From the Enemy's Point of View

Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Catherine V. Howard

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226858029, 9780226858012
• eBook ISBN: 9780226768830
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Araweté are one of the few Amazonian peoples who have maintained their cultural integrity in the face of the destructive forces of European imperialism. In this landmark study, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains this phenomenon in terms of Araweté social cosmology and ritual order. His analysis of the social and religious life of the Araweté—a Tupi-Guarani people of Eastern Amazonia—focuses on their concepts of personhood, death, and divinity.

Building upon ethnographic description and interpretation, Viveiros de Castro addresses the central aspect of the Arawete's concept of divinity—consumption—showing how its cannibalistic expression differs radically from traditional representations of other Amazonian societies. He situates the Araweté in contemporary anthropology as a people whose vision of the world is complex, tragic, and dynamic, and whose society commands our attention for its extraordinary openness to exteriority and transformation. For the Araweté the person is always in transition, an outlook expressed in the mythology of their gods, whose cannibalistic ways they imitate. From the Enemy's Point of View argues that current concepts of society as a discrete, bounded entity which maintains a difference between "interior" and "exterior" are wholly inappropriate in this and in many other Amazonian societies.
 

1

Cosmology and Society

1. The Cannibal Gods

The Araweté say that the souls of the dead, once they have arrived in the heavens, are devoured by the Maï, the gods, who then resuscitate them from the bones; they then become like the gods, immortal. This assertion, which draws together central cosmological themes of Araweté culture and encapsulates its concept of the person, is what the present book will attempt to understand. For the Araweté, the person is inherently in transition; human destiny is a process of “Other-becoming.”

To trace out all the implications entailed by this motif, I will turn towards a comparative horizon to see how other Tupi-Guarani treat the same questions. In turn, analyzing Araweté discourse about the person will make it possible to open up a path linking the other peoples of this linguistic family, and then to formulate some hypotheses about the properties of a single Tupi-Guarani structure of the person. This method, therefore, will be recursive: inserting the Araweté facts into a system, which in turn will be built upon these facts.

This is only a first step in my broader aim to conduct an experiment. To construct the Araweté conception of the person, I will explore certain facts about their social organization and cosmology. I will then line up a series of considerations (admittedly schematic) about Tupi-Guarani cosmologies to show that the same metaphysics underlies phenomena as disparate as cannibalism, shamanism, social morphology, and forms of marriage. Here too I will be guided by the Araweté, taking the question of the person as the connecting thread.

I start with the hypothesis that there exists something in common among the different Tupi-Guarani societies beyond their linguistic identity and behind their apparent morphosociological diversity. It remains to be seen in the course of this work if such a hypothesis is acceptable. For now, I advance a few generalizations.

The Araweté, one of the formerly numerous peoples of the region between the Xingu and Tocantins rivers, do not display any striking features or anomalies that would make them stand out from the physiognomy common to the Tupi-Guarani peoples of eastern Amazonia. If they are to be distinguished in some way, it is rather for having relatively few of the institutional and ceremonial forms present in the other societies of this family. This cannot, in my opinon, be attributed merely to disorganization caused by contact with Western society, nor to pressure from enemy tribes that in recent decades have dislodged them from their former territory. Indeed, I believe that the Araweté have been much less affected by contact than have most of the other groups in the region—at least up to now.

The Araweté parsimony of social categories and institutions has as its counterpart a complex, highly developed cosmological discourse, albeit not architectonically elaborated or dogmatically invariant. The Araweté imaginary is manifested in speech and in song. Very little of what really matters is visible; the essential takes place on another stage. In a certain sense, one could say of them what has been said of the Guarani: here too “all is Word” (Melia 1978:57). But the words of the Araweté seem less to echo the ascetic withdrawal of their Guarani relatives (adherents of logos) and more to evoke the excessive gestures of the remote sixteenth-century Tupinamba.

On the other hand, perhaps the very nature of Araweté society, both “simple” and “archaic,” will allow us to discover fundamental structures of the Tupi-Guarani by revealing principles that also operate in those societies having more differentiated social and ritual institutions.¹

One question in particular stands out about the Araweté and resonates with what has been written about other Tupi-Guarani societies. It concerns what appears to be an excess or a supplementary quality of cosmological discourse as compared to social organization. How to account for the coexistence of, on the one hand, a “loosely structured” organization (few social categories, absence of global segmentations, weak institutionalization of interpersonal relations, lack of differentiation between public and domestic spheres) with, on the other hand, an extensive taxonomy of the spiritual world (not easily reducible to homogeneous principles), an active presence of that world in daily life, and a thoroughly vertical, “Gothic” orientation of thought? What is to be done with this preponderance of discourse over institution, of the spoken word over the schematism of ritual, of the cosmological over the sociological series?

Societies such as the Araweté reveal how utterly trivial any attempts are to establish functional consistencies or formal correspondences between morphology and cosmology or between institution and representation. The ethnological literature on the Tupi-Guarani has found it difficult to avoid alternating between theoretical truisms and anecdotal descriptions, when it is not lamenting the social disintegration of the peoples studied. But neither is it enough to say that among the Araweté (and other Tupi-Guarani groups), cosmology “predominates” over social organization,² nor to acknowledge that cosmology is a constitutive part of the social structure and the inevitable means of access to it. Rather, it is essential to grasp the problematic sense of this cosmology and then try to account for the “fluid” character of the morphology.

Upon reflection, one is struck by a certain “something,” obscure but distinct, that seems to determine Araweté society. It is as if somehow the society were submitted to a centrifugal dynamic, a turning towards the exterior, an exiting from itself towards those regions above and beyond the social, as if something crucial were occurring out there. But to achieve this, Araweté society seems to occupy itself with undoing any internal divisions and articulations, real or virtual. It presents itself as smooth, unified (but not around a center), homogeneous (but dispersed), equal in all its parts, as if it were a monad floating in a populous and fractured cosmos defined by multiplicity and open-endedness. This internal nondifferentiation, however, is put to the service of a radical difference, of an impulse leading outside itself, a passion for exteriority which, despite the apparent repetitive calmness of Araweté daily life, inscribes Becoming in the very heart of this society. Thus, its “center” is outside, its “identity” is elsewhere, and its Other is not a mirror for man, but his destiny.

The Araweté case appears to invert the traditional representation that anthropology makes of “primitive society” as a closed system, a taxonomic theater where every entity, real or conceptual, finds its place in a system of classification; where the order of the universe reflects the social order; where temporality is recognized only to be denied by myth and ritual; where what is defined as exterior to the social (nature and supernature) exists merely to counterproduce the society as a haven of interiority and self-identity. Such a vision cannot be accommodated to the Araweté by any means whatsoever. Not for the obvious reason that it cannot be accommodated to any real society (societies change, temporality being their very substance; classifications are political instruments; and between norms and practice there must be a rupture, or else social life would be impossible), but rather, because the Araweté lean in another direction. I believe that in fact many cosmologies approximate the traditional representation, and that many societies attempt to remain, in a nontrivial sense, identical with themselves and coextensive with the cosmos. To do so, they must be capable of introjecting and domesticating difference, by means of devices that put difference to the service of identity. For such societies, opposition is the precondition of composition; to divide is to prepare a synthesis; and to exclude is to create an interiority.

Against these societies without an exterior that struggle to conjure away difference and congeal Becoming (as far as this is possible), I contrast the Araweté, a society without an interior—or, to put it less bluntly, a society with a dynamic that dissolves those spatial metaphors so common in sociological discourse: interior, exterior, center, margins, boundaries, limen, etc. Here, we move into a non-Euclidean social space.

The simplicity of Araweté society masks a complexity of another order. We shall see that the Tupi-Guarani method of constructing the person follows the same non-Euclidean tendency. It has nothing to do with some mirror chamber of reflections and inversions between the Self and the Other that tends toward symmetry and stability. Rather, the Tupi-Guarani construct the person through a process of continuous topological deformation, where ego and enemy, living and dead, man and god, are interwoven, before or beyond representation, metaphorical substitution, and complementary opposition. We move into a universe where Becoming is prior to Being and unsubmissive to it.

I will attempt to demonstrate that the complex of relations between human beings and the gods is the most strategic avenue to understanding Araweté society. In such a complex, death is the productive event. It is not merely the moment when it is possible to analyze the person into its components; it is the place where the person is actualized. We will see that here, as with the Gê societies, “the dead are the others” (Carneiro da Cunha 1978), and death is where the conceptual determination of alterity takes place. But in the case of Tupi-Guarani, the difference between the living and the dead cannot be conceived as an opposition, either formal or real. Nor can it be reduced to the model of phonological contrast or to “the work of the negative.” They envision a positivity in death that does not imply a vision of life as a negativity. If the Gê use the method of double negation to posit the person, the Tupi-Guarani risk a double affirmation; this and that, the living and the dead, the Self and the Other.³ Araweté society is not dialectic.

The reference to the Gê is not fortuitous; they will be the exemplary contrastive case throughout this book, although not always explicitly so. If there exists such a thing as dialectical societies (Maybury-Lewis 1979), the Gê and Bororo would rank as perfect examples. In them we find the maximal development of complementary oppositions in social categories and cosmological values, oppositions that fold, refold, intersect, and echo each other in a vertiginous baroque progression. The person is constructed as a delicate synthesis between nature and culture, being and becoming, achieving its reality by articulating itself with symmetrical positions determined by ceremonial names, formal friendships, and rites of mortuary impersonation. In such societies, everything signifies: from the landscape to the body, the socius inscribes its principles in the universe. The Gê are justly famous for their sociological complexity and conservatism, and for being the best-studied peoples of Brazil. They were the point of departure for the work of Lévi-Strauss on native American mythologies, and they appear to be one of the strongest cases supporting structural anthropology.

None of the attributes I’ve just described, unfortunately, are applicable to the Tupi-Guarani. Compared to the crystalline properties of Gê societies, the Tupi-Guarani evoke images of amorphous bodies—clouds or smoke—in their weak and casual social organization, their absence of clear conceptual boundaries between cosmological arenas, their fragility in the face of contact with Western society (though more in appearance than in essence), their plasticity, and their otherworldly style of thought.

The contrast between the Gê and Tupi-Guarani forms becomes all the more evident when considering their long history of ecological competition, warfare, and cultural interchange. But this point should be qualified: we must not overlook the internal differences of each group nor assume that language and culture coincide (ignoring the intense pre-Columbian cultural dynamic). Above all, we should not ignore the innumerable other South American cosmologies that as a set form a vast system of transformations: Gê, Tupi, Tukano, Yanomami, Carib, Upper Xingu. Ever since Lévi-Strauss;s Mythologiques (1969b, 1973, 1978, 1981), it has become increasingly evident that the sociological, linguistic, and cultural units of the continent are combinatory variants of a structure that operates with the same basic symbolic materials.

Thus, the Tupi-Guarani do not enjoy any privileged relation with the Gê, and the Gê are certainly not the only pertinent contrast. Nevertheless, the Gê are strategically valuable for comparisons made on a continental scale. They are a “pivotal element” in the history of South American ethnology (Lévi-Strauss 1963a, 1969b: 9), as testified by the special place they occupy in recent syntheses (Kaplan 1981b, 1984; Rivière 1984). Every Americanist will find it easy to confirm the basic similarities between the Araweté and other minimalist societies that serve as points of departure for such syntheses, such as the Trio (Rivère 1969) and the Piaroa (Kaplan 1975) of northern Amazonia. It is easy to understand as well why the crystalline features and terse institutional dialectic of the Gê serve as a heuristic counterpoint and define a theoretical problem.

What is notable about the differences between the Gê and the Tupi-Guarani is that they can be found within a common ground. Both utilize what Héritier (1982:158–59) calls the “elementary symbolics of the identical and the different” with which a society arranges the parameters of its self-representation. But each of them uses the same symbolic materials to pursue a different strategy, with results that appear to diverge radically in their philosophies. This is why I view with reservation the idea that the same basic macrostructure corresponds to the same social philosophy for all South American cosmologies, a philosophy that considers identity to be an impossible security, and difference a dangerous necessity—meaning that difference is either introjected and domesticated, or banished and denied (as J. Overing Kaplan has so well formulated). We shall see that Tupi-Guarani cannibalism complicates the essential question of the differential forms of conceptualizing difference.

2. Living with the Araweté

I spent twelve months among the Araweté, divided among periods from May to July 1981; February to April, June to September, and December 1982; January 1983; and February 1988. I did not observe the activities that occur during the part of their annual cycle falling in October and November.

After short research experiences among the Yawalapiti, Kulina, and Yanomami, which were not continued for various reasons, I began to turn my attention towards Tupi-Guarani peoples. The impression I got from the literature on these groups was ambiguous. Although the material on the early Tupinamba and Guarani suggested a great complexity, the monographs on contemporary Tupi-Guarani groups were discouraging. The majority of them, characterized by the problem of “acculturation,” portrayed the ethnographic present as little more than a fleeting instant between a remote past of sociocultural plenitude that was reconstructed at risk, and an imminent, inevitable future of disaggregation or disappearance. The picture that emerged was of simplified social systems, where demographic losses had led to a generalized disfunctional state, an emergency adaptation in which only fragments of the themes common to almost all South American societies persisted: bits and pieces of the great cycle of mythic twins, the couvade, the extended family, shamanism. It was impossible to know whether the impression of superficiality that these works left was due to the authors’ theoretical perspectives or to the situation of the peoples studied—or if, after all, the Tupi-Guarani were not especially “interesting.”

Moreover, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Tupi-Guarani practically disappeared from the ethnological scene. What little research was undertaken and published about them was not only outside the main current of ethnographic discussions, but also failed to clearly delineate a problematic that could be contrasted with the models constructed for other South American systems. Everything led one to believe in the end that the Tupi-Guarani really were peoples of the past, dominated by the glorious shadow of the Tupinamba.

Since the mid-1970s, however, interest in Tupi-Guarani societies began to reemerge, as part of a general increase in field research projects. The relative maturity of Brazilian ethnology, especially since high standards of description were established for the societies of Central Brazil, made it necessary to reexamine “marginalized” social systems such as those of the Tupi-Guarani.

My choice of the Araweté took place within this context. Thanks to the books of F. Fernandes (1963 [1949], 1970 [1952]) on Tupinamba warfare and that of H. Clastres on Tupi-Guarani prophetism (1978 [1975]), I became aware of a remarkable conception of the person and of society, perceptible even in the “acculturation” monographs on the Tupi of eastern Amazonia. I decided to experiment with synthesizing the Tupi-Guarani facts based on research in the field, given that the available syntheses relied almost exclusively on historical sources or secondhand ethnographic descriptions.

The Araweté were among the groups of the Xingu-Tocantins region that the expanding frontier in southern Pará had recently overtaken with the construction of the Transamazon Highway. From their “contact” in 1976 to 1980, only one anthropologist, who worked with the Asurini (neighbors of the Araweté), made a short visit to Ipixuna, an affluent of the middle Xingu, where the Araweté had been settled by the government’s national Indian agency, FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio). I knew nothing more about them.

In May 1980, I requested authorization from FUNAI to do research in the area. It was granted to me in January 1981 to begin in May of that year. The long interval between my request and the granting of permission was due to the fact that relations between the governmental organ and the anthropological community had deteriorated to an even lower level than usual.

After overcoming a long series of bureaucratic and political obstacles, I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Translator's Note
• Preface
• Note on Orthography
• 1. Cosmology and Society
• 2. Approaching the Araweté
• 3. The Forsaken Ones
• 4. The Frame of Life
• 5. Nurture and Supernature
• 6. Familiar Terms
• 7. Birth, and Copulation, and Death
• 8. Alien Words
• 9. Beings of Becoming
• 10. The Anti-Narcissus
• Appendix 1-A: Araweté Villages in 1981–83
• Appendix 1-B: List of Historical Araweté Villages
• Appendix 2-A: Araweté Population
• Appendix 2-B: Genealogies
• Appendix 3: Botanical and Zoological Terms (English, Portuguese, Araweté, Latin)
• Appendix 4: Glossary of Araweté Terms
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index