Making Kin out of Others in Amazonia Author(s): Aparecida Vilaca Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 347 -365 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3134479 Accessed: 26/01/2009 11:34 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp.. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rai.. http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rai Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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MAKING KIN OUT OF OTHERS IN AMAZONIA APARECIDA VILA9A
Federaldo Rio de Janeiro Museu Nacional, UniversidadeFederaldo
This article analyses the process of producing kinship among various Amazonian peoples, focusing primarily on the Wari', Txapakura-speaking people living in Western Amazonia (Brazil). It argues that the production of kin cannot be related exclusively to the domestic or intra-tribal domain, since kinship emerges through a constant dialogue with non-human entities. By examining the significance of alimentary taboos associated with couvade practices in a number of groups, it shows that the new-born is made human by means of the production of its body as human body in contraposition to animal bodies.
... [la naissance] n'est pas la simple addition d'individu supplementaraire telle ou telle famille, mais une cause de desequilibre entre le monde des hommes et l'univers de puissances invisibles... (Clastres 1972: 12)
During the same period in which anthropology debated the relationship between the 'biological facts' of reproduction and the socially recognized ties of kinship through the works of Durkheim, Malinowski, Rivers, and later Radcliffe-Brown (an enduring dichotomy according to Schneider 1984: 193), Levy-Bruhl exploring the phenomenon of primitive participation noted with some surprise that in the most varied ethnographic regions, procreation was no assurance of kinship with the child. This was not because paternity or even maternity could not be recognized, an important issue in theoretical discussions at the time, but because the child born to a woman could still be reckoned to be non-human: the child of an animal. Levy-Bruhl was not referring to mythic episodes in which such cases were abundant, but to the facts of quotidian life: 'The idea that child of normal appearance may nevertheless not be "human" is a familiar one to the primitives' (Levy-Bruhl 1966 [1927]: 42). One of the examples which Levy-Bruhl uses to illustrate his point is quoted from a 1924 issue of the Journal of the African Society: In Northern Nigeria, 'when a child gets to the age of three or four without being able to walk, and keeps thin in spite of large appetite, the case is considered very serious one. The parents bring the child to the priest and consult him. He examines the child, and may inform the parents that it is not "human," but the "offspring of something in the bush or in the water." If the offspring of something in the bush is indicated, the friend to carry to the bush: he does so, leaves the child and parents give the child to hides to see what happens. The child left to himself will first cry and then, after looking Royal Anthropological Institute 2002. J. Roy. anthrop.Inst. (N.S.) 8, 347-365
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round and seeing that no one is about, will change into a monlkey and vanish among the trees' (Levy-Bruhl 1966 [1927]: 45).
Looking back at this period, we find ourselves face to face with two sets of phenomena or objects of study: first, kinship, pertaining to the sphere of human relations, or more specifically to relations within the same ethnic group; and, secondly, data on cosmology and religion, where different domains peopled by humans and non-humans are set in relationship. Despite referring explicitly to the native concept of filiation, the case reported by Levy-Bruhl was not correlated with the facts of kinship.' Faced with the same phenomena today, we may observe that anthropologists working directly on kinship still fail to connect these two sets of data. At the core of anthropology from its inception, kinship studies underwent kind of ostracism in the 1970s, especially after the critiques of Needham (1971a; 1971b) and Schneider (1965; 1972) threw into question the relevance of kinship as an area to be studied. In the 1990s, however, kinship surfaced again, only now with a different range of interests. Instead of terminologies and marriage rules, analysis focused on native conceptions of bodies and gender themes derived from a feminist agenda; instead of the concern with the relationship between the biological and the social, authors aimed to show the complexity of the 'biological'. The emphasis was thus on native notions of body and consubstantiality; rather than being seen as natural givens, these came to be understood as products of society and culture. Consubstantiality, located in this new body, was no longer a relation determined by birth, but a condition being continuously produced through acts of sharing, particularly of foods (Carsten 1995; Rival 1998) and mutual care (McCallum 1998; Passes 2000). Overing In her introduction to recent collection of articles on notions of kinship (now termed 'relatedness'2) in different areas of the world, Carsten (2000) claims that an important shift differentiating old and new studies lies in the privilege given by the latter to the domestic sphere (understood as relationships of caring and food sharing between people living in close proximity on day-to-day basis). Previously, she says, the domestic sphere had been pushed into the background by an anthropology in search of grand structures and large degree universally syntheses, which presumes the domestic 'to be to matter for psychological rather than anthropological study' constant or (Carsten 2000: 17). Passes 2000: 3, 9), although According to Overing (1999: 84; Overing comprising the main topic of interest for native peoples themselves, everyday life in the heart of the family and domestic nuclei appeared to be far too chaotic and commonplace to be research topic for the anthropologists who were fascinated by the study of the exotic rather than the mundane. Even when it did occur to them to pay attention to domesticity, no structures were found. In place of the domestic they focused on cosmology, eschatology, and relations with the exterior in general, since 'shamans interacting with cannibal gods, warriors lopping off the head of enemies ... are much more exciting prospects than people preparing communal meals or training and caring Passes 2000: 9). for children' (Overing
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This concern to focus analysis on domestic life, which becomes equivalent to the social universe (Overing Passes 2000: 6),3 leads to the same type of dissociation of ethnographic materials made in Levy-Bruhl's time. The fact that the relationship between killer and victim (implied in the example of warfare cited above) or those between be tween shamans and their animal/spirit partners are frequently conceived in Amazonia in terms analogous to those which connect humans in everyday life, namely filiation and affinity (Fausto 2000; 2001a;Vilaca 1992; 1996; 1998; 2000;Viveiros de Castro 1986; 1993), is not mentioned in these recent works, whose authors fail to associate the phenomenon with that of domestically produced kinship. This omission is to be found in cases other than those of kinship derivmanner similar to the Nigerian case ing from warfare and shamanism. In quoted by Levy-Bruhl, among a wide variety of Amazonian groups the fact that parents are humans is no assurance of the child's humanity. According to Gow (1997: 48), at the moment of birth the Piro baby is inspected to decide whether it is human or not: it could be a fish, tortoise, or other animal. Among the Piaroa, the baby is called 'the young of animals' (Overing pers. comm.). Among some groups, such as the Je-speaking Panara (Ewart 2000: 287), the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Arawete (Viveiros de Castro 1986: 442), Guayaki (Clastres 1972: 16), and Parakana (Fausto 2001a: 396), the body of the child is literally moulded with the hands after birth, in this way acquiring human form. According to Fausto (pers. comm.), the Parakana explain that the moulding of the baby's body has the aim of differentiating it from the bodies of animals. Despite being highly marked during the post-natal period (which for this reason I will focus on here), this ambivalence in identity occurs at various other moments of life. All of infancy and even various periods of adult life (especially initiation, first menstruation, warfare reclusion, and illness) are particularly marked as highly susceptible, very often being understood to involve the possible loss of properly human identity (Da Matta 1976: 85-8; Lima 1995: 187; Schaden 1962: 85-94;Viveiros de Castro 1986: 474). In the words of Seeger (1981: 24) writing about the Suya: 'Severe illness, death, weakness, and sexuality are also transformations of the social human beings into more animal-like beings.' Starting out from the native conception of kinship as something to be continually fabricated, and of alimentary taboos associated with birth as a recognized part of the couvade complex, and based on ethnographic material from the Wari' (Txapakura, Brazil) and other Amazonian groups, wish to question the divisions posited between domestic life and cosmological facts by exploring the notion of an alterity internal to consubstantiality. argue here that the exterior is constitutive part of kinship relations in Amazonia as consequence of the fact that these relations are constructed from alterity as a starting point. The production of kin is related to the supra-local universe not only because of the need to capture identities and potencies from the exterior, as numerous Amazonian ethnographies testify,4but testify,4but also because humanity is conceived of as position, essentially transitory, which is continuously wide universe of subjectivities that includes animals.5 produced out of Production of differentiated groups conceived of as kin takes place by means
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of the fabrication of similar bodies from this substrate of universal subjectivities. Some clarifications are necessary before we can proceed.
The Amerindian body In the mid-1970s, at a time when native notions of the body did not look so attractive as they do today to anthropologists working in other ethnographic regions, researchers of lowland South American indigenous groups had already called attention to the prominent role assumed by the problematic of the body in Amerindian thought and its wide-ranging repercussions on cosmological conceptions and social organization (Overing 1977a; 1977b; Seeger 1980). Ethnographies of the period devoted much space to theories of conception, notions of illness, alimentary taboos, and body decoration: a fact pointed out by Seeger, Da Matta, and Viveiros de Castro (1979: 3) in a seminal article on the theme. Levi-Strauss's conclusions concerning the central importance of categories of the sensible in the logic of South American myths, developed in the Mythologiques(Levi-Strauss 1964; 1967; 1968, 1971), were shown to apply perfectly to the understanding of social life as a whole. Organizational principles such as descent and corporate groups modelled all better known on the basis of African, Melanesian, and Asiatic societies were found to be inadequate when dealing to anthropologists at the time with South American materials, producing a false idea that we were faced with amorphic and destructured societies (Overing 1977a: 9; Seeger 1980: 131; Seeger, Da Matta & Viveiros de Castro 1979: 3). In the place of'corporate descent groups', however, Amerindians presented us with 'corporal descent groups' (Seeger 1980: 130), understood as groups of persons related by substance, such as blood, semen, and foods. Thus, while classical anthropology notion of social structure as system of relationship between bequeathed system groups, Amerindians unfolded for us structural principles based on of relations between bodies (Seeger, Da Matta &Viveiros de Castro 1979: 14). In the apt expression of these authors, 'indigenous socio-logics is based on physio-logics' (Seeger, Da Matta &Viveiros de Castro 1979: 13). Although in some of these analyses the notion of the body was still related to that of biological substrate, constituted from birth (Seeger 1980: 130, implicit in his concept of corporal descent groups; Turner 1971: 105, for whom social marking is inscribed on the body as 'social skin'), it is important to stress the innovative nature of the analyses of those authors who drew attention to the role of society in the constitution of this body. Among these, Viveiros de Castro (1987 [1977]: 32) in his study of the Yawalapiti of the Upper Xingu, insisted on the idea that 'human nature is literally fabricated, modelled by culture ... the social is not deposited on the Yawalapiti body as though onto an inert support: it creates this body'. Viveiros de Castro has recently returned to the question of Amerindian corporeality in search of new synthesis, developing the model of perspectivism or multinaturalism. In this model, various constitutive aspects of the native notion of the body which were previously noted are now highlighted, especharacter.The main innovation lies in localcially its fabricated and mutating character.The izing the subject's point of view in the body. According to this author, many
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Amerindian peoples conceive the world to be inhabited by different types of subjects, all possessing souls, who apprehend the world from distinct points of view related to their bodies (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 470). He warns that this is not an instance of what we know as multicultural relativism, which supposes 'a diversity of subjective and partial representations, each striving to grasp an external and unified nature, which remains perfectly indifferent to those representations. Amerindian thought proposes the opposite: ... One single "culture," multiple "natures"' (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 478). Thus, instead of multiculturalism we have multinaturalism. The shaman with his capacity to adopt other points of view via the transmutation of his body is testimony to this extended notion of humanity and the body as the site of differentiation. But although this experience centres on the shaman, it is not restricted to him: as mentioned above, such mutability can occur at various stages of the life cycle, especially at birth, during illness, after homicide, and at death. To change identity is to change body, capacity that humans share with those animals possessing subjectivity. What enables this permutability of the body is precisely the equivalence of spirits: all are equally human, equally subjects. By modifying the body through alimentation, change in habits, and the establishment of social relations with other subjects, another point of view is acquired: the world is now seen in the same way as the new companions, that is, the members of other species. We shall now see how the notion of kinship as condition to be fabricated is related to this constant dialogue with other subjectivities.
Making kin The performative aspects of kinship are present in numerous Amazonian ethnographies. Notions such as the cognatization of the local group, found in studies of Guianese groups (Overing 1975; Riviere 1984), and others (Gow 1991: 192), point us to similar inference: people who live together tend to be identified as consanguineal kin, whether through the use of consanguineal terms of reference or through the use of teknonyms. As Viveiros de Castro (1993) shows, this is not just feature of those Amazonian systems classed as Dravidian. The same idea recurs among the Wari', whose kinship terminology presents similar configuration to 'Crow'type terminologies. This is not a prescriptive terminology: that is, none of the consanguine terms possesses positive matrimonial content. The Wari' do not this group includes cross kin who are conceived of in marry near kin Dravidian systems as affines.Thus affines. Thus there is no repeated exchange of real sisters, frequently seen as the ideal form of marriage in such systems, and we can observe among the genealogies large number of marriages between groups of brothers and sisters, as well as polygyny (especially sororal) and the levirate (Vilaca 1995). In addition, there is a tendency towards endogamic marriages, taking place within the same sub-group before contact and within the same village today.6This trend emerges almost as a norm in the discourse of informants: the foreigner as a member of another sub-group is classified is an undesirable spouse since he or she (and his or her kin) will sooner or later prove to be bad affines.
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true kin, iri nari, and distant Kinsfolk, called ka nari wa, may be classified as true kin, naripira or naripaxi (where iri means true, pira means 'far', and paxi means 'more or less'). Though on some occasions the Wari' say they are all kin, they tend to classify cohabitants as true kin and those who live at spatial or social distance as distant kin. The closest win ma are same-sex siblings, but the term is usually extended to include all inhabitants of the local group and members of the sub-group, such that the term win ma, which means 'one who accompanies' or 'one who does the same', functions as an antonym of foreigner, tatirim.Today, the Wari' usually refer to inhabitants of the same post (a village settlement, equivalent in actuality to sub-group) as their true kin and on these occasions may exclude genealogical kin who live in another village. They refer to all cohabitants by consanguine kinship term, very often tracing tortuous genealogical paths via kin of kin. Use of affinal terms as vocatives are avoided in quotidian life and effective co-resident affines are called by their actual name or by consanguine terms.7 The same type of phenomena was described by Gow in terms of the Piro: proximity and living together are so decisive in determining kinship that genealogical kin who live far away may be excluded from the kin circle. Inhabitants of the village of Santa Clara would very often say: 'we are all kin here'. And a woman once told the author: 'These are my kin, the people in this village.You know them all, there are no others.' According to Gow,'her statement excluded two siblings, two daughters and many other real kin in other communities, while simultaneously including several people with whom she otherwise counts no close kin connections at all' (1991: 193-4). It should be stressed that this is not a purely formal or terminological assimilation, but a true process of consubstantialization, generated by proximity, intimate living, commensality, mutual care, and the desire to become kin. For many Amerindian groups, the body is product of particular social acts that continually transform it. This implies a radical difference in focus: in contrast to our own ideas, informed (at least from the end of the nineteenth century) by genetic conception of kinship in which substance determines social relations, in Amazonia, social relations determine substance (Viveiros de Castro 2000: 29 n.40, 30). Seeger reports an illustrative detail from the Suya. A man interested in increasing his number of near kin 'achieves this by fully observing the dietary restrictions of certain classificatory kin in relation to whom these restrictions are not normally observed' (1980: 114; 1981: 149).8 This implies that reckoning oneself to be consubstantial and acting as such effectively constructs this consubstantiality not in a fictitious way, as our logic would suppose, but in way that is as true and real as that provided by way of living together. At issue, therefore, is another type of substance, irreducible to bodily fluids circulating between people. This 'substance' contains not just memory and affect, but above all agency.9 To become kin, it is necessary to desire to be kin and to act as such: for example, by living together, respecting alimentary taboos, not eating dead kin (specifically in the Wari' case), calling people by kin terms, and so on. Without doubt, it was this idea that my Wari' father, Paleto, wanted to pass on to me when he asked in surprised tone, after two-month stay in my house in Rio de Janeiro, why white people did not simply make themselves into kin, too? He seemed to imply it was enough to want this. quote
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him verbatim: 'Among ourselves we are kin. We are not like yourselves you are related only to your younger brother, Eddie, and to your father and mother. You just like one another for no reason. Why don't you make yourselves into kin as well?'. The notion that shared substance or similar bodies are produced through social acts applies not only to non-genealogical kin. Americanist studies inspired by feminist anthropology and focused on the processes of daily life within the local group have been valuable in demonstrating the importance of sociability10in the construction of kinship relations as a whole. In recent article analysing the couvade among the Huaorani of Venezuela, Rival (1998: 625-6) shows how birth is merely one step in the formation of baby, process which begins in the womb and continues into the post-natal period for as long as the couvade lasts. The new-born is treated like a house guest and he must be gradually incorporated into the by his parents his hosts house through specific actions, including the giving of food. A brief examination of conception theories among some Amerindian groups amply illustrates Rival's point concerning the socially determined nature of consubstantiality, which typically defines consanguineal kinship in Amazonia. It may be noted that these theories are the subject of apparently varied and contradictory explanations from informants, who also display certain lack of interest in precisely describing the process. C. Hugh-Jones (1979: 115) and S. Hugh-Jones (2001: 255) comment on variations among Barasana informants when explaining the substances that form baby, while Carneiro da Cunha (1978: 101) notes the same phenomenon for the Kraho.11 Whenever asked the Wari' about the baby's formation in the womb, the prompt answer was that semen from one or more men was exclusively responsible. However, when I asked directly about the role of menstrual blood, the response was very often positive. According to Conklin's (2001: 116) informants, menstrual blood forms the baby's blood while semen makes up the body (flesh and bones). As solution to this apparent confusion, we can accept the futility of trying to find the 'true' theory of conception and take up C. Hugh-Jones's lead (1979: 116) by focusing on the more important aims of finding commonalities within the range of variations and trying to understand why they exist. To do so, we must consider two crucial points in Wari' theory. The first point is the evident lack of interest in reflecting on the substantive aspects of conception, except when in the presence of ethnographers. The second point common to all informants and to almost all Amerindian groups is that procreation is continuous act which lasts virtually up until the moment of birth or until one or two months before. The Wari' (and other peoples) say that women who become widows during pregnancy will inevitably bear small and weak babies unless they have lovers during this period. This notion of procreation as fabrication has a more important consequence: all the men who have sexual relations with the mother during her pregnancy contribute to the making of the baby.The importance of this fact derives not so much from the implied mixture of different substances, but from the expansion in possibilities for social action. An outcome of this is the equally widespread notion that the father is the man who socially accepts paternity, usually the mother's husband. When we relate the idea of multiple
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paternity to the common (but not universal) idea in Amazonia that semen is the only substance responsible for the formation of the child, the intention to dissolve any primacy of'substance' becomes clear, annulling any notion that might correspond to 'genetic essence' and thus allowing space for the actions of social agents to become decisive. The absence of a genetic notion of kinship in Amazonia which this wide is not in itself a novel range of ethnographic data only goes to confirm finding. But the important point to note is that this social process of fabricating consubstantiality is strongly valued as a constitutive attribute of humanity and as a site of agency. The Wari' want kin and know how to make them: they produce children and incorporate strangers and enemies via marriage. As Gow (1991: 276) showed for the Piro, to be a real person is to be capable of relating kinship to history to be capable of making kin out of strange people, continuously, through marriage. It is unsurprising, then, that evidence of the social fabrication of kinship is fundamental to the evaluation of relationships, such that, as Rival says, 'eating the same food and sleeping together ... develops a common physicality, which is far more real than genealogical ties'(1998: 621, my emphasis). Despite the which suggests the existence of contradiction implicit in such statement native category of genealogical kinship in opposition to constructed kinship she touches on (while the author maintains that all kinship is constructed) a crucial point: namely, the emphasis on the evidence of action, borne out by Gow's account of the Piro. Thus, if baby in the womb and a child adopted from strangers or enemies are both equally constructed as consubstantials (just like enemies incorporated as kin), adoption makes it even more apparent that relation of alterity (among the shared substance is produced in terms of Barasana,according to S. Hugh-Jones 2001: 264, the verb 'to adopt' means 'to make human'). The Wari' ethnography forces us to consider the fabrication of consubstantiality, or of bodies, as part of a wider process, which establishes relations between humans and animals, acts of commensality and cannibalism. Wari' shamans explain that when animals attack and kill people and the victim is incorporated into the species of the attacker, they do this because they desire kin for themselves, people with whom they can share their day-to-day life. For the Wari', the world is inhabited by great variety of beings who think Wari'is not an ethnonym, but the inclusive pronoun of themselves as humans. Wari'is 'we', with the meaning 'human being' or 'person'. This is above all a position Wari'is opposed to karawa,animal, prey, that of a human and a predator. Wari'is food, category that includes enemies, wijam.What matters is that from the point of view of animals, they are the ones who are human, wari', and that they in turn see Indians as their prey, animals, or enemies. This point of view or perspective is given by the body. The Wari' use the idiom of the body not just to speak of kinship kinsfolk have the same body but also to speak of personality or ways of being: 'Je kwere',which means 'my body is like this', is the usual answer to questions such as: 'Why do you like this?' 'Why do you do it this way?' The same applies to animals: the peccary, for example, lives in bands because 'its body is like that'. My point is that, if we recognize the fact that humanity is not limited to the Wari', we shall be in a better position to understand that the production
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of consubstantial kinspeople through the fabrication of identical bodies activates not only the restricted universe of the local group or the tribe/ethnic group, but also a wider universe of subjectivities from which the differentiated groups are constructed. A critical examination of dietary restrictions associated with birth clearly shows that human bodies are produced by processes that contrapose them to animal bodies. This does not mean, as culturalized animal hope to have made clear, that the human body is body. On the contrary, it implies naturalization or 'speciation', on the basis of an undifferentiated cultural substrate or a universe of subjectivities that includes animals.
The couvade As Peter Riviere (1974) observed in an article that has since become classic text on the theme, the couvade has been one of anthropology's traditional problems since its beginnings. The term 'couvade' was coined by Tylor in 1865 on the basis of reports from early travellers to the New World: these writers had noted the similarity between the attitude of indigenous fathers after birth of a child (particularly in the Caribbean) and the European custom, denominated couvade or covada, according to which, in the words of Van Gennep's 1943 Manuel de folklorefran(ais contemporain,'the husband takes the place of the childbearer in the bed, is cared for in place of her and performs his role for a variable lapse of time' (cited in Menget 1979: 246). Menget notes that this symbolic substitution of the mother by the father is rare or even absent from the American material, and what we actually have is the observance of series of post-partum restrictions applicable to the father just as much as to the mother. The author concludes that the couvade is not limited to the father, though he may be the most visible subject of the taboos (Menget 1979: 247). Levi-Strauss, in La penseesauvage, pensee sauvage,had already pointed out the mistake: to say that the man takes the place of the childbearer is erroneous; husband and wife are submitted to the same precautions because both are blended with the child, who is extremely susceptible during the first weeks or months of life. Following Levi-Strauss, the emphasis on the father's attitudes at the moment of birth relates to native theories of conception and gestation which, for the most part, claim that the father alone is responsible for the formation of the baby in the uterus (Levi-Strauss 1962: 258-9; see also Menget 1979: 247). Rival points out two other reasons for the emphasis given to the behaviour of the father in the couvade. The first lies beyond native thought and derives from typically Western naturalization of the mother-child relation, which elides any reflection on the restrictions on maternal behaviour, therefore stressing exclusively the attitudes of the father in context where both genitors are actually submitted to the taboos. The second reason is based on feature common to many Amazonian societies: their uxorilocal character.As character.As the couvade, in the author's interpretation, is ritual of'co-parenthood', constituting couple as such, its implications for the father's social status become more pronounced, since this is the moment when his full absorption into the house of his parents-in-law occurs (Rival 1998: 628, 634).
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While the reasons why greater attention is given to the father's behaviour during the couvade may vary, those authors who have written more recently on the theme are unanimous in saying that the couvade relates not just to the father-child relation, but also to that between mother and child, husband and wife, and close kin in generic sense. Menget (1979: 260) observes very opportunely that analysis of the couvade cannot be restricted to the vertical relations between parents and children, since it 'constitutes public mode of confirming, negating or creating classificatory relations, of re-arranging the cognatic universe by means of an idiom of substances' (see also Rival 1998: 630-1). Nevertheless, the different interpretations given to the couvade are not confined to their sociological aspects per se. Since Tylor and Frazer, many authors have sought to accentuate the mystical character of the ritual procedures, which suppose not only spiritual connection between parents and children, but also the possibility of humans being affected by the 'magical' actions of other beings, such as animals and spirits. As result, the fulfilment of couvade restrictions acts not only to define social groupings, but also to protect the from external influences.12 baby and very often the parents, too It is not my aim here to produce historical survey or critical analysis of the different interpretations of the couvade found in the anthropological literature:for erature: for this refer the reader to the articles by Riviere (1974) and Rival particularly in the alimentary taboos (1998). My interest in the couvade related to it- resides specifically in its elucidative value in illustrating the central argument of this article: social units are defined as an outcome of a dialogue involving different kinds of beings. And here we can turn to the ethnographic data. Among the Wari', certain types of game, fish, and even some fruits are avoided by the couple during pregnancy and after birth.13 They should not, for example, eat, kill, or have any type of contact with armadillos, coatis, anteaters, hawks, and peacock bass fish, among others. If other men have had fact which is rarely sexual relations with the woman during her pregnancy admitted they, too, should observe the same restrictions. The Wari' say that the restrictions protect the child (and only the child) from sicknesses of the ara maka type, that is, from sickness caused by animals either with or without spirit/soul (jam, which attests to humanity) but which act in the situation as simple animals, in other words, as non-humans. Such maladies involve conjunction between the sick person and attributes of the animal that, in the case of children, has been killed or eaten by the father (or another genitor) or by the mother. For instance, the coati provokes insanity and the shaman must remove the animal's hairs from the child's eyes; the eagle digs its talons into the child's head, provoking aches and fevers; the armadillo causes difficulties in urinating and defecating. Other animals, such as the tapir, peccary, capuchin monkey, and various kinds of fish, are not prohibited as foods as long as restrictions concerning their preparation and ingestion are followed. These are mostly animals with spirit, or humans in other words, and make up the preferred prey of the Wari' as whole, including parents of new-borns. The dead animal should not be played with or mocked, and should be ingested fully and as quickly as possible, so that its spirit gains another body and revives, returning to its home
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and family. In some cases, the animal must be inspected by the shaman before being cut up for consumption: he removes the objects which confer shamanic powers and which attest to its humanity. These animals may provoke - in both sicknesses of the kep xirak type, characterized by the children and adults animal acting like a human being, shooting arrows at the body of its victim and eating his or her internal organs. In the process, the sick person gradually transforms into the animal: if the patient dies, this transformation is considered to be complete. In one case witnessed, the shaman found fur and larvae, food of the capuchin monkey (which testifies to the importance of commensality in the creation of consubstantiality), in the child's body and rebuked the parents for having eaten the monkey inappropriately.According inappropriately.According to the shaman, the child was in the process of turning into a monkey. The first type of illnesses, ara maka, appears to be similar to those caused by the failure to adhere to post-partum prohibitions in various Amerindian groups. In the words of Lima (1995: 180-7) writing on the Juruna, a conjunction between the child and the animal in question takes place: the child assumes the characteristics of the animal (or plant food). The post-partum restrictions among the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Siriono (Holmberg 1985), the Carib-speakingYekuana (Guss 1989), and various Ge-speaking groups, among them the Apinaye (Da Matta 1976), the Suya (Seeger 1981), and the Panara (Ewart 2000), are all explained in similar fashion by the ethnographers. Seeger says of the Suya: 'If the parents eat the animal, the child will have the animal's characteristics' and, I should add, dispositions (Seeger 1981: 152). By observing taboos, the parents avoid this kind of symbiosis while they finish making the child's body similar to their own. This fabrication occurs especially through commensality mediated by the mother's milk and by the circulation of substances directly between their bodies, as is the case among the Wari'. According to most of these ethnographers, such practices suppose sympathetic transfer of attributes from foods to the child (see Crocker 1985: 51), by means of the people with whom the child shares bodily substances. This can only happen because the child is permeable in bodily terms its 'biological frontiers' are ill defined.14 In addition, the agency in this process is attributed exclusively to humans properly speaking. The Wari' case allows us to complicate the problem and consider animal agency as part of the illness's process, since some illnesses affecting children originate in the animal's desire to take him or her with them to live as a kinsperson. As previously mentioned, Wari' shamans say that 'human' animals (those with spirit) attack with the intention of incorporating the victim into their species: the shaman must go to them and negotiate their return of the latter's true family awaits him or her. In one case, the victim, alleging that the latter'strue shaman Orowam was obliged to negotiate the return of sick person's soul from a capuchin monkey's house. The monkey said that the victim was his son, but Orowam argued that this was untrue, that the person had kin and needed to return. With this, the kinship relation between the sick Wari' man and the animal was undone, while the one between him and his Wari' kin was re-established. The final consequence of aggression is the incorporation of the sick person into the aggressor's species, corresponding in effect to consubstantialization of the victim, who acquires an animal body and is
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referred to by the animal by consanguine terms. Devouring has the aim of incorporating, and predation by animals is, in effect, capture of individuals.15 In the Wari' case, we can state that all illness of kep xirak type is an interrupted process of shamanic initiation, since the shaman is characterized precisely by the establishment of kinship relations with an animal species, initiated by predatory act. In some reports of curing, the shaman, attempting to rescue the spirit of a child accompanying the animal, says to the latter: 'This one is still too much of a child to be a shaman.' Some illnesses are also interpreted as having been caused by dead kinspeople, wishing for the company of one of their own. However, by hurting them, they do not act as kin since cognatic kin never hurt each other, and it is not from this point of view that wari' who wants to predator, of they see their victims, but from that of kill enemies and prey (see Vilaca 1992: 75-90). In my view, ara maka illnesses comprise sub-category of illnesses of the kep xirak type, rather than an exclusive class of illnesses. The continuity between these two types becomes clear when we take into account the large variation in the opinions of numerous informants concerning which animals are non-human (which act, therefore, exclusively via the sympathetic mode, causing ara maka sicknesses). Additionally, according to most informants, several animals which are avoided during the couvade, such as the armadillo and eagle, possess spirit, and it is frequently unclear how they actually cause sickness: do they provoke affliction by simple contagion or by deliberately shooting their victim with arrows? There also remains the question of the victim's post-mortem destiny.According destiny.According to the shaman Orowam, child who fatal victim of the eagle or giant armadillo may go to live with becomes these animals after death, acquiring an animal body. This attests to the animal's active agency. We can conclude that the basic reference for metamorphic processes is a relation between subjects, and not one between a subject and an animal without intentionality. Such becomes clear when we examine the ethnographic data relating to other Amazonian peoples. Reichel-Dolmatoff's analysis of post-partum restrictions among the Desana (Tukano) matches my own observations among the Wari'. According to the author, the Desana explain the restrictions by saying that woman's pregnancy and the birth of her child make the 'Keeper of the Game' profoundly jealous, as he is sexually attracted to women. His jealousy of the husband arouses him to take revenge on the latter for usurping his sexual privileges. Thus he hunts him down by sending his animals, specifically those that bite and devour (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971: 146-7). It would perhaps be overly conjectural to deduce that the animals'jealousy of women equals desire to have children with these women - or in other words that their children should be animals and not humans, which takes us had Reichel-Dolmatoff not himself previously back to the Wari' model stated that the number of children couple has must be limited, as an excesreduction in the sive number is interpreted by the animals as implying number of their own group (1971: 145).This is also made clear in the ethnography of the Barasana, also speakers of a Tukano language: includesanimalsis evidencedby the world that includesanimals unbornsoul is part of a worldthat That an unbornsoul childinto theiranus theiranus and otherTaking-inPeople... try to suckthe childinto factthat fact thattapirsandother
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reversal of birth as they are jealous of the loss of one of their number ... Birth is thus like passage from the animal world (nature, He) to the human world (culture) (S. Hugh-Jones 1979: 141).16
What should be emphasized, and what has become particularly clear in examining alimentary restrictions, is that we cannot reduce the production of kinship to acts of sociability, since we must recognize that cannibalism and predation are equally effective means for producing kin, despite constituting different kinds of processes. Such is the case with homicides when, via a form of predation, the killer incorporates the enemy as kinsperson (a son in the case of the Wari'). It is puzzling that some anthropologists insist on the radical separation between processes of sociability, related to daily life within the local group, and acts of predation and cannibalism, related to contact with the exterior, excluding an intrinsic aspect from the process of kinship fabrication. Rival (1998: 635), for example, criticizes the Amazonianists who point to cannibalism, killing, and predation as primary means of social reproduction in Amazonia, alleging that the Huaroani 'can reproduce themselves without the intervention of external creators'. My point is that sociability within the local group exists only in contradistinction to other potential forms of association, equally social, which all take the construction of bodies as their reference point. As Viveiros de Castro observed: 'Fabrication is creation of the body, but of the human body (of the person therefore) and, to this extent, is based on negativity: on negation of the possibilities of the "non-human" body' (1987 [1977]: 32). Da Matta's interpretation of the Apinaye couvade accords with the one propose here, but he takes as his point of departure what seems to me to be confusion common to many interpretations. quote: The Apinay6 theory of illnesses clearly identifies the patient with the plant or animal that has been inappropriately ingested ... Here [in pregnancy and at birth] it is necessary to prevent the child from reverting back to nature and from transforming back into blood. potential human being must be 'saved' from the natural world. For this reason, seclusion after childbirth has a double objective. First, as in other cases, it aims to establish a discontinuity between the child and nature ... Then it aims to keep the new potential human being in contact with certain members of human society, those that are responsible for its transition from nature to culture. Thus to the action of creating discontinuity is added an action whose objective is to provoke continuity between a certain number of people (Da Matta 1976: 90-1).17
This interpretation would be admissible were it not based on mistaken acceptance of the opposition between nature and culture premise equally in Guss's of the Yekuana The issue is not to present analysis (1989: 136-7). prevent the child from reverting back to nature but rather to affirm specific nature by fabricating body akin to those of its parents, its family, or other members of the local group. As we have seen, in the process of being created this body runs the risk of being made like the body of other types of people (or simply of animals).18Thus, it does not involve process of culturalization in opposition to the inverse danger of naturalization (in the sense of animalization), but of 'specification' realized by means of the body: the desire is to
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create human nature which is morespecificthan the universal sociality from where the child originates. We could say that the couvade restrictions constitute an anti-shamanic process, in the sense that they avoid 'corporeal' associations with beings of other species, which constitute the condition of possibility for Amazonian shamanism. According to Fausto, during the couvade Parakani parents should avoid any activity related to shamanism. Among the Arawete, when shaman is making a child through repeated sexual relations with his wife, he ceases to sing and dream (Viveiros de Castro 1986: 440). But it is not only his shamanic activities that cease: all direct interaction with animals is avoided, and the parents also usually refrain from hunting during the couvade. During this period, therefore, men are in position of anti-hunters, anti-warriors, and anti-shamans. It is interesting to note that among various populations there is an incompatibility between fertile women and shamanism, independent of the couvade. Fausto (2001b) observes that, among the Parakani, women should not dream (an activity fundamental to shamanism), or at least not until after the menopause. The clearest example comes from the Barasana,who see shamanism and the ability to menstruate as mutually exclusive but intimately linked. Just as shamans are 'open' beings, women are open during menstruation (S. Hugh-Jones 1979: 125). This openness is related to contact with the He world of the ancestors whence children originate.'In one sense, the women are seen as being closer to the He world than the men' (S. Hugh-Jones 1979: 251). According to S. Hugh-Jones (2001 pers. comm.), we could venture the proposition that, at least in the Barasana case, women are not shamans because they are already so by means of this contact with the exterior provided by gestation. This seems to me an interesting point, to be developed on another occasion, and one which again confirms the external origin of humans generated in the female womb. The Nigerians cited by Levy-Bruhl would certainly understand this claim.
Conclusion To conclude, wish to touch briefly on the question of the body/soul relation in the couvade. The centrality of the soul in the taboos relating to the couvade was pointed out by Riviere (1974). For Riviere, the couvade is related to human duality: body and soul. It is not a ritual for the fabrication of the body, but the fabrication (sedimentation) of the child's soul, which at birth is extremely volatile, liable to detach itself from the body with extreme ease. As it is bound to the soul of its parents, it accompanies them during their treks in the forest and can be captured by spirits; for this reason, parents should obey the restrictions (Riviere 1974: 431).This theme is present among various Amerindian groups. Riviere concludes: 'The examination of the ethnographic examples indiritual relating to the cated that in those societies at least, the couvade is spiritual creation of a newborn child ... Birth:couvade::natural:spiritual' (Riviere 1974: 432). It is worth noting, though, that despite his particular which I have interpretation of the couvade, Riviere agrees with the idea
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tried to develop here of the existence of an undifferentiated universe of subjectivities, from which the child must be individualized. What this involves for Riviere, though, is spiritual individualization: 'The couvade is concerned with the creation of an independent spiritual being, and for this to be achieved separation from an undifferentiated spiritual mass is required' (1974: 433). The Wari' data allow us to think of the problem in another fashion or, better still, to relocate the body/soul dichotomy in different terms. For the Wari', the soul (jam) only exists when the body is in some way absent (as inert): in dreams, in serious illness (and the shaman is therefore chronically ill), and at death. There is no soul linked to the body, and speaking about someone's soul is an indelicate act, as though their death were desired or foreseen. The soul is above all potency, related to the capacity to produce another body.19And it is precisely with a different body that the soul manifests itself the most fully: after death, the body of peccary is acquired or, in the case of death provoked by animals, that of the aggressor species. The soul of shamans, the only people to have an ever-present soul, is simply an animal body. The Wari' data are entirely incompatible with the current model of the body/soul dichotomy. For example, an illness very often explained as an attack on the soul by particular animal species is always seen and treated as process of bodily transformation. Faced with my recurrent difficulty in understanding this fusion of entities that to my mind were necessarily separate, the Wari' used to say that the person's soul was already there in the animals' house, while the body at home gradually acquired the bodily attributes of the aggressor species. What seems to be clear here is that illness, whether of new-born or an adult, makes up one of these moments when the human body can be remade and assume another form. This other form is that of the soul.
NOTES This article was written in constant dialogue with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2000; 2001). The reader will also strong inspiration from the work of Gow (1991; 1997) on Piro kinship. Preliminary versions of the text were presented as seminar papers at the Departments of Social Anthropology in the Universities of Cambridge and St Andrews, and at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, between January and March 2001. thank the staff and students present for their questions and comments. My special thanks goes to Carlos Fausto for his valuable suggestions, and to Stephen Hugh-Jones, Peter Riviere, Joanna Overing, Marilyn Strathern, and Oiara Bonilla for their comments and criticisms. I also thank the anonymous Journal readers for prompting me to clarify some central points. Field research among the Wari' was financed by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and by FINEP The text was translated into English by David Rodgers. 'While in analyses of totemism these two orders of phenomena emerged as related, this was due less to a focus on immediate descent associated with procreation, as implied in the case concern with a more remote or abstract descent of reported by Levy-Bruhl, than to ancestral humans from animals. 2It is notable that since the 1960s ethnographies inspired by Needham have avoided using the term 'kinship terminology', opting for 'relationship terminology'. For an Americanist example, see Maybury-Lewis (1979). The emphasis on domestic relations receives an emic justification in the introduction to Overing and Passes (2000: 5-6, 7). Though recognized as source of life and creativity by these
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sociableworld peoples, the exterior is none the less considered to be asocial, since 'the human sociableworld is often understood as distinct from all other agential worlds of the cosmos ... agents of the exterior are viewed as incapableof sociality until transformations prove otherwise' (Overing Passes 200(: 7). 4There are numerous examples focusing primarily on the importance of warfare killing for the reproduction of the social group. The Jivaro case is well known: women were fertilized during rites centred upon the head of an enemy (Taylor 1985; 1994). Death is thus essential to the process of the local group (conceived cognatically as is common in Amazonia) opening up to the exterior: death outside implies the production of life inside (Viveiros de Castro 1993: 188). My intention is to expand on this insight and to seek to understand the way in which this monad opens up to the exterior during the different stages in the constitution of kinship. 'See Viveiros de Castro (2000; 2001) for the general formulation of this idea; Taylor (1996: 209) for this conception among the Achuar; S. Hugh-Jones (1979: 141-2) for the Barasana. "Until the moment of so-called 'pacification', the Wari' were organized in sub-groups each with its own inscribed territory. After this, in the 1960s, members of different sub-groups began to live together in mixed settlements close to the houses of the SPI (Servicode Prote(aoao Indio) administrators (today FUNAI, Fundafao Nacional do Indio): these posts each corresponded to village. However, by retaining relationship with a particular territory of original occupation, each of the posts became identified with the sub-group associated with this territory. 7It is on ritual occasions that affinity expresses itself the most clearly.These rituals generally involve different sub-groups in the position of hosts and guests, who consider each other as foreigners (distant kin with whom marriage is generally shunned) and address each other by affinal terms: the same terms which are avoided in day-to-day life when dealing with effective affines. 8See Menget (1979: 26() for similar information on the Txicao, and Da Matta (1976: 94) on the Apinaye. Viveiros de Castro (1986: 439n. 88), in using the notion of'substance group' (altered in the English version to 'community of abstinence', 1992: 360n. 3) for the Arawete, explains that it is impossible to specify exactly what substance it is that is characterizing the group: at most, it would be 'metaphoric or metonymic substance', defining sociological group rather than an (ethno-)physiological 'Here we can make use of the distinction drawn by M. Strathern (1999: 169) between general sense, includsociality and sociability: while the former concerns social relations in ing for example warfare, the latter (at least in its usual acceptation) relates to the experience of empathy and community. It is worth noting that in Amazonian ethnology, the term sociality is usually employed by various theoretical strains to mean 'social relations'. The difference lies in what each of them takes to be a social relation. "See also Holmberg (1985: 170) on the difficulty of extracting information about conception from the Siriono, and Taylor (1996: 205), who states that the Achuar have 'remarkably unelaborated theories of procreation'. '2Riviere (1974: 426), whose explication of the couvade turns on the spiritual constitution of individuals, observes that native interpretations generally situate the couvade within this order of phenomena. '3After starting to live in close contact with whites, the Wari' began to ignore many of these restrictions. Nevertheless, when a small child becomes ill, the cause may be attributed to the disregarding of the taboos. 14 refer to Carneiro da Cunha (1978: 107-8) on this notion among the Krah6 and to Turner (1995: 150) on the Kayap6; see also Carsten (1995: 233) on Malaysia. feel very uncomfortable with this notion of permeable boundaries, since it supposes the existence of something like solid or fixed body. In my view, this body is not permeable but mutable first one thing, then another. In other words, this body only exists within relations, and changes radically or otherwise (turns into a tapir or kinsperson of X) depending on the new relations that it establishes. See Strathern (1988) for similarities between this idea of a mutable body which transforms itself as an outcome of relations and her model of the Melanesian person. 1-As an example of analogous incorporation in the opposite direction, we can recall the adoption of pet animals, very often treated as children. However, I should note this does not apply to the Wari'.
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relationship posited by Clastres (1972: 15) between the birth of infants and the emergence of the first Guayaki ('l'acte de naissance premiers guayaki') seems to me to help clarify the point. According to the myth, humans originated from subterranean animalized beings (similar to armadillos), who ascended to earth and became human. The author argues that the process effects passage 'from animality to humanity'. 17It is interesting to note that Da Matta (1976: 87) attributes the same objectives to the killer's seclusion: production of discontinuity (of 'substance') between the killer and victim. 18Note also that among some groups the bodies of adults those of the child's father and/or mother may also find themselves at risk. See Lima (1995: 187) on the Juruna. Among the moment of Guayaki, the father of the new-born lives, in the words of Clastres (1972: 25), ambiguity in his ontological state 'between nature and culture', since he runs the risk of animalizing himself by becoming jaguar prey. For the Guarani-Nandeva, a man who fails to remain at home after his wife gives birth is attracted by the first animal he meets, which he sees as person; consequently,'the animal mixes with us and we remain living with the animal for the rest of our lives' (Schaden 1962: 89). 19Here, it would be interesting to consider the notion of'dividual' as used in studies of Melanesia (Strathern 1988). However, while there the duplicity of individuals refers to the domain of sexual in Amazonia duplicity refers to the human/non-human domains (animal spirits etc.). For a reflection on the notion of'dividual' in Amazonia, see Kelly (2001).Viveiros de Castro (2000: 19n. 19) suggests that the body/soul relation can be thought of, in Amazonian cosmologies, in terms of a figure-ground reversal. 16The
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La transformation
des etrangers en parents en Amazonie
Resume Cet article analyse le processus de production de la parente chez plusieurs peuples amazoniens, en concentrant l'attention principalement sur les Wari', un peuple de langue Txapakuara qui vit en Amazonie occidentale (Bresil).Je soutiens que la production de la parente ne peut etre liee exclusivement au domaine domestique ou intra-tribal, car la parente emerge travers un dialogue constant avec des entites non-humaines. En examinant la signification des tabous alimentaires associes aux pratiques de couvade dans un certain nombre de groupes, d6montre le nouveau-ne est humanise grace l'article la production de son corps en que tant que corps humain contrairement aux corps des animaux. Programade Pos-Graduacaoem AntropologiaSocial, Museu Nacional Quinta da Boa Vista s/n?, Sao Crist6ovo,Rio de Janeiro,RJ, Brazil 20940-040.
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