southern Highlands may marry a woman of the invisible world, relates Edward Schiefflin (2005: 97); when the man has a child by her, he can leave his body in his sleep and visit her world. Reciprocally, people from that world may enter his body and through his mouth converse with the people present. Then there was the Mianmin man of the Western Highlands who, beside his human wife, formed a polygynous arrangement with a dead woman from a different descent group. The dead wife lived in a nearby mountain, but she gardened on her husband’s land and bore him a son (Gardner 1987: 164). Don Gardner also tells of the time that the Ulap clan of the Mianmin saved themselves from their Ivik enemies by virtue of a marital alliance with their own dead. The Ivik clan people were bent on revenge for the death of many of their kinsmen at Ulap hands. Sometime before, the big-man of the Ulap and his counterpart among their dead, who lived inside the mountain on which the Ulap were settled, exchanged sisters in marriage. When the big-man of the dead heard the Ivik were threatening his living brother-in-law, he proposed that the two Ulap groups exchange the pigs they had been raising for each other and hold a joint feast. In the course of the festivities, the ancestral people became visible to the Ulap villagers, who were in turn rendered invisible to the Ivik. So when the Ivik enemies came, they could not find the Ulap, although three times they attacked the places where they distinctly heard them singing. Throughout the Western Mianmin area, this account, Garner assures us, has the status of a historical narrative. We need not conclude that relations between humans and their metaperson counterparts are everywhere and normally so sympathetic. On the contrary, they are often hostile and to the people’s disadvantage, especially as the predicament noted earlier of the Inuit is broadly applicable: the animals and plants on which humans subsist are essentially human themselves. Although some anthropologists have been known to debate whether cannibalism even existed, it is hardly a rare condition—even among peoples who profess not to practice it themselves. As already noticed, in many societies known to anthropology, especially those where hunting is a mainstay, the people and their prey are involved in a system of mutual cannibalism. For even as the people kill and consume “people like us,” these metaperson-alters retaliate more or less in kind, as eating away human flesh by disease or starvation. All over the Siberian forest, for instance, Humans eat the meat of game animals in the same way that animal spirits feed on human flesh and blood. This is the reason why sickness (experienced as a loss of vitality) and death in the [human] community as a whole are understood as a just payment for its successful hunting both in the past and the future. (Hamayon 1996: 79)[106] Married to the sister or daughter of the “game-giving spirit,” an elk or reindeer, his brother-in-law the Siberian shaman thus enters an affinal exchange system of flesh—the meat of animals compensated by the withering of people—on behalf of the human community. Thus here again: “Being similar to the human soul in essence and on a par with hunters in alliance and exchange partners, spirits are not transcendent” (ibid.: 80). It is, to reprise Århem’s expression above, “an intersubjective and personalized universe.” Metaperson powers-that-be The metahuman beings with whom people interact socially are often hierarchically structured, as where gods such as Sedna and species-masters such as Caribou Man encompass and protect the individual inua in their purview. These hierarchies are organized on two principles which in the end come down to the same thing: the proprietary notion of the higher being as the “owner”—and usually also the parent—of his or her lesser persons; and the platonic or classificatory notion of “the One over Many,” whereby the “owner” is the personified form of the class of which the lesser persons are particular instances. One can find both concepts in Viveiros de Castro’s discussion of the Araweté term for metahuman masters, nā: The term connotes ideas such as leadership, control, responsibility, and ownership of some resource or domain. The nā is always a human or anthropomorphic being. But other ideas are involved as well. The nā of something is someone who has this substance in abundance. Above all, the nā is defined by something of which it is the master. In this last connotation, he is at the same time “the representative of” and the “represented by” that something. (1992: 345)9 Although, in a spasm of relativism, Pascal famously said that a shift of a few degrees of latitude will bring about a total change in juridical principles, you can go from the Amazon forests or the New Guinea Highlands to the Arctic Circle and Tierra del Fuego and find the same ethnographic descriptions of greater metapersons as the “owners”-cum-“mothers” or “fathers” of the individual metapersonal beings in their domain. Urapmin say “that people get into trouble because ‘everything has a father,’ using father (alap) in the sense of owner. . . . In dealing with nature then, the Urapmin are constantly faced with the fact that the spirits hold competing claims to many of the resources people use” (Robbins 1995: 214–15). (Parenthetically, this is not the first indication we have that the “spirits” own the means of production, an issue to which we will return.) Among Hageners, the Stratherns relate, all wild objects and creatures are “owned” by “spirits,” and can be referred to as their [107]“pigs,” just as people hold domestic pigs (1968: 190). “Masters of nature,” to whom trees and many other things “belong,” these kor wakl spirits are “sworn enemies of mankind” because people tend to consume foods under their protection without proper sacrifices. “The people are terribly afraid of them” (Vicedom and Tischner 1943–48, 2: 608, 659). In the Siberian Arctic, large natural domains such as forests, rivers, and lakes had their “special owners,” as Waldemar Bogoras calls them. The forest-master familiar to Russo-Yukaghir had “absolute power” over the animals there; he could give them away as presents, lose them at cards, or round them up and cause them to depart the country (Bogoras 1904–9 285). Not unusual either is the compounded hierarchy of metahuman owners, composed of several levels of inua-figures: as among Tupi-Guarani peoples such as Tenetehara and Tapirapé, where species-masters are included in the domains of forest-masters, who in turn belong to the godly “owners” of the social territory. Similarly for Achuar, the individual animal inua are both subsumed by “game mothers”—who “are seen as exercising the same kind of control over game that mothers exercise over their children and domestic animals”—and also magnified forms of the species—who, as primus inter pares, watch over the fate of the others. The latter especially are the social interlocutors of the Achuar hunter, but he must also come to respectful terms with the former (Descola 1996: 257–60). The chain of command in these hierarchical orders of metaperson “owners” is not necessarily respected in pursuing game or administering punishments to offending hunters, but it is quite a bureaucracy. As I say (and so have others), this sense of belonging to a more inclusive power can be read as membership in the class of which the “owner” is the personified representative—that is, a logical and theological modality of the One over Many. The ordering principle is philosophical realism with an anthropomorphic twist, where a named metaperson-owner is the type of which the several lesser beings are tokens. In a broad survey of the concept in the South American lowlands, Carlos Fausto (2012) uses such pertinent descriptions of the species-master as “a plural singularity” and “a singular image of a collectivity.” Anthropologists will recognize classic studies to the effect: Godfrey Lienhardt (1961) on the totems or species-beings who subsumed the forms of the same kind; and Edward Evans-Pritchard (1956) on the Nuer “God” (Kwoth), manifested in a diminishing series of avatars. (Parenthetically, as species-masters are more widely distributed in the world than totems proper, the latter may be understood as a development of the former under the special influence of descent groups or other segmentary formations.) In his own well-known wandering minstrel tour of animism—rather like the present article, composed of ethnographic shreds and patches— E. B. Tylor conceived a similar passage from “species-deities” to “higher deities” by way of Auguste Comte on the “abstraction” thus entailed and Charles de Brosses on the species archetype as a Platonic Idea (1903: 241–46).10[108] That divinity originates as a kind of animism of higher taxonomic order is not a bad (Platonic) idea. Consider this notice of Sedna: “In popular religious thought, the Sea Mother is an indweller. She indwells in the sea and all of its animals. She is immanent in the calm of the sea, in the capes and shoals where the waters are treacherous, and in the sea animals and fish” (Merkur 1991: 136). Analogously, for the Aboriginal peoples of Northwest Australia, the cult of their great Rainbow Serpent, Ungud, could be epitomized as inua all the way down. A bisexual snake identified with the Milky Way, the autochthonous Ungud made the world. Les Hiatt summarized the process: Natural species came into existence when Ungud dreamed itself into new various shapes. In the same way Ungud created clones of itself as wonjina [local versions of Dreamtime ancestors], and dispatched them in various places, particularly waterholes. The wonjina in turn generated the human spirits that enter women and become babies. . . . Ungud is thus an archetype of life itself. (1996: 113) In his informative account of the local Ungarinyin people, Helmut Petri specifies that the numerous wonjina were transformed into “individual Ungud serpents,” such that “Ungud appeared in the Aborigines’ view at one time as an individual entity, at another time as a multiplicity of individual beings” ([1954] 2011: 108). This included the spirit children whom the wonjina deposited in the waterholes: they were given by Ungud. Hence the One over Many, down to individual human beings, for each person thus had an “Ungud part” (see also Lommel [1952] 1997). It only needs to be added, from Nancy Munn’s revelatory study of analogous phenomena among Walbiri, that in participating intersubjectively in an object world created by and out of the Dreamtime ancestors, human beings experiencing “intimations of themselves” are always already experiencing “intimations of others”: those Dreamtime heroes “who are superordinate to them and precede them in time” (1986: 75). Accordingly, violation of any part of the country is “a violation of the essence of moral law” (ibid.: 68). While clearly different from other societies considered here, these no less “egalitarian” Australian Aborigines are thus no less hierarchical. “It’s not our idea,” Pintupi people told Fred Myers in regard to the customs and morality established in perpetuity by the Dreamtime ancestors. “It’s a big Law. We have to sit down beside that Law like all the dead people who went before us” (Myers 1986: 58).[109] The cosmic polity By way of integration of themes presented heretofore, there follows a sketch of the cosmic polities of the Mountain Ok-speaking Min peoples of New Guinea.11 There was no visible or proximate political state in the center of New Guinea, the region of the Fly and Sepik River headwaters traditionally inhabited by the Mountain Ok or Min peoples. All the same, the Telefolmin, Urapmin, Feramin, Tifalmin, Mianmin, and others could be fairly described as governed by metahuman powers whose authority over otherwise politically fragmented peoples was exercised through obligatory rules effectively backed by punitive force. The Hocartesian question might well be, “Why not call it a state?” Or else, if this cosmic polity were unlike a state in that the controlling powers largely outnumbered the civil society of humans, their regime could be all the more dominating. Experientially, the people live in a condition of subjugation to a host of metaperson powers-that-be, whose numerous rules of order are enforced by the highest authorities, often through the offices of the lesser personages in their aegis. Among the Central Min peoples, where this regime achieved its most integrated form, it was dominated by the cosmocratic duo of Afek, mother of humans and taro, and the serpentine Magalim, who preceded her as the autochthonous father of the numerous creatures of the wild (Jorgensen 1980, 1990a, 1998). Parents of all, Afek and Magalim were themselves children of none. The beginnings of their respective reigns were marked by violent breaches of kinship relations, giving them the independence that was the condition of their universality. Afek was notorious for committing incest with her brother, whom she later killed (and revived). Magalim was born of himself by intervening in the sexual intercourse of a human couple. Emerging as a serpent, he was subsequently rejected by his would-be mother, swallowed his foster-father, and killed his father’s brothers. Magalim has been likened to the Rainbow Serpent figures of Aboriginal Australian traditions: among other resemblances, by his habitation of subterranean waters, from which he rises when irritated to cause destructive floods (Brumbaugh 1987). Afek adds to the analogy by her own resemblance to Australian Dreamtime ancestors, creating features of the landscape and endowing the customs of the human groups she gave rise to in the course of her travels. Thereafter Afek’s presence would be mediated primarily by the human ancestors whose cult of fertility she established, whereas Magalim as indwelling “boss” of the land acted through the multifarious inua of its creatures and features. Although in effect they thus organized complementary domains—Afek the human sphere and Magalim its untamed environs—through their [110]respective human and metahuman subjects each extended into the jurisdiction of the other—often there to do harm.12 Much of Min cultural order, including the taboos that sanction it, is the codification of the legendary doings of Afek in the mode of mandatory custom. “Since that time,” Tifalmin people say, “men and women have known how to do things” (Wheatcroft 1976: 157–58). The precedents thus set by episodes in the epic of Afek’s advent include the different social and sexual roles of men and women and the rituals and practices of menstruation, initiation, childbirth, and death. Indeed, death itself was initiated by Afek along with the westward journey of the deceased on the underground road to the land of the dead—whence in return come life-giving shell valuables, hence Afek is also the originator of wealth, exchange, and long-distance trade. Afek bore the taro plant that iconically distinguishes the Min people, making a complementary schismogenesis of it by destroying the swamps in the Telefolmin region, thereby marking the contrast to lowland sago peoples. Along her journey, she established the men’s cult houses where the remains of the ancestors of each Min group and the associated initiation rituals would guarantee the growth of their youth and their taro. Afek’s ritual progress culminated in the construction of her own great cult house, Telefolip, in the Telefolmin village of that name. Afek’s house became the ritual center of the Mountain Ok region, thus giving the Telefolmin people a certain precedence over the other Min groups. Rituals performed in connection with the Telefolip house radiated Afek’s benefits in human and agricultural fertility widely among the other Min communities. If the house itself deteriorated, the growth of taro in the entire region would decline in tandem. The several Min groups of a few hundred people each were thus integrated in a common system of divine welfare centered on the Telefolip shrine. The overall effect was a core–periphery configuration of peoples in a tribal zone with the Telefolmin custodians of Afek’s legacy at the center. As described by Dan Jorgensen (1996: 193): “The common linkage to Afek locates Mountain Ok cults in a regional tradition. Myths concerning Afek not only account for the features of a particular ritual system or aspects of local cosmology, but also place groups relative to one another in terms of descent from Afek (or a sibling)” (cf. Robbins 2004: 16–17). “A surprisingly ambitious ideology,” comments Robert Brumbaugh, “because it does not link up with any economic or political control from the center” (1990: 73). Here is another instance where the superstructure exceeds the infrastructure. What does link up with the superiority of Telefolmin, as Brumbaugh also says, is Afek’s continued presence: In Telefolmin religion, Afek remains present and accessible. Taro fertility is a visible sign of her power, just as her bones are the visible signs of [111]her presence. . . . Thus the Falamin, when addressing the local ancestors in ritual, consider that they are heard by Afek as well. When stronger reassurances are needed, the local ancestor is bypassed, new personnel take charge of the ritual and Afek is invoked directly. Groups without access to bones of Afek—it seems that not all groups have them—are covered by Afek’s promise to hear and respond when she is called upon for taro. (1990: 67) But “Magalim always ruins Afek’s work,” Telefolmin say, breaking her “law” by deceiving men into killing their friends, seducing women, driving people mad, causing landslides and floods, and wrecking gardens (Jorgensen 1980: 360). Capricious and malicious, Magalim is oftimes (but not always) the enemy of people: a menace especially among the Central Min, where he is the father, owner, and thereby the common form in the persons of the animals, plants, rocks, rivers, cliffs, and so on, that inhabit and constitute the environment—where human persons hunt, garden, and otherwise traverse with disturbing effects. “All things of the bush are Magalim’s children, Magalim man,” Jorgensen was told. “If you finish these things, Magalim is their father and he will repay you with sickness, or he will send bad dreams and you will die” (ibid.: 352). The wild has its own hierarchy: at least three levels of Magalim-persons, encompassed by the archetypal All-Father serpent. Jorgensen notes that certain species-masters of distinct name “look after” marsupials and wild pigs, even as Magalim himself looks after snakes. But all are in turn encompassed in Magalim, as “All these names are just names. The true thing is Magalim” (ibid.). Likewise for Urapmin, Joel Robbins refers to intermediate species-masters controlling their particular animal-persons; these “owners” being in turn subsumed in the greater Magalim-Being. Certain “marsupial women” are guardians of the many marsupial kinds that people hunt and eat. Taking a fancy to a hunter, a marsupial woman may have sex with and marry him. Thereafter she comes to him in dreams to inform him about the whereabouts of game. But marsupial women have been known to become jealous of their husband’s human wife, especially if the latter is too generous in sharing marsupials with her own relatives. Then the hunter has accidents in the bush or falls sick, or even dies if he does not leave his human spouse (Robbins 2004: 210). In any case, where Magalim reigns, the principle holds that all particular inua, whether of living creatures or natural features, are also forms of him. The individual Magalim-persons who cause Feramin people trouble may be treated as acting on their own or as agents of Magalim All-Father. The people may say, “Tell your father to stop making thunderstorms—and not to send any earthquakes either” (Brumbaugh 1987: 26). Magalim, however, is not always causing trouble for Feramin. Without changing his notorious disposition, he may turn it on strangers, whom he is reputed to dislike, and thus become protector of the local people. Indeed, he defends Feramin tribal territory as a whole. The Feramin were divided into four autonomous communities (“parishes”); but Magalim’s remains were in the care of a single elder, and when ritually invoked before battle, they made all Feramin warriors fierce and their arrows deadly. “Without subdivision by parishes,” Brumbaugh writes, “the territory of Feramin as a whole is considered under the influence of Magalim, who watches over its borders and the well-being of the traditional occupants” (ibid.: 30).[112] Protector of the entire territory from an abode within it, a subterranean being who can cause earthquakes, Magalim is the indwelling inua of the land itself: “boss of the land,” the people now say. Indeed, if all the creatures and prominent natural haunts of the wild are so many aliases of Magalim, as Jorgensen puts it, it is because he is “identified with the earth and its power.” “Everything depends on Magalim,” Jorgensen was often told, including Afek and all her people who “sit on the top of the ground” (1998: 104). Kinship to territory: the self-born Magalim, slayer of his foster-kin, becomes god of the land. Hence add gardeners to the tragic predicament of the animist hunters. The Urapmin, according to Robbins, are constantly aware they are surrounded by “nature spirits” (motobil) who are original “owners” of almost all the resources they use (2004: 209–10). Consequently, “every act of hunting or gardening causes some risk,” even on non-taboo grounds, should it disturb the metaperson-owners—who would thereupon punish the person responsible “for failure to observe their version of the laws” (ibid.: 211). Interesting that New Guineans and Australian Aborigines, although without any native juridical institutions as such, have been quick to adapt the European term “law” to their own practices of social order. In other contexts, Robbins speaks of “the law of the ancestors,” apparently referring to the numerous taboos based on traditions of Afek that organize human social relationships. The Urapmin term here translated as “law”—awem (adj.), aweim (n.)—maps a moral domain of prohibitions based “on kinds of authority that transcend those produced simply by the actions and agreements of men” (ibid.: 211). Otherwise said, these laws are “sacredly grounded prohibitions aimed at shaping the realm of human freedom” (ibid.: 184). Given the range of social relationships and practices established by Afek, it follows that the laws were “complex” and “left everyone laboring under the burdens of at least some taboo all the time” (ibid.: 210–11). Although Urapmin boast of having been the most taboo-ridden of all Min people, it could not have been by much. Among others, the Tifalmin knew taboos that were likewise “very powerful . . . sustaining and interpenetrating many other normative and ethical aspects of everyday life” (Wheatcroft 1976: 170). This could be true virtually by definition, inasmuch as by following Afek’s precedents, the entire population would be ordered by taboos marking the social differences between men and women and initiatory or age-grade statuses. Negative rules predicate positive structures—and at the same time uphold them.13 In Telefolmin, Urapmin, and probably elsewhere, violations of Afek’s taboos were as a rule punished occultly, without Afek’s explicit intervention. On the other hand, in Tifalmin the metaperson-powers of both the village and the bush were actively engaged in sanctioning the many taboos of “everyday life.” Often punishments emanated from the prominent ancestors whose remains were enshrined in Afek’s cult house. Alternatively, they were inflicted by the “vast congresses” of thinking and sentient animal “ghosts” (sinik), inua who struck down people with disease or ruined their gardens. The last suggests that even people who adhere to Afek’s food taboos may thereby suffer the vengeance of the species-masters—that is, for killing and eating the latter’s children. As Don Gardner observed for Mianmin, since [113]every animal has its “mother” or “father,” human mothers and children become vulnerable to an equivalent payback for what was done to the species-parent’s child. And among the Central Min, where the parent is an All-Father like Magalim, the threat is apparently constant as well as general in proportion. Brumbaugh writes of Magalim: All smells connected with women and children bring danger from Magalim. He may make women pregnant, eat an unborn child and leave one of his own, or come unseen between a couple having intercourse in the bush to give his child instead; it will then be a contest between the power of the man and the power of Magalim that determines the future of the child. (Brumbaugh 1987: 27) It follows that to the extent people are socially objectified in terms of the wild foods they could or could not eat, they are in double jeopardy of suffering harm: whether magically or indirectly from Afek, mother of humans, for eating wrongly; or from the mother or father of the animal for eating it at all. Here again are “cosmic rules” of human order, enforced throughout the social territory by metaperson authorities to whom it all “belongs.” Determination by the religious basis Of the South American lowland people, the Piaroa, Joanna Overing writes: Today, Masters of land and water own the domains of water and jungle . . . both of whom acquired their control over these habitats at the end of mythical time. These two spirits guard their respective domains, protect them, make fertile their inhabitants, and punish those who endanger their life forces. They also cooperate as guardians of garden food. The relevant point is obviously that the inhabitants of land and water are not owned by man. (1983–84: 341) Since, as a general rule, the peoples under discussion have only secondary or usufructuary rights to the resources “owned” by metaperson-others, it follows that their relations of production entail submission to these other “people like us.” In conventional terms, it could justifiably be said that the spirits own the means of production—were it not that the “spirits” so-called are real-life metapersons who in effect are the primary means-cum-agents of production. Fundamental resources—plants, animals, celestial and terrestrial features, and so on—are constituted as intentional subjects, even as many useful tools are “person-artifacts.”14 Marked thus by an intersubjective praxis, this is an “economy” without “things” as such. Not only are metahuman persons ensouled in the primary resources, they thereby govern the outcome of the productive process. As intentional beings in their own right, they are the arbiters of the success or failure of human efforts. For theirs are the life-forces—which may be hypostatized as mana, hasina, wakan, semengat, orendat, nawalak, [114]or the like—that make people’s gardens grow, their pigs flourish, and game animals become visible and available to them. Some decades ago, Jonathan Friedman and Michael Rowlands put the matter generally for “tribal” peoples: “Economic activity in this system can only be understood as a relation between producers and the supernatural. This is because wealth and prosperity are seen as directly controlled by supernatural spirits” (1978: 207). Of course we are speaking of the people’s own notions of what there is and how it comes to be: a culturally informed reality they share with metaperson-others to whom they are subjected and indebted for life and livelihood. When faced with the assurance of Kwaio people that their prosperity is “a result of ancestral support,” Roger Keesing refrains from the temptation “to say that the sacred ancestral processes are a mystification of the real physical world,” for, “in a world where the ancestors are participants in and controlling forces of life, this conveys insights only at the cost of subjective realities” (1982: 80). But why, then, “subjective realities”? If the ancestors participate in and control the people’s everyday existence—if they are “empirical,” as Fredrik Barth might say—the demystification would shortchange the “objective” realities.15 Not to worry, however: in due course, with a few pertinent ethnographic notices in hand, I consider what scholarly good or harm would come from crediting such “determination by the religious basis.” It is not as if the producing people had no responsibility for the economic outcome—even apart from their own knowledge and skill. The Inuit shaman explains that: “No bears have come in their season because there is no ice; and there is no ice because there is too much wind; and there is too much wind because we mortals have offended the powers” (Weyer 1932: 241). Even so, something then can be done. Around the world, the common recourse for this dependence on the metaperson agents of people’s prosperity is to pay them an appropriate tribute, as in sacrifice. Sacrifice becomes a fundamental relation of production—in the manner of taxation that secures benefits from the powers-that-be. As Marcel Mauss once put it, since spirits “are the real owners of the goods and things of this world,” it is with them that exchange is most necessary ([1925] 2016: 79). A Tifalmin man tells how it works: When we bring secretly hunted marsupial species into the anawok [men’s cult house] during ceremonies, we tell the amkumiit [ancestral relics] and the pig bones [of feasts gone by], “you must take care of us and make our pigs grow fat and plentiful, and our taro immense.” As soon as we told them this, shortly afterwards we see the results in our gardens. They do just what we petitioned. (Wheatcroft 1976: 392) For all this hubris, however, the Tifalmin are not really in control. Edmund Leach notably remarked of such sacrifices that the appearance of gift and reciprocity notwithstanding, the gods don’t need gifts from the people. They could easily kill the animals themselves. What the gods require are “signs of submission” (Leach 1976: 82–93). [115]What the gods and the ancestors have, and peoples such as the Tifalmin seek, is the life-force that makes gardens, animals, and people grow. The metahuman powers must therefore be propitiated, solicited, compensated, or otherwise respected and appeased—sometimes even tricked—as a necessary condition of human economic practice. Or as Hocart had it, based on his own ethnographic experience: “There is no religion in Fiji, only a system that in Europe has been split into religion and business.” He knew that in Fijian, the same word (cakacaka) refers indiscriminately to “work”—as in the gardens—or to “ritual”—as in the gardens. So why call it “production”? How can we thus credit human agency if the humans are not responsible for the outcome: if it is the ancestors according to their own inclinations who make the taro grow; or if it is Sila Inua, the Air, and the bears themselves who make hunting successful? In a golden few pages of his recent work Beyond nature and culture (2013), Philippe Descola argues persuasively that our own common average native notion of “production” fails to adequately describe human praxis in a metahuman cosmos. Where even animals and plants are thinking things, the appropriate anthropology should be Hocartesian rather than Cartesian. Rather than a subject–object relation in which a heroic individual imposes form upon inert matter, making it come-to-be according to his or her own plan, at issue here are intersubjective relations between humans and the metaperson-others whose dispositions will be decisive for the material result. Descola can conclude from his Amazonian experience that it is “meaningless” to talk of “agricultural production” in a society where the process is enacted as interspecies kinship: 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 win it over; and they nurture its growth and help it to survive the perils of life, just as a mother helps her children. (2013: 324) Not to forget the mistress and mother of cultivated plants, Nankui, described by Descola elsewhere (1996: 192ff.): the goddess whose presence in the garden is the source of its abundance—unless she is offended and causes some catastrophic destruction. Hence the necessity for “direct, harmonious, and constant contact with Nankui,” as is successfully practiced by women who qualify as anentin, a term applied to persons with the occult knowledge and ritual skills to develop fruitful relations with the goddess. The way Simon Harrison describes the agricultural process for Manambu of the Middle Sepik (New Guinea), people do not create the crops, they receive them from their ancestral sources. “What could pass for ‘production,’” he writes, “are the spells by which the totemic ancestors are called from their villages by clan magicians to make yams abundant, fish increase, and crocodiles available for hunting” (1990: 47). For “yams are not created by gardening,” but, like all cultivated and wild foods, “they came into the phenomenal world by being ‘released’ from the mythical villages by means of ritual” (ibid.: 63). Note that this is a political economy, or, more exactly, a cosmopolitical economy, inasmuch as the human credit for the harvest goes to those who gained access to the ancestors by means of their secret knowledge—rather than the gardener who knew the right soils for yams. Of course, one may accurately say that, here as elsewhere, human technical skills, climatic conditions, and photosynthesis are responsible for the material outcome, for [116]what actually happened; but also here as elsewhere, the decisive cultural issue, from which such specific political effects follow, is, rather, what it is that happened—namely, the clan magicians summoned the yams from the ancestral villages. Such is the human reality, the premises on which the people are acting—which are also the beginnings of anthropological wisdom. Further ethnographic notices of the spiritual nature of the material basis are easy to come by. I close with a final one that has the added advantage of addressing the issue, raised in Harrison’s work, of human power in a cosmic polity. The site will be Melpa and their neighbors of the Hagen region. Here a variety of metahuman beings—Sky People deities (including their collective personification in “Himself, the Above”); “Great Spirits” of the major cults; the human dead, both recently deceased kin and clan ancestors; and the numerous “nature spirits” or inua-owners of the wild—are the agents of human welfare: In trade and economic affairs . . . in campaigns of war or at great festivals, any success is seen as the result of the help of benevolent spirits. . . . Benevolent spirits are said to “plant our fields for us” and to “make our pigs big and fat.” . . . They are said to “raise the pigs.” (Strauss [1962] 1990: 148) The functions of these metaperson-kinds are largely redundant; many are competent to promote or endanger the well-being of the people. It will be sufficient to focus on a few critical modes of life and death from the metapersons—with a view also to their constitution of human, big-man power. Whereas the Sky People originally “sent down” humans and their means of existence, it is the recent dead and clan ancestors who are most intimately and continuously responsible for the health and wealth of their descendants—though for punishing people they usually enlist the ill-intentioned inua of the wild. As recipients of frequent sacrifices, the recent dead protect their kin from accidents, illness, and ill fortune. “They will ‘make the fields and vegetable gardens for us . . . raise pigs for us, go ahead of us on journeys and trading trips, grant us large numbers of children . . . stay at our side in every way” (ibid.: 272). So likewise, on a larger scale, as when a meeting house is built for them, will the clan spirits “make our fields bring forth . . . our pigs multiply, protect our wives, children, and pigs from plagues and illness, keep sorcery and evil spirits at bay” (ibid.: 279). But if the gardens are planted without proper sacrifices, “the owner-spirit digs up the fruits and eats them” (Vicedom and Tischner 1943–48, 2: 677). By contrast to this constant attention, the Great Spirits of the collective cults are ceremonially celebrated only at intervals of years. On these occasions, the large number of pigs sacrificed testifies to the deities’ exceptional ability to multiply things themselves by promoting the people’s growth, fertility, and wealth. In such respects both the dead and the cult deities are particularly useful to big-men and would-be big-men, that is, as the critical sources of their human power: We rich people [i.e., big-men] live and sacrifice to the Kor Nganap [Female Great Spirit]; this enables us to make many moka [pig-exchange festivals]. Through this spirit we become rich, create many children who remain healthy and alive, and stay ourselves healthy. Our gardens bear much fruit. All this the Kor Nganap does, and that is why we sacrifice to it. (Vicedom and Tischner 1943–48, 2: 794)[117] The Stratherns relate that when a big-man goes on a journey to solicit valuables, he asks his clan-ancestors to come sit on his eyelids and induce his trading partner to part with his valuables. Big-men are also helped by the ghosts of close relatives, who may be enlisted by partaking of the pig backbone cooked especially for them. The same ancestors and ghosts are with the big-man in the ceremonial ground when he makes the prestations that underwrite his fame and status (Strathern and Strathern 1968: 192). In another text, Andrew Strathern notes that traditional Hagen big-men had “a multitude of sacred and magical appurtenances which played an important part, from the people’s own perspective, in giving them the very access to wealth on which their power depended” (1993: 147). Strathern here addresses a range of leadership forms in a variety of Highland New Guinea societies—including Baruya, Duna, Simbari Anga, Kuskusmin, and Maring, as well as Melpa—to show that the “ritual sources of power” amount to a Melanesian Realpolitik: the condition of possibility of human authority, as regards both the practices by which it is achieved and the reason it is believed. All the same, we need not completely abandon historical materialism and put Hegel right-side up again, for in these big-man orders one may still speak of economic determinism—provided that the determinism is not economic. To conclude To conclude: we need something like a Copernican Revolution in the sciences of society and culture. I mean a shift in perspective from human society as the center of a universe onto which it projects its own forms—that is to say, from the received Durkheimian, Marxist, and structural-functionalist conventions—to the ethnographic realities of people’s dependence on the encompassing metaperson-others who rule earthly order, welfare, and existence. For Durkheim, God was an expression of the power of society: people felt they were constrained by some power, but they knew not whence it came. But if what has been said here has any cogency, it is better to say that God is an expression of the lack of power of society. Finitude is the universal human predicament: people do not control the essential conditions of their existence. I have made this unoriginal and banal argument too many times, but if I can just say it once more: if people really controlled their own lives, they would not die, or fall sick. Nor do they govern the weather and other external forces on which their welfare depends. The life-force that makes plants and animals grow or women bear children is not their doing. And if they reify it—as mana, semengat, or the like—and attribute it to external authorities otherwise like themselves, this is not altogether a false consciousness, though it may be an unhappy one. Vitality and mortality do come from elsewhere, from forces beyond human society, even as they evidently take some interest in our existence. They must be, as Chewong say, “people like us.” But so far as the relation between the cosmic authorities and the human social order goes, in both morphology and potency there is no equivalence between them. As I have tried to show, especially by egalitarian and chiefless societies, neither in structure nor in practice do they match the powers above and around them. Among [118]these societies there are no human authorities the likes of Sedna, Sila, Ungud, the Original Snake, Afek, Magalim, Nankui, or the New Guinea Sky People.16 What Viveiros de Castro says in this regard to the Araweté and Tupi Guarani peoples generally can be widely duplicated among the classically “acephalous” societies: How to account for the coexistence of, on one hand, a “loosely structured” organization (few social categories, absence of global segmentation, weak institutionalization of interpersonal relations, lack of differentiation between public and domestic spheres) with, on the other hand, an extensive taxonomy of the spirit world . . . an active presence of that world in daily life, and a thoroughly vertical “gothic” orientation of thought . . . ? Societies such as the Araweté reveal how utterly trivial any attempts are to establish functional consistencies or forced correspondences between morphology and cosmology or between institution and representation. (1992: 2–3) Even apart from the numerous malevolent, shape-shifting beings with superhuman powers of afflicting people with all kinds of suffering, Viveiros de Castro describes a society of immortal gods in heaven without equal on earth, who make people’s foods and devour their souls, who are capable of elevating the sky and resurrecting the dead, gods who are “extraordinary, splendid but also dreadful, weird—in a word, awesome” (ibid.: 69).17 But they do have shamans, precisely of similar powers (ibid.: 64)—as do many other such societies. Even where there are no chiefs, there are often some human authorities: big-men, great-men, guardian magicians, warriors, elders. Yet, given the basis of their authority, these personages are so many exceptions that prove the rule of domination by metaperson powers-that-be; for, like Inuit shamans or Hagen big-men, their own ability to command others is conveyed by their service to or enlistment of just such metaperson-others. Indeed, as Vicedom and Tischner write of Hageners: “Any manifestation of power in people or things is ascribed to supernatural or hidden power,” whether in the form of good harvests, many children, success in trade, or a respected position in the community (1943–48, 1: 43). In insightful discussions of the Piaroa of the Orinoco region, Joanna Overing (1983–84, 1989) notes that human life-giving powers were not their own, but were magically transmitted to individuals from the gods by tribal leaders. By means of powerful chants, the ruwang, the tribal leader, was uniquely able to travel to the lands of the gods, whence he brought the forces for productivity enclosed within “beads of life” and placed them in the people of his community. Overing points out that this is no political economy in the sense that tribal leaders control the labor of [119]others. But as they absorbed more divine powers than others, they were responsible for building the community: “Without the work of the ruwang, the community could not be created, and because of his greater creative power, he was also the most productive member of the community” (1989: 172). In such cultural-ontological regimes, where every variety of human social success is thus attributed to metapersonal powers, there are no purely secular authorities. Roger Keesing relates of an ambitious young Kwaio man that he is well on his way to big-manship, as evidenced by his staggering command of genealogies, his encyclopedic knowledge of traditions of the ancestors and their feuds, his distinction as a singer of epic chants, and his acquisition of magical powers. Accordingly, he is “not only acquiring an intellectual command of his culture, but powerful instruments for pursuing secular ambitions as a feast-giver” (Keesing 1982: 208). Or for an Australian Aboriginal example: Helmut Petri concludes that the reason certain Ungarinyin “medicine men” and elders are leading and influential men of their communities is that they “are regarded as people in whom primeval times are especially alive, in whom the great heroes and culture-bringers are repeated and who maintain an inner link between mythical past and present” ([1954] 2011: 69). Not that those who so possess or are favored by divine powers are necessarily placed beyond the control of their fellows, for popular pressures may be put on them to use such powers beneficently. Here is where the famous “egalitarianism” of these peoples becomes relevant. Tony Swain (1993: 52) notes that the native Australian elders’ shared being with the land entails the obligation to make it abound with life—a duty the people will hold them to. Swain is careful to insist that the leaders’ access to ritual positions amounts to a certain control of “the means of production,” hence that this is not the kind of communalistic, nonhierarchical society “imagined by early Marxists.” But then, ordinary people, without direct access to metapersonal sources of fertility, “can and do order ritual custodians to ‘work’ to make them food: ‘You mak’em father—I want to eat.’” All of which brings us back to the issue of mystification. Earlier, I warned against too quickly writing off the human dependence on gods, ancestors, ghosts, or even seal-persons as so much mistaken fantasy. Well, nobody nowadays is going to attribute these notions to a “primitive mentality.” And from all that has been said here, it cannot be claimed these beliefs in “spirits” amount to an ideological chimera perpetrated by the ruling class in the interest of maintaining their power—that is, on the Voltairean principle of “There is no God, but don’t tell the servants.” Here we do have gods, but no ruling class. And what we also distinctively find in these societies is the coexistence in the same social reality of humans with metahumans who have life-giving and death-dealing powers over them. The implications, as I say, look to be world-historical. As is true of big-men or shamans, access to the metaperson authorities on behalf of others is the fundamental political value in all human societies so organized. Access on one’s own behalf is usually sorcery, but to bestow the life-powers of the god on others is to be a god among men. Human political power is the usurpation of divine power. This is also to say that claims to divine power, as manifest in ways varying from the successful hunter sharing food or the shaman curing illness, to the African king bringing rain, have been the raison d’être of political power throughout the greater part of human history. Including chiefdoms such as Kwakiutl, where,[120] The chiefs are the assemblers, the concentrators, and the managers of supernatural powers. . . . The human chiefs go out to alien realms and deal with alien beings to accumulate nawalak [generic life-giving power], and to concentrate it in the ceremonial house. When they have become centers of nawalak the salmon come to them. The power to draw salmon is equated with the power to draw people. The power to attract derives from nawalak and demonstrates its possession. (Goldman 1975: 198–99) It was not military power or economic prowess as such that generated the dominance of the Abelam people over the various other Sepik communities of New Guinea eager to adopt Abelam cultural forms; rather it was the “supernatural power” that their successes signified. “Effectiveness in warfare and skill in growing yams, particularly the phallic long yams,” Anthony Forge (1990: 162) explains, “were in local terms merely the material manifestations of a more fundamental Abelam domination, that of power conceived essentially in magical and ritual terms.” What enabled the Abelam yams to grow larger, their gardens to be more productive, and their occupation of land once held by others was their “superior access to supernatural power.” Accordingly, the political-cum-cultural reach of the Abelam extended beyond their actual grasp. Beyond any real-political or material constraints, the Abelam were admired and feared for their superior access to cosmic power in all its forms, and notably for its “concrete expression” in rituals, buildings, and a great array of objects, decorations, and aesthetic styles. Abelam culture was thus carried abroad by its demonstrable command of greater force than its own (ibid: 163ff.). Southeast Asian “tribals” and peasants are well known for sacrificial “feasts of merit” in which the display and/or distribution of livestock, foods, and ritual valuables such as porcelain jars and imported textiles is the making of local authorities. But it is not so much the economic benefits to the population at large that constitute this authority—as if the people were rendered dependent on the sponsor of the sacrificial feast for their own means of existence—as it is the privileged dependence of the feast-giver on the metahuman sources of people’s prosperity. As Kaj Århem comments in regard to the “ritual wealth” thus expended: Such ritual wealth is regarded as objectivized spirit power—an indication that the owner is blessed and protected by personal spirits. Spirit possession manifests itself in good health and a large family. The blessings of the spirits are gained by proper conduct—keeping the precepts of the cosmologically underpinned social and moral order—and, above all, by continuously hosting animal sacrifices, the so-called “feasts of merit.” Wealth, sacrifice, and spiritual blessing are thus linked in an endless, positive feedback circuit. The implied reification of spiritual potency in the form of wealth and worldly power—its acquisition and accumulation as well as its loss—is central to Southeast Asian cosmology and politics. (2016: 20) Economic prowess is a metaphysical power.18 Then again, there are other well-known ways, from the magical to the military, of demonstrating such metahuman potency. Even in the matter of kingship, the royal authority may have little or [121]nothing to do with the accumulation and disposition of riches. In certain African stranger-kingships described elsewhere (Graeber and Sahlins 2017: chap. 5), power essentially rested on the ritual functions of ensuring the population’s prosperity: the authority to do so being dependent on descent from exalted foreign sources, complemented usually by traditions of the dynastic founder’s exploits as a hunter and warrior in the wild. As Shilluk, Lovedu, and Alur demonstrate, in more than one African realm such stranger-kings “rained” but did not govern. For all the superior foreign origin of an Alur chiefly dynasty, its connection to the ancient great kingdom of Nyoro-Kitara, the Alur ruler, reported Aidan Southall, was revered by his indigenous subjects more for his power to stop war than to make it; “and the sanction to his ritual authority, which is always uppermost in people’s minds, is his power to make or withhold rain rather than his power to call in overwhelming force to crush an opponent” ([1956] 2004: 246): Rain (koth) stood for material well-being in general, and a chief’s ability to demonstrate his control over it was a crucial test of his efficacy. The chief’s control of rain and weather, together with his conduct of sacrifice and worship at the chiefdom shrines, stood for his general and ultimate responsibility in the minds of his subjects for both their material and moral well-being. ([1956] 2004: 239) You will have noticed that I have come back full circle to Hocart’s Kings and councillors. Government in general and kingship in particular develop as the organization of ritual. As said earlier, we scholars of a more skeptical or positivist bent are at liberty to demystify the apparent illusions of the Others. We can split up their reality in order to make society autonomous, expose the gods as fantasy, and reduce nature to things. To put it in Chicagoese, we may say we know better than them. But if we do, it becomes much harder to know them better. For myself, I am a Hocartesian. A final note in this personal vein. Written by one of a certain age, this pretentious article has the air of a swan song. Similarly, for its concern with disappearing or disappeared cultural forms, it is something of the Owl of Minerva taking wing at dusk. Still, it does manage to kill those two birds with one stone. Coda Already copyedited, this text was on its way to the printer when by happy chance I discovered that in 1946 Thorkild Jacobsen had formulated the concept of a “cosmic state” in reference to Mesopotamian polities of the third millennium bce. Jacobsen’s discussion of a universal metapersonal regime in a city-state setting indeed anticipates many of the attributes of “The original political society” as presented here—most fundamentally his observation that “the universe as an organized whole was a society, a state” ([1946] 1977: 149). Ruled by divine authorities, human society was merely a subordinate part of this larger society, together with all the other phenomena-cum-subjects inhabiting the cosmos, from beasts and plants to stones and stars: all animate beings (inua) likewise endowed with personality and intentionality. Jacobsen depicts this hierarchically organized world in which personkind was the nature of things in a number of parallel passages. For example:[122] Human society was to the Mesopotamian merely a part of the larger society of the universe. The Mesopotamian universe—because it did not consist of dead matter, because every stone, every tree, every conceivable thing in it was a being with a will and a character of its own—was likewise founded on authority: its members, too, willingly and automatically obeyed orders which made them act as they should act. . . . So the whole universe showed the influence of the essence peculiar to Anu [Sky, king and father of the gods]. ([1946] 1977: 139) By Jacobsen’s descriptions, this universal animism was classificatory—the personalities of elements of the same kind were instances of a master personality of the species; and the scheme was hierarchical at multiple levels—species forms were in turn inhabited by higher, divine forms, such that the world was governed through the indwelling being of cosmocratic gods in every existing thing. While the whole universe manifested the essence of Anu, the goddess Nidabe created and inhabited the useful reeds of the wetlands and by her presence made them flourish. “She was one with every reed in the sense that she penetrated as an animating and characterizing agent, but she did not lose her identity in that of the concrete phenomena and was not limited to any or all the existing reeds” (ibid.: 132). Note that this kind of philosophical realism, with the god as personification of the class of which individuals are participatory members, is a general logic of partibility or dividualism. The god is a partible person manifest in various other beings—like the “myriad bodies” (kino lau) of Hawaiian gods—and at the same time exists independently of them. By the same token (pun intended), the several members of a divine class are at once manifestations of the god and (in)dividuals in their own right and kind. Following this classificatory logic, Jacobsen achieves a description of divine kingship in Mesopotamia of the kind known from classic anthropological accounts in which, for all that the king is a certain god, the god is not the king. Nyikang is Juok, but Juok is not Nyikang; Captain Cook is Lono, but Lono is not Captain Cook. Just so, the Mesopotamian king is Anu, but Anu is not the king. Indeed, given the partibilities involved, the Mesopotamian king in various capacities is also Enlil, Marduk, or any and all the great gods. (Interesting that Hocart [(1936) 1970: 88] recounted the analogous claim of an important Fijian chief who, after enumerating the great gods of the chiefdom, said, “These are all my names.”) This type of intersubjective animism is by far the most common type of divine kingship: the king as human manifestation of the god, as an avatar of the god, rather than the human as the deity in his own person, such as the self-made Roman god, Augustus. Jacobsen also thus testifies to the principle that human authority is the appropriation of divine power. In the cult, the Mesopotamian king enacted the god and thereby controlled and acquired the god’s potency. By a kind of usurpation, as it were, a man could “clothe himself with these powers, with the identity of the gods, and through his own actions, when thus identified, cause the powers to act as he would have them act” (Jacobsen [1946] 1977: 199). For the rest, Jacobsen’s text delivers on the usual ontological suspects of a metapersonal cosmos: no subject–object opposition, and, a fortiori, no differentiation of humans from nature—or can we not say: no culture–nature opposition? (Similar observations are made in the same volume by John A. Wilson [(1946) 1977] on ancient Egypt and H. and H. A. Frankfort [(1946) 1977] on ancient civilizations in [123]general.) Given this universal subjectivity as a matter of common experience, neither did the ancient Mesopotamians know a transcendent, “supernatural” realm. “The Mesopotamian universe did not have ‘different levels of reality’” (Jacobsen [1946] 1977: 149). The ethnographic examples of “The original political society” were deliberately taken from so-called “egalitarian societies” situated far from any state system to avoid the possibility that the cosmic polities at issue had been diffused or otherwise transplanted from an already existing regime of ruling kings and high gods. However, comparing Jacobsen’s account with peoples such as the Inuit and New Guinea highlanders, something of the reverse seems more likely: that the ancient civilizations inherited cosmological regimes of the kind long established in human societies. If so, the human state was the realization of a political order already prefigured in the cosmos: the state came from heaven to earth—rather than the gods from earth to heaven. References Århem, Kaj. 2016. “Southeast Asian animism in context.” In Animism in Southeast Asia, edited by Kaj Århem and Guido Sprenger, 3–20. London: Routledge. Balikici, Asen. 1970. The Netsilik Eskimo. Garden City, NJ: The Natural History Press. Barth, Fredrik. 1975. Ritual and knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1987. Cosmologies in the making: A generative approach to cultural variation in inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boas, Franz. (1888) 1961. The Central Eskimo. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1901. The Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 15. Bogoras, Waldemar. 1904–9. The Chukchee. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Brennan, Paul W. 1977. Let sleeping snakes lie: Central Enga traditional religious belief and ritual. Bedford Park, South Australia: Association for the Study of Religion, Special Studies in Religion, No. 1. Brumbaugh, Robert. 1987. “The Rainbow Serpent in the Upper Sepik.” Anthropos 82: 25–33. ———. 1990. “Afek Sang: The ‘old woman” myth of the Mountain Ok.” In Children of Afek: Tradition and change among the Mountain Ok of Central New Guinea, edited by Barry Craig and David Hyndman, 54–87. Oceania Monograph 40. Crocker, Jon Christopher. 1985. Vital souls: Bororo cosmology, natural symbolism, and shamanism. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. Danowski, Déborah and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2017. The ends of the world. Translated by Rodrigo Guimaraes Nunes. Cambridge: Polity Press.[124] de Heusch, Luc. 1963. Le pouvoir et la sacré. Annales du Centre d’Étude des Religions 1. Brussels: Institute de Sociologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles Descola, Philippe. 1996. In the society of nature: A native ecology in Amazonia. Translated by Nora Scott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1956. Nuer religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fausto, Carlos. 2012. “Too many owners: Mastery and ownership in Amazonia.” In Animism in rainforest and tundra: Personhood, animals, plants, and things in contemporary Amazonia and Siberia, edited by Marc Brightman, Vanessa Elisa Grotti, and Olga Ulturgasheva, 29–47. New York: Berghahn Books. Feachem, Richard. 1973. “The religious belief and ritual of the Raiapu Enga.” Oceania 43: 259–85. Forge, Anthony. 1990, “The power of culture and the culture of power.” In Sepik heritage: Tradition and change in Papua-New Guinea, edited by Nancy Lutkehaus, 160–70. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Frankfort, H., and H. A. Frankfort. (1946) 1977. “Introduction.” In The intellectual adventure of ancient man: An essay on speculative thought in the Ancient Near East, H. Frankfort, H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen and William A. Irwin, 1–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedman, Jonathan, and Michael J. Rowlands. 1978. “Notes toward an epigenetic model of the evolution of ‘civilization.’” In The evolution of social systems, edited by Jonathan Friedman and Michael J. Rowlands, 201–76. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Gardener, D. S. 1987. “Spirits and conceptions of agency among the Mianmin of Papua New Guinea.” Oceania 57: 161–77. Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara: The theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Glasse, R. M. 1965. “The Huli of the Southern Highlands.” In Gods, ghosts, and men in Melanesia: Some religions of Australian New Guinea and the New Hebrides, edited by Peter Lawrence and Mervyn J. Meggitt, 27–49. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Goldman, Irving. 1975. The mouth of heaven: An introduction to Kwakiutl religious thought. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Graeber, David, and Marshall Sahlins. 2017. On kings. Chicago: HAU Books. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1960. “Ojibwas ontology, behavior, and world view.” In Culture in history: Essays in honor of Paul Radin, edited by Stanley Diamond, 17–49. New York: Columbia University Press. Hamayon, Roberta N. 1996. “Shamanism in Siberia: From partnership in supernature to counter-power in society.” In Shamanism, history, and the state, edited by Nicholas Thomas and Carolyn Humphrey, 76–89. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Harrison, Simon. 1990. Stealing other people’s names: History and politics in a Sepik River cosmology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[125] Hiatt, L. R. 1996. Arguments about Aborigines: Australia and the evolution of social anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hocart, A. M. 1933. The progress of man. London: Methuen. ———. (1936) 1970. Kings and councillors: An essay in the comparative anatomy of human society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1950) 1968. Caste: A comparative study. New York: Russell and Russell. ———. (1952) 1970. The life-giving myth and other essays. London: Tavistock and Methuen. ———. (1927) 1969. Kingship. London: Oxford University Press. Hodgkins, Gael Atherton. 1977. “The Sea Spirit of the Central Eskimo: Mistress of sea animals and supreme spirit.” Ph.D. dissertation, Divinity School, University of Chicago. Howell, Signe. 1985. “Equality and hierarchy in Chewong classification.” In Contexts and levels: Anthropological essays of hierarchy, edited by R. H. Barnes, Daniel de Coppet, and R. J. Parkin, 167–80. Oxford: JASO. ———. 1989. Society and cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2012. “Knowledge, morality, and causality, in a ‘luckless’ society: The case of the Chewong in the Malaysian Rain Forest.” Social Analysis 56: 133–47. Huxley, Francis. 1956. Affable savages: An anthropologist among the Uribu Indians of Brazil. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Jacobsen, Thorkild. (1946) 1977. “Mesopotamia: The cosmos as a state.” In The intellectual adventure of ancient man: An essay on speculative thought in the Ancient Near East, H. Frankfort, H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen and William A. Irwin, 125–84. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Jorgensen, Dan. 1980. “What’s in a name: The meaning of meaningless in Telefolmin.” Ethos 8: 349–66. ———. 1990a. “Placing the past and moving the present: Myth and contemporary history in Telefolmin.” Culture 10: 47–56. ———. 1990b. “Secrecy’s turns.” Canberra Anthropology 13: 40–47. ———. 1990c. “The Telefolip and the architecture of ethnic identity in the Sepik Headwaters.” In Children of Afek: Tradition and change among the Mountain Ok of Central New Guinea, edited by Barry Craig and David Hyndman, 151–60. Oceanica Monograph 40. ———. 1996. “Regional history and ethnic identity in the hub of New Guinea: The emergence of the Min.” Oceania 66: 189–210. ———. 1998. “Whose nature? Invading bush spirits, traveling ancestors, and mining in Telefolmin.” Social Analysis 42: 100–16. Keesing, Roger. 1982. Kwaio religion: The living and the dead in a Solomon Islands society. New York: Columbia University Press. Lang, Andrew. (1898) 1968. The making of eeligion. New York: AMS Press.[126] Lawrence, Peter, and Mervyn J. Meggitt. 1965. “Introduction.” In Gods, ghosts, and men in Melanesia: Some religions of Australian New Guinea and the New Hebrides, edited by Peter Lawrence and Mervyn J. Meggitt, 1–26. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Leach, Edmund. 1976. Culture and communication: The logic by which symbols are connected. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lienhardt, R. Godfrey. 1961. Divinity and experience: The religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lommel, Andreas. (1952) 1997. The Unambal: a Tribe in Northwest Australia. Carnarvon Gorge, Queensland: Takarakka Nowam Kas Publications. Mauss, Marcel. (1925) 2016. The gift: Expanded edition. Translated by Jane I. Guyer. Chicago: HAU Books. Meggitt, Mervyn J. 1965. “The Mae Enga of the Western Highlands,” in Gods, ghosts and men in Melanesia: Some religions of Australian New Guinea and the New Hebrides, edited by Peter Lawrence and Mervyn J. Meggitt, 105–31. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Merkur, Daniel. 1991. Powers which we do not know: Gods and spirits of the Inuit. Moscow: University of Idaho Press. Munn, Nancy. 1986. Walbiri ethnography: graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a Central Australian society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Myers, Fred R. 1986. Pintup Country, Pintup self: Sentiment, place, and politics among Western Desert Aborigines. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Oosten, J. G. 1976. The theoretical structure of the religion of the Netsilik and Iglulik. Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen. Overing, Joanna. 1983–84. “Elementary structures of reciprocity: A comparative note on Guianese, Central Brazilian, and North-West Amazonian socio-political thought.” Anthropologica 59–62: 331–48. ———. 1989 “The aesthetics of production: The sense of community among the Cubeo and Piaroa.” Dialectical Anthropology 14: 159–75. Petri, Helmut. (1954) 2011. The dying world in Northwest Australia. Carlisle, Western Australia: Hesperian Press. Radin, Paul. 1914. “Religion of the North American Indians.” The Journal of American Folklore 27: 355–73. Rasmussen, Knud. 1930. Intellectual culture of the Hudson Bay Eskimos. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921–22, Vol. VII. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag. ———. 1931. The Netsilik Eskimos: Social life and material culture. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921–22, Vol. VIII. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag. Robbins, Joel. 1995. “Dispossessing the spirits: Christian transformations of desire and ecology among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea.” Ethnology 34: 211–24. ——— 1999. “This is our money: Modernism, regionalism, and dual currency in Urapmin.” In Money and modernity: State and local currencies in contemporary Melanesia, edited by David Akins and Joel Robbins, 82–102. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ——— 2004. Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in Papua New Guines. Berkeley: University of California Press.[127] Schiefflin, Edward L. 2005. The sorrow of the lonely and the burning of the dancers. Second edition. New York: Palgrave. Schmitt, Karl. 2005. Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Southall, Aidan. (1956) 2004. Alur society: A study in processes and types of domination. Münster: International African Institute/LIT Verlag. Speck, Frank. 1977. Naskapi: The savage hunters of the Labrador Peninsula. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Strathern, Andrew. 1993. “Great-men, leaders, big-men: The link of ritual power.” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 97: 145–58. Strathern, Andrew and Marilyn Strathern. 1968. “Marsupials and magic: A study of spell symbolism among the Mbowamb.” In Dialectic in practical religion, edited by E. R. Leach, 179–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology. Strauss, Herman. (1962) 1990. The Mi-culture of the Mount Hagen people, Papua New Guinea. Edited by Gabriele Stürzenhofecker and Andrew Strathern. Translated by Brian Shields. Pittsburgh Ethnology Monographs No.13. Department of Anthropolgy, University of Pittsburgh. Swain, Tony. 1993. A place for strangers: Toward a history of Australian Aboriginal being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1903. Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom. Fourth edition, 2 vols. London: John Murray. Valentine, C. A. 1965. “The Lalkai of New Britain.” In Gods, ghosts, and men in Melanesia: Some religions of Australia New Guinea and the New Hebrides, edited by Peter Lawrence and Mervyn J. Meggitt, 162–97. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Valeri, Valerio. 2000. The forest of taboos: Morality, hunting, and identity among the Huaulu of the Moluccas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Vicedom, Georg F., and Herbert Tischner. 1943–48. The Mbowamb: The culture of the Mount Hagen tribes in East Central New Guinea, 3 volumes. Translated by F. E. Rheinsteain and E. Klestat. Xeroxed manuscript, Australian National University. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1992. From the enemy’s point of view: Humanity and divinity in Amazonia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2015. The relative native: Essays on indigenous conceptual worlds. Chicago: HAU Books. Wagley, Charles. (1947) 1983. Welcome of tears: The Tapirape Indians of Central Brazil. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Wagley, Charles, and Edwardo Galvao. (1949) 1969. The Tenetehara Indians of Brazil: A culture in transition. New York: AMS Press.[128] Weyer, Edward Moffat. 1932. The Eskimos: Their environment and folkways. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wheatcroft, Wilson. 1976. “The legacy of Afekan: Cultural symbolic interpretations of religion among the Tifalmin of New Guinea.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. Wilson, John A. (1946) 1977. “Egypt.” In The intellectual adventure of ancient man: An essay on speculative thought in the Ancient Near East, H. Frankfort, H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen and William A. Irwin, 31–124. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. La société politique véritable Résumé : Même les sociétés prétendues égalitaires et peu structurées connues de l’anthropologie, les sociétés de chasseurs comme les Inuits ou bien les Aborigènes d’Australie par exemple, sont en structure et en pratique des segments subordonnés de règnes cosmiques et inclusifs, contrôlés et gouvernés par des divinités, des ancêtres, des maîtres d’espèce et d’autres méta-personnes douées de pouvoir de vie et de mort sur la population humaine. “Le Mbowamb passe sa vie entière sous l’emprise et en compagnie des esprits.” (Vicedom et Tischner). “la société [Arawaté] n’est pas complète sur terre: les vivants font partie d’une structure sociale globale fondée sur l’alliance du ciel et de la terre” (Viveiros de Castro). Nous avons besoin d’une révolution copernicienne de la perspective anthropologique, marquant un départ de notre perspective prenant la société humaine pour centre de tout et projetant sur tout sa propre forme - c’est à dire les conclusions trompeuses des écoles Durkheimiennes ou structuro-fonctionnalistes - et rendant compte des réalités ethnographiques diverses de la dépendance des peuples à des pouvoirs englobant, incarnés, capables de donner la vie et de délivrer la mort, déterminant l’ordre terrestre, l’épanouissement des êtres et l’existence. Quoi qu’en dise Hobbes, l’état politique est la condition d’humanité dans l’état de nature; il y a des êtres royaux dans le ciel même lorsqu’il n’existe pas de chefs sur terre. Marshall SAHLINS is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His recent books are Apologies to Thucydides (University of Chicago Press, 2004), The Western illusion of human nature (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008), What kinship is . . . and is not (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Confucius Institutes: academic malware (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2015), and What the Foucault!?! (Prickly Paradigm Press, in press). Marshall SahlinsDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of Chicago1126 East 59th StreetChicago, IL 60637USAmsahlins@uchicago.edu ___________________ Inaugural Hocart Lectures, SOAS, April 29, 2016. This article is an excerpt from David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins’ forthcoming book On kings (2017). 1. One is reminded of the great Rainbow Serpent of Australian Aboriginals, as also by the Original Snake’s relation to the celestial god Tanko, thus making a pair like the male sky deity and the autochthonous serpent of Australian traditions (see below on Magalim of the Central New Guinea Min peoples and Ungud of the Kimberleys, Western Australia). 2. On the distribution and respective powers of these great spirits among Inuit and Siberian peoples, see the general summaries in Weyer (1932), Oosten (1976), Hodgkins (1977), and Merkur (1991). On the dominance of Sedna among the Central Inuit, see in particular Weyer (1932: 355–56). 3. The distinction between “indwelling” and “free souls” (such as ghosts) is adopted from Merkur (1991). Reports of the ubiquity of the former among Inuit have been recurrent at least since the eighteenth century. Thus, from East Greenland in 1771: “The Greenlanders believe that all things are souled, and also that the smallest implement possesses its soul. Thus an arrow, a boot, a shoe sole or a key, a drill, has each for itself a soul” (Glann, in Weyer 1932: 300). 4. In a comparative discussion of species-masters in lowland South America, Carlos Fausto (2012: 29) notes that the topic has been relatively neglected by ethnographers, “due to a widespread view of the South American lowlands as a realm of equality and symmetry.” 5. Like the Chukchee shaman who told Bogoras:We are surrounded by enemies. Spirits always walk about with gaping mouths. We are always cringing, and distributing gifts on all sides, asking protection of one, giving ransom to another, and unable to obtain anything whatever gratuitously. (1904–9: 298) 6. Peter Lawrence and Meggitt speak of a general Melanesian “view of the cosmos (both its empirical and non-empirical parts) as a unitary physical realm with few, if any, transcendental attributes” (1965: 8). 7. Yet the Araweté are no more mystical in such regards than is the ethnographer. The affective tone of their life, Viveiros de Castro notes, does not involve what we consider religiosity: demonstrations of reverence, devaluation of human existence, and so forth. They are familiar with their gods. 8. Or else, like the various animals known to Naskapi of the Canadian Northeast, these other persons “constitute races and tribes among which the human is included” (Speck 1977: 30). 9. These species- and place-masters are known the length and breadth of the Western Hemisphere. For good examples see Wagley ([1947] 1983) on Tapirapé, Wagley and Galvao ([1949] 1969) on Tenetahara, Huxley (1956) on Urubu, and Hallowell (1960) on Ojibwa. As noted, the great Inuit god-inua are also represented as “owners” of their domains. 10. This classificatory logic is evident in Hermann Strauss’ reports on the subsumption of the various Sky People of the Mbowamb into “He, himself, the Above.” As the beings who “planted” the clan communities, together with their foods and customs, the Sky People are “owners” of the earthly people, but generally they remain at a distance and are involved only in times of collective disaster or need. Exceptionally, however, Strauss cites a number of Mbowamb interlocutors assigning responsibility to “The Above” for both individual and community misfortunes.If many men are killed in battle, they say “He himself, the Ogla [Above], gave away their heads.” . . . When a great number of children die, the Mbowamb say, “He himself, the Above, is taking all our children up above.” If a couple remain childless, everyone says “Their kona [land] lies fallow, the Above himself, as the root-stock man (i.e., owner) is giving them nothing.” ([1962] 1990: 38–39) 11. I am especially indebted to Dan Jorgensen for his unstinting, generous, and informative replies to my many questions about the ethnography of the Telefolmin and of Min peoples in general. His knowledge and interpretations of this material, as of anthropology more broadly, are extraordinary—though, of course, I take responsibility if I have misconstrued the information he provided. I have also relied heavily on several of his writings, especially Jorgensen (1980, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c, 1996, 1998, 2002). Also most useful have been Barth (1975, 1987), Wheatcroft (1976), Brumbaugh (1987, 1990), and Robbins (1995, 1999, 2004). 12. As a civilizer who carved a human cultural existence out of the wild, displacing its “nature spirits,” Afek’s story is similar to stranger-king traditions. A further similarity is her union or unions with local men (or a dog). Although the Min peoples are generally known as “Children of Afek,” there are alternate local traditions of the autochthonous origins of certain groups from animal ancestors. The same sort of opposition between indigenous “owners” and the incoming rulers is in play in the domination of the area by the Telefolmin people, who arrived at their present location and achieved their superior positon by early military feats. 13. I am indebted to Dan Jorgensen for this point: which, as he observes, derives from observations of Lévi-Strauss. 14. “In the Amerindian case . . . the possession of objects must be seen as a particular case of the ownership relation between subjects, and the thing-artefact as a particular case of the person-artefact” (Fausto 2012: 33). 15. Later in the same monograph, Keesing attempts to recuperate these “political insights” in favor of the conventional view that the spiritual powers are an ideological reflex of the Kwaio big-man system. But aside from the fact that the Kwaio spirit-world is much more complex morphologically than Kwaio society, there are no Kwaio big-men with the life-and-death powers even of their ancestral predecessors. 16. Of the Huli equivalent of Hagener Sky People, R. M. Glasse writes: “Dama are gods—extremely powerful beings who control the course of nature and interfere in the affairs of men.” Notably, one Datagaliwabe, “a unique spirit whose sole concern is punishing breaches of kinship rules” (1965: 27)—including lying, stealing, adultery, murder, incest, violations of exogamic rules and of ritual taboos—inflicts sickness, accidents, death or wounding in war (ibid.: 37). 17. For a similar structure of divinity in a non-Tupi setting, see Jon Christopher Crocker (1983: 37 et passim) on the bope spirits of the Bororo. In both cases, by conveying to the gods their rightful share of certain foods, the people will be blessed with fertility and natural plenty. 18. Geertz (1980) was right to speak of a Balinese “theatre state.” So were those who criticized him for underplaying its material dimension.