“In this beautifully written study of Urarina mastery of life, Walker demonstrates the continued importance of careful ethnographic attention to historically emergent forms of subjectivity. Walker’s perceptive attention to social values and organising principles helps us understand how the Urarina transcend predation, identity and difference. We are transported to the heart of a society both more individualising and more communalist than the ones we have grown up in.”–Laura Rival, author of Trekking through History: The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador

“A celebration of Urarina understandings of the individual and the social world, Under a Watchful Eye unveils the many paradoxes of native Amazonian sociality. Well-written and finely crafted, the book critically engages with issues raised by perspectivism, incorporation theory, and constructional approaches, proposing novel and stimulating insights on indigenous notions of living well.”–Fernando Santos-Granero, author of Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life

“This book is based on the sensitive and multi-layered ethnography which only real, long-term participant observation can produce. We are convinced by detailed supporting evidence and never lost, as is the case for some Amazonian ethnography, in formulations, which having acquired an academic life of their own, seem impossibly remote from the experience of shared human practice.”–Maurice Bloch, author of How We Think They Think: Anthropological Studies in Cognition, Memory and Literacy

Harry Walker is Lecturer in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Under a Watchful Eye

Self, Power, and Intimacy in Amazonia

By Harry Walker

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27359-7

Contents

List of Illustrations, vii,
Acknowledgments, ix,
Prologue: Learning to Stand-Leaned-Together, 1,
1. Spaces of Refuge, 7,
2. Vital Shields, 34,
3. Conceiving the Conjugal Body, 59,
4. Mutuality and Autonomy, 94,
5. Authority and Solidarity, 133,
6. Mastering Subjection, 164,
Epilogue: An Accompanied Life, 203,
Notes, 217,
Bibliography, 227,
Index, 235,

CHAPTER 1

Spaces of Refuge

PERSON AND BEING

This book is about the shared nature of human existence: how we live our lives in the close company of others, in whose very being we come to participate. We come into the world accompanied, and this remains our defining condition: who we are, how we come to experience ourselves as conscious subjects, with the capacity to act on the world, are fundamentally conditioned by our constitutively accompanied nature. This mutuality does not undermine individuality but precedes it and is its condition of existence. Typically grounded in intimate but often asymmetrical relations of care and protection, mutuality nevertheless also establishes a certain vulnerability. This can manifest as a willingness to be dominated, if our continued sense of identity, our sense of self, can thereby be assured.

The Urarina, a hunting and horticultural people of the Peruvian Amazon with reference to whom these arguments are developed, recognize and elaborate these relational qualities of human experience to a high degree. Yet they never lose sight of the importance of individuality and uniqueness. A range of factors have shaped this dual emphasis on mutuality and autonomy, from low population density and the immediate, largely face-to-face nature of the social environment to limited access to modern technologies and manufactured goods to the exuberant, formidable expanse of the seemingly endless jungle, teeming with diverse forms of life. Then there is the extraordinary, turbulent history of the Amazon basin itself, marked by complex networks of trade and warfare, demographic expansion and contraction, high mobility, and brutal clashes between radically different civilizations. The struggle for survival of the indigenous inhabitants of the region has not diminished over the centuries, and their enemies today remain as powerful as ever. Despite historical trajectories and environmental conditions that are in many ways unique, peoples such as the Urarina also grapple with answers to fundamental existential conundrums that apply equally to us all, concerning what it means to be alive, to be human, and to live with others.

Despite the commonality of our human predicament, the responses that Urarina have developed—not to mention the distinctive cultural forms through which these are expressed—are their own, and must be understood with reference to the social and cultural milieu in which they are embedded. Careful analysis of a diverse range of practices and events together with commentaries and explanations offered by my hosts and interlocutors over the course of fieldwork reveal a set of basic assumptions and presuppositions, often more or less taken for granted, about the nature of the self and its coming into being through relations with others. How well these square with our own theories or intuitions may vary considerably. Some of the most important rites and practices of child care from an Urarina perspective—ceremoniously cutting the umbilical cord and burying the placenta, or going out of one’s way to keep a newborn baby feeling warm and safe—differ only slightly from our own experiences, while others—the performance of esoteric chants that can last for hours, or the receipt and bestowal of personal names by shamans in the throes of powerful visionary experiences—offer a striking contrast. The common Amazonian wisdom that certain animals, plants, or material objects are themselves essentially persons who share many basic qualities of humanity, including a mind or soul, intentionality, and even human culture, are still more difficult to reconcile with our scientifically informed understandings. Reflecting on these ideas and practices may not only help to draw our attention to implicit assumptions and prejudices in our own worldview; they may be seen to offer insights into the nature of human experience that we can recognize as valid in some important sense despite being largely overlooked or even suppressed by dominant Western discourses.

In everyday language in the West, the term person is used more or less synonymously with human being. We might therefore assume that asking what it means to be a person is the same as asking what it means to be human. But a little closer examination reveals some exceptions: someone in a permanent coma is still human, for example, but could be said to have lost some intrinsic part of his or her personhood. Certain animals, on the other hand, such as much-loved pets, might come close to being treated as persons by their owners, even if deep down the latter “know better.” Further enquiry into the dominant logic in Western societies suggests a more or less widespread sense that to be a person is to be a self-contained, independent entity endowed with a set of inner mental or psychological capacities such as self-awareness, rationality, and responsibility. These criteria effectively constitute the individual as an autonomous being, the author of his or her own actions, an authentic self with a private identity, capable of having experiences that belong exclusively to that private self. This sovereign individual, self-governing and self-disciplining, is considered to have a separate and independent existence both temporally and spatially, with his or her own unique experiences as well as abilities, preferences, needs, and desires.

The commonsense Western view has largely taken it for granted that it is essentially because we are conscious, rational beings of this kind that we are able to enter into social relations with others. People are assumed to preexist the social relationships they enter into, giving rise to a conception of social relationships as a kind of supra-personal glue that binds individuals together, linking them up to form a larger unit—society—to which they are in some sense opposed but which mirrors their qualities of wholeness and enclosure at a larger scale. The processes by which people are drawn into social relations are often labeled “socialization” or “enculturation,” revealing a related assumption that we begin life as essentially natural organisms, asocial and cultureless. There may be an implicit dualism at work here that opposes the body to the mind or soul as completely different kinds of substance and that tends to objectify “external” objects as existing entirely separately from the observer, implying a rigid distinction between subjects and objects. This further corresponds to the dualism of nature and culture: the body is basically seen as a biological organism, bounded by the skin and endowed with a more or less “given” or “natural” set of needs or drives that are met, controlled, or moderated by “culture,” an artificial creation of joint human activity.

Processes of socialization or enculturation are correspondingly focused on cultivating the mind, comprising forms of learning conceived as primarily psychological rather than physiological. These are not absolute distinctions, but they do reflect general tendencies or habits of thought that stem from deeply rooted and widely shared assumptions about the underlying nature of reality: they constitute part of our shared understanding of what the world is like on the most fundamental level, or what kinds of things make up a world—what is sometimes referred to as an ontology.

Concepts of the person are deeply implicated in everyday practices, values, and social institutions ranging from morality and law to politics and religion. This was a point made forcefully by Durkheim (1973 [1898]), who pointed out the centrality of ideas and values surrounding the individual to the modern form of collective life. In the wake of industrialization and modernization, the notion of the abstract individual as the key locus of natural rights and moral values had become a key source of coherence in an increasingly secular society characterized by highly divergent lifestyles. Mauss (1983 [1938]) took this further by showing how this Western concept of the individual had a historical trajectory of its own, in which a range of influences, including ancient Greek moral philosophy, Roman law, and Christianity, all conspired to give shape to a concept of the person as an individuated self, separable from the particular role or social position he or she inhabited.

Since Mauss, a vast literature has grown up dedicated to exploring historical and cross-cultural variability in, and determinations of, the person or self. Much of this literature has converged in drawing a somewhat stereotypical contrast between “Western” and “non-Western” forms of personhood. Generally speaking, the latter has been conceptualized as more or less the opposite of the bounded, autonomous, reflexive, and independent Western self; hence a proliferation of terms emphasizing its essentially “joined-up” rather than “individualized” qualities, as implied by descriptive labels such as “interdependent,” “sociocentric,” “dividual,” “permeable,” “multiple,” “partible,” or “detachable.” This may further correspond on a moral or ideological level to a contrast between the values of individualism and egalitarianism, on the one hand, and holism, on the other, the latter typically associated with forms of hierarchy and collectivism (e.g., Dumont 1972). Western social sciences are not immune to the same predispositions, and it has been suggested that their methodological focus on individuals as the basic units of social reality has hindered their ability to comprehend even individualistic societies (Dumont 1986: 11).

Forms of personhood are more divergent at the level of moral values and ideologies than in terms of actual, everyday experience of the self and of one’s relations with others. In this latter sense, Western persons are undoubtedly more “relational” or “joined up,” and less “individualistic,” than the discourse of individualism would imply (see, e.g., Carsten 2004: 101–7). On the other hand, many of the features of individualism are to be found in a variety of non-Western societies. Scholars have long drawn attention to the fact that native Amazonian societies are structured in terms of symbolic idioms that relate to the construction of the individual or, more precisely, the fabrication of the body rather than the definition of groups and the transmission of goods (e.g., Seeger, Da Matta, and Viveiros de Castro 1979). In many areas of Amazonia there are no social groups that survive the lifetime of single individuals; the only social group is formed by the settlement, which has little continuity through time because its existence depends on the leader or headman and is constituted by his personal network of relationships (see Rivière 1984). The apparent individualism of some Amazonian peoples is thus in part the product of an atomistic social system; and yet these same peoples maintain an unmistakably strong orientation toward others, emphasizing the relational grounding of the self to a high degree. That we perceive these tendencies as contradictory, or their coexistence as paradoxical, calls into question some of the ontological assumptions that underpin much Western thinking about the person.

BEYOND PERSPECTIVES

A radical difference between Western and Amazonian concepts of the person arises from their divergent attitudes toward animals and other nonhuman beings. The significance of this difference was driven home by Descola (1992, 1996), who observed that nonhumans are often considered to possess a soul or spiritual principle and that it is therefore possible for humans to establish various kinds of personal relations with them, ranging from seduction or protection to forms of alliance and exchanges of services. These natural beings are thought to be endowed with human dispositions and emotions, the ability to talk, and a variety of other social attributes, including human forms of social organization, behaviors based on kinship and respect for certain norms of conduct (Descola 1992: 114). Descola drew the conclusion that these “animistic” systems of thought effectively invert the way Western “naturalism” deals with the differences between humans and nonhumans. As he later expressed it, if Western ontology proposes that humans and animals have similar bodies (all made up of the same basic elements) but very different minds or interiorities (only humans have higher-order consciousness), animistic ontologies propose the opposite: a fundamental discontinuity of bodies but a continuity of minds, shared by humans and nonhumans alike (Descola 2005).

This crucial insight forms the basis of what is now known as perspectivism. Especially as developed in a groundbreaking article by Viveiros de Castro (1998), this theory derives much of its considerable explanatory power, and its striking elegance, from one key claim—that people everywhere make some kind of distinction between what is “universal” or “given” in the world and what is “particular” or “constructed” through intentional action but that Westerners and Amazonians have almost precisely opposed ideas about which is which. The most obvious example concerns the categories of nature and culture. Western thought posits a unitary nature, differently perceived or represented by the world’s many diverse cultures (hence the familiar notion of multiculturalism). Amazonian ontology, by contrast, is “multinaturalist”: it presumes a universal (human) culture but a multiplicity of natures.

Though at first highly counterintuitive to a Westerner steeped in a naturalistic ontology, such a formulation immediately helps us to make sense of the claim that although all beings see themselves as human, they do not see other kinds of beings as human but rather as nonhuman predators or prey. Animals are assumed to inhabit a cultural universe more or less shared by everyone: they may dwell in longhouses, drink manioc beer, have chiefs and shamans, marry exogamously, and so on. We do not see any of this under normal waking conditions, because of the limitations imposed by our own species-specific “nature,” our (human) body with its unique capacities, affordances, and dispositions. Where a jaguar sees manioc beer, we see blood; a tapir’s ceremonial house is for us a salt lick. It is not merely that we see the same world in different ways: in a multinaturalist ontology, different beings see different worlds in the same way.

The implications of perspectivism for kinship and personhood have tended to receive less attention from anthropologists than relations with nonhumans, especially outside Amazonia, but they are no less significant. We typically assume consanguinity, or blood relatedness, to be fixed at birth and relatively unproblematic; affines or in-laws, on the other hand, are created through human intervention, specifically marriage. Thus anthropology has traditionally focused attention on marriage patterns and their consequences while assuming that who or what counts as a blood relation can be mostly taken for granted. Yet the evidence suggests that many Amazonian peoples see consanguinity as unstable and in need of careful creation out of an assumed universal background of real or potential affinity, which extends to include even enemies and nonhumans. This simple inversion of our own expectations helps to explain why so many Amazonian social practices are focused on the body and its fabrication, from everyday acts of feeding and nurturing to complex rites of decoration and ornamentation. All living beings, nonhumans included, share the same generic soul, which sees only the same thing everywhere; bodies, on the other hand, are markers and instruments of difference. Conceived as bundles of capacities and affects as much as physical matter, it is the body that determines the world one apprehends.

Although grounded in the body, perspectives are not fixed or immutable. In fact, Amazonian social practice has been characterized precisely as an ongoing, essentially predatory “struggle between points of view” (Stolze Lima 2000: 48), in which all beings seek to impose their perspective on others while avoiding the attempts of those same others to do likewise. Fausto (2000, 2007) describes the Amazonian lived world as one in which different groups, human and nonhuman, living and dead, all seek to capture “others” and turn them into kin. Shamans and warriors seek to capture animals and enemy spirits, appropriating their names, songs, or souls as a way of ensuring the reproduction of the social group. At the same time, nonhumans try to capture humans by seducing or preying on them so as to transform them into members of their community. Such a formulation is especially useful for the way in which it brings concepts of power to the fore while making clear that they can no longer simply be associated with relations of coercion or control between humans. Instead, power is embedded in the relational matrix through which perspectives are transformed, especially relations of adoptive filiation, domestication, and “taming.”

(Continues…)Excerpted from Under a Watchful Eye by Harry Walker. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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