On Body and Soul

Ⅲ ABSTRACT: Th e ethnography of lowland South American societies has occupied a central place in recent debates concerning what has been called the 'ontological turn' in anthropology. Th e concepts of 'animism' and 'perspectivism' , which have been revigorated through studies of Amerindian ontologies, fi gure increasingly in the ethnographies of non-Amerindian peoples and in anthropological theory more generally. Th is article traces the theoretical and empirical background of these concepts, beginning with the infl uence of Lévi-Strauss's work on the anthropology of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and proceeding with their impact on Amazonian ethnography. It then investigates the problems that two alternative traditions-one combining a cognitivist with a pragmaticist approach, the other a phenomenological one-pose to recent studies of Amazonian ontologies that rely on the concepts of animism and perspectivism. Th e article concludes by considering how animism and perspectivism aff ect our descriptions of Amerindian society and politics, highlighting the new challenges that studies of Amerindian ontologies have begun to address. Ⅲ

HALBMAYER, Ernst (ed.): Dossier: Debating Animism, perspectivism and the construction of ontologies, INDIANA 29, 2012, 145-169

Recent discourse within Western ecologism raises numerous issues relevant for the debate on animism within anthropology. Instead of perpetuating the image of the cosmological alterity of indigenous societies and instrumentalizing it as an environmental utopia, this article argues for a certain "monism" of environmental ethics. Based on insights of Western eco-psychology, Western tradition of nature philosophy, as well as the work of anthropologists like Bird-David, Ingold, and Hornborg and their contributions to the debate on a "new animism", it is argued that the spatio-temporal accumulation (or diminishment) of capacities to manage the borderlines of cosmological domains gives shape to the quality of human-nature-relationships. As the example from the Sateré-Mawé shows, their modes of human-nature relationship form a kind of sequence that has as much to do with historical external relations of an Amazonian society as with progressive advances and regressive longings in a person's life cycle. Taken together, both Western discourse on an ecological turn of developmental psychology and the sequential modes of Sateré-Mawé human-nature relationships make a strong argument for a common ground of environmental ethics. Both Western and indigenous societies are nowadays challenged by the necessity to re-construct an environmentally beneficent "animic way of being" (Ingold). To be aware of this common ground opens up the space for a more "symmetric anthropology".

Anthropology of Consciousness, 2018

This essay considers the role of the imagination in the envisioning and poetic construction of future being and becoming in Amazonia. Poetic construction is the process whereby the assembled forms that emerge from the imagination are brought out into the world of the senses. Imaginative envisioning and poetic construction are the means by which diverse ontologies of humans, animals, and spirits are articulated into particular visions of future transformation that posit a becoming from humanity to otherness in Amazonia. This essay seeks to elucidate the conscious processes through which cosmological ideas are imaginatively envisioned and poetically constructed by Amazonian societies as visions of future transformation and becoming from human to nonhuman being.

Following the increasing consensus around the “Ontological Turn” within the Anthropological debate, the amount of inquiries on Amazonian communities rapidly increased. What is probably more striking about this shift is the repositioning of premises it introduced in our discipline, the production of investigations regarding the Amazon inaugurated a new era for Anthropology. The comprehension of the experiences related to those civilizations who do not share the “Western” ontological premises has become crucial both in the development of our discipline and in the debate around the constitution of the Moderns, namely, the distinction between Nature and Culture. The core assertions of these new perspectives, mainly rotating around the work of Viveiros de Castro, regard the ontological foundation of reality. The cosmological perception shared within the Amazon postulates a common Humanity underpinning the living experience of every entity. In addition, due to this common essence, each animal species perceives itself as human, or, in other words, the only epistemology is the “human one”: each entity is human in its perception of the world. What implicates the evident differences in resemblance, behaviour and perception within the animal kingdom – including human species – is the complete and essential diversity of bodies. My argument blossoms from this discussion but tries to make a step forward. I will argue how in terms of morality – phrased through the concept of conviviality –, this proposal appears too dichotomous, is indeed clear how, in some Amazonian contexts, the overarching essence of every entity, humanity, is disposed hierarchically. I will show how, through comparison of different Amazonian communities, Animality and Humanity rely on similar essences, but are, and this is fundamental, disposed in a hierarchical scale: animal perspectives are a corrupted form of humanity. In addition, since the body is the central foundation of ontology, I will argue how humanity is crafted and preserved thanks to techniques of the body. In order to go beyond this impasse between ontological studies and more traditional ones, I am suggesting the term historical multileveled ontology to refer to this context in which Being appears as a horizontal, but hierarchical, array of forms of humanity, and in which morality and behaviours form the ontology of entities. My argument will advance a theoretical proposition that can represent a via media between the Ontological Turn and more conviviality-centric interpretations and therefore can be a fruitful contribution to the debate on Amerindian ontological questions and, more broadly, to the development of Anthropology after the critiques represented by Post-Modernism.

Ethnos, 2008

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2012

In this article I propose an ethnographic analysis of change and continuity as a transformational process lived in the body by the Tupinambá of Olivença (Brazil). This perspective provides an alternative to the models of either acculturation or ethnic resurgence that currently pervade approaches to indigenous people such as the Tupinambá, who were settled on the Brazilian Atlantic coast, by missionaries, in the seventeenth century. The ethnographic analysis suggests that in the Tupinambá case, transformational ethnic processes partially depend on corporeal dispositions towards drinking manioc beer. The argument is informed by multiple comparisons with reference to Americanist debates about Amazonian studies as well as to sixteenth-century ethnological sources about the Tupi of the Atlantic coast. Inasystematicanalysisof themeaningsassociatedwiththebodyinAmericanistliterature, Tânia Stolze Lima (2002) distinguishes between four corporeal concepts. The first three are labelled 'body-torture' ,'body-art' , and 'body as subjectification or point-of-view' , the last of which she develops through an ethnography of the Juruna and which marks the central argument of Amerindian perspectivism. The fourth is identified as 'bodyfabrication' ,which was first discussed by Anthony Seeger,EduardoViveiros de Castro,and Roberto da Matta (1979) to explain how Amerindian personhood is literally fabricated throughout the life-cycle. The present article suggests that we can take this idea even further, by considering the 'fabrication' of person and body as a microhistorical process of constitution over time. The constituting process is transformational-that is to say, it is a historical process in which, as Christina Toren suggests, ideas are transformed in the selfsame process in which they are maintained, and 'being and becoming are aspects of one another' because 'we engage others in the process of our own becoming' (2002: 189; see also Toren 1999). This article proposes to articulate this perspective with analyses of personhood and ethnicity as indigenous transformations in which introduced alien elements are transformed as modified 'versions' of indigenous structuring elements (cf. Fausto & Heckenberger 2007: 6; Gow 2001: 27). The analytical contribution of the article lies in the ethnographic connection between this historical dimension and the Amerindian body. Transformational personhood is here taken to be a key ethnographic bs_bs_banner

What we call fantastic, one of the dimensions of the supernatural, is, in turn, understood as one of the forms of the real by the indigenous people. This study sought to document the rich culture of the fantastic entities of indigenous populations from different regions of the Amazon, from which folkloric and demonic beliefs often emerge. The purpose of this article is to expand and develop an understanding of an aesthetic, semiotic, metaphorical, and symbolic order of the indigenous culture of the Amazon, through sensitivity, ecological awareness, and respect for the culture and history of these traditional peoples. The method of this study aligns with the Indigenous worldview, and respect, and upholds its relational significance. It transcribes lived and presented cultural experiences with a rich use of metaphors, stories, and symbols, of sound and visual features and landscapes as an experience of living space, exploring the environmental, mythical, and spiritual dimensions of indigenous peoples.

Ethnobiology Letters, 2017

This article analyzes ritualized prescriptions for harvesting oleoresin or “oil” from the copaíba tree in Brazil. These harvesting prescriptions involve increasingly complex attributions of mind to the copaíba tree itself. The copaíba tree is widespread throughout the Americas, and for centuries has been well-known for the medicinal oil that can be extracted from its trunk. In Brazil, contemporary knowledge of the copaíba tree is bound up with colonial history and what were often destructive extractivist economies. Whereas historical accounts of the copaíba tree are often limited to mechanistic descriptions for extracting oil, this article examines attributions of mind that harvesters make to the copaíba tree. These attributions can be read from procedures for extracting oil. Such procedures are concerned with moon cycles, tree marking, sexual activity, and gaze. The article shows that such prescriptions have a wide transregional and interethnic distribution, from the Amazon Basin in northern Brazil to the Atlantic Forest on Bahia’s southern coast. New evidence from southern Bahia also involves prescriptions concerning speech and naming, which presuppose that the copaíba tree is sensitive to intentionality and human language. These mind attributions are inferred through pragmatic analysis of the (ontological) presuppositions that are embedded by harvesting prescriptions. The contribution concludes with reflections on the implications of this presuppositional analytic approach for debates concerned with animism and the “ontological turn.”

2015

In this thesis I explore the knowledge practices of the Pastaza Runa, an indigenous group of the Ecuadorian Amazon. A central claim in my work is that processes of knowledge acquisition among the Runa involve an acknowledgement that human bodies, as well as non-human ones, share a network of ‘likeness’. This is not to be located specifically in the possession of a soul nor in the ‘shared’ substance of the body. For the Runa, humans share with non-humans specific ‘patterns’ of action, which I call ‘forms’. Things can affect humans (and vice versa) because they share a certain formal resemblance. Such resemblance is not found in discrete entities, but rather in the movements between entities. As such, forms cannot be reduced to the physicality of a singular body: they are subject-less and inherently dynamic. The concept of forms developed in this thesis seeks to think about the relationship between human and objects in ways which go beyond ideas of ensoulment or subjectification. Such...