On the Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar Author(s): Steven Lee Rubenstein Reviewed work(s): Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 53, No. 1 (February 2012), pp. 39-79 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/663830 . Accessed: 14/03/2012 04:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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On the Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar by Steven Lee Rubenstein This essay involves a set of speculations concerning the role plant-granted visions play in the formation of the Shuar subject. It also reflects on the need for an ethnography of secrecy and the ineffable. In both these tasks I seek to engage psychoanalytic theory. Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic helps analyze the relationship between the discourse and the silence of the unconscious. His essay on the “mirror stage” is useful for thinking about bourgeois subjectivity. Nevertheless, I argue that premissionization Shuar did not go through the mirror stage. First, I argue that Shuar practices effected the colonization of the Symbolic by the Real, in contrast to bourgeois culture, in which the Symbolic colonizes the Real. Then I explore the role of desire, violence, and speech in the construction of different kinds of power. Pierre Clastres’ work helps to explore how these two cultures clash and articulate on the colonization frontier, while psychoanalytic theory adds to Clastres a theory of the subject. Ultimately, this article is an experiment in acknowledging the psychic unity of humanity—while at the same time illuminating the differences between the state and societies against the state.

In this article, I attempt to write about phenomena that resist entry into the realm of language, namely, secret power-granting visions. I am specifically interested in the power-granting visions of Shuar, a group of perhaps 80,000 people indigenous to the Ecuadorian Amazon (in most of the travel and academic literature, they are known as “Jı´varo,” but I avoid the term because Shuar consider it pejorative).1 This essay is thus an experiment in dwelling within a cross-cultural moment in ethnographic research, the encounter with the unfamiliar and unsettling. I conducted research among the Shuar from December 1988 to February 1992 and in five summer visits since then. As I reread in my university office transcripts of interviews I conducted with Shuar, I realize that I did not fully understand the answers to my questions at the time I asked them. As I reread these interviews, as I do with older ethnographies, I try to imagine myself as being back in the field, dependent on a certain kind of suspension of disbelief, trying to live in a world where the things to which I must hold my research and myself accountable, the things I must take as real, are precisely those things my own culture tells me are unreal.

Steven Lee Rubenstein is Reader of Latin American Anthropology in the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies of the University of Liverpool (86 Bedford Street South, Liverpool L69 7WW, United Kingdom [[email protected]]). This paper was submitted 4 VIII 09 and accepted 9 III 11.

Michael Harner (1968) made Shuar—especially Shuar shamans—famous for their use of hallucinogens in his article “The Sound of Rushing Water.” But he also pointed out that in nonshamanic contexts, all Shuar consumed the same hallucinogens as shamans and that all male Shuar took a hallucinogen more potent than that used by shamans. Moreover, adult Shuar considered it essential to the welfare of their children that they too consume considerable amounts of hallucinogens. Through life-history interviews of women conducted in 2006, I learned that women also took and continue to take hallucinogens and, moreover, that they continue to consider the provision of hallucinogens as essential to good parenting. In other words, shamanic visions are a specific subset of a universal set of practices. I began to consider the possibility that the childhood experiences of the average Shuar are as important as, if not more important than, the experiences of shamans to an understanding of the importance of visions in Shuar culture. Shuar routinely characterize these visions, or the encounters that occur within them, as among the most important moments of their lives. What is it about these visions that make them so important? Harner, a meticulous ethnographer, provides a straightforward answer: The Jı´varo believe that the true determinants of life and death are normally invisible forces which can be seen and utilized only with the aid of hallucinogenic drugs. The nor1. Maurizio Gnerre (1973) has argued convincingly that “Jı´varo” evolved from the sixteenth-century Spanish spelling of “shuar.”

䉷 2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2012/5301-0003$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/663830

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mal waking life is explicitly viewed as “false” or “a lie,” and it is firmly believed that the truth about causality is to be found by entering the supernatural world or what the Jı´varo view as the “real” world, for they feel that the events which take place within it underlie and are the basis for many of the surface manifestations and mysteries of daily life. (Harner 1984:135; see also Karsten 1935:444, and see Gow 2000: 62 regarding a similar belief among the Peruvian Piro)

If Harner is right (and as best I can tell, this is a fairly accurate summary of what virtually every Shuar I have met believes), then we can no longer call the substances Shuar take “hallucinogens.” They are kinds of palliatives that enable one to succeed in a world of deception.2 This is why women consume certain infusions while they are pregnant and give their babies a few drops of another infusion at birth. It is why parents will give a more potent infusion to a child who has displayed a lack of self-control; they hope that the experience will give the child the strength needed for self-discipline. It is why fathers will give an even stronger infusion to their pubescent sons, who will soon participate in feuding and warfare. As Ann-Christine Taylor put it, plant-granted visions continue to function for Shuar as “existential amplifiers” (Taylor 1993: 666). But what happens in these visions that makes them sources of such power? Sometimes Shuar are granted visions of their future. The contents of these visions are kept secret until they come to pass. But there are other aspects of the experience that Shuar will not talk about. They willingly talk about their visions in generic terms, as involving an encounter with a spirit. The name of the spirit and other details of the encounter, however, are typically kept secret. The ethnographic question leads to a methodological question: how is an anthropologist to write about the unspoken? This question may seem to be methodological, based as it is in a particular ethnographic situation, but I consider it 2. This essay is to a large degree my effort to view Harner’s account not as a belief to be interpreted or a proposition to be tested but as an invitation to imagine what this world would look like if I were to take this point of view seriously. This is how I understand Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2011:133) recent demand that the anthropologist’s idea of seriousness must not be tied to the hermeneutics of allegorical meanings or to the immediative illusion of discursive echolalia. Anthropologists must allow that “visions” are not beliefs, not consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively: not worldviews, but worlds of vision (and not vision only—these are worlds perceivable by senses other than vision and are objects of extrasensory conception as well).

As Viveiros de Castro notes, this kind of seriousness is necessarily accompanied by humor, in a way that leaves no room for irony. It seems to me that irony comes fairly easily to the many well-read Shuar I know (e.g., Federation officials and indigenous activists)—but I have long marveled at how effortlessly other Shuar are able to move from deadly seriousness to laughter. The results of my own efforts in this essay are some necessarily illiberal thoughts. If I have succeeded, some readers will take them seriously, and others will consider them jokes, but, I hope, no one will read them as ironic.

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theoretical as well, since it leads me to reflect more generally on an ethnography of the ineffable. There is a line here, and after wavering considerably, I realize that I cannot take either side. On one side is the possibility that my informants are fully aware of and understand their visions, although they keep this knowledge secret. On the other side is the possibility that something occurs in visions that cannot enter speech. The possibility of the latter makes it impossible to know which of the two is the case. I suggest that both are in play simultaneously. In his examination of secrets, sociologist Georg Simmel (1950:312) concluded that “we simply cannot imagine any interaction or social relation or society which is not based on this teleologically determined non-knowledge of one another.” In an earlier essay in which I reflected on the secrets that largely defined my relationship with an individual Shuar, I pursued Simmel’s suggestion that the temptation to confess or betray is the source of the power of the secret (Rubenstein 2004:1055–1061). In the course of my fieldwork, however, I have spoken to many more Shuar about their visions, in an effort to learn the secrets of power. They readily told me about the immense importance of plant-granted visions and of the effects these visions had on their lives. But they repeatedly refuse to tell me what occurred in their visions, and they consistently insisted that some visions are kept secret from everyone. So this essay is at least as much about the power of secrecy as it is about forms of power. I would like to suggest that some secrets are powerful because they are mimetic of the ineffable. My use of the word “mimetic” invokes philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotic.3 As Michael Taussig has shown, the mimetic faculty is often essential to the ways people perform their relationship to the ineffable. Like the symbolic, it is a field of power: “Once the mimetic has sprung into being, a terrifically 3. In addition to the symbolic, in which the relationship between a signifier and its object is entirely arbitrary, Peirce called attention to indexes that compel attention because they are directly connected to their object (e.g., “where there is smoke (index) there is fire (object)”) and icons that share some quality with, and are thus mimetic of, their objects (e.g., a map of a village or a diagram of circuitry; Peirce 1998 [1903]). (It is important to note that, like symbols, icons depend on convention. One must learn what maps are before one can recognize them as iconic; Taussig 1993:51–52.) “Indexes” and “icons” make it possible to signify without using language. For example, when the protagonist of Janet Hendricks’s account of a warrior’s narrative describes his difficulties breathing through blood, he employs the onomatopoeia “shupi shupi,” Hendricks remarks that in an English-language narrative, one would more likely describe the sight of blood rather than the sound, and that the sound of labored breathing would have been described in different terms. She concludes that Shuar favor sound over other senses (1993:189). I believe that she is missing the point, because she has shifted the object of her analysis from Tukup’s narration to his actual experience. I believe that the importance of onomatopoeia in Shuar narration has to do with the importance of the iconic relative to the symbolic, rather than the importance of sound relative to sight (see Kohn 2005 for another example of the usefulness of these distinctions in understanding an Amazonian culture).

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ambiguous power is established: there is born the power to represent the world, yet that same power is a power to falsify, mask, and pose” (Taussig 1993:42–43). What happens in these visions that makes them sources of such power? As I suggest below, it may have something to do with the way visionary encounters form a kind of subjectivity that can stand up to a tension in Shuar culture between valuing freedom and valuing power. This kind of subjectivity is fundamentally distinct from the bourgeois subjectivity proposed by Sigmund Freud and his followers.4 It is made possible by the way Shuar visions mediate the real and the symbolic—registers that in many ways parallel a distinction made by Jacques Lacan—and, consequently, by an ambivalent relationship between visions and speech. The central concern of psychoanalytic theory is “the unconscious,” that is, the thoughts and ideas a person cannot put into words, not because of some lack of competence but because of some mechanism of repression. One could argue that by definition the contents of the unconscious are not meaningful, but Freud argued that the unconscious works and that the workings of the unconscious have knowable, meaningful effects that we can talk about. Of all psychoanalytic theorists, Lacan was perhaps the one most concerned with the significance of the chasm between the unconscious and the conscious and of the ways that talk is both unavoidable and a danger to psychoanalysis. Lacan was concerned that analysts had come to take the role of language in analysis for granted without considering the ways it can distort or disguise as easily as it can expose and explain. He argued that “the Symbolic”—the order constituted through language—is a realm of misrecognition and impossible desires. Given the importance of secrets and distorted speech in Shuar culture, I believe that anthropologists must take Lacan’s concerns seriously as well.5 4. These theories are controversial for a diverse range of scholars, so I must pause to explain my own position. I do not accept the work of Sigmund Freud and his followers as a universal theory of the human mind. I do, however, find in it a compelling account of the formation of bourgeois subjectivity. Now that Shuar territory has been colonized and reorganized along bourgeois forms of production and governance, many Shuar are emulating this kind of subjectivity, an issue this article can point to but not explore in depth. But I also find certain concepts in psychoanalytic theory useful in developing an account of the formation of Shuar subjectivity (which complements Elke Mader’s 1999 analysis of Shuar personhood), which is a central concern of this essay. 5. Another reason anthropologists should be more interested in debates in Freudian theory is the ways these debates challenge assumptions about the bourgeois subject as an autonomous individual. A first reading of Freud would suggest that he was primarily interested in the operation of different “drives” (which he contrasted to instincts; Freud 1961 [1920], 1962 [1905]). For most followers of Freud, however, his work is most notable for its attempts to model the structure of the mind (which in turn help explain the dynamics of different drives). Freud’s models are considered “topographic,” not because he identified each element with a different place in the brain but because he understood the functioning of each element in terms of its position relative to the other elements. The first topographic model distinguished between the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious (Freud 1955 [1900]:513–616). The sec-

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This essay is necessarily speculative. As an “ethnography of the ineffable,” it is also an experimental alternative to an ethnography of “representation.” Although the “crisis of representation” of the 1980s questioned the right of anthropologists to represent their informants, this crisis centered on an understanding of culture as representation and of ethnography as interpretation (see Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1973; Marcus and Fisher 1986). But it is important for ethnographers to acknowledge that our informants may have experiences and their cultures may involve practices, or dimensions or registers of experiences or practices, that resist representation. This essay thus lingers on a second encounter, between ethnographic fieldwork and writing. To acknowledge the importance of the secret or ineffable in the lives of our informants, I look for ways to write not “about” these experiences or customs but “around” them. There is, of course, a good deal that Shuar have to say about plants, visions, and powers. Just as such talk frames experiences about which my informants do not speak, my interpretations of this talk are forwarded to frame (and thus acknowledge) that which I cannot interpret.

Psychoanalysis and Ethnography As only a few other anthropologists have engaged Lacan (e.g., Crapanzano 1980; Ivy 1995) and my reading of Lacan is selective and not shared by all Lacanians, I begin with a brief comment about my approach. One reason I believe that anthropologists should find in Lacan’s work a productive path to engage psychoanalytic thought is his attention to language.6 ond topographic model distinguished between the id, the ego, and the superego (Freud 1960 [1923]). For an account of how these two models relate, see Freud 1949 [1940]; for present purposes, it is sufficient to note that the ego cuts across the dividing line between the unconscious and the conscious. Lacan takes this a step further, in that in his account the ego cuts across the line between internal and external; his model takes more account than Freud’s of the way social dynamics shape psychological dynamics. One thing I find valuable in this line of thought is a fractured and conflicted account of the bourgeois subject (see Borch Jakobsen 1988 [1982]) that stands in stark contrast with the idea of the autonomous individual, which has dominated bourgeois ideology and social science since the Enlightenment (Habermas 1994; Marx 1978 [1844]; Wolf 1982: 7–10). 6. I believe that Lacan’s identification of the unconscious with language addresses quite precisely a point initially made by Franz Boas regarding Freud. While I believe some of the ideas underlying Freud’s psychoanalytic studies may be fruitfully applied to ethnological problems, it does not seem to me that the one-sided exploitation of this method will advance our understanding of the development of human society. . . . To give an example: The phenomena of language show clearly that conditions quite different from those to which psycho-analysts direct their attention determine the mental behavior of man. The general concepts underlying language are entirely unknown to most people. They do not rise into consciousness until the scientific study of grammar begins. Nevertheless, the categories of language compel us to see the world arranged in certain

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Lacan relied on Saussurian linguistics, especially the distinction between parole and langue, and the implications of the arbitrariness of the sign (see Saussure 1966 [1915]). For Lacan, the difference between signified and signifier constitutes an unbridgeable space of “misrecognition” (me´connaissance). Lacan’s Saussurian analysis means that one’s language, and everything of the subject’s that is mediated by language, is always intimately human but also “Other”—alien—to one’s self. This is not the place to review the many critiques or alternatives to Saussure’s dualistic semiotic. In some cases, a dialogic or performative approach to language is more useful (some have argued that Lacan takes a performative approach to language in that language creates the subject; Lee 1990:75– 79).7 One reason I find Lacan’s reading of Saussure appropriate is because it resonates with a dualistic view of the world that permeates Shuar culture. Another reason I find it useful is that attention to the specificity of language is a first step to recognizing what is culturally specific and relative. As psychoanalyst Bruce Fink noted, We are born into a world of discourse, a discourse or language that precedes our birth and that will live on after our death. Long before a child is born, a place is prepared for it in its parents’ linguistic universe: the parents speak of the child yet to be born, try to select the perfect name for it, prepare a room for it, and begin imagining what their lives will be like with an additional member of the household. The words they use to talk about the child have often been in use for decades if not centuries, and the parents have generally neither defined nor redefined them despite many years of use. Those words are handed down to them by definite conceptual groups which, on account of our lack of knowledge of linguistic processes, are taken as objective categories and which, therefore, impose themselves upon the form of our thoughts. (Boas 1940 [1920]:288–289)

Lacan was struck by the way Le´vi-Strauss’s analysis of marriage and kinship approached the territory of Freud’s unconscious, and he supposed that this had to do with his debt to linguistics; I suspect that it may also owe in part to his debt to Boas (Lacan 1968:48). 7. See Sherzer and Urban’s (1986) call for a “discourse centered approach” and Mannheim and Tedlock’s (1995) call for a “dialogic” approach to language. Instead of seeing speech as partial examples of a language, these approaches see language as something that emerges only through conversations among people. This approach shifts focus from an abstract system of meanings to actual social interactions occurring within social and cultural contexts. Both approaches are relevant to my argument. As the ethnographic record makes clear, dialogue occupied a central place in Shuar language. Gnerre (1986) and Hendricks (1993) demonstrate that even Shuar monologues took place within dialogic contexts (the one exception is monologues directed to the waka´n
of plants and animals, as well as instruments of shamanic power; these monologues are delivered in the register of song; Taylor and Chau 1983). Nevertheless, for Shuar, speech is a domain in which recognition is always perilous and threatens to dissolve into misrecognition.

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centuries of tradition: they constitute the Other of language. (Fink 1995:5)

This point provides a razor for working through what may be universal in Lacanian thought and what may be limited to bourgeois culture (see Zaretsky 1976). For example, while the arbitrariness of the sign and the way meaning is constituted through difference may be universal, the appropriateness of castration as a trope to refer to the process of subjectivation, central to Lacanian thought, may not be. (Indeed, if my analysis below is correct, for Shuar the key trope of subjectivation is the incorporation of the visionary power). Against the Symbolic, and that which enters into language, is that which resists entry into language. Lacan calls this “the Real.” Since the Real does not enter language, it is impossible to describe it directly; we can, however, imagine what it is not. For example, we can try to imagine the consciousness of a baby before it has any awareness of language. Lacan sometimes speaks of the Real and the Symbolic as developmental stages—babies are born, as Freud wrote, “polymorphously perverse” (meaning that the entire body is an unbroken erogenous zone, for which anything can be an object of erotic gratification). So too, Lacan’s real is without zones, subdivisions, localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the real is a sort of unrent, undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere, there being no space between the threads that are its “stuff.” It is a sort of smooth, seamless surface or space which applies as much to a child’s body as to the whole universe. (Fink 1995:24)

As the baby enters the Symbolic order, “in the course of socialization, the body is progressively written or overwritten with signifiers: pleasure is localized in certain zones, while other zones are neutralized by the word and coaxed into compliance with social, behavioral norms” (Fink 1995:24). Lacan explicitly distinguishes the Real from “reality.” Since we cannot put the Real into words, it does not exist as such. It is the Symbolic that constitutes reality (see Berger and Luckman 1966): “a world that can be designated and discussed with the words provided by a social group’s (or subgroup’s) language” (Fink 1995:25). Although one may identify the Real and the Symbolic with developmental stages, they coexist: a baby is born into a world of language, and older people begin encoding its body as soon as it is born (and in many societies, before). Similarly, the Real is a spectral presence through the life of the individual; Lacan (1978:vii) identifies it as the unconscious.8 “The real is 8. Lacan’s identification of “the Real” with the unconscious marks an important break from other Freudians, who see the unconscious as the result of repression. Lacan starts with the Real and calls attention to the production of the Symbolic. Lacan suggests that although fragments of the Real can be and are transformed into the Symbolic, there is always a certain portion of the Real that is left over. As we shall see in the conclusion, this “leftover” or “surplus” Real is of central importance to Slavoj Zˇizˇek.

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perhaps best understood as that which has not yet been symbolized, remains to be symbolized, or even resists symbolization; and it may perfectly well exist ‘alongside’ and in spite of a speaker’s considerable linguistic capabilities” (Fink 1995: 25). In this sense, the Real and the Symbolic are better thought of as registers than as developmental stages. Between the Real and the Symbolic is another stage, or register: the Imaginary. The Imaginary consists of images people form of themselves and others.9 For Lacan—in sharp contrast to other psychoanalysts—“the foremost imaginary object is the ego” (Fink 1995:84). Whereas many psychologists and sociologists refer to this process of self-definition as “intersubjective” (Mead 1934, 1964), Lacan terms the ego “moi,” “me” (the objective case; the “me” is acted upon), in contrast to the subject, the “I” that acts. While other psychoanalysts (especially in the United Kingdom and the United States) sought to help strengthen the ego of their analysands, Lacan viewed the Imaginary as the problem. He argued that “it is an analyst’s job to intervene in the patient’s real, not in the patient’s view of reality” (Fink 1995:25)—that is, in the unconscious, the unspeakable. Cultural anthropologists face some problems that are very similar to those of psychoanalysts. It is often quite obvious to me that those Shuar who represent themselves to me most articulately are those who, having considerable experience talking to Euro-Americans or Europeans, have learned how to reflect back to me what they believe I wish to hear (and, certainly, what is most intelligible to me). I suggest that one reason anthropologists and colonized peoples (such as Native Americans) so often have conflicting anxieties about “cultural representations” is that such representations are “Imaginary” in the Lacanian sense, a self-serving or defensive construction that “makes sense” in the context of whatever politics constitutes the ethnic boundary at the time but usually fails in some way when it is actually taken to be identical to the collective subject.10 Moreover, cultural relativism is at least in part a theory of cultural repression, in that it posits that “culture” often shapes our thoughts, feelings, and actions in unreflexive ways—a powerful idea but one that creates all sorts of hermeneutic problems. For example, I worry that the forms of ethnocentrism I can most easily express and explain in language are 9. Just as Peirce proposed the iconic and the indexical to talk about nonsymbolic media for meaning, Lacan sees the Imaginary as a nonsymbolic register for meaning: “While Saussure teaches us that language is essentially structured by difference, we cannot assume that all difference is perceived by virtue of language alone. The animal kingdom—in which the imaginary predominates, the symbolic generally playing little or no part—proves that difference is already operative at the level of the imaginary” (Fink 1995:189, n. 6). 10. In this context, the discourse that is “Other” to the image of indigenous peoples could have been Social Darwinism and Unilineal Evolution in the nineteenth century or the human-rights discourse of the United Nations and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the twentieth century (Kuper 2003; Merlan 2009; Stocking 1968, 1987).

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the least serious of the biases that threaten my understanding of another culture. Often, the questions that I ask my informants demand that they put into words things the meaning of which may best be indexed by how hard it is for them to do so. In this essay, I use the Lacanian registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic to refer to developmental stages because I am in part raising questions about early-childhood socialization. But I am even more interested in how I, as an anthropologist, can use these terms as registers, to make sense of what does not enter Shuar discourse by examining it in relation to what does enter Shuar discourse. A brief consideration of one of Jacques Lacan’s most notable essays both highlights the contrast between Shuar culture and our own and illuminates some of these seemingly mysterious features of Shuar culture, especially the questions, What makes the encounter with the aru´tam waka´n
so important to Shuar, and Why must key elements of this encounter be kept secret? The mirror stage. An important phase in childhood socialization involves the internalization of one’s self-image (Grosz 1990:46). According to Lacan, an important moment in this phase is the “mirror stage,” which not only inaugurates “the Imaginary” but also effects an essential split in the subject. Some have argued that Lacan uses the term “mirror” metaphorically (e.g., Homer 2005:24; Laplanche 1976:81). Perhaps this is because the term is used metaphorically by so many other psychoanalysts, especially followers of objectrelations theory. Yet Lacan and object-relations theorists were careful to emphasize the differences between them.11 I suspect 11. After all, it was Freud himself who argued that the ego first emerges through a representation of one’s bodily form (Freud 1960 [1923]:25– 27). Psychoanalyst Malcolm Pines contrasts the “specular-image” approach of the “French School” and the metaphorical usage of British and American psychoanalysts. A critical difference is that the specular use of the term need not refer to a social interaction but that the metaphorical uses do (Pines 1985:211); D. W. Winnicott, too, distinguished between his use of “mirror” and Lacan’s (Winnicott 1971 [1967]:111). Heinz Kohut (1971), the founder of “self psychology,” made the metaphorical notion of “mirroring” central to his approach. (Psychoanalyst Daniel Stern [1984:5, 1985] prefers the term “attunement” to mirroring, in part to avoid confusion.) Psychiatrist Susan Pawlby (1977) argues that metaphorical mirroring is a process that begins close to birth and is initiated by the mother. At first, the mother imitates her baby; then she gives positive feedback when she perceives the baby imitating her. “The mother’s answering gesture provides the infant with an interest-holding event which is temporarily contingent upon his own performance of a similar event. Thus, intentionality and reciprocity are inserted by the caretakers into their beginning dialogues with their infants” (Pines 1985:215). Winnicott argued that the metaphorical mirroring of the mother had priority over one’s relationship with a literal mirror. He suggested that, as the expression on a mother’s face reflected that of her baby, a baby looking at its mother saw itself (Winnicott 1971 [1967]:112). It could then look in a mirror to see, in its own reflection, a recollection of its mother’s approving face (Winnicott 1971 [1967]:113). According to ego psychology, the purpose of therapy is to reinforce this sense of self by having the analyst act as a mirror. In my reading, Lacan’s mirror stage is explicitly literal. At stake in this distinction is his critique of other psychoanalysts. Lacan’s argument turns this sequence around and puts the literal mirror first: by using “mirror”

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that this reading reflects the ways that actual mirrors are taken for granted in bourgeois society; it effaces bourgeois dependence on mirrors (indeed, I believe that part of the power of Lacan’s reflections is to suggest a profound ambivalence that is reenacted daily by virtually every member of the bourgeois upon preparing for bed, waking up, urinating, or defecating).12 I share the view of those who read Lacan as referring to an actual mirror in part because this is the means of the apprehension of one’s body as a whole (rather than feelings about one’s self) and because (unlike the faces of other people) it reflects an image that is simultaneously “accurate . . . as well as delusory” (Grosz 1990:39; see also Fink 1995:36; Metz 1982:46; Silverman 1996:10–11). In the mirror stage, the child identifies with an image of itself. My point is to highlight the importance of the asocial or antisocial (and thus objective) elements of the mirror stage.13 Metaphorical mirroring reflects the mother’s intentions, feelings, or desires. An actual mirror conveys to the child nothing but what the child projects onto the mirror, recast according to the optical properties of the mirror. Lacan was taken by the fact that “the human child, at an age when he is for a short while, but for a while nonetheless, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can already recognize his own image as such in a mirror” (Lacan 2006 [1949]:75). This image is mimetic of the child’s actions; that is, it establishes an iconic but not symbolic representation of the child: This act . . . immediately gives rise in a child to a series of gestures in which he playfully experiences the relationship between the movements made in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it duplicates—namely, the child’s own body, and the persons and even things around him. (Lacan 2006 [1949]: 75)

For Lacan, this fact plays a decisive role in the psychological development of the child between the ages of 6 and 18 literally, he sets up an argument that psychologically healthy mirroring is not merely perilous but impossible (this point is made very clearly in Lacan 2006 [1946]:151). The infant’s subjectivity is divided before any caregiver can reflect back on the baby a positive image of the subject. (Although, according to Bruce Fink, it is the metaphorical kind of mirroring with the mother who plays with her child in front of a mirror that causes the child to invest so much in its mirror image [Fink 1995: 36]). Moreover, I suspect that those who insist that Lacan was using the word metaphorically are attached to the claim that Lacan’s theories (at least, in this reading)—or, more to the point, bourgeois subjectivity— are universal. 12. Although usually, and ironically, “unreflexively” (in the metaphorical sense of the word). 13. By “objective” I mean to invoke Silverman’s emphasis on Lacan’s points in Seminar VII: “The mirror image fulfills ‘a role as limit’—‘it is that which cannot be crossed’” (Silverman 1996:11; see also Lacan 1992 [1986]:151). Lacan uses “object” in another sense, to refer to egos.

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months.14 It provides the child with a whole or gestalt image of itself, one that “symbolizes the I’s mental permanence” at a time when the child cannot walk and is still nursing, that is, a time of “motor impotence and nursling dependence” (Lacan 2006 [1949]:76). It is thus a glimpse of the future— of the autonomous whole the child may become—while at the same time a distortion, especially given that, as a mirror image, it presents the child with an image that is literally the reverse of the child’s embodied perspective. In short, the first occasion the infant has to form a selfimage, an identity of itself as a singular whole, the infant identifies with an image that is and is not itself: the distorted image of the mirror. The child cannot but have an ambivalent relation to its self-image; there is always a gap (be´ance) between one’s experience of one’s self and one’s image of one’s self. What the child ultimately beholds is, in Lacan’s terms, its own “want-of-being.” The mirror stage is just the first time in a lifetime during which the subject will hold onto an image of itself that displaces one’s physical self, an image that, for Lacan, is forever inauthentic, displaced from a truth that is itself absent. This mirror image is “the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (Lacan 2006 [1949]:76). That the precipitation of a “self” that is fundamentally alienated from itself occurs through an encounter with the baby’s own image of itself means that any future mirroring with anyone else will only feed an illusion. As Lacan wrote, “the important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any individual” (Lacan 2006 [1949]:76). (Inter alia, Lacan’s model suggests that the ego forms as a result of acts of recognition or misrecognition. This view contrasts with the popular belief that one begins with an ego or self-image that can be influenced by acts of recognition or misrecognition.) 14. According to a review of observational and experimental data, Papousˇek and Papousˇek (1974) noted that infants react to mirrors as early as 18 weeks of age and that they have a significant response rate to eye contact at about 20 weeks. Experiments by Lichtenberg suggest that children do reach a point where they discover “that the mirror will not only ‘capture’ and reflect visual information about an object placed before it, but that the mirror conveys information ‘out there’ about themselves.” This stage occurs between 15 and 21 months of age (Lichtenberg 1985:201). Psychiatrist Robert Emde concluded that infant selfrecognition emerges only in the second year (Emde 1983). Under experimental conditions, the experimenter controls the environment. I do not believe that this renders the experiments useless. On the contrary, I think that it is important to acknowledge the more general control adults may have over the infant’s environment. It is quite possible that infants enter a “mirror stage” but do so through their parents’ prodding and encouragement (Fink 1995:36). In any event, my argument hinges on the point that while it is quite likely that children enter a mirror stage, it is just as likely that this is a culture-bound event and is perhaps even restricted to bourgeois culture.

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The literal mirror gives way to metaphorical mirroring, and the child’s ego takes shape in this social milieu: “Imaginary relations” are not illusory relationships—relationships that don’t really exist—but rather relations between egos, wherein everything is played out in terms of but one opposition: same or different. They involve other people who you consider to be like yourself for a variety of reasons. It could be because the two of you look very much alike, are similar in size or age, and so on. In the case of an infant, it is generally that child in the family, extended family, or circle of friends who bears the greatest affinity to the infant in terms of size, age, interests and abilities and who also stands in a similar relation to a parental or authority figure. (Fink 1995:84–85)

The mirror stage ends as a developmental stage with the child’s acquisition of language. But the Imaginary continues as a register, alongside the Symbolic, because the be´ance of the mirror stage haunts all future social relations. Through language, the child, and then the adult, can actively seek a recognition it can never receive. As Jonathan Lee explained, What the child would appear to ask for, in her first attempts at speech, is the satisfaction of her bodily needs. But what Lacan emphasizes is that the linguistic translation of these needs—what he calls demand—is inherently interpersonal: demand is always addressed to another person, at first a parent or caretaker. Indeed, the child is not simply asking for food when she demands this of her parent; rather, she is using the demand for food to provoke the parent, the other, into recognizing her existence as a force to be contended with. In such recognition is held the promise of something to fill the be´ance between body and moi, and it is that which is at the heart of what the child will regard as parental love. In short, the child’s demand for food actually masks a deeper longing for recognition by the other, recognition that will in some way make up for the child’s fundamental want-of-being. It is this profound but always only implicit longing for recognition—itself a product of the mirror stage—that Lacan designates by the term desire (Lee 1990:58–59).

This desire can never be fulfilled; that is, the child’s want-ofbeing can never be fulfilled, because any other person to whom one might direct one’s desire suffers from the same want-of-being. Although this problem has its origin in the mirror stage, for Lacan it is ultimately a problem in and with language. Because one’s words are always the words of someone else, they are never really one’s own (Lee 1990:49–50). If there is any truth in the mirror image, it concerns the impossibility of self-identity, an instruction that is confirmed or seconded in language itself (where the signifier can never be itself). But this negativity can be read as a positive: the suggestion that the infant may become something else. Such a “becoming,” in which some parts blossom as others wither

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or drop off, or as some parts unhinge as others connect, may have more in common with the corporeal experience of the baby—disorganized, not fully in control—than with the image of the baby as whole. All an analyst can do, according to Lacan, is challenge the analysand to reject misrecognitions and unfulfillable desires and accept that what we are today is not what we were yesterday or will be tomorrow. Lacan ends his reflections on the mirror stage with an enigmatic but hopeful note: “In the subject to subject recourse we preserve, psychoanalysis can accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the ‘Thou art that,’ where the cipher of his mortal destiny is revealed to him, but it is not in our sole power as practitioners to bring him to the point where the true journey begins” (Lacan 2006 [1949]:81). What is at stake, for psychoanalysts and anthropologists alike, is to understand how people are able to forge meaningful lives in a world not of their making. This accomplishment depends not only on the cultural resources available but also on the kind of subjectivity. In the remainder of this essay, I use Lacan’s concepts of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic to explore how visions played such an important role in the pursuit of a meaningful life among Shuar, in part through the constitution of a different kind of subject. To be crystal clear: I take Lacan’s mirror stage as determinate of a certain kind of subjectivity and not of subjectivity as such. Among Shuar, I argue, plant-granted visions created a different kind of subject, one whose freedom does not depend on some sovereignty. This kind of subject did not inhabit a world innocent of misrecognition and violence—on the contrary!—but misrecognition and violence were organized in this world in ways that contrast starkly with those of the bourgeois world.

Shuar Culture, 1916–1964 Most Shuar live in the montan˜a: the easternmost foothills of the Andes and the uppermost fringe of the Amazon rainforest, between 400 and 1,200 m above sea level, mostly in presentday Ecuador. They are one of several neighboring groups that are culturally and linguistically similar—the Achuar (in Ecuador and Peru), the Huambisa and the Aguaruna (or Awaju´n) in Peru—that anthropologists refer to as Jivaroan. My claims are restricted to the Shuar, although I also draw on research in neighboring groups. My claims are also restricted to a specific period, before I began my fieldwork. To explain: this article is motivated by questions that arose during my own fieldwork, but it is based on the realization that I must look beyond the historical horizons of my fieldwork for the answers. During my research I often experience a feeling of dislocation, because I have to interpret what informants tell me in terms of two frames of reference. One involves institutions with fixed, material locations: the Shuar Federation headquarters, the hospital, the marketplace, all in the town of Sucu´a; outside of town, a Shuar centro (“center” or community, i.e., nucleated settle-

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ment), someone’s house, a garden, a river—most talk centers on events or interests that have some clear relationship to one of these places. Sometimes, however, this talk seems to drift somewhere past me. I have come to realize that I could follow what people were saying (even if they were speaking in Spanish, as they often did in conversation, and which I relied on in my interviews) only in reference to key Shuar terms—kaka´ram, kajeka, akasma, and so on. I have since learned that most of my Shuar friends experience this dislocation too. The Shuar world (by which I simply mean that world most easily described in the Shuar language) has been shattered by the market economy, bureaucratic and hierarchical political institutions, the spatial relations of the state, and writing as the authoritative form of knowledge. This process began when poor Ecuadorians from the highlands began to settle in Shuar territory, in small numbers in the 1920s and in large numbers in the late 1950s. Missionary activities (mostly by Catholics of the Salesian Order but by some evangelical Christians as well) paralleled those of Ecuadorians, and the state assigned jurisdiction of a Shuar reserve to the Salesians in 1935. Shuar children were educated in larger numbers at mission boarding schools starting in the 1940s (although family continued to have an important role in socialization during visits home). The creation of the Federation of Shuar Centros in 1964 by Salesian missionaries and their alumni signaled a remarkable reconfiguration of colonial forces. The Ecuadorian state recognized a degree of Shuar political autonomy; in return, the Federation accepted the role of primary agent of modernization (Rubenstein 2001). This was achieved in part through a reorganization of Shuar social and spatial relations and in part through the creation of schools in which Shuar with specialized training would teach Shuar children to read and write in Spanish. As late as the 1950s, most Shuar maintained a way of life consistent with accounts from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.15 Within a few years of the Federation’s founding, its structures, discourses, and practices had replaced this way of life (Harner 1984:210). As far as I can tell, all Shuar discourse has been recast in terms of missionary discourse (or, for younger Shuar, that of the United Nations and NGOs; see Boster 2003). Beyond this discourse, however, most Shuar see something else. The world of the Shuar language remains vividly meaningful to most of 15. As Anne-Christine Taylor (2007:144) observed, Their culture has proved remarkably enduring and appears to have undergone relatively little change between the Spanish conquest and the middle of the twentieth century. Comparing early colonial accounts of the historic Jivaroans, often quite detailed, with the writings of the first professional ethnographers of these Indians in the twentieth century— scientists such as Rafael Karsten (1935), Matthew Stirling (1938), or Gunther Tessman—one cannot fail to be impressed by the close fit between descriptions produced at an interval of close to four centuries, and relating to territorial implantation, settlement patterns, material culture, styles of warfare, appearance, and attitudes.

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my informants, even though so many of its material referents have given way to a new order. To make sense of Shuar visions within the frame of reference of the Shuar language, I must rely on accounts of Shuar life before the founding of the Federation. I rely on ethnographies by Rafael Karsten (fieldwork: 1916–1919, 1928–1929), Matthew Stirling (fieldwork: 1930–1931), and Michael Harner (fieldwork: 1956–1959, 1964, 1969). Written at different times, these works are relatively consistent with one another and, in many ways, with what Shuar tell me today. But, I must emphasize, what they describe is not the material world in which Shuar operate today. Power/Knowledge What are we to make of Harner’s claim that for Shuar the normal waking life is false and the world accessed through hallucinogenic drugs true? Harner is using “the real” to denote a realm that we do not recognize but that has all the qualities the word “real” connotes for us.16 I am not sure whether the distinction between the natural and the supernatural applies in Shuar culture, but Shuar certainly distinguish between the world that can be seen, understood, and manipulated without the aid of specific plants and the world that they can see through the aid of such plants.17 All Shuar I have met are convinced that the visions made possible through the consumption of these plants are always true and are irreplaceable sources of power, although I never heard a Shuar refer to the ordinary world as “false” or “a lie.” Against the true or real world, I suggest that Shuar view the normal waking life as a world of signification and understand that there is always some gap between a sign and its object. It may not be a false world, but it is a world of falsehood and deception. Their beliefs in the importance of visions do not make Shuar dreamy, otherworldly people. Harner noted that “the Jı´varo seem proud of their ability to judge for themselves the usefulness of continuing or changing their traditional behavior on very pragmatic and personal grounds” (Harner 1984: 196). Indeed, the more time I spend in the company of Shuar, the more certain I am that “pragmatic” is the single best English word to describe their outlook on life. Although they would translate our words “to think” and “to feel” as one word, enentaimsatin, when discussing with Shuar how one does this activity, people regularly explain that it involves considering the consequences of one’s actions. In fact, there 16. I believe that it is significant that Shuar, like Lacan, make a clear distinction between “the real” and the ordinary life. But Shuar and Lacan do not mean the same thing by “real.” To Shuar, “false” or “lie” signifies incomplete or mistaken knowledge; Shuar speak of visions as revealing hidden things. More generally, Shuar use the word “true” (neka´s) to signify the accuracy of an account. 17. Harner is firm that this occurs only through the use of visiongranting plants. Karsten claims that Shuar receive true knowledge from ordinary sleeping dreams but concurs that only in the visions granted by certain plants may a Shuar encounter forces like the aru´tam waka´n
(Karsten 1935:445).

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Before the formation of the Shuar Federation, Shuar had no territorial or political center, and the basic unit of Shuar social life was the politically and economically autonomous family (Harner 1984:41; Karsten 1935:183; Stirling 1938:38). There was no one Shuar society; there were many scores of autonomous social groups, linked by very fluid kinship networks, trading partnerships, and alliances. Each social group was organized through one or a cluster of houses; houses would be abandoned and relocated every 5–9 years. Men and women played distinct and complementary roles in the production of food, social life, and warfare. The typical house consisted of a husband, two or three wives, unmarried sons, daughters, and sons-in-law.18 Clusters of households were organized through alliances between sons-in-law and a father-in-law.19 Sometimes closely allied houses would be 200– 300 yards apart; more typically, they were spread along a small

river at half-mile intervals (Harner 1984:78).20 Following Harner’s calculations, there were more than 200 such social groups in 1956–1957. The actual number would fluctuate over time as old groups dissolved into new ones. Shuar are famous for their hatred of authority. According to Harner, Shuar were well known “as an individualistic people intensely jealous of their freedom and unwilling to be subservient to authority, even among themselves” (Harner 1984:1). This value extended to relations between parents and children and was central to enculturation. Stirling reported that “young children are very seldom disciplined in spite of which, like most primitive children, they are very well behaved. The children, especially young boys, have almost complete liberty to do as they please” (although children who broke clay pots or stole meat, the availability of which was unpredictable, could be punished through the use of stinging nettles or the smoke of hot peppers; Stirling 1938:111; see also Harner 1984:89–90). Shuar parents located their children in extended bilateral networks of kin. These networks are in part structured through Dravidian kinship terminology. They are also structured by a distinction between neka´s (true) and kana (branch) relatives, a distinction that is clear-cut for a small fraction of one’s kindred and negotiable for the rest (Harner 1984:97– 98). Yet it is the position of any other Shuar in this network that determines whether he or she may be counted on as an ally. And it is the position of any Shuar one encounters in the networks of others that determines whether he or she is an enemy. Like others, one important way Shuar socialized their children was through language and speech. “Fathers often spend an hour or more before dawn lecturing their sons on the degree of relationship between a variety of enemies and friends in their own and other neighborhoods” (Harner 1984:103). According to Karsten, these lectures emphasize the child’s obligation to avenge old offenses. “This discourse is, at times, repeated every morning when the house-father gets up, said with about the same words, and, of course, cannot fail to make an impression upon the minds of the young ones” (Karsten 1935:260). The principal means by which Shuar parents socialized their children, however, was through the use of vision-granting plants, which they believe to be a source of knowledge and power.21 Parents fed children the masticated leaf of the tsentsemp (Matelea rivularis) either just before a newborn was brought to its mother’s breast (Karsten 1935:226) or when it was a few days old (Harner 1984:84), to ensure that it would be healthy, and again when the child was 2 or 3 years old

18. Shuar today refer to this social group as “iı´ shuari” (our people) in Shuar and “familia” (family) in Spanish. 19. Shuar had no name for such clusters but would identify them according to the name of the stream along which they were located. Harner calls them “neighborhoods” (1984:77), and Descola calls them “endogamous nexi” (1982:303), although Mader and Gippelhauser (2000: 65) did not find a pattern of endogamy.

20. Among the Achuar, such clusters typically amounted to 10 households, and distinct clusters were separated by a 2- or 3-day-walk’s distance (Taylor 1983:333). 21. As Bennett (1992:483) notes, “The use of hallucinogens is very circumscribed among the Shuar. They drink narcotic beverages only to communicate with the spirit world. The casual Western uses of hallucinogens for escape, relaxation, or experimentation are foreign to them.”

is another word that one can use for “to feel,” neka´p-ra, but this word is explicitly sensual (rather than emotional) and is also used to mean “to experiment.” I suspect that it is this pragmatic sensibility that led AnnChristine Taylor, who conducted field research among the Achuar, to exclaim, Indeed, they have very few explicit theories about anything, and have little taste or talent for explicating the self-evident. There are no specialists of metaphysical lore and ritual in this society: even shamans are considered experts in the manipulation of certain kinds of relations rather than holders of specialized knowledge. (Taylor 1993:658)

Certainly, Shuar shamans do have specialized knowledge, especially knowledge they purchase from neighboring Runa (Quichua-speaking) Indians. But this knowledge is perhaps closer to the Hellenic notion of techneˆ, craft (specifically, techniques to harm or heal others), than to episteˆmeˆ, “pure” knowledge. Similarly, the dualistic view of the world observed by Harner may be considered a Shuar metaphysics, but I would suggest that a Shuar epistemology (if the term is even appropriate) takes the form of practices through which Shuar bump into the “true” world and seek to make use of its powers. Shuar hold that visions are “true” because of the clear effects these visions have on their lives. Whether Shuar are ingesting vision-granting plants or attending Catholic missionary or Ecuadorian schools, they do so for comparable reasons: to gain useful—that is, empowering—knowledge. Shuar Social Organization

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(Karsten 1935:234).22 Periodically, members of a household staged “feasts” during which everyone (including small children) would fast for a day and then consume natem (an infusion from the vine Banisteriopsis caapi) to the point of vomiting, upon which they would sleep to intense visions of the future.23 Upon waking, people breakfasted on mashed manioc or plantains and then fasted the rest of the day to take more natem that night. This practice was repeated for several days, as it was believed to make people stronger and cleverer and was considered part of the children’s education (Karsten 1935:434–435). Youngsters who were blatantly irresponsible, especially those who were not respectful of their parents’ knowledge or authority, were given maı´kua (an infusion from the plant Brugmansia suaveolens), which caused the child to have visions through the night.24 This was considered not a punishment but rather a means of education, for the child was thus put into contact with the invisible world and shown the same truths known to adults or may have encountered an aru´tam (power-granting vision) and been given adult powers (Harner 1984:90).25 At some point in time, daughters between the ages of 2 and 8 years were made to refrain from eating meat for a week before a 4-day festival in which they would dance during the day and consume tsentsemp and tsa´ank (an infusion made from Nicotiana tabacum L.) at night, in the hope of encountering an aru´tam and to ensure that they would grow up to be healthy and strong women (Harner 1984:90–91).26 Similarly, sometime after the age of 6 a boy would fast and hike for several days with his father to a waterfall, where he would consume tsa´ank and sometimes maı´kua, explicitly to encounter an aru´tam in a visionary state that could last up to 3 days. Of all a boy’s childhood experiences, nothing is considered to compare in importance with the experience. The power 22. There is some confusion over the classification of tsentsemp. It may instead be Justicia pectoralis—or J. pectoralis may refer to one of a number of different plants that have medicinal properties and are given to children: tsemantsma, tapir, or wirink. 23. Shuar commonly add two other plants to natem: Diplopterys cabrerana and Psychotria viridi, both of which contain N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the alkaloid most likely producing the hallucinogenic effects in B. caapi mixtures (see Luna 1986). Banisteriopsis caapi contains beta-carboline alkaloids (harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine), but according to Bennett, “the amounts in normal dosages are insufficient for hallucinogenic activity. Beta-carboline alkaloids, however, may inhibit monoamineoxidases, substances that render DMT inactive” (Bennett 1992:488). 24. Brugmansia contains various alkaloids, notably atropine, hyoscyamine, and the highly psychoactive hyoscine (Lockwood 1979). 25. Harner translates aru´tam as “a vision,” but Mader argues that aru´tam is better translated as “power” (1999:163–169). I believe that the difference between Harner’s and Mader’s translations of the word reflects the fact that for Shuar, “vision” is “power” (see Hendricks 1988:221–222; Taylor 1993:660–661). 26. According to Bennett (1992:488), “the physiological effects of tobacco are biphasic. Small doses stimulate the central nervous system, depress hunger and thirst, and relieve pain. Large doses can produce catatonia, diarrhea, nausea, respiratory failure, visions, and trance (Lewis and Elvin-Lewis 1977; Wilbert 1987).”

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deriving from the acquired arutam soul is seen in Jı´varo terms as an enculturating and socializing device, since its force is believed to promote almost all the value aspects of character, including honesty, inclination to work, and intelligence; as well as to increase the actual knowledge of the child. (Harner 1984:91)

In addition to their love of freedom, Shuar are also well known for their bellicosity. Karsten wrote, “The Jibaros are no doubt at present the most warlike of all Indian tribes in South America” (Karsten 1935:259). Stirling agreed: “At the present time the Jivaros are without doubt the most warlike group in all South America, and it is probable that this statement would hold true for the past century” (Stirling 1938: 41). In perhaps more measured tones, Harner remarked, It should not be unexpected that the leaders in Jı´varo society are outstanding killers and shamans. Although such leadership is informal, almost all neighborhoods have at least one or two noted killers and a few superior shamans who are valued as protectors of their neighboring relatives, or at least of those with whom they are on friendly terms. Such leadership roles are earned and, in the case of the killers, acquired literally through life-and-death struggles. (Harner 1984:111)

This situation, in which leadership is not institutionalized and may be sought by anyone who dares, conforms to what political anthropologists called an “egalitarian society,” a society that “does not have any means of fixing or limiting the number of persons capable of exerting power” (Fried 1967:33).27 Shuar culture did, however, provide distinct paths to power, each involving different techniques involving vision-granting plants through which one could access the real world. Uwishı´n Uwishı´n is typically glossed as “shaman” or in Spanish as “brujo/a” (witch) or “curandero/a” (healer). Uwishı´ns arguably have the most developed technology for accessing and manipulating the invisible real world and thus provide a paradigmatic example of how Shuar interact with the real world (Noll 1985). An uwishı´n is someone who, through an apprenticeship with another uwishı´n, has purchased tsentsak (shamanic darts) and learned how (after a preparatory period using tsa´ank) to use natem to contain, control, and use tsentsak to either harm or heal others (Harner 1984:152–166). According to Harner, uwishı´ns believe that all tsentsak have a material and a nonmaterial aspect; uwishı´ns swallow material aspects (e.g., insects, plants) that bring with them their non27. This situation was no doubt influenced by ecological and demographic factors. Based on a survey of Shuar living east of the Cutucu Ridge, Harner calculated a population density of 1.19 persons per square mile (Harner 1984:77). In part because of their dispersed settlement pattern, Shuar thus lived in a situation “in which resources are widely available and open to anyone with the ability to obtain them” (Wolf 1982:91).

Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar

material aspect. To harm another person, an uwishı´n blows a tsentsak in the direction of the intended victim, who is struck by the nonmaterial aspect. An uwishı´n who is about to cure first examines the patient—natem enables the uwishı´n to see the ordinary world and the otherwise hidden, or “true,” world simultaneously—to see whether the patient has indeed been struck by a tsentsak and, if so, to identify the malevolent uwishı´n. The healing uwishı´n then puts a tsentsak (both material and nonmaterial aspects) in his or her mouth. The nonmaterial tsentsak catches and contains the nonmaterial tsentsak wounding the patient’s body. The uwishı´n then vomits out the tsentsak and can show the patient the material aspect as evidence of the cure (Harner 1984:162–163). One may say that Shuar use a material but ineffective analogue for an immaterial but effective instrument. I suggest that this dual aspect of the tsentsak, the use of something that is perceivable in the ordinary world and mimetic of something in the invisible “true” world, is paradigmatic of other techniques (as I suggest below when analyzing aru´tams and anent) for bridging the distance between these two worlds (see Taussig 1993: 16). Kaka´ram Preoccupied with killing, Shuar were more concerned with two other invisible powers, the aru´tam of the killer, and the muisak, or avenging force, of the victim.28 I have addressed the circulation of the muisak elsewhere (Rubenstein 2007); here I focus on the aru´tam.29 Shuar provide a generic mise en sce`ne for the acquisition of an aru´tam waka´n
. The most detailed account comes from Harner and focuses on men: If the arutam seeker is fortunate, he will awaken at about midnight to find the stars gone from the sky, the earth trembling, and a great wind felling the trees of the forest amidst thunder and lightning. To keep from being blown down he grasps a tree trunk and awaits the arutam. Shortly the arutam appears from the depths of the forest, often in the form of a pair of large creatures. The particular animal forms can vary considerably, but some of the most common arutam include a pair of giant jaguars fighting one another as they roll over and over towards the vision seeker, or two anacondas doing the same. Often the vision may simply be a huge disembodied human head or a ball of fire drifting toward the forest toward the arutam seeker. When the apparition arrives to within twenty or thirty feet, the Jı´varo must run forward and touch it, either with a small stick or his hand. This is said to require a good deal of courage, and sometimes the person flees the arutam instead. But if he does run forward and touch the vision, it instantly explodes like dynamite and disappears. (Harner 1984:138) 28. The aru´tam is not the only “soul” Shuar recognize, although it is the most important. 29. Perhaps because they were men, Karsten’s and Harner’s accounts provide far more information about men than about women; consequently, the following account focuses primarily on boys and men.

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The seeker then returns home but tells no one of his success. Instead, he sleeps on the bank of the nearest river so that the aru´tam, in the form of an old man, may return to him in his dreams, reveal himself to be the waka´n
(spirit) of one of the seeker’s ancestors, inform the seeker of his fate, and then enter the seeker’s body.30 “Upon acquiring this arutam soul, the person feels a sudden power surge into his body, accompanied by a new self-confidence” (Harner 1984:139; see also Taylor 1993:660–661). One who possesses an aru´tam is a kaka´ram, a powerful one, and cannot be killed. Indeed, one feels an overwhelming desire to kill, and a successful and longlived kaka´ram might have killed dozens of people (see Rival 2005:304–305 on the importance of the relation between the body and the soul in Amazonian understandings of the desire to kill). The acquisition and use of aru´tam waka´n
provided the basis of precolonial Shuar power; the difficulties in accumulating and controlling it provided the basis for Shuar egalitarianism. According to Taylor, the content of the waka´n
’s message “as well as the identity of the dead Jivaroan who issues it must henceforth be shrouded in utmost secrecy” (2007:146). One way an aru´tam waka´n
could be lost was talking about one’s visions. Since warriors on the eve of a raid customarily took turns describing their aru´tam to one another, a young warrior would have to seek new aru´tam sometime in the future (Harner 1984:140). Moreover, they also believed that after inhabiting the same body for 3 or 4 years, an aru´tam waka´n
would begin wandering about at night, as the warrior slept. During such nocturnal walks it could be acquired by someone else (Harner 1984:141). The aru´tam waka´n
inhabited people but did not belong to them. Shuar thus depended on a power that circulated, and while one could harness this circulation, one could never control it absolutely or permanently (see Clastres 1989:209–210). Shuar culture thus allowed for the concentration of power, but only ephemerally. Sooner or later a warrior lost all of his aru´tam waka´n
and eventually died. Like nonwarriors, Shuar believed, warriors also possess a neka´s waka´n
(a “true” or “ordinary” soul) that, upon death, takes the form of a demon (iwianch). The iwianch represents the opposite of a fulfilling life; it is an ugly spirit consumed by perpetual hunger and loneliness (Karsten 1935: 30. I must stress that these are ordinary dreams. Waude Kracke (2009: 71) has noted that with a few exceptions (e.g., the Jarawara in Brazil), a number of Amazonian languages code dreams as “indirect” knowledge and that among the Brazilian Kagwahiv this knowledge can come from the spirit of a dead animal or dying person. Nevertheless, he concludes that dreams are generally “regarded in a sense as deceptive.” Sasha Aikhenvald reports that the Peruvian Shipibo-Konibo and Brazilian Tariana-Tucano view their dreams as “unreal” (2004:309, 346–347, 380); indirect knowledge is in such cases simply uncertain knowledge. Graham (1994) identifies dreams as an “inner experience” pertaining to “individual subjectivity” but describes how Xavante have developed elaborate “dream-songs” that provide them with expressive forms for communicating inner experiences. Through the singing of these songs in the context of community dances, the individual experience is socialized.

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373; Harner 1984:144). Through their beliefs about aru´tam waka´n
, however, Shuar men transformed death from an experience of emptiness and consumption into a source of power and productivity. For it was at the moment of his own death that a warrior’s own aru´tam waka´n
—the same number that he had possessed over the course of his life—would come into existence (Harner 1984:143). A great warrior could attempt to will his aru´tam waka´n
to his sons, by instructing them to leave his corpse seated on a stool and leaning against the center-post of the men’s end of his house. The sons and sometimes sons-in-law would then take turns each night to take tsa´ank, enter the house in darkness, touch the corpse, and announce, “I am your son, father,” in the hopes of encountering an aru´tam waka´n
(this ritual thus enacts the quest for an aru´tam through a maı´kua-granted vision; in this case, the corpse stands in for the waka´n
; see Harner 1984:168–169). The inheritance of an aru´tam waka´n
, however, was far from guaranteed (see Mader 1999 for a more comprehensive analysis of Shuar discourse about power as constantly circulating and transforming).31 Brushing against the Ineffable Anthropologists usually explore the intersubjective element of visionary knowledge through accounts of shamans (e.g., Buchillet 1992; Hill 1992; Kracke 1992; Townsley 1993), where a visionary transaction with a spirit empowers a normally benevolent transaction between the shaman and another human in the ordinary world. Since shamans typically talk about their visions with their patients, they are usually good informants on visionary knowledge. The aru´tam vision of the Shuar kaka´ram is in many ways the structural opposite, in which a transaction with a spirit in the vision-world empowers one to kill other humans.32 Despite the decline in warfare, even today, kakarma (power) is for many Shuar a tangible quality. But kaka´rams do not readily talk about their visions. Elke Mader, who conducted research among the Shuar in 1990, 1991, and 1994, confirms Harner’s account of a twopart vision (Mader 1999:246; see also Harner 1984:138–139). She argues that power is transmitted through the words of the anthropomorphic aru´tam (Mader 1999:244–246). She provides a symbolic analysis of typical elements of the aru´tam encounter (pp. 227–230) and demonstrates convincingly the parallels between the imagery in individuals’ accounts of vi31. In Lacanian terms, one could say that these moments expressed attempts to activate “the name of the father”—as Lacan (2006 [1953]: 229–230) wrote, “for without names for kinship relations, no power can institute the order of preferences and taboos that knot and braid the thread of lineage through the generations.” Like most Amazonian cultures, however, Shuar social organization is based on generationally shallow households, not lineages (see Murphy 1979; Overing Kaplan 1981). Before the Federation, Shuar did not use patronyms; many did not even know the names of their grandparents (Mader and Gippelhauser 2000: 65). 32. I am describing the dominant elements of the structure; of course, shamans can kill, and warriors can also defend their families.

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sions and the imagery in the popular Shuar myth of the cave of the tayos (oilbirds [Steatornis caripensis]; pp. 249–270). She argues that there is a detailed discourse linking Shuar visions, myths, and rituals concerning the transmission of powers and Shuar feuding and warfare. Mader provides the most detailed and insightful account of Shuar symbolism. Her analysis relies not only on her own interviews but also on accounts collected by the missionary Siro Pellizzaro and the research of several Shuar students. While the raw material of this discourse is undoubtedly Shuar, I am concerned that the fact that this material has entered discourse is to some degree the accomplishment of missionaries and their Shuar students, that is, part of the transformation in Shuar history from power based on visions to power based on writing. But even granting that a Shuar discourse about power existed before missionization, all ethnographic accounts of the Shuar make clear that some elements of visions enter discourse only under specific circumstances; my informants suggest that there is some element of visions that may not enter discourse at all. This essay is meant to complement Mader’s work by focusing on those elements that resist entry into discourse or that enter discourse only in distorted form. None of my informants would speak to me of the details of their encounter with their aru´tam, but they all spoke of the feeling of strength and purpose that it gave them, qualities that stayed with them as long as they possessed the aru´tam. Taylor provides a different, though equally significant, account of the beliefs of the Achuar. Noting that the aru´tam is essential to the personality of an “outstanding human-being,” she remarks that her informants do not speak of the aru´tam transmitting any “energy” or “force” (as occurs in other Amazonian societies) to the seeker. She then asks, what exactly is conferred? The Jivaroan emphasis on the heightened sense of selfconsciousness and purpose, instead of that of strength or vitality as such, seems to point to a different interpretation, which is that the arutam serve as an existential amplifier; it gives not just life, but, more importantly, life with direction or quality, life linked to a certain set of values. (Taylor 1993: 666)

Although there are some notable differences between Shuar and Achuar (the Shuar receives and absorbs the aru´tam itself), the emphasis on a heightened sense of self, of self-possession, is shared. What is it about visions that leads Shuar to view them as sources of power? To understand these other elements, I wish to reflect on a double tension within these practices. One is the straightforward way in which the heightened sense of one’s own self and vitality is directed toward the extermination of the life of another self (boys too young to participate actively in a raid would accompany their fathers on raids; Harner 1984: 139). The other is the conjunction of speech and silence: Most of his relatives and acquaintances shortly know that

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he has acquired an arutam soul simply because of the change in his personality. For example, he especially tends to speak with great forcefulness. However, he must not tell anyone that he has acquired such a soul, or it will desert him. (Harner 1984:139)33

Aside from prowess at killing, combined with invincibility, the principle diagnostic of a kaka´ram is the ability to speak clearly and effectively. This ability is exemplified in autobiographical narratives, which, according to Taylor (2007:148), are “in fact the only kind of discourse in which experience of the past is given collective shape” (see also Hendricks 1993). Yet one of the most important events in the person’s life is kept out of this autobiography. Mader reports that there are conditions under which Shuar speak of their visions, but my informants have revealed to me only those visions that “have already come true.” It is easy to misunderstand a Shuar who says that his or her vision was true as likening the vision to a prediction. Given Shuar views of the ordinary world, it makes more sense to liken the relationship between the envisioned future and the future in this world to the relationship between the uwishı´n’s nonmaterial but real tsentsak and the material tsentsak that is its mimetic manifestation. It is not really that the vision “came true”; rather, it is that the Shuar came to experience the material manifestation of the vision. Thus, Shuar talk of their visions is not in my view a violation of secrecy. In effect, to say that a vision has come true is simply to say that others have seen it; it is thus their vision too. The vision entered the social on its own, as it were. According to Harner, during the visions the waka´n
informs the seeker of his fate and then enters the seeker’s body. We could say that the vision enters the seeker’s body; through the body, the vision enters the world, and the seeker meets his destiny (see Lacan 1988:159). This complex is so important, Taylor concluded, that “Jivaroan culture as tradition is not an objectified body of knowledge or set of explicitly held representations, nor is it concentrated in material things or institutions; it is primarily the means of achieving a certain kind of selfhood” (Taylor 2007:151). Put another way, then, what is it about the encounter with the aru´tam that produces this kind of selfhood?

Shuar Culture through the Looking Glass I think that the answer has something to do with the way in which the plant-granted vision is not like a mirror. Very few 33. Descola (1996:304) reports that Achuar share this attitude: The uncertainty surrounding the nature of the messages delivered by arutam, including the fact that it is possible to pretend to have received them, stems partly from the need to keep the revelation secret, on pain of forfeiting its benefits. The subject is such an intimate one that my companions will only speak of it with reticence, even when describing past visions whose personal relevance has now been superseded.

According to Chacon, however, Achuar speak freely of their visions (Chacon 2007:529–532).

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Shuar before the founding of the Federation, and no Shuar before European colonization, had a mirror. Adults could use language to describe one another or fill a gourd with water to create a reflective surface. But while there are many puddles in a rain forest, they are usually muddy and can barely reflect shadows. There may be some rivers and the occasional oxbow lake that run still enough to reflect an image back, but Shuar seldom pause before them, and the baby swaddled and slung behind a parent or, more likely, older sister has virtually no opportunity to see its reflection. What if it was not “the specular image,” as Lacan suggested, that was for Shuar infants “the threshold of the visible world” (Lacan 2006 [1949]:77) but something else? I propose that Shuar babies did go through “the Imaginary” but did not go through the mirror stage. I suggest that the first image a Shuar was given of itself as he or she became self-aware was not the deceptive image of wholeness that bourgeois children get from mirrors. In place of a mirror, I speculate that the Shuar Imaginary had a basis that is as material and objective as the mirror in bourgeois society but quite different in nature: the images that they encountered were those given to them by tsentsemp, tsa´ank, and maı´kua.34 Just as a mirror disrupts the visual plane against which it is set (for example, creating the illusion of depth when flat on a wall), visions disrupt any consciousness of a continuous reality. While each person’s vision was subjective, this realm of the “Imaginary” had an objectivity for Shuar because it was based on the ingestion of plants; plants constituted the external and shared point of reference for all power-granting visions. Most importantly, the vision did not present the child with an image of itself; it was the medium for an encounter with another subject.35 Mader provides a detailed analysis of the part of visions that Shuar recount in words and that thus draws on and enters into discourse. While I value her analysis, I do not believe 34. Shuar make a clear distinction between plant-granted visions, karama`, and the dreams that come with sleep, kara. Shuar have no compulsion about sharing and talking about their ordinary dreams with others. Moreover, they interpret dreams, but not for knowledge of the self. As Philippe Descola has demonstrated, Achuar have a complex hermeneutics involving inversion and homology, through which they interpret their dreams to gain knowledge of future events (an aru´tam may reveal itself in a dream, but such dreams are speechless and are not spoken of; Descola 1989:443; see also Peluso 2004:108). Descola’s larger, and compelling, argument is that Achuar view their dreams more like the way Claude Le´vi-Strauss views myths than the way Freud views dreams. He concludes that “when dreams want to reason like the structuralist, they can do with the help of the Jivaro” (Descola 1989:449). Peluso, in contrast, describes how the Ese Eje of the Peruvian Amazon believe that a pregnant woman’s dream can reveal through the medium of language the true name, which is the true identity, of her yet-to-beborn baby [Peluso 2004:110].) 35. According to Karsten (1935:445), “These spirits are essentially the ancestors (apa´chiru) of the sleeping Indian, who give their descendants advice and instruction. But on the other hand these spirits are also the souls (waka´ni) of the narcotic plants themselves, with whom the Indian enters into intimate communion by consuming the drinks.”

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that it is sufficient to explain the power that Shuar gain through the vision. In my conversations with Shuar there is a surplus power, a feeling of power that goes beyond the waka´n
’s account of the future. As Harner and Mader have both pointed out, the communication of knowledge about the future is only one part of the encounter between a person and an aru´tam waka´n
. Both emphasize that a crucial part of this encounter is the incorporation of the aru´tam waka´n
, or some of its power, into the person. This Shuar belief is similar to Lacan’s point that encounters with others not only influence one’s self-image but also actually constitute the ego, that is, a part of one’s self. It is this intersubjective mutual recognition in the plant-granted vision that, for Shuar, establishes “the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (Lacan 2006 [1949]: 76). Descola calls attention to this dimension of the self in his conversations with Achuar concerning kinds of aru´tam.36 Descola’s careful analysis of anent (a very specific register that I discuss at greater length below) meant to summon an aru´tam makes it clear that it is the formation or transformation of a new kind of subjectivity that is the essential source of power: Of particular significance, finally, is the exclamation, “As I wait in expectation, let him carry me off [jurukuta], as I wait in expectation, let him rearrange me [iwiaitkuta]”: the effect of arutam is revealed here in two complementary modalities. The first evokes the adoption of a child and thus suggests the creation of a new social identity; the second indicates a metamorphosis in the course of which the supplicant discovers himself to be endowed with new characteristics. This is confirmed by Tunki who, in answer to the question “How does arutam act upon the visionary?” replied “Arutam reorganizes [iwiaitkawi] the personality: it becomes a new personality.” (Descola 1996:309)

What is the relationship between the verbal and nonverbal parts of the vision? Here, I believe, anthropologists may benefit from Lacan’s methodological arguments against his fellow psychoanalysts. Most simply put, Lacan felt that his colleagues depended unquestioningly on language to access dynamics that resisted entry into language: early-childhood experiences and the unconscious. He believed that the discourse created by the analyst and the analysand disguised and distorted precisely those elements of the analysands’ experiences and desires that 36. Some of his informants believe that there are two kinds of aru´tam, one that promises domestic success and one that promises martial success. Descola, however, is more inclined to the view of others who reject this distinction, claiming that all aru´tam grant a “perfect self-control and sense of one’s own self worth” and that it is this kind of subjectivity, rather than specific words, that makes both kinds of success possible (Descola 1996:303).

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needed analysis. Similarly, Mader’s analysis of the verbal part of the vision gives us insight into how adults comprehend their encounter with an aru´tam. Typical of most adult experiences, it is, of course, mediated by language. And as Mader’s analysis demonstrates, it of course gives us further insight into Shuar discourse. But this is only one dimension of personhood. How, though, might we understand the portion of the vision that cannot be verbalized?37 How can we understand the significance of the plant-granted visions of preverbal Shuar children? Here I believe that an anthropology of the ineffable can learn from Lacan’s psychoanalysis of the ineffable (Lee 1990:33–34). For Lacan, the point of entry into an understanding of bourgeois subjectivity was the mirror. I believe that for Shuar the point of entry is the plant-granted vision. My method is to reflect on the ways plant-granted visions are and are not like mirror images. This is a speculative exercise, but it helps us look at other aspects of Shuar culture in new and interesting ways. My argument is simple and thus brief. Shuar recognize that the Symbolic—the order constituted through language—is a realm of misrecognition and impossible desires (see Basso 1987 for an analysis of language as a realm of deception and illusion among the Brazilian Kalapalo). We can thus use Lacan’s analysis of the Symbolic to infer what occurs in the Shuar vision. If speech is the realm of misrecognition, then for Shuar their visions are a realm of true recognition, the true recognition of, and consequently (and most importantly) by, an Other. In their earliest visions, I propose, babies encounters images of the Real—an experience that reinforces their experience of reality as Real. In later visions, the child encounters a nonhuman from which it experiences a pure and truthful recognition, a kind of recognition not possible from other human beings (which has implications for Shuar attitudes toward sociality that I explore below). Like Lacan’s mirror-visionary, the Shuar visionary-Imaginary is built up and modified through a person’s life. However, whereas Lacan’s Imaginary begins with a literal mirror 37. Of course, an ethnographer may consume any of these plants. This is what Michael Harner did in an attempt to gain insight into the religion of the Conibo in the Peruvian Amazon. In 1961, he took ayahuasca (the Quichua name for natem) and recounted his visions to a master shaman, who told him, “You can surely be a master shaman” (Harner 1980:8). In 1964, he returned to Shuar territory specifically to begin training to become a shaman. The day after taking maı´kua, he began to tell his two companions what he had seen when one interrupted him: “You must not tell anyone, even us, what you have encountered. Otherwise, all your suffering will have been in vain. Someday, and you will know when that is, you can tell others, but not now” (Harner 1980:16). Michael Harner entered the “real” world of the Shuar by leaving anthropology. The anthropologist is left to work within the limits of language. Lacan, Lorenzo Chiesa (2007:13) wrote, intended to demonstrate that “the ego is nothing but a necessary imaginary function of the subject, while arguing that the subject cannot be reduced to his imaginary dimension.” Perhaps the ethnographer faces an analogous challenge, to conjure up in language an image of the ethnographic subject, without suggesting that the ethnographic subject can be reduced to this image.

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and is built up through metaphorical mirroring, the Shuar Imaginary begins with a plant-granted vision and is built up through more plant-granted visions, as Shuar would repeat the search for an aru´tam many times in the course of their lives. I do not question that Shuar also experience metaphorical mirroring, that is, the reception of an image of one’s self through the actions and reactions of another. I point out only that Shuar insist on a clear distinction between the encounters they have with other beings in the real world of the plant-granted vision and the encounters they have with other beings in the deceptive world of everyday relations. (Put another way, for Lacan the ego exists in the Imaginary register. For Shuar, no ego is real in this world. For Lacan, the subject is split. For Shuar, the “me” and the “I” are allies in a way that contrasts strongly with their roles in Lacan’s patients.) For Lacan, the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic may coexist as distinct registers in the life of an adult, but we have direct access to the Real only as preverbal infants. Shuar adults, however, can always have another direct encounter with the Real through a plant-granted vision and new encounter with an aru´tam. It is for this reason, I posit, that Harner’s (1984:134) informants told him that the normal world is a lie, but the world of the aru´tam is real. The effect of the vision’s disruption of ordinary “reality,” one might say, is to reverse the semiotician’s point that symbols are the arbitrary signifiers of objects: visions reveal that there is something arbitrary about the objects of the mundane world (to suggest a reformulation of the quote from Harner [1984:135], at the beginning of “Power/Knowledge”).38 The visionary-Imaginary thus involves a be´ance for Shuar, as for the bourgeois analyzed by Lacan. The Shuar be´ance, however, takes different forms and functions: a gulf between the Imaginary and the Symbolic (i.e., between vision and speech) and, as Harner put it, between the false normal world and the true hidden world. Put another way, for Lacan the Imaginary effects a split in the subject; for Shuar, it effects a split in the world. But there is no reason to believe that, as was the case for Lacan’s analysands, who he supposed had all passed through the mirror stage, Shuar identify the visionary-Imaginary in terms of a gap between the body as dependent fragments and the body as autonomous whole. The earliest visions that occur after the Shuar child enters the Symbolic reflect knowledge 38. According to Aldous Huxley (2004 [1954]:79), The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

While the first sentence applies to Shuar, the ambivalence of the rest of this passage does not: Shuar report leaving the visionary-Imaginary more sure, self-satisfied, and proud. This is because all Shuar agree that the realm of the vision is true. If there is something that makes Shuar less sure, less self-satisfied, and humbler, it is something in the ordinary world.

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of its split or alienated subjectivity, but one that contrasts sharply with that of the bourgeois subject. The principal divide that the Shuar encounters within the visionary-Imaginary is not the distinction between the Shuar and his self-image, his “me”; it is between the Shuar and the aru´tam. There is in this drama a kind of alienated subjectivity, but the relationship between the Shuar and the aru´tam is one not of identification but of attachment. As long as the aru´tam is partnered with the Shuar, it is a source of overwhelming power. As Shuar typically suggest, in the visions that occur as they grow older, there is some kind of symbolic communication that, coming from a nonhuman, Shuar take to be accurate in the ordinary sense of the word. Perhaps these revelations of the seeker’s future are the noncorporeal analogue of that nonsymbolic portion of the aru´tam that is incorporated into the seeker’s body. This experience enables Shuar to articulate another difference internal to the subject, between the Shuar who ingests the plant-granting vision and the Shuar who is “rearranged” and augmented by the aru´tam. But this second subject is neither the ego in Lacan’s sense of self-image nor Freud’s “ego-ideal” against which the Shuar may judge himself (and fall short)—it is the “me” transformed into the “I” who will return to the ordinary world and a life of action. In other words, the one thing visions have in common with the mirror stage is what Lacan identified as the truth of the mirror stage: not what one is, but what one will become. Shuar make clear that central to the visionary recognition is a recognition of what one will become. In contrast to bourgeois children, for Shuar the experience of the be´ance is exhilarating and literally empowering. The Shuar visionaryImaginary is the inverse of Lacan’s mirror stage: power and independence signified by the fragmented and metamorphosing images of Others issued forth from the plant (not the wholeness reflected by the mirror). I propose that this “visionary-Imaginary” constitutes “another Other,” that is to say, another realm that can, as it were, stand up to language.39 I am not arguing that Shuar did not go through Lacan’s Imaginary. Shuar children entered into the Symbolic, interacted with other children and adults, and surely formed selfimages through these encounters. I am, however, proposing that Shuar had and continue to have access to another Imaginary, one mediated through visions and constituted through relations not with other egos (“me’s”) but with other I’s, that is, the aru´tams. Shuar could thus have a subjectivity that avoids or even resolves psychological problems caused by the ego. More to the point, the visionary-Imaginary and the Symbolic had functions for Shuar fundamentally different from those of the Lacanian Imaginary and Symbolic in bourgeois society. In both, the Imaginary mediates a relationship between the Real and the Symbolic. In bourgeois society, I sug39. It stands up to other people, as well: since visions do not enter speech, other people cannot play a role in interpreting their meaning.

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gest, it is the terrain in which the Symbolic colonizes the Real. Conversely, I suspect that through visions, Shuar created a space in which the Real could colonize the Symbolic. One way it did so was through seemingly endless cycles of feuding and warfare that repeatedly squeezed, almost to the point of closure, the cycle of life and death. For Lacan, during the Imaginary a ruptured identity manifests itself in jealousy verging on paranoia; frustration with the impossibility of being the internalized Other explains childish aggressiveness (Grosz 1990:41–42). For those who view the mirror stage metaphorically (with Mommy playing the mirror), this phase ends with the resolution of the Oedipus complex (Grosz 1990: 42–43). Shuar, however, continued to have literal visions into adulthood, resulting in a desire to kill that was not enclosed by the Oedipal triangle but rather channeled through extensive kinship networks that organized blood feuds and warparty alliances. Another way the Real colonized the Symbolic was through practices (described below) that disallowed speech or distorted it beyond recognition. Put another way, by punctuating their speech with certain silences and by distorting speech beyond recognition during encounters with others or attempts to conjure up visions for others, Shuar mimicked aspects of their encounter with an aru´tam and thus extruded a bit of the Real into reality.40 Visions, however, enable a Shuar to speak truthfully. It is not that a vision reveals a particular truth about which the Shuar may speak; it is rather that the possession of an aru´tam manifests itself in the person’s ability to see and speak about the world clearly. The Shuar term for this quality is paan chicham (clear speech), which Shuar believe may overlap with, but be different from, penker chicham (good speech). An anthropologist taking a performative approach to language can say that individual Shuar manipulate speech and use it strategically to manipulate others with more or less skill and that the most skillful are considered kaka´rams. Shuar, however, believe that a kaka´ram is sincere and transparent. It is as if it is the authentic quality of the vision that enters into the kaka´ram’s speech. Above, I called attention to the mimetic relationship between the material and nonmaterial tsentsaks of the uwishı´n. It seems to me that the relationship between the paan chicham and the aru´tam waka´n
of the kaka´ram is analogous. Paan chicham is mimetic of the aru´tam in its power and truthfulness. This leads to an irony, if not a paradox, in that the kaka´ram does not speak clearly about his visions. This paradox is resolved on the eve of a raid, which occasions the principal exception to the taboo on speaking of 40. Similarly, Bruce Fink has suggested that some forms of bourgeois feminism are, in effect, attempts “to subjectify the real” (Fink 1995:117). If in Lacanian terms the “phallus” is a function of “the alienation brought about by language,” perhaps the array of Shuar practices that privilege visions and that distort or deprecate speech can be seen as forms of political resistance against the phallic function (Lacan 1977:28; see also Fink 1995:106).

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one’s visions. Warriors took turns revealing to one another the identity of their respective aru´tams (for Shuar, these often turn out to be legendary ancestors such as Shakai and Nunkui). The ultimate proof that one possesses an aru´tam is that one could speak its name—one had the knowledge and also the sincerity and honesty. To prove that one has an aru´tam, one must give it up.41 It was through this paradox, I suggest, rather than the kinds of neuroses Lacan treated, that Shuar paid the price for their divided subjectivity. The split effected by the identification with and incorporation of the aru´tam enacted being’s embracing of its becoming. The only threat that this arrangement presented to Shuar was the possibility of the loss of the aru´tam. Yet even this loss Shuar managed to make their own by deliberately disowning their aru´tam on the eve of a raid, by violating its secrecy and naming it among the other warriors. This negation of becoming was simultaneously its realization. As soon as the warrior pronounced the name of his aru´tam, it departed his body; in effect, on the eve of killing, the warrior committed a form of spiritual suicide (Harner 1984:140). I think that it is highly significant that this occurred at the threshold of death, as the warrior would either have killed or have been killed before the next night fell. Freud grappled with this dependence of life on death in his various writings about the death instinct. In light of Shuar beliefs, Lacan’s account makes more sense: The death instinct essentially express[es] the limit of the historical function of the subject. This limit is death—not as an eventual coming-to-term of the life of the individual, not as the empirical certainty of the subject, but, as Heidegger’s formula puts it, as that “possibility which is one’s ownmost, unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as such indeterminable (unu¨berholbare),” for the subject. (Lacan 2006 [1953]:262)

This practice is evocative of Lacan’s understanding of the aim of psychoanalysis: for the analysand to be able to speak his or her own story (to speak as an “I” rather than as a “me”), the analysand must recognize life’s dependence on death:42 The events of a subject’s life come to have meaning only through their relationship to a future point in that life that is somehow essential and revelatory of meaning. . . . Death is such an essential and revelatory future moment, not because it is a nonarbitrary end point of life, but because it is the one part of the subject’s life that cannot be taken 41. In my analysis of Shuar head-shrinking, I argued that, unlike bourgeois culture, Shuar culture was not based on the accumulation and display of valued goods (Rubenstein 2007:364–365). The same principle is at work here: it is through a verbal display that the aru´tam is returned to circulation. 42. To put it succinctly, if vulgarly, it is said that only two things in life are certain, death and taxes. The latter says much about being the subject of a state. But if we are speaking of all human beings and wish to include Shuar, then the one thing in life that is certain is death. It is this certainty to which Heidegger, as quoted by Lacan, was referring.

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away from the subject: one’s death is unavoidably one’s own. (Lee 1990:92)

When one is born into a social world often governed by convention and taught to express one’s feelings and desires in a language shared and shaped by countless others, one’s death is not just the end of one’s becoming, it is most purely one’s own. In speaking of and thus losing one’s aru´tam, one spoke this truth. The vision entered the space of language and left the kaka´ram behind. It left the “I” behind, alone to confront its ego, its “me.” Perhaps battle was as much a contest between the “I” and the “me” as it was between two warriors: the next day, a man could say either “I killed him” or “he killed me.”43 The Shuar subject thus entered life on its own as the warrior entered the space of death (one might say that in order to kill, the warrior must first be able to die). The murder of another the next day may thus be considered a kind of rebirth (which, at some point, will be followed by another trip to a waterfall, to take maı´kua again, and encounter another aru´tam).44 The warrior was vulnerable not only in the face of his enemies but also in the face of his allies. Shuar social life offered very few occasions for large-scale collective action. A war party was one of the few occasions for many men from several clusters to work together. A successful party required a solidarity that often rested on a weak foundation, especially as it was quite possible for members of the same party ordinarily to be enemies. One could easily take advantage of the conditions of the raid to kill the other (Harner 1984:185). Revealing the identity of one’s aru´tam on the eve of a raid was one way to heighten the sense of shared purpose. Perhaps the fact that this act had the effect of expelling one’s own aru´tam—of exposing one’s self among one’s fellow warriors— further heightened the sense of solidarity. The destruction of a social group was thus preceded by the creation, however fragile and ephemeral, of one of the largest social groups to which a Shuar man might ever belong. Shuar warriors gave up their aru´tams in return for a brief period of social solidarity. In the next section of this essay, I describe certain practices that illustrate the fraught nature of Shuar sociality that would have made such moments so precious. These practices involved ritual uses of speech, the principal means by which power intruded into the social.

Language and the Space of Death As in Lacanian theory, Shuar seemed to inhabit a Symbolic 43. This helps us understand the muisak: the “avenging soul” is the “me” that was killed, pure ego whose sociality can only take the form of violence. 44. According to Descola, Achuar believe that the aru´tam does not depart until after one has killed. The loss of one’s aru´tam leaves one “in a state of extreme languor, racked by insatiable hunger, all will annihilated” (Descola 1996:304).

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register that is defined by violence and vulnerability. Lacanian thought provides a useful point of reference for comparing bourgeois culture and Shuar culture, in that it directs our attention to the relationship between the Symbolic and violence. But, I argue, the terms and operation of this relationship are strikingly different in these two cultures. In bourgeois societies, the name of the father (represented by the phallus) displaces one’s power over the Symbolic; symbolic castration—the loss of one’s phallus—is the price one pays for entering society.45 In Shuar culture, on the other hand, it was through the actual gain of an aru´tam that one entered society; individuals gained mastery over speech through their encounter with an unnamed aru´tam. These individuals chose the moment of loss—not of the Symbolic but of their kernel of the Real—by speaking the name of the aru´tam before entering the space of death. As feminist theorist Kaja Silverman pointed out, an important way to begin situating Lacan’s analysis historically and culturally (and thus moving away from the suggestion that the value of Lacanian thought depends on the universal validity of his claims) is by distinguishing between his concepts of “the law of language” and “the law of kinship structure.” Following the work of Claude Le´vi-Strauss (1951, 1969) and Gayle Rubin (1975), she argues that according to the former, the incest taboo between child and parent, central to bourgeois culture, leads to an erotic displacement that maps 45. Lacan argued that the function of “the Symbolic” (language) in bourgeois society is determined by the Oedipalized character of the nuclear family: “For Lacan, successful negotiation of oedipal conflicts is quite literally a matter of learning to speak properly” (Lee 1990:64). This involves literally taking “the name of the father” (i.e., paternity; one’s name signifies the acceptance that the father has sexual rights to the mother). In this formulation, “father” is the essential signifier: The father is the representative, the incarnation, of a symbolic function which concentrates in itself those things most essential to other cultural structures: namely, the tranquil, or rather, symbolic, enjoyment, culturally determined and established, of the mother’s love, that is to say, of the pole to which the subject is linked by a bond that is irrefutably natural. (Lacan 1979 [1953]:422–423)

Five years later, Lacan proposed to view the phallus as the essential signifier. In this sense, “phallus” does not refer to a part of the body (or one might say, apart from the body: the castrated, or potentially castrated, penis) but to something more fundamental: the alienation of signifier from signified and the alienation of speakers from language (Lacan 2006 [1958]:579). In short, language in bourgeois society is phallocentric. I would suggest that while language may function as the Other for Shuar as well, their language may not be phallocentric and its function is not shaped by the dynamics of the Oedipus complex. Lacan himself suggested that cultures like that of the Shuar cannot be understood in terms of the Oedipal complex I think that the Oedipus complex did not appear with the origin of man (assuming it is not altogether senseless to try to write the history of this complex), but at the threshold of history, or “historical” history, at the limit of “ethnographic” cultures. . . . I am convinced that its function had to be served by initiatory experiences in cultures that excluded it, as ethnology allows us to see even today. (Lacan 2006 [1946]:150)

I believe that pre-Federation Shuar culture provides a good example of such a culture.

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relations among father, mother, and child. According to the latter, the incest taboo between brother and sister, central to nonstate societies, leads to the circulation of women, alliances between brothers and brothers-in-law, and the organization of families into larger social units (Silverman 1992:35–42; see also Le´vi-Strauss 1969).46 As Silverman (1992:37) points out, there is no necessity for the circulation of women. Among the Shuar, who were matrilocal, one could, for example, say that men circulated. Of course, one could say that Le´vi-Strauss’s point about the use of women to forge alliances among men held, but the circulation of men in Shuar society had important consequences. It was used to forge alliances between a senior warrior and his sons-in-law (not brothers-in-law). This had two important consequences. First, it functioned to build up the power of senior warriors (see also Turner 1979). If institutionalized, this could, one might suppose, have led to the development of the state. But the second consequence was that when the senior warrior died, there was no longer any bond holding the sons-in-law together. They dispersed to form their own networks of allies. In Shuar society, kinship did not build up larger social units; it broke them down.47 The senior warrior and his sons-in-law formed an independent social group, but they were not autonomous; they belonged to multiple, overlapping networks of allies. According to older ethnographies, Shuar socialized a great deal. Nevertheless, Harner describes a life that was insecure and at times lonely. The problem, as I have argued through this essay, is not a failure of social solidarity but rather the undependability of networks and, at a more profound level, the lack of trustworthiness in recognition, in the truth value of recognition. The “Symbolic” as a space of death signals the perpetually troubled relationship Shuar have with both language and other Shuar. Whereas the Shuar visionary-Imaginary is constituted through the recognition of an impossible other, the Shuar Symbolic is, I suggest, constituted through, and constitutes, the dangerous—in many cases impossible—realm in which people encounter ordinary others. In this section, I 46. Silverman is attentive to research by anthropologists, as are Deleuze and Guattari, but for understandable reasons they give too much emphasis to the work of Le´vi-Strauss. Although I do not share their emphasis on the “aesthetics of conviviality,” this essay is strongly influenced by the arguments about sociality in Amazonia forwarded in Overing and Passes (2000a). The case studies in this volume provide an important counterpoint to Le´vi-Strauss’s account of kinship. 47. Recalling the comment of an insightful undergraduate, Robert Murphy noted that “the family is the only social unit whose function is to break up” (Murphy 1971:212). Murphy’s point was that most societies have developed other institutions that mitigate against this effect. The complex forms of marriage exchange Le´vi-Strauss analyzed at such length are one example, the Shuar Federation is another. I emphasize that before the Federation Shuar society was, in effect, coextensive with the family, because I have come to conclude that Shuar culture is best understood through practices (especially those involving plant-granted visions) that magnified, rather than mitigated against, this effect.

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explore the Symbolic as a space of death, first in childhood relationships and then in adult interactions and relationships. Speech and the Dialectic of Control The “Symbolic” as a space of death signals the perpetually troubled relationship Shuar have with both language and other Shuar. Whereas the Shuar visionary-Imaginary is constituted through the recognition of an impossible other, the Shuar Symbolic is, I suggest, constituted through, and constitutes, the dangerous—in many cases impossible—realm in which people encounter ordinary others. To understand this, I turn to a different tradition in psychoanalytic theory that has addressed intersubjective recognition. According to Jessica Benjamin, the tension between a desire to dominate and a desire to be dominated is a challenge all children must confront in their socialization. This is because infants are fully dependent on older caregivers, especially their mothers, but at around the age of 14 months they begin to become capable of some independence. For Benjamin, the move toward independence is not purely a move toward separation and autonomy. Ironically, in order to achieve independence, the child has a new need: the need to be recognized (by its mother, among others) as independent. As the growing child explores its world with increasing volition, it tests the boundaries that surround it. There is the risk that a child can become, in effect, a sadist, asserting itself at the expense of others; there is also the risk that the child will prolong its dependence on its mother, in effect playing the masochist, surrendering its own boundaries (Benjamin 1988:52–53). Benjamin’s language concerning recognition suggests the influence of object-relations theorists such as D. W. Winnicott, who first called attention to metaphorical “mirroring” as a form of recognition.48 As I read her, however, she is not concerned so much with “recognition” as with the ways a subject’s power depends on its recurring encounters with resistances. What is important is not the mother “mirroring” back an image of the infant but rather the mother and child’s struggle to assert their own agency without obliterating the other. This “dialectic of control” identifies a challenge in childhood socialization that persists through adulthood. Benjamin is working within psychoanalytic terms and thus within the Oedipal triangle (that is to say, a triangle organized by desire and threatened or repressed violence) of the bourgeois nuclear family. Among Shuar, this triangle is ruptured 48. Benjamin draws on the work of “object-relations” theory as advocated by Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott. In general, Lacan was critical of their inattention to the importance of language; this issue has serious consequences for therapeutic practice. I am concerned only with certain insights that Benjamin has concerning recognition in the realm of the Symbolic; I do not believe that these specific insights are incompatible with my general use of Lacan. What is significant is that Benjamin goes beyond self psychologists and object-relations theorists by exploring intersubjectivity in early-childhood development explicitly as a field of power.

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in at least two notable ways. In the world of the vision, it is through the intervention of the aru´tam and the dynamics of recognition of which we cannot speak; in the world of speech, it is through the intervention of a personal, bilateral kindred that extends far beyond the walls of the natal home and thus the history of violence (not Freud’s hypothesized castration anxiety but the threat of actual murder) and alliances that canalize this network. I believe that familiar narratives of blood feuds are a means through which the domination drama between parent and child described by Benjamin is doubly displaced. First, any tension between parent and child is displaced by enmity toward others. Second and just as important, domination is displaced by actual violence. Shuar culture is characterized by both a will to power and a rejection of authority. Domination, as Benjamin insists, is a kind of social relationship. The obliteration of another— the termination of any possibility for a social relationship— is the expression of power without domination. This may also explain why Shuar beliefs developed so as to encourage repeating the quest for a visionary encounter with an aru´tam: such visions, building on infantile visions that predated the entry into the Symbolic, provided a space where a Shuar, if he dominated his own fears, could have a social (i.e., intersubjective) interaction with a nonhuman, an interaction free of the complex and perilous negotiations between two humans. Dangerous Dialogues My reflections on the importance of intersubjective encounters in Shuar visions and the ways they contrast with intersubjective encounters among Shuar stand apart from much research among other Amazonian peoples. There has been a great deal of research recently on “conviviality” in Amazonian societies, what Joanna Overing and Alan Passes described as the “aesthetics of community” (Overing and Passes 2000c:xi; see also Overing and Passes 2000a). They called attention not only to how individual agency and sociality were mutually constitutive but also to the importance of the affective (as opposed to the purely structural) in this process (Overing and Passes 2000b:14). In an ethnography of the Piro of the Peruvian Amazon, Peter Gow noted that when people believe that all kin “should live well together,” it follows that kin who live apart are those with whom one cannot live well (Gow 2001:122). Gow’s comment occurs in the middle of an analysis of elaborate greeting rituals that occur when Piro of one village visit another; one could describe his account as a negative dialectic of conviviality. Given their pre-Federation settlement pattern and that Shuar even today consider the matrilocal homestead the basic unit of social life, one could say that they provide the extreme case of Gow’s principle: people do not get along with those with whom they do not live. In Hendricks’s account (1993: 146), Shuar revalue this negation as something positive: “I was told that the ‘traditional’ Shuar man was the one who

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separated himself from others and lived a quiet life avoiding conflict.” Shuar are highly social, but because households are dispersed, socializing often requires long-range visits (Harner 1984:105–111; Karsten 1935:245; Stirling 1938:96–99). The apparent contradiction between bellicosity and sociality leads to another important feature of Shuar culture: dialogic discourse (on ceremonial dialogues in native South America, see Urban 1986; see also Cre´peau 1993; Erikson 2000; Surralle´s 2003). As noted above, Shuar speech is an indicator of power—not because speech is a medium of domination (since no Shuar could give orders to another; Hendricks 1993:7) but because a skilled orator is taken to possess an aru´tam. Much of Shuar speech is structured around explicit calls for recognition, and in certain cases recognition must be carefully negotiated, lest one man be given cause to kill another. Ritual dialogues are both necessary and highly risky activities. Brief descriptions of two major kinds of ceremonial dialogues will establish the basic principles. According to Hendricks, the most important pre-Federation speech form was the ene´mak, “war speech” (Hendricks 1993:86). This began with the approach to and entry into a house: a visitor first announced his presence from a distance, with a call; at the entrance of the house, brandishing a shotgun or lance, he declared, “Winia´jai [I am coming].” At that moment, the host jumped up, brandishing his own shotgun or lance, and began questioning the visitor to establish who he was and the purpose of his journey. The dialogue consisted of stereotypic phrases, contracted to two to four syllables and shouted as the two men stepped forward and backward; the entire exchange could take up to 15 minutes (Karsten 1935:283–285). When large war parties assembled, the men formed two lines facing one another to perform the ene´mak collectively. If two strangers chanced upon one another on a trail, they also performed the ene´mak to establish their relationship and intentions. The other major form of ceremonial dialogue was (and in many places, still is) the aujsatin, or visiting speech. As with the ene´mak, this began with the approach to and entry into a house: a visitor first announced his presence from a distance, with a call; at the entrance of the house, brandishing a shotgun or lance, he declared, “Winia´jai [I am coming].” The visitor remained, as it were, in a state of suspended animation— “coming”—until the host responded, “Winitia [You may come].” According to Karsten, this period could be prolonged until the guest and host had both seated themselves, the host had arranged himself, and a woman of the household had served manioc beer. Once the host had formally acknowledged the guest, the guest would shout for 5 or 10 minutes—the nature of his journey, news from home, and if he was a stranger, to identify who he was, where he was from, and how the two men were related (if they were) and to affirm friendship and support. During this speech the host periodically shouted back an appropriate term of recognition (“yes,” “true,” “quite so,” “no,” “I don’t know”). When the visitor

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finished, the host reciprocated with his own speech (Karsten 1935:245–247; Stirling 1938:96–99). As Janet Hendricks writes, these exchanges “provide participants with an opportunity to display personal power, aggressivity, knowledge and skill, while at the same time preventing open conflict by acknowledging the power of one’s opponent” (Hendricks 1993:87–88). “Acknowledgment” is also a key function of the semantically limited, but essential, declarations listeners make while listening to a speech. Robert Cre´peau has argued that in situations where social solidarity is weak, Achuar visiting speeches, empty of content, have a phatic function in demonstrating mutual respect of the rules for social interaction and communication (Cre´peau 1993:93). I add that in a culture where “the effective use of language is considered to be a decisive factor in a man’s success in social and economic activities” (Hendricks 1993:86), the use of speech to acknowledge the speech, the presence, and the very existence of others is equally important. What speech is, in effect, acknowledging is the presence of a person with an aru´tam. That power, which the Shuar recognizes in the silent realm of the vision, is acknowledged by other Shuar in the realm of speech.49 Significantly, it is through gesture and voice, but not words, that men perform mutual dominance. But these speeches are not entirely void of content, and they have immediate communicative functions. Shuar children are brought up in a world where their families are involved in a variety of blood feuds, and whenever two men meet, they must discover immediately the nature of their relationship to assess whether they are friend or foe. During an ene´mak exchange on a path, for example, two men have a very short period of time to determine whether, through kinship relations, they are ancestral enemies. A man who is highly knowledgeable about his networks of kin and who wishes to avoid a conflict can identify himself in such a way as to assure amicability. Otherwise, one will kill the other. The same holds true when one visits another’s house: “Failure to manipulate kin classification successfully can result in the visitor’s food or beer being poisoned or in his being ambushed by the host after he leaves the house” (Harner 1984:103). In the realm of speech, the wrong kind of recognition means death. Secret Songs and the Vision of Sociality One might infer that the dispersed settlement pattern puts extra pressure on intrahousehold relations. Yet Karsten, Stir49. My view is close to that of Alexandre Surralle´s (2003:787), in his analysis of the greeting rituals of the nearby Candoshi: “The ceremony is not focused on signification but on the preconditions of signification: that is to say, the ceremony occupies a spectrum that extends from the perception of the presence of others to the first instances of categorization, those of identity and alterity of the participants.” As Surralle´s points out, this is achieved primarily through decoration and vision, the sustained reciprocal gaze of each other’s face, face paint, and ornamentation. I believe that this was important for Shuar as well, but my concern is the significance of the channel of speech.

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ling, and Harner observed that domestic relations between men and women and between adults and children are for the most part characterized by liberty and harmony. There is, however, an interesting record of unfulfilled desires and hurt or angry feelings. These enter language, but in a way that further illustrates a profound ambivalence toward language: anent. An anent, I suggest, is the closest speech can come to the visionary-Imaginary—and it does so in a form virtually unintelligible to other people. Anent are highly formalized statements that typically portray a desired situation. Shuar (like the Aguaruna and Achuar) believe that they were composed by legendary heroes in a mythic past (although anent often include Spanish words that sometimes describe objects of recent invention, such as “airplanes, jukeboxes, ink, books, and so forth”; Taylor and Chau 1983:99). Men and women have their own anent, which they share only with people of the same sex. Close kin may pass on their anent to others; one may also seek to purchase anent from an elder. Among the Aguaruna, one can learn an anent only with the aid of tsa´ank that has been chewed by the elder. Once one has memorized the anent, one must abstain from sexual relations and consuming certain foods for several days (Brown 1986:72, 168). “Anen are not characterized by directive speech. Few commands are to be found in them. Instead they consist primarily of descriptive statements about the singer or the future state of things” (Brown 1986:168). Nevertheless, anent are not referential, that is, they are not used to communicate information; they are performative: they are believed “to have a direct effect on the course of events” (Taylor and Chau 1983: 92). They are usually addressed to the productive activities of a household, such as hunting and cultivation, and harmonious relationships among people related through marriage, especially husbands and wives and brothers-in-law (Taylor and Chau 1983:94). Michael Brown concluded, The manipulative quality of anen shares much in common with the power of visions. Both are constituted by evocative imagery that illuminates a desired future state. Consumption of psychotropic substances figures in the performance of anen and the search for visions. Although both are essentially private experiences, they place the actor in direct contact with ancient sources of knowledge, thus projecting past and present into the future. Visions and anen are attributed a palpable quality that distinguishes them from other phenomena: they are both reified, referred to as “things” that have a life of their own. This reification underscores the degree to which the performer of an anen sees himself as engaging in a real operational procedure rather than as performing a purely symbolic act. (Brown 1986:169–170)

Anent are not speeches about visions; they are speeches that function in many ways like visions. The singer of an anent, I propose, is seeking to communicate a vision to another Shuar (this is why it is essential that anent are believed to have been authored by mythic heroes like Nunkui and Shakai,

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for these are the aru´tam that are the sources of visions). We could then view the words of the anent to be not like a prayer (or plea), an exhortation to the earth, or an animal, or one’s spouse, but rather the iconic representation of a vision to be. Critically, these speeches are removed by Shuar as much as possible from the realm of social discourse. Anent are secret; some people refuse to reveal their anent to an ethnographer; others are willing to produce in speech what they termed “imitations” of their anent (Brown 1986:187). The language of anent is heavily distorted: some syllables are repeated, others are contracted, parts of suffixes are dropped or changed, and in some cases new suffixes, which have no semantic value but affect the rhythm of the anent, are added (Taylor and Chau 1983:97). These changes often render one person’s anent unintelligible to others (Taylor and Chau 1983:99; Brown 1986:31). Most importantly, anent must be sung (an anent that is not sung is only an “imitation” of an anent, and not a real anent). Taylor and Chau (1983:95) argue that “song” is not a native category; what we call singing “is a metalinguistic device used . . . to signal the ‘otherness’ of the language one is speaking.” Anent are sung alone, or, if in the company of intimates, sung sotto voce. Sometimes, an anent is merely played on a musical instrument (Taylor and Chau 1983:94). Taylor and Chau (1983:96) call attention to the similarities between anent and shamanic chants (see also Buchillet 1992, on the power of the inaudible in Desana healing rituals, and Hill 1992, on the instrumentality of music in Wakue´ni healing rituals; Townsley 1993 provides a detailed analysis of the combination of chanting and “twisted language” in Yaminahua healing rituals). “Song,” they suggest, is the language of the pasuk (a shaman’s familiar; i.e., an assistant that in the real world of visions often takes the form of an animal) and tsentsak. I believe that the relationship between the words and the melody of the anent is analogous to that between the material and the nonmaterial tsentsak, or dart, used by shamans. With both anent and tsentsak, I believe, one may say that Shuar use a material but ineffective analogue for an immaterial (or unspoken) but effective instrument. I suggest that the material (or spoken) analogue is a technique for bridging the distance between the ordinary world and the invisible “true” world. Perhaps song is the language of the aru´tam waka´n
(or “aru´tam soul”)—this would explain why an anent played on a musical instrument has force but the words of an anent spoken without music are considered an imitation. The dilemma for Shuar is that words constitute the language of human beings; in the words of the anent, Shuar turn language against itself. The language that warriors use to communicate to one another the identity of their aru´tam has the effect of driving their aru´tam away. Perhaps by making language unrecognizable to other humans, Shuar hope to create in their solitary or soft chanting of anent a space in the mundane world where the truth of the imagination may abide. In their

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solitude, what they imagine most is productivity and the companionship of others.

Reflections of F on the Subject What is at stake in this article is how we talk about the difference between state and nonstate societies. It is not surprising that this is hard to talk about. Pierre Clastres (1989) began his provocative Society against the State (originally published in 1974; English translation published in 1989) by asking whether it is possible for us to talk about such peoples— “primitive” or “archaic” societies, including Amerindians, especially in Amazonia—without having to characterize them in terms of a lack of the institutions of coercion and subordination that we take for granted, in other words, as “stateless” societies. He suggested that rather than trying to understand such societies as lacking in power, we need to try to understand them as standing against a certain kind of power, namely, the “command-obedience” relationship. The rest of his essay consists of his reflections on what kind of power can be antithetical to the command-obedience relationship we so take for granted. Clastres argued that all power hinges on a relationship between speech and violence and that state societies (in which command-obedience is considered acceptable or even normal) are characterized by the conjunction of the two (as Weber [1978:54] put it, “the legitimate use of physical force”; emphasis in the original) and that nonstate societies employ a variety of strategies for keeping the two dimensions of power separate. In an intellectual tradition that perhaps includes Hobbes as well as Rousseau, Clastres believes that there are always people who are tempted to conjoin the two or that people may be aware of a desire within themselves to do so. “The State” exists not only as potentate but also as potentiality: as an idea, or the glimmer of an idea, somewhere in the mind (see Abrams 1988). Consequently, the performance of the practices that keep speech and violence separate constitutes a “history of their struggle against the State” (Clastres 1989:218; emphasis added). The Shuar add to Clastres’ examples another, and important, kind of history of a people’s struggle against the State. Among the Shuar, speech and violence are conjoined in the person of the kaka´ram: the search for the power of voice and the search for the power of physical violence are one and the same. Nevertheless, their pre-Federation social organization cannot be understood in terms of the command-obedience relationship, and it could hardly be characterized as a state. Given that the head of each household could aspire to be a kaka´ram, that the typical kaka´ram could generally rely consistently only on the support of his sons-in-law, that each cluster of allied households formed a politically and economically autonomous unit, and that these units typically dispersed when the elder kaka´ram died, one might characterize the history of the pre-Federation Shuar as a people’s struggle against Society.

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Nevertheless, I think that Clastres is right to call attention to the relationship between speech and violence. His analysis, however, lacks a theory of the subject, and I think that the interplay between speech (or discourse, or the Symbolic) and violence in the constitution of “the subject” is essential for a full understanding of the difference between the state and societies against the state. What I am attempting to do in this essay is to add to Clastres’ analysis of political practices in egalitarian society an analysis of the formation of “the subject” in one egalitarian society.50 I end this essay with some reflections on the relationship between different kinds of subjects and different configurations of speech and violence.51 I find psychoanalytic theory as provocative a set of reflections on the “subject” in bourgeois states as I find Clastres’ reflections on “power” in nonstate societies. In both kinds of societies, there is some kind of problem with “the subject,” but the problems (and hence, the subjects) are different. Lacan’s mirror stage is an encounter with the self that one can never become; Shuar visions involve an encounter with an other that no other human can be.52 Language and the limits of language are key to both, and an adequate understanding of the subject requires a reconsideration of the Symbolic. In keeping with much psychoanalytic theory, the Lacanian subject is the desiring subject, desire signifies a lack, and desire is constituted through the Symbolic. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Fe´lix Guattari have argued that this is a bourgeois view. While they employ Lacan’s distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, they explicitly treat desire as a presence. They argue that humans are born into a social world organized by flows between different organs of different people and things and that desires produce these flows (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:1–2, 46–48).53 In non-

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capitalist societies, flows are coded, regulating specific flows between specific organs on specific occasions, and people are territorialized, meaning that flows among them are local (pp. 139–153). As various kinship systems and their political and economic, as well as social, functions illustrate, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters are never just mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters—they always have other functions.54 The Clastrian question is, what kinds of desire organize speech and violence in ways that frustrate or serve the command-obedience relationship? For Shuar, I have argued, it is an augmentation of the person—specifically, the attachment of the power of the aru´tam through a plant-granted vision (rather than the mirror stage or castration anxiety)—that creates the desiring subject. This subject desires, above all else, not pleasure but power.55 Shuar experience this desire not as a lack but as a surplus of speech and a desire to kill. Although speech and violence are combined in the kaka´ram, they are functionally separate in that the threat of violence is never used to support the use of speech to command. Arguably, high levels of violence, or the threat of violence, promoted a dispersed settlement pattern among Shuar that undermined any attempt to institutionalize alliances among large numbers of kaka´rams under the leadership of one. Moreover, the desire to kill constitutes a kind of power that can never take the form of a command-obedience relationship: the only thing a kaka´ram wishes of potential victims is to kill them, not to command them. Speech and violence connect most directly not through a command but through the naming of one’s aru´tam on the eve of a raid. And it is this act— an autonomous act—that detaches the aru´tam-power from the kaka´ram’s body. It is the separation of the vision and speech, the violation of which initiates the separation of the aru´tam from the body, then—rather than the separation of nuclear family), they argue that

50. See Kracke (1978) for a psychoanalytically informed analysis of leaders in an Amazonian society. 51. Thus far, I have been using the word “subject” to refer to the person, whether an “I” (subjective case) or a “me” (objective case). For Lacan, the distinction between the “I” and the “me” is decisive, and it is only the former that is, properly speaking, the “subject.” I am not sure that this distinction applied to pre-Federation Shuar, but I do find Lacan’s attention to the desiring subject illuminating. 52. My attention to comparative paradigms of intersubjectivity parallels what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1996:190) calls the “symbolic economy of alterity” (see also Gow 2001; Vilac¸a 2010), although I draw on an intellectually distinct approach. This essay is in part a preliminary step toward a specific engagement with this emerging literature and in part an argument for the relevance and value of Lacan and Zˇizˇek to this larger project, especially when analyzing the colonization frontier. 53. Deleuze and Guattari, moreover, accept Freud’s conceptualization of the unconscious and often use Freudian language to develop their arguments. Nevertheless, they read Freud’s case histories as ofteninsightful documents of psychosocial dynamics of bourgeois families and not as documents of a universal theory of psychic dynamics. They insist that the Oedipal triangle and the experience of desire as a lack are expressions of bourgeois ideology. Against the classic Freudian view (while crediting Melanie Klein [1930] for emphasizing that a child’s psychological development is influenced by its relations with others beyond the

from his very early infancy, the child has a wide-ranging life of desire— a whole set of nonfamilial relations with the objects and the machines of desire—that is not related to the parents from the point of view of immediate production, but that is ascribed to them (with either love or hatred) from the point of view of the recording of the process, and in accordance with the very special conditions of this recording, including the effect of these conditions upon the process itself. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:48)

54. I suggest that it is systems just like these that Joanna Overing and Peter Gow have observed among the Piaroa of Venezuela and the Piro of Peru, respectively. Specifically, Overing has suggested analyzing social life in terms of coded flows (Overing Kaplan 1986:147, 149). As Gow makes clear, such flows are not organized like capitalist flows, where one person’s possessions are another person’s lack; rather, they are organized through highly coded and productive desires: People are not talking about the “rates of exchange” between different commodities such as game and sexual favors, nor about their respective property rights over products or their own bodies. In native Amazonian daily life people are talking about hunger and sexual desire, and the satisfaction of these desires by other people. (Gow 1989:568)

55. Power may be a cultural value and personal aspiration, but the kaka´ram, dependent as much on fluid social networks as on the recognition of an aru´tam, cannot be considered some primitive version of the autonomous individual.

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speech and violence per se (see Clastres 1989:152–155)—that distinguishes Shuar politics. I also take this to mean that the Shuar subject is essentially fragmented (albeit in a way that is fundamentally distinct from Freud’s bourgeois subject). The Oedipal State I conclude with an account of the bourgeois subject, because I think that this kind of subjectivity helps explain why Shuar, who successfully resisted the Inka and the Spaniards, were so quickly and peacefully subjugated by the modern state. In this account, I rely heavily on the work of various critical theorists.56 Deleuze and Guattari argue that the workings of class domination are better understood through an analysis of desire than through interests (1983:257). Deleuze and Guattari, philosopher Slavoj Zˇizˇek, and Kaja Silverman have forwarded very compelling, and complex, analyses of what Silverman (1992:2) calls the “libidinal politics” of capitalism by bringing Marxian and Freudian thought into engagement. I cannot hope to do justice to their arguments, but this conclusion is heavily indebted to their work. Political theory, which not only is a set of theories about states and their subjects but also is produced by the subjects of states, largely concerns itself with classifying different kinds of states, analyzing the different rights and duties of the sovereign and its subjects, and evaluating the relative strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of states. For political anthropologists, the existence of nonstate (or egalitarian) societies highlights certain seemingly universal features of states: the command-obedience relation that Clastres emphasizes and the class stratification that Morton Fried (1967) emphasizes. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1971 [1848]) famously remarked, the history of all such societies is a history of class conflict. In these theories, the state is fundamentally opposed to human freedom. The Enlightenment project was to theorize a new kind of order that would guarantee the freedom to choose one’s way of life (i.e., a system in which the sense of subject as actor would displace or determine the sense of subject as acted

56. Strictly speaking, “critical theory” refers to the work of the Frankfurt School, that is, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Ju¨rgen Habermas. These scholars drew on the works of Marx and Freud to reformulate the Enlightenment project and to analyze the origins of fascism in bourgeois culture. Although not aligned with the Frankfurt School, the scholars I rely on in this section—Deleuze and Guattari, Zˇizˇek, and Silverman—are engaged in similar projects, and I am using the term to refer to their work as well. Most critical theorists use the word “subject” to refer to both the grammatical sense of one who acts and the political sense of one who is subject to some ruling order. The tension between these two senses may have something to do with why Lacan believed that there is something fundamentally unstable about the subject. At least, this is how Zˇizˇek interprets Lacan.

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upon or spoken for). Proponents of the liberal state57 and of capitalism (i.e., the bourgeois state) claim that these systems have either achieved this goal or are the best means available to achieve it. As one of the central objectives of indigenous political movements, to seek the recognition from the state (and thus enjoy the rights of its subjects), entails recognizing the legitimacy of the state, indigenous peoples must care about the truth of this claim. The struggles of the Shuar Federation for legal recognition suggest that the Shuar accept this claim. Zˇizˇek’s work is of value not only because it provides an important critique of this claim but also because the very critique helps explain why Shuar would nevertheless find the bourgeois project appealing. As I read him, the great paradox of capitalism is not that it promises freedom while delivering inequality but rather that it does so in a way that convinces people that the solution to problems caused by capitalism is more capitalism. The key lies in the means through which the bourgeois subject is produced. According to critical theorists, the bourgeois subject came into being historically through the rise of the labor contract, which first emerged in Europe in the fourteenth century and became the dominant and paradigmatic relationship with the industrial revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see also the work of conservative legal historian Henry Maine [1946 (1861)]). According to Marx (1976 [1867]:668), the creation of capitalism—the transformation of money and other commodities into “capital”—begins with an act of mutual recognition: Two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact: on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour-power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour.58

These new workers were free in the sense that they were not part of the means of production (like slaves and serfs) and in the sense that they were “free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own” (Marx 1976 [1867]:668; see also pp. 165–166). The relationship between the capitalist and the worker was thus, it seems, predicated on the mutual recognition of two free and equal actors. This may have been the case in the fourteenth century, when feudalism was collapsing but before capitalism was institutionalized. Former serfs undoubtedly and very reasonably considered the labor contract to be a major improvement over their former con57. By “the liberal state” I mean states that claim legitimacy based on some combination of the rule of law and representative democracy, which emerged after the Glorious Revolution in Great Britain (1688), the American Revolution (1775–1783), and the French Revolution (1789–1799). 58. According to Marx, this is not a natural scenario but rather an encounter that had its origins in England in the fourteenth century, when the Black Death disrupted feudal relations, in some cases enabling lords to take direct control over the land of dead peasants and in other cases freeing peasants from their dead lord. Thus, at the same time a demand for and a supply of free workers came about.

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dition. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, however, the dependence of workers on wage labor was anything but a victory.59 This kind of contract developed before actual bourgeois states, and it provided the basis for the “social-contract theories” that have been used to legitimize the bourgeois state.60 According to these theories, the basis of this kind of state is not the command-obedience relationship around which feudal society revolved but the contract entered into among free and equal people. In turn, this kind of state enacted laws that supported and enforced the wage-labor contract while exacerbating economic and political inequalities among its subjects. The Marxist critique of capitalism is that the encounter between capitalist and worker in fact involves a misrecognition that itself is predicated on and perpetuates more profound misrecognitions. The fundamental misrecognition is that the capitalist and the worker are equal, or free in the same way. (As Silverman [1992:7] notes, in Lacanian thought the Imaginary and Symbolic identifications are “mutually coercive.” Perhaps this explains why the mirror is so important in bourgeois society, not just as a play object for parents and their babies but to the point that most people look at themselves in a mirror not only when they awake but also shortly before going to bed. The image it reflects—that one’s opposite is one’s equal—supports the fiction of the labor contract, that the worker and the capitalist, while formally opposites, are nevertheless equal.) That capitalists own the means of production has a series of important consequences. For example, British political economists such as Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo argued that as long as the supply of workers is greater than the demand, workers will need capitalists more than capitalists need workers, wages will be lower than profits, and capitalists will, on average, be wealthier than workers (see Marx 1976 [1867]:689, 720). 59. The ability of former serfs to demand of landowners wages in return for their labor certainly seems to have been a victory for the commoner. The situation began changing at the end of the fifteenth century, when English landowners realized that they could make more money by selling wool to Flemish mills than by renting land to farmers. When possible, landowners seized free holdings by force; this process was intensified and backed by the force of law with the enclosure acts in the eighteenth century. Laws were passed that forbade small landholders from owning livestock, ensuring their destitution. Newly landless people had no choice but to seek employment under any condition—in the sixteenth century, a series of laws were passed making idleness and begging illegal, punishable by flogging, imprisonment, and in some cases enslavement. It was through such laws that, as Clastres would put it, violence and speech combined to produce “the worker” as a subject of power. 60. Social-contract theory, which argues that the only legitimate basis for the state is the consent of the governed, was developed (in very different forms) by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Contemporary advocates of social-contract theory have also been influenced by Immanuel Kant.

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According to Zˇizˇek, however, this is but the material consequence of another kind of misrecognition: that the freedom of the worker is a form of freedom. “This freedom is the very opposite of effective freedom: by selling his labor ‘freely,’ the worker loses his freedom—the real content of this free act of sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital” (Zˇizˇek 1989:22). Thus, for Zˇizˇek, the wage-labor contract undoes the entire Enlightenment contract. However, as Zˇizˇek points out, this is because this contract is premised on yet another kind of misrecognition: that labor power can be a commodity like any other. Marx (following the political economists of his day) argued that labor is unique in that it is labor that transforms everything else into some useful product (Marx 1976 [1867]:53; see also Kołakowski 2005:227–228). “The crucial point not to be missed here,” Zˇizˇek (1989:22) insists, “is that this negation is strictly internal to equivalent exchange.” In formal terms, the exchange of labor power for a wage is entirely fair; the price set by the abstract forces of supply and demand, it is the act of exchange that by definition establishes the equivalence between a quantity of money and a quantity of the worker’s time. The “catch,” as he puts it, is that the commodity sold by the worker, labor power, can be used by the capitalist to produce other commodities that are worth more than the wages paid for the labor power. The process of capitalist production thus produces something new (something that would not come into existence, e.g., with the exchange of bread for meat, in Smith’s famous example), what Marx termed “surplus-value.” It is this surplus value that Marx believed to be the real source of wealth in capitalism, being reinvested in new technologies that have enabled capitalism to grow into a global system. In capitalism, not only is labor viewed like any other commodity but the meaning of labor (as a producer of all other values) is also displaced onto a different commodity: money (see Zˇizˇek 1989:24). This is because money can buy anything; Marx does not consider this an essential property of money but rather one that attaches to money only when it comes to be used to purchase labor power. Unlike feudal lords, capitalists invest a portion of their wealth in developing new markets and new technologies, thus creating ever more commodities that one might purchase with money and thus making money seem not only more desirable but also more productive and powerful. Marx calls this last misrecognition “commodity fetishism” because people believe that money— whether an inert object mined by humans (e.g., silver and gold) or printed by humans (e.g., paper money) or just an idea, today represented electronically—is talked about as if it were alive and had the power to reproduce, like real living things.61 61. An anthropologist does not need Marx to reach this conclusion about bourgeois culture. I witnessed an example of this when I was growing up in New York and saw television commercials for the Dime Savings Bank in which people were told that if they put their money in the bank it would grow, illustrated by a cartoon of someone burying a dime in the earth, and a tree growing out as if the dime were a seed.

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Now the point is not that people literally believe that money is alive (an equally important part of my socialization [see n. 61] was my mom—no capitalist, but a believer in savings banks—repeatedly insisting that “money doesn’t grow on trees”). According to Zˇizˇek (1989:30–33), the power of ideology is not that people believe in an illusion (e.g., that money can grow) but that people acknowledge the reality but live as if things were not so. This is evident when the state response to failing banks is to lend banks money and the response to a credit-default crisis is to encourage people to borrow more money. The critical question is, what keeps people believing things they do not “literally” believe? According to Marx, the working class was first produced from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries through state violence, which compelled ever-growing numbers of people to sell their labor power. But subjects of the bourgeois state must be produced anew in every generation, before entering the labor market (and without the constant and immediate use of violence).62 What kind of cultural and psychological work has to occur to sustain this series of misrecognitions? Critical theorists argue that this kind of subject—the subject ready and willing to enter into the wagelabor contract—is produced through the bourgeois family.63 Eerily, while revising this article in Liverpool—and during one of the worst credit crises in capitalism’s history—I can watch a commercial for Barclay’s Bank that begs viewers to have faith that if they put their money in the bank it will grow, this time accompanied by a computer-generated image of someone planting a pound coin in the ground, which then grows into a money tree. The technology behind the commercials may have undergone a “revolutionary” change, but the symbolism remains the same. For an analysis of such beliefs at the periphery of the capitalist system, see Taussig (1980). 62. A theory of the bourgeois subject is not a theory of class consciousness. In Marxian theory, the different positions of capitalists and workers in the labor contract means that the two classes have antagonistic interests, the consciousness of which will eventually lead to violent conflict. The presumption of equality in the labor contract, however, pretends that both parties are similar kinds of subjects. Members of both classes traffic in alienated labor power and fetishize commodities, and most crudely one could say that these actions define one kind of bourgeois subject (even as they define two different classes). According to Zˇizˇek and Deleuze and Guattari, this subject is a “desiring” subject that is produced through the Oedipal drama of the bourgeois family. 63. There has been a good deal of research by feminist scholars on the relationship between the bourgeois family and capitalism, although this research has largely focused on the relationship between husbands and wives. The rise of capitalism led to the breakdown of peasant and aristocratic households and the emergence of a new family form. The class system, combined with a sexual division of labor, transformed relations within and between families. Capitalism separates the workplace from the household, production from consumption, and labor from pleasure. As Miche`le Barrett (1988:221) noted, this kind of household can play a critical role in absorbing surplus production. Reviewing recent debates among feminist theorists and sociologists, Silverman concludes that the ideology of the family not only has economic determinants but also has a critical function within capitalism (Silverman 1992:49; see also Kuhn 1978:57–58; McDonough and Harrison 1978:28). This argument does not assume or require that all families match the bourgeois ideal. Barrett distinguishes between “households,” which can be organized in a variety of ways, and “familial ideology,” which represents the ideal of

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According to bourgeois ideology, the household is the proper place for sex and the production of children. Freud’s insight was that independent of whatever virtues parents consciously seek to instill in their children, it is the very structure of the household, the way that it triangulates desires, that produces “the subject.” Although Freud was relatively uninterested in capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari and Zˇizˇek find in psychoanalytic theory the link between the kind of subject produced by the bourgeois family and the kind of subject who will experience the labor contract as the foundation of freedom. According to Deleuze and Guattari, when capital becomes productive and money becomes the primary way through which social relations are ordered, the formerly coded “flows” that connected people and objects in highly specific ways become “decoded.” Crude examples of such decoding include the beliefs that “everything has a price,” that people will do anything if offered enough money, and, more commonly, that “my money is as good as anyone else’s” (i.e., money does not care whether someone is high- or low-born, cultivated or uncultivated). To all appearances, the bourgeois family is clearly set off from this uncoded world: “There ensues a privatization of the family according to which the family ceases to give its social form to economic reproduction: it is as though disinvested, placed outside the [social] field” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:263). Within the privatized family, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters are, or appear to be, simply themselves. In fact, they provide the interior limit to the utter decoding of all flows. The Oedipal triangle of “mommy-daddy-me” sets the stage for castration dramas through which desire comes to be experienced not as productive but as a lack. “We are all little colonies and it is Oedipus that colonizes us” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:265). Whereas Freud used the language of myth to understand this process (thus identifying one family’s personal drama as archetypical of all families), Lacan seeks instead to describe an abstract structure common to such families. He thus explains desire-as-lack by describing the subject, the “I,” not as an identity but as a position within this structure. Specifically, it is a location situated between two registers that are alien to one’s self: the Real (which, by definition, has not yet entered and perhaps can never enter into the Symbolic and is thus unavailable to one’s consciousness) and the Symbolic (the entire cultural world that exists through the words and deeds of others but is introduced to the subject, and is for Lacan signified, by “the name of the father”). One may think of this location as empty, but Lacan’s argument is that it is precisely this empty location that defines the subject. a given class (Barrett 1988:199). According to Barrett, this ideology reflects not necessarily a specifically capitalist logic but rather the ideals of an emerging bourgeoisie that was seeking to establish its social and cultural dominance over other classes (Barrett 1988:202–203; see also Foreman 1977; Zaretsky 1976).

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Put another way, the subject is constituted through lack: it is what is neither Real nor Symbolic. This lack defines the subject as a desiring subject. According to Lacan, there is always some portion of the Real that cannot enter into the Symbolic and that anchors this lack. But one can desire only what one can imagine. For example, at first this desire may simply be for milk. As the child grows and develops an image of herself as a person, as a desiring subject, she will realize that her mother is not just a source of milk but is another desiring subject, and the girl may come to desire her mother— or, more precisely, to desire being desired by one’s mother. And she will discover that her mother has other desires. The child’s desire will turn toward other objects, drawn from a repertoire of objects available in her culture. But none will ever satisfy her. None of them can. No object taken from that “Other” that is the Symbolic can ever fill the lack that exists because of that “Other” that is the Real.64 That portion of the Real that is cut off from one’s self is, according to Lacan, what Freud meant (in the terms of his Oedipal myth) by “castration.” Put another way, some portion of the Real that cannot be symbolized is what is “left over” (reste) from the process of symbolization. Lacan refers to this “left-over” as surplus—specifically a surplus pleasure (plusde-jouir), meaning a pleasure that one cannot use. Lacan also calls this jouissance (a pun on jouis-sense, “enjoyment-insense” or “enjoy-meant”). A simple example of this may be the pleasure some people experience when shopping, especially upon entering a supermarket or department store where one is surrounded by objects that one cannot purchase in fact but could purchase in fantasy (when I was growing up, this image was a common sign of the superiority of capitalism over communism in popular American culture; in the film Moscow on the Hudson, the overwhelming—i.e., “surplus”— bounty of a supermarket causes the protagonist, a Soviet defector, to faint). Zˇizˇek refers to this surplus pleasure as a “hard kernel” of the Real that exerts an obscure and uncontrollable force on society. All societies must find some way to channel this force, but most cannot. It is thus fundamentally destabilizing. In capitalism, however, the lack that defines the desiring subject is masked by the lack created when one sells off one’s 64. In his seminar of 1959–1960, Lacan drew on a distinction Freud made between das ding, that “thing” that belongs to the unconscious and is unrepresentable, and die sache, the symbolic representation of something (Freud 1960 [1923]). He called attention to das ding as that object of desire that one believes to be lost, but which, according to Lacan, one never had in the first place. Objet petit a, on the other hand, are all those things one actually may have or not have. For Lacan, the distinction is critical to ethics: “To make oneself the guarantor of the possibility that a subject will in some way be able to find happiness even in analysis is a form of fraud. There is absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream” (Lacan 1992 [1986]:373), the ”bourgeois dream” meaning living in “the service of goods[.] Private goods, family goods, domestic goods, other goods that also solicit us, the goods of our trade or our profession, the goods of the city, etc.” (Lacan 1992 [1986]:372; see Lee 1990:168).

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own labor power, which one must do if one lacks ownership of the means of production (Zˇizˇek 1989:49). But in bourgeois ideology, purchasing commodities can fill this lack, so above all things people desire money (indeed, equating it with freedom)—and therefore are willing to work for wages.65 Heiko Feldner and Fabio Vighi (2010:2) summarize Zˇizˇek’s argument thus: “Capitalist ideology functions by surreptitiously converting jouissance into value—into something which is valorised and exchanged.” For Zˇizˇek, jouissance is a “hard kernel” of the Real, a signifier of trauma (the castration effected by the Symbolic) that constitutes a problem in every society. He suggests that capitalism is so durable because it provides (through the exchange of alienated labor power for fetishized commodities) a salve for the wound of castration. This model of the subject depends on two elements: first, a distinction between the registers of the Real and the Symbolic and second, the use of “phallus” and “castration” as signifiers of desire and lack. I find the first element useful in analyzing Shuar culture but not the second. For this reason, I find the work of Deleuze and Guattari especially useful. For them, “castration” is neither privileged nor the privileged signifier of the Symbolic. It is the effect of culturally specific processes. As I understand them, it is capitalism, through the bourgeois family and specifically the Oedipal drama, that produces this traumatic wound that transforms desire into a lack that can never be filled.66 As I read them, it is the Oedipalizing 65. As Marx (1964 [1844]:147–148) put it, The increase in the quantity of objects is accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new possibility of mutual swindling and mutual plundering. Man becomes ever poorer as man, his need for money becomes ever greater if he wants to overpower hostile being. The power of his money declines so to say in inverse proportion to the increase in the volume of production: that is, his neediness grows as the power of money increases. The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the modern economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces . . . Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm. Subjectively, this is partly manifested in that the extension of products and needs falls into contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, unnatural and imaginary appetites. Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice, and whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favor for himself than does the industrial eunuch—the producer—in order to charm the golden birds out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbors in Christ. He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses—all so that he can then demand the cash for this service of love.

66. Zˇizˇek (1989:50) criticizes Marxism for never having come to terms with this trauma. Indeed, his 1989 work provides an interesting contrast to Deleuze and Guattari’s 1983 work, originally published in 1972. Deleuze and Guattari’s work, while haunted by the failure of Leninism, is relentlessly critical of capitalism; Zˇizˇek’s work, while never accepting the superiority of capitalism, relentlessly mocks Leninism. I wonder whether this has something to do with the fact that the former was published in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers (and of course after France lost its war

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family that solves a problem in the capitalist mode of production. I consider Deleuze and Guattari’s historicization of the Oedipal complex and castration anxiety a significant advance that helps us better understand the difference between bourgeois societies and societies like that of the Shuar. According to them, castration anxiety cannot simply be interpreted as the experience of desire as a lack. It is also the mark of a relocation of violence in the production of the subject. Here we see the value of a theory of the subject for Clastres’ model: it identifies another kind of violence (psychic rather than political, in the strict sense) on which the command-obedience structure of the bourgeois state depends. For Deleuze and Guattari, one of the pivotal case studies manifesting Freud’s complicity with this Oedipal colonialism is “A Child is Being Beaten” (Freud 1955 [1919]), which describes a fantasy, often accompanied by masturbation, that an indefinite number of children of undetermined sex are being beaten by someone (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:61). According to Freud’s patients, this fantasy involves a series of three displaced identifications through which children work through their Oedipal dramas.67 It begins with an identification with the child being beaten and ends with an identification with the father who is beating the child. Freud’s point is not that everyone is a sadomasochist; rather, the dynamics of the Oedipal triangle makes it likely that children will have both sadistic and masochistic fantasies as they negotiate the passage from childhood to adulthood. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, none of Freud’s patients describes the second fantasy. It is Freud’s construction, meant to help him make sense of the relationship between the first and third fantasies (and how—within the fantasy—boys and girls swap positions). Rather than take this as an accurate account of some patients’ dreams, Deleuze and Guattari take it as revealing a dynamic inherent in the Oedipal triangle: the internalization of sadistic fantasies (when one identifies with the castrating father) and masochistic fantasies (when one experiences violence as a substitute for, and thus a form of, love). It thus exemplifies psychoanalytic theory’s place in bourgeois ideology. This is a disturbing and provocative analysis, but I think that it fills an important gap in Zˇizˇek’s analysis of capitalism because it shows how pleasure (e.g., in constant shopping sprees) can also express a kind of violence and how a violation in Vietnam), whereas the latter was published after Gorbachev announced that all Soviet troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan and announced his policy of perestroika (although more immediately, Zˇizˇek left the Communist Party of Slovenia following the JBTZ [i.e., Ljubljana] trial in 1988). 67. In the first fantasy, the father beats a sibling; since the sibling is a rival for the father’s affections, the beating signifies the father’s love for the patient. In the second fantasy, the father beats his daughter as punishment for her incestuous desires, although this beating is also a substitute for the father’s love and thus pleasurable. In the third fantasy, the patient enjoys watching a father-substitute beat other children, thus combining sadistic form with masochistic pleasure.

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(e.g., going to work) can be experienced as a kind of pleasure. Castration may be a metaphor, but metaphors such as these are played out through fantasies, repressed desires, or dreams, where the violence one experiences is, at that moment, real. Cynics may say that the threat of violence is always present in bourgeois societies, while the faithful believe that democracy ensures the consent of the governed. The fact remains that bourgeois states need subjects who do not require the constant and arbitrary exercise of brute force to be obedient. Moreover, they need subjects who can serve as agents of the violence of the state (a necessity if, as Weber stated, the state is to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force). For Deleuze and Guattari, the violence that is both symbolic and terrifying exists in the dreams of children, and it is this combination of symbolism and violence that produces bourgeois subjects: Simultaneously the boys are beaten-initiated by the teacher on the little girl’s erotic stage (seeing machine), and obtain satisfaction in a masochistic fantasy involving the mother (anal-machine). The result is that the boys are able to see only by becoming little girls, and the girls cannot experience the pleasure of punishment except by becoming little boys. It is a whole chorus, a montage: back in the village after a raid in Vietnam, in the presence of their weeping sisters, the filthy Marines are beaten by their instructor, on whose knees the mommy is seated, and they have orgasms for having been so evil, for having tortured so well. It’s so bad, but also so good! (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:61)

Perhaps one must have read The Heart of Darkness (or have seen Full Metal Jacket) and must remember the My Lai Massacre to understand their point (our fantasies have the greatest force when they are inexplicable, and they thrive when we forget our own history). The point, for this essay, is that bourgeois subjects do not make great warriors. Even after going through training that is designed to desensitize and habituate themselves to the act of killing, conscripts become generally reluctant killers. What traumatized American soldiers the most during WWII was not the fear of being killed: “Fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure” (S. L. A. Marshall, quoted in Silverman 1992:63, emphasis in original)—this is the form in which subjects of the state struggle against the state. When converted into an occupying force, bourgeois soldiers often end up questioning their identity as civilized men and women. Both situations cause tremendous stress. As this essay was being revised, Time reported on the difficulties in “bringing relief to thousands of damaged soldiers”: “Army troops, TIME has learned, are seeking mental help more than 100,000 times a month. That figure reflects a growth of more than 75% from the final months of 2006 to the final months of ‘09, according to Army data” (Thompson 2010:22). What is remarkable in these accounts is not the terror of being shot at or being a constant target but the trauma of

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being made a killer. I believe that this is because—and in stark contrast to men in “societies against the state,” such as the Shuar—these soldiers are not killing for their own jouissance, but for the pleasure of their commanders, of the state. By literally emasculating others, under the orders or in the interests of the state, they are simultaneously enacting their own symbolic emasculation. Society against the State. “In a democratic order,” Zˇizˇek (1989: 147) writes, “sovereignty lies in the People.” There is one serious danger in such a situation: “But what is the People if not, precisely, the collection of the subjects of power?” This is how he analyzes the totalitarian states that plagued the twentieth century, principally Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The ideology of these regimes (and the fact that they, like many other dictatorships, employed the device of elections) points to a fatal problem in Rousseau’s theory of democracy: the concept of “the People.” Zˇizˇek (1989:147) concludes that “the Lacanian definition of democracy would then be: a socio-political order in which the People do not exist—do not exist as a unity, embodied in their unique representative.” What better way to characterize the pre-Federation Shuar? What I have tried to demonstrate in this essay is how certain beliefs about plant-granting visions play a central role in sustaining such a society. Zˇizˇek insists that entry into the Symbolic creates a “hard kernel” of leftover or surplus Real that makes trouble for every society except capitalist ones, where it is harnessed to “solve” the very problems it creates through constant revolutions (in the means of production). This occurs not only through the intervention of the Symbolic as such but also through a specific symbolic order based on the labor contract, through which the mutual recognition of capitalist and worker is the means by which workers give up their labor power to the capitalist. This produces surplus value, which is used to produce the commodities that workers buy in an impossible attempt to fill the void. I propose that the Shuar have found their own solution to this problem, a solution that can be expressed as the “mirror image” of capitalism: the Shuar enter a particular kind of Imaginary based on plant-granted visions, where the mutual recognition of the aru´tam waka´n
and the Shuar is the means by which the vision gives up some portion of its power to be incorporated into the individual Shuar. This produces a jouissance that Shuar experience as a drive to kill, a drive that I do not even try to understand and a kind of killer that I do not think bears comparison to any kind produced in bourgeois society. Here we see the value of a theory of the subject for Clastres’ model of societies against the state. If, as Lacan suggested, all psychic economies are threatened by a surplus of pleasure (jouissance), Shuar managed this by giving up their share of the Real (when naming their aru´tam and losing its force on the eve of a raid) in return for the pleasure of killing (or trying to kill) another. Shuar thus used jouissance to create a

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system without internal limits. Whenever power threatened to concentrate within Shuar society, feuding threatened to kill the most powerful men or send the most powerful men into war, where they could be killed. Violence was thus as central to pre-Federation society as it is to the state, but in significantly different ways. For Shuar, the aru´tam created a desire to kill, but in ways that subvert the Symbolic. Power was derived not from a coordination of the Imaginary and the Symbolic (whether it be “God” or “the People”) but rather from a coordination of the Imaginary and the Real. It was the intrusion of the Real into the individual’s Imaginary that created the kaka´ram. Clear, truthful speech occurred in the register of the Symbolic, but I believe that it should be understood as an index of that “hard kernel” of the Real that for the kaka´ram was not traumatic but a form of jouissance. This jouissance perhaps should be viewed not as surplus pleasure but as surplus power. This power could never take the form of a command-obedience relationship: killing someone makes it impossible to command them; death dissipates surplus power. No state can form through this kind of violence. Shuar visions involve a recognition that occurs in both the Real and the Imaginary. This is not a break with the Real. On the contrary, some part of the Real, in the form of the force of the aru´tam, adheres to the Shuar subject. The ineffable plays such an important role in Shuar power because it marks the intrusion of the Real into real life. There were, no doubt, attempts to bring the Real directly into the Symbolic, but, I propose, Shuar beliefs about visionary knowledge and power doomed such attempts to failure. In Clastrean terms, the point at which speech and violence actually met, with the speaking of the name of the aru´tam on the eve of a raid for Shuar, was the point where this excess of power dissipated (i.e., the aru´tam departed the body). Violence and speech were brought as close as possible, but the resulting discharge, the killing of another, could be indexed by the reputation of the killer but not transformed into an enduring command-obedience chain. No state can form through this kind of speech. Colonialism. Among anthropologists, Michael Taussig popularized the idea of the “space of death” in his work on the inhabitants of Putumayo, Colombia. As he described it, “The space of death is crucial to the creation of meaning and consciousness, . . . We may think of the space of death as a threshold, yet it is a wide space whose breadth offers positions of advance as well as of extinction” (Taussig 1984:467). For Taussig, the space of death accurately and precisely names the “room without a number” in which dissident Argentine-Jewish newspaper publisher Jacobo Timerman was tortured in 1977. Taussig is especially concerned with “cultures of terror,” those spaces of death “based on and nourished by silence and myth in which the fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious flourishes by means of rumor and fantasy woven in a dense web of magical realism” (Taussig 1984:469). This is the state where violence punches through speech, per-

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haps, one might say, where the state reaches its outer limit (perhaps most recently expressed for Americans in images from Abu Ghraib). In a way, this essay is my attempt to comprehend what the “space of death” might have been like in a “society against the state.” Before the founding of the Federation, Shuar lived in a world in which “men sleep with their guns at their sides, rarely go more than a few hundred yards from their houses without weapons, and when visiting another family, expect their hostess to sample the beer, before she serves it, to prove it is not poisoned” (Harner 1984:186). I believe that Taylor’s (1993:666) emphasis on “existential ‘health’” and the “meaningful life-course in accordance with the epic values typical of a warrior culture” has an important critical function in contrasting the power and freedom granted by the aru´tam vision with the power and freedom granted by the wage-labor contract. But I am concerned that it can be read to romanticize the conflict-ridden lives of Shuar. Lacan understood that “thou art that” (where his patients entered their own space of death) could not stand for a completed, integrated, or fulfilled identity. It is reported that many of Lacan’s patients could not understand this and that they often stormed out of his analytic sessions in anger. Shuar exited the space of their visions not with a desire to kill their aru´tam but with “a tremendous desire to kill” somebody (Harner 1984:139). Whom one killed, exactly, depended on the tricky terrain of language; the detailed accounts of enmities learned from childhood, the ability to manipulate kinship relations, the luck, good or ill, of whom one met on the path. This was a world in which, no matter how powerful one was, one’s identity was always subject to renegotiation. I suggest that the desire to kill, felt after acquiring an aru´tam, was an index of a Shuar’s awareness that power points toward the space of death and that destiny is a state not of grace but of war (or, as Clastres might have put it, that Hobbes’s state of war, an ongoing war against the leviathan, is the only state of grace). I have tried not to minimize the violence that, to be honest, still threads through Shuar society. This violence, unleashed against several Spanish towns in a series of uprisings between 1579 and 1599, resulted in the death of most of the Spaniards and the abandonment of all but one of the towns (whose survivors relocated). “In this manner, the territory of the Jı´varo was left free of Spanish presence [and] the Jivaroanspeaking peoples succeeded in maintaining a high level of autonomy until well into the twentieth century” (Santos-Granero 1992:215–220).68 Since Ecuadorians returned to settle the Amazonian region in the early twentieth century, there have been no reports of 68. These towns were established between 1546 and 1576 by settlers to whom the crown had granted the right to exploit Indian laborers to extract gold from local placer mines. Although the warriors were predominantly Jı´varoan, they were supported by Andean Indians, who had been relocated to the Amazonian region, as well as some disaffected mestizos.

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organized violence by Shuar against settlers.69 This “space of death,” however, is still an active presence among the Aguaruna in Peru. As Shane Greene has noted, plant-granted visions are still “the first step” toward becoming a kaka´ram (Greene 2009:81). Bikut, the legendary hero whom many Aguaruna liken to Jesus, Buddha, and Socrates, is the embodiment of the entry of the space of death into the ordinary world. A young man who kept ingesting maı´kua (in Aguaruna, baikua) “in search of more and more powerful visions,” at one point he stood up and declared that he had been transformed into Bikut. “He was consumed by aggression, so much that his family was forced to restrain him in the house by tying him to his stool. Bikut’s baikua-induced dementia was, however, also the source of a unique and unbeatable warrior spirit” (Greene 2009:92). In stark contrast to Socrates, who drank hemlock in order to die, Bikut drank baikua in order to kill. Greene opens his ethnography with a conversation between an elder warrior and a bilingual teacher (who had founded one of the four oldest regional indigenous organizations) over the difference between visionary knowledge and textual knowledge. Perhaps because no single Aguaruna organization has the legitimacy and hegemony of the Shuar Federation (and, as Greene points out, there are more than a dozen different Aguaruna organizations), Aguaruna warriors can still act as leaders at critical moments.70 This was the case in 1979, when a group of warriors waited in the forest while another group peacefully occupied the unauthorized camp of film director Werner Herzog (the peaceful action succeeded in ejecting Herzog and his crew from Aguaruna territory, but the warriors later burned the camp as an outlet for their aggression [Greene 2009:186–187]). In January 2002, more than 100 warriors massed and attacked a community of settlers from the Andes, leaving 15 colonists dead. Greene remarks that he could not “even fathom the kind of violence 69. The growing threat of oil exploitation is leading to an escalation of conflict that recently erupted into violence that appears to have been spontaneous. In January 2009, the Ecuadorian Congress passed legislation allowing companies to prospect on communal and indigenous land, with other provisions specifically meant to encourage foreign mining in the Amazonian region as well as the Andes, sparking nationwide protests (Dosh and Kligerman 2009). In late September, approximately 500 Shuar blockaded the highway connecting Morona Santiago to the rest of the country, and they engaged the National Police on September 30. At a press conference later that night, president Rafael Correa reported that “Tremendously violent groups armed with shotguns and rifles waited for police and met them with gunshots.” According to different reports, between 35 and 40 police were wounded, one Shuar was killed (it is unclear whether he was intentionally killed and who shot him), and 11 more were wounded. 70. In addition to the Shuar Federation, there is also an association of Shuar founded by evangelical Christian missionaries Frank and Marie Drown in the 1960s, an organization of Shuar centros that broke away contentiously from the Federation, and an organization of Achuar centros that separated amicably from the Federation. These other organizations are all considerably smaller than the Federation; today their leaders seek to maintain amicable relations and to coordinate their activities.

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that these Aguaruna men decided to use” (Greene 2009:152). At one point during my dissertation fieldwork, Euro-Ecuadorian settlers expressed real fear of a violent Shuar uprising. That the violence of the aru´tam can leave the vision to create in the ordinary world such a space of death is indeed terrifying, but I suspect that what makes this so unfathomable to Greene is that this potentiality is not terrifying to warriors. So I think that it is a mistake to characterize the Shuar space of death as a culture of terror. Terror, I have concluded, belongs to the state because states have an existential dependence on a belief in secure boundaries. But the self-destruction of paranoid military dictatorships in post-Pero´n (Isabel), post-Pero´n (Juan) Argentina was just one example of the state at its limits. States sometimes reach their paranoid limit when they enter into spaces where they see no other states to mirror back to them an acceptable self-image. For Taussig, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is paradigmatic, but so are the Americas: “The space of death is one of the crucial spaces where Indian, African, and white gave birth to the New World” (Taussig 1984:468). Taussig’s study centers on the rubber-gathering areas and stations along the Putumayo River between 1900 and 1912 and the survivors of that little holocaust. For colonialism marks a frontier for societies against the state, too; it is where states come face-to-face with their own nightmare. In the Amazon, capitalist culture, in which people believe that their desires are infinite and that money can buy anything (in other words, that people will do anything for money, if offered enough of it), encounters cultures in which desires are coded and canalized, where people regularly feel free to ask for what they want of another and do as they please. When the British Parliamentary Select Committee on Putumayo asked Peruvian rubber magnate and politician Julio Ce´sar Arana what he meant when he said the Indians did not wish to be civilized and indeed were cannibals, he replied, “What I mean by that is that they did not admit of exchange, or anybody to do business with them—Whites, for example” (quoted in Taussig 1984:482). Perhaps an encounter with this carefree lack of desire fomented in Arana and others unmanageable anxieties about their own excessive desires. The absence of Indian desire reveals that bourgeois desire is a presence, after all.71 The province now called Morona Santiago illustrates a different colonialist dynamic. It lacked rubber trees to exploit, and although people have long suspected that there are oil 71. I think this is why Arana interprets this as a sign of cannibalism: he believes himself to have value only insofar as others desire the goods he has to sell. If people do not want what he has to sell, he has no value. One who feels truly worthless might kill oneself, put oneself in a position to be killed (see Harner 1984:181–182), or—as I think may be the case here—fantasize one’s own obliteration. Moreover, as Gerald Sider (1987) has suggested, cannibalism can function as a metaphor for violent incorporation, and white fears might reflect the projection, onto Indians, of a desire to incorporate Indians into an economy controlled by whites, in coded form.

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deposits under Shuar territory, there was no serious interest in exploring for and extracting it until recently. But after the 1941 war, Shuar were suddenly located on the contested border with Peru. Under these conditions, Ecuadorians did not rely on the exorbitant violence of the rubber boom. It tried to use relatively peaceful means to convert Shuar into bourgeois subjects. Put another way, instead of mobilizing the state’s space of death to colonize natives, the state relied on capitalism’s libidinal economy to colonize and pacify the Shuar space of death. Today, headhunting is illegal, and many Shuar prefer to rely on the Shuar Federation or Ecuadorian courts, rather than feuding, to resolve conflicts. But Shuar are paying a price for peace. One example is how the “pacification” of the Shuar has turned out to mean the appropriation of Shuar violence by the state, which has embraced an image of Shuar as warriors. Thus, in the Cenepa War (1995–1996), special brigades of Shuar soldiers named “Aru´tam” and “Iwia” fought, not against Achuar, but against Peruvians.72 While Shuar violence has been subordinated to the directives of the state, Shuar speech is being subordinated to authorized publications. The Shuar Federation cares more about the recognition of the state than it does about the recognition of aru´tams. In the process, it has embraced an “ideology of dependence and hierarchical order [that is] is in sharp contrast to the pre-Federation ideology of individual autonomy and balance of power” (Hendricks 1988:224). The Federation thus realigns Shuar agency to promote their incorporation into a class-stratified society. It claims to defend Shuar culture, but through publishing books about Shuar myth and ritual rather than through the quest for plant-granted visions or warfare. In this context, it is not surprising that many Shuar talk openly about their visions; they have been colonized by speech—not the speech of the kaka´ram, but the speech of the literate (see Hendricks 1988). This move toward literacy began as the project of Salesian missionaries. Elmer Miller (1970) called attention to the way that Christian missionaries in South America were subverting native belief in the power of visions as they revealed the power of the written word. The Salesians have dedicated themselves to transcribing Shuar myths and rituals, to enlisting young Shuar in this project, and to using written accounts of Shuar beliefs and practices, including accounts of visions, in their schools (see Boster 2003). But attempts to preserve indigenous culture through the production of written texts may thus have unintended consequences. Descola tells a moving story in which a Christian missionary, having committed the words to paper, performed a flawless aujmatin (visiting speech) be72. Almost every Shuar with whom I spoke embraced the new role of the Shuar in the Ecuadorian military. For leaders of the Federation, this role is evidence of Shuar patriotism, creating a debt that the state must repay through its support of the Federation (Brysk 2000:142). Many members of the Federation, however, speak of the Cenepa War not as a victory for Ecuador but as a victory of the Shuar and declare that it was they who were appropriating Ecuadorian violence.

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fore an Achuar kaka´ram. Rather than feeling honored, or comforted to know of a new means for reproducing his culture, the old man was saddened by the realization that writingpower had made vision-power obsolete (Descola 1996:353– 356). Descola’s informant recognized the power of the priest because the priest had succeeded in reproducing an Achuar ritual so accurately. I suspect that priests convinced large numbers of Shuar and Achuar of the authenticity of their claims to truth and power because they exhibited some of the virtues of the kaka´ram—they were articulate and charismatic speakers and generous in their gifts of manufactured goods. But other missionaries had tried to convert Shuar in the past and failed. There must be another reason why the Shuar, who had been famous for resisting the power of the state even from Inka times, succumbed so quickly to statesponsored efforts to pacify and evangelize them in the midtwentieth century. My final speculation is that this has to do with some of the features of capitalism to which Marx (especially in Zˇizˇek’s reading) called attention and that distinguish it and liberal states from tributary empires like the Inka and the Spaniards. The labor contract promises the two things that Shuar valued most: power and freedom. That it involves the alienation of one’s labor power would not necessarily have troubled Shuar, who were used to the exchange of their aru´tam powers or the exercise of violence during raids. I suggest that the first generation of Shuar who had regular contact with settlers in the twentieth century saw that the settlers who had access to money were able to purchase a seemingly endless variety of manufactured goods. They need not have felt any malaise, and all my informants agree that their grandparents and parents continued to seek the powers available only through plant-granted visions. But money must have appeared to them to be a new kind of desirable power. How did their children make sense of this new world? One informant, who was born 12 years before the founding of the Federation, told me, The food settlers eat, they bring from elsewhere, they bring from outside, and it is a good food, no? It is better than the papachina [probably the taro corm] that we cultivate and that did not have any value. They did not eat the papachina while I did eat rice, but there was the sense of shame because I did not have money. I don’t have money, because money has to do with it, if I had had money or my parents, we would eat rice, the same as them. If you have money it has value and if you don’t have to spend any money it doesn’t have any value; that is it, more or less.

A generation of Shuar understood commodity fetishism before they understood what a life of wage labor entails. Shuar also routinely complain about the racism that they experienced as children, from Ecuadorian teachers. Might it be that it was through this entry into a different (Hispanic) Symbolic that Shuar children experienced a kind of “castra-

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tion,” one experienced as a lack that could be filled only through the pursuit of expensive commodities? Racist teachers are like the aru´tam waka´n
in that they are supposed to grant power, but their message of the Symbolic—Lacan’s “thou art not”—is not emancipating but demeaning. What most Shuar learn at mission schools and from observing settlers is that one can have the speech of the other but not its power; this is what Oedipalization is all about. The missionary and the settler are the vanguards of state expansion. At stake are two radically contrasting regimes of recognition: for Shuar, the real, the essence, is internal. This means that they cannot recognize whether or not a Shuar possesses an aru´tam; they can only infer as much through its effects. Ecuadorians, on the other hand, recognize their inferiors immediately; their schema of essences is superficial, immediately recognizable in the ordinary world. Ecuadorian racism gives the settlers an identity that binds them to the state and its laws of language, but this racism, in turn, gives the Shuar an image of him- or herself as marginal. Simultaneously, the Shuar Federation (and Ecuadorian laws considering inheritance) is creating “the name of the father” through local patrilineages (Rubenstein 2002:240). Although many households still function in many ways as they used to, as mobile and ultimately ephemeral loci in fluid social networks, Shuar territory is being reinscribed through the creation of landing strips and, more importantly, roads. Different communities have radically different levels of access to market towns, which determines what portion of land can be devoted to the production of commodities. While actual household structure remains fluid, a familial ideology is being instilled in Shuar, one that coordinates the sexual division of labor with the emerging class system. Following Zˇizˇek and Deleuze and Guattari, I believe that the myth of a contract that is between equals and freely entered into is the guise through which one becomes complicit in one’s own symbolic emasculation. To be clear, I am arguing for a certain kind of equivalence between the murders executed by Aguaruna warriors against poor settlers that Greene (2009:152) reports and the contract that a capitalist enters into with a worker or the state enters into with its subjects. The significant difference is not that Aguaruna violence is literal and the violence of these contracts is metaphorical. It is the transformation of the violence from literal to symbolic that is precisely what makes the key difference possible, that is, the reversal of the direction of violence from being against others to being against one’s self. In both cases the victims are innocent, and for me, the importance of the theoretical apparatus of this essay (Lacan, Clastres, etc.) is how they help me conceive of that unoccupiable locus from which both forms of violence are equally appalling and equally unfathomable but still equal. For Shuar, I believe that Ecuadorian colonialism was the process through which, at some specific point (which, pace Zeno, cannot be isolated analytically), they momentarily came to occupy this locus, where one system of violence could be exchanged for the other.

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Shuar today exhibit a variety of attitudes toward the diverse forms of power in their world. Older Shuar often freely talk about the plant-granted visions of their youth, perhaps because they long ago traded in the value of the vision for the value of the written word, probably because they believe that the days of feuding and warfare are behind them and do not fear the loss of an aru´tam power. Many younger Shuar seek as much formal education as possible, hoping that textual knowledge will bring them power (including, many say, the power to help their communities). Many feel that they have no choice but to sell the timber on their land or seek wagepaying jobs in order to feed and clothe their own children. Some question the value of plant-granted visions and other rituals practiced by their parents. And others are profoundly disturbed by the kind of power that comes with literacy and money, because they are not convinced that it will bring them either power or freedom. Ironically, at the same time that the Shuar Federation secures the recognition of the Ecuadorian state and, moreover, produces more and more written accounts of Shuar myth and ritual, more and more Shuar express an anxiety that they are losing their culture (see Rival 1997 on a similar tension among the Ecuadorian Huaorani). Their world has changed, but it continues to be one of deception and misrecognition. I know several Shuar who have continued to seek plant-granted visions or say that they will. And for some, there is still a great deal at stake in secrecy.

The End of Analysis Descola remarks on the profound identity crisis of the old kaka´ram when he encountered the power of writing; this is a pain that is echoed when my informants relate to me stories of their experiences at mission schools (Descola 1996:353– 356; see Lyons 2001, MacCormack 1991, and Orta 2004 for discussions of the dynamic between visionary, textual, and oral sources or forms of knowledge in indigenous-missionary relations in the Andes). Descola’s larger point, that what we literati imagine to be a positive form of recognition may in fact be devastating to Amerindian culture, is one of the thoughts motivating this essay.73 Thus, when I crouch forward, 73. Analyzing indigenous adaptations of missionary and other NGO technologies, Stephen Hugh-Jones argues that the popularity of the books published through the Colec¸a˜o Narradores Indı´genas do Alto Rio Negro among Tukanoans reflects a history of objectifying their culture in material form. He further suggests that, in contrast, the Kayapo affinity for video reflects their history of ritualized political performances (HughJones 2010). I would argue that the Shuar equivalent would not be the Mundo Shuar series of books published by the Salesians, but rather Radio Arutam, also established by the Salesians. Although many Shuar possess a copy or two of a Mundo Shuar book, I never saw any give them the importance that Tukanoans give the ethnographies about them. All Shuar, however, listen to (and on occasion broadcast a message through) their radio station, and it plays an important role in their ethnic (or national) consciousness. Following Hugh-Jones’s argument, I would suggest that this reflects a prior history of political expression through speech.

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pen and notepad in hand, only to hear an informant tell me that her vision is a secret, I do not perceive an obstacle to my research but rather a social fact that, in this context, is also an act of resistance against colonialism. I also perceive an invitation to reflect on those bits of a culture the importance of which lies in their not being shared. Shuar understand that mutual acknowledgment between people is superficial and fleeting. As Taylor points out, “As in any competitive social structure, the hierarchy of individuals is very unstable and their relative positions are constantly shifting” (Taylor 2007:151). An ally, even a relative, today may become an enemy tomorrow.74 Shuar tell me that it is their power-granting visions that provide them with the resources to negotiate this shifting terrain. I would like to suggest that, for Shuar, visions play the role that Lacan hoped analysis could play for his patients. Visions interrupt discourse and take a Shuar to “the ecstatic limit of ‘Thou art that’ where the cipher of his mortal destiny is revealed to him” (Lacan 2006 [1949]: 81). But these visions accomplish even more: they bring Shuar to the point where the true journey begins. Bob Scholte argued that “the possibility of communicative interaction is the irreducible epistemological precondition to any anthropological knowledge whatsoever” (Scholte 1969: 440). Following Lacan, I would suggest that mutual recognition is impossible in the realm of language. But I do not mean to entirely disavow Adolf Bastian’s principle of the psychic unity of humankind, which Scholte evokes in the quotation above. As my observations on Shuar culture suggest, Shuar themselves are aware of the impossibility of recognition in language. An anthropology in the Bastian tradition may still be possible if we acknowledge this as a situation shared by all humans. Shuar, after all, do not then give up entirely on speech. Neither should anthropologists give up on ethnography. The speculations in this essay—the chain of ideas unleashed—sometimes feel as if they could go on forever. Yet to admit that they are speculations is to call them into question. I am not enough of a Lacanian to dismiss them as illusions. But perhaps one could say that they are surrogates for (or traces of) some unspeakable kernel of the Real that an anthropologist encounters through ethnographic fieldwork. This kernel fuels a “surplus jouissance” that an anthropologist feels when encountering a “society against the state”—and a desire to return to this kernel, even when professional obligations and the academic calendar make this impossible.75 74. To acknowledge that this applies to anthropologists (and missionaries, employees of NGOs, and anyone else who wishes to be an ally of the Shuar) as well is not easy, but I think that it is necessary if we are to take Shuar culture seriously. 75. Or, to put this in other terms, to say that there is something about the Shuar that I cannot tell you about is not to admit to my failure or limits as an ethnographer. It is rather to suggest that fieldwork is my maı´kua and Shuar are my aru´tams (acknowledging their reality and my tenuous attachment to them does not mean I wish to be a Shuar, but it does mean that I can no longer view my own world quite so seriously). And in telling you this, I lose them—and must go back to the field, soon.

Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar

Unlike traditional psychoanalysts, Lacan rejected the idea of sessions of uniform (and necessarily arbitrary) duration. He believed that the act of terminating a session was itself part of the therapeutic process and had to be determined strategically by the analyst, whether the result was a session that lasted 2 hours or one that lasted 2 minutes. I am concerned that ethnographers today recommend ideal periods for fieldwork that conveniently fit university rules concerning leave or the dictates of funders (while we strategically forget the often idiosyncratic practices of earlier fieldworkers). Ironically, I believe that most of my colleagues agree that fieldwork never ends. Surely, this testifies more to the unpredictability of social life than to its regularity. We might do well to follow Lacan’s example and rely less on convention and more on deliberate experimentation in deciding when one must leave the field or end an article. I believe that this would be a necessary component of an ethnography that seeks to identify precisely those places where we seek—and, thank God, fail—to “capture” our object of study. Such places do not signify the failure of anthropology (or rather, they do signal the failure of an anthropology that we do well to disavow). On the contrary, I propose that such places are the closest anyone can come to recognizing the creative vitality of our informants and their culture. This place, I argue, is where we recognize that our informants have their own lives (messy and unpredictable, but also containing vital self-direction) to live and that ethnography can, and must, come to an end.

Acknowledgments This article is based on fieldwork funded by the British Academy and support from the University of Liverpool. I began work on this article as a 2008–2009 Fellow at the National Humanities Center; I am very grateful for their support, especially Karen Carroll’s editorial expertise. The director, Geoff Harpham, greeted us with the dare to be daring; I owe much to his challenge and encouragement. I am very grateful for Hayder Al-Mohammed’s constant challenges to my reading of Lacan. I am also thankful for the encouragement and assistance of many people: Mariela Bacigalupo, Jeff Blank, Nicolas Bock, Natalia Buitron-Arias, Jessica Brantley, Michael Brown, Carol Clover, Victor Corva, Magnus Course, Michael Demers, Kim Fortun, Magnus Pharao Hansen, Geoffrey Harpham, Freya Jarman-Ivens, Anahid Kassabian, Susan Roberta Katz, Leˆda Leita˜o Martins, Carlos London˜o Sulkin, Barry Lyons, Elke Mader, Elizabeth Mansfield, Kate Marsh, George Mentore, Todd Ramo´n Ochoa, Daniela Peluso, Orin Starn, and Michael Wood. I must also thank three anonymous reviewers for their penetrating and immensely constructive comments. Finally, I thank my Shuar informants, who forced me to view secrecy not as the absence of information but as a positive force.

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Comments Oscar Calavia Departamento de Antropologia, Centro de Filosofia e Cieˆncias Humanas, Programa de Po´s-Graduac¸a˜o em Antropologia Social Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Campus Trindade, 88040-970 Floriano´polis, Brazil ([email protected]). 1 X 11 I deeply sympathize with Professor Rubenstein’s display of anthropological imagination. Perhaps I should not. Nowadays, most anthropologists prefer to focus on Indian voices, but Rubenstein speaks about Shuar silence. Even more, he builds a nearly all-embracing discourse on ineffability: visions and secret visions. Perhaps it is too broad: I will be able to comment on only a small part of his vast endeavour. Rubenstein’s paper warns us against some tacit premises in ethnological research and escapes from the sheer dialogue-centric practice in contemporary anthropology. He writes it taking some risks. Psychoanalytical wording is not welcomed in ethnological discussions, since it could embed a leaning toward universalizing the assumptions of the bourgeois soul. I think that Rubenstein succeeds in using psychoanalysis as a sort of Western folk knowledge, deeply rooted in Western practices and even in Western furniture— mirrors, of course, but also doors, bedrooms, and bathrooms—that can be displayed in contrast to another folk psychology, that of the Shuar. This is healthy, I presume. Recent ethnological studies of the Amazonian Lowlands include a large number of inquiries into person-building, and nobody would doubt that an Amazonian soul is not a unified device but a confederation of very dissimilar constituents that have been nurtured at home, inherited from ancestors, earned in war, and so on. However, I suspect that there is a hidden trend toward, at least, choosing some of these parts as an equivalent to the Western Self. Moreover, there is in Brazilian ethnology a core argument on the worth of alterity over identity. Identity is, in the end, a limit of alterity: it is the Other, not the Self, that is the ground of reality, and the Self is no more than a non-Other. I suspect that these analyses are seen as interesting but hardly verisimilar and perhaps as a bit exotic. Identity is an element too important in our own tradition to comprehend other traditions without it. So this socially constructed Amazonian person is expected to bear a set of feelings and emotions very akin to ours: otherwise, how could the empathy so required in ethnographical research be possible? Especially when dealing with issues as tough as war, feuds, headhunting, and cannibalism—past and present, actual or virtual—it is tempting to minimize them, to deny them as colonial fantasies, or to admit them as a sort of sacred stuff socially instituted but far away from the individual psyche. Rubenstein’s digression through the Lacanian mirror aims at the very psychological core of identity: dealing with ayahuasca instead of mirrors, Shuar children do not perceive

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themselves as the primary form of the Other and consequently do not perceive others as replicates of them. Identity can have little, if any, meaning. That is full of psychological consequences, since, as Rubenstein points out, because they grow among foreign spirits instead of neighbor selves, Shuar are, for instance, good warriors. Shuar war was far less lethal than ours, but also it hurt far less the killer’s soul. I like Rubenstein’s comparison between ayahuasca and mirrors: the Lacanian “mirror,” of course, but above all concrete, material mirrors. Ayahuasca has been understood as a visionenhancing drug, a means of shamanic search, and a sort of God inside the pantheon in the backwoods. In all these cases, ayahuasca is generally transparent: through it we can see social and cosmological patterns that owe very little to ayahuasca itself. A mirror, on the other hand, is not transparent: a mirror raises concepts that would be unthinkable without the material existence of mirrors. In Western tradition, there is a large array of optical instruments or devices that show similar structural value: telescopes and microscopes, of course, but first and foremost the perspective box, which ordered space in Renaissance paintings. These perspective representations— and these vision-enhancing tools—are not part of our everyday experience unless we live across from a grand plaza or work in an astronomical observatory. However, they constitute our idea of spatial reality, the very base of our idea of effective reality. Ayahuasca is, in the Upper Amazon—a place apparently devoid of any large material culture—a similar kind of device: it furnishes another world vision away from daily experience but endowed with a higher cognitive worth. It grounds art forms and philosophical notions about sociality and reality. It is a concept-raiser object.

Magnus Course Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, Scotland (magnus [email protected]). 13 X 11 This essay certainly cannot be faulted for lack of ambition. It addresses a core problem, perhaps the core problem, of anthropology: the ways in which we are different and the ways in which we are the same. While most recent Amazonianist anthropology has taken the former aspect of the problem—difference—as an axiomatic truth, Rubenstein draws our attention back to the issue of what exactly it is that an anthropologist may or may not share with the people with whom he or she works. The end result of his investigation is again a reinsertion of difference, but the path he takes to get there is, well, different. While I am persuaded by the overall direction of the essay, I focus my comments here on the one aspect of Rubenstein’s argument I remain unconvinced by: the idea that language can be unproblematically located within the Symbolic.

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There seem to me to be several problems with this assertion, most of them stemming from Lacan’s misunderstanding of the nature of language. For ultimately, Lacan’s approach to language is nothing more and nothing less than the reproduction of one very particular language ideology that takes language as wholly symbolic. This assumption leads Lacan to have two problems with language: first, that our words always turn out to be the words of others and second, that our words are necessarily divorced from the Real. I am not convinced that either of these issues corresponds to Shuar anxieties about language. Let us address each of his concerns in turn. Amerindian people, like Lacan, frequently locate the force of language outside of themselves. Yet having never suffered in the first place from a folk theory of speech as emanating solely from within, as isomorphic with an individual intentionality, they cannot be said to view the alterity of language as a problem from which only Lacanian analysis can save them. The rooting of language in the Other is not as obfuscated in Amerindian language ideologies as it is in the language ideology of Lacan’s bourgeois patients. Thus, while for Lacan language is a realm of misrecognition, for Shuar and other Amerindian peoples language is precisely a realm of recognition. The alterity of speech is neither surprise nor disappointment but rather the primary source of its value. This point emerges at several points in the text: to give but one example, the force of the kaka´ram’s speech is precisely in the fact that people correctly recognize that the words spoken are not his alone but those of the aru´tam waka´n. Shuar seem well aware that it is not just language itself that is iterable but also the very subjectivities from which language itself emerges. This is in some cases a problem and in others an asset, but in no case can the entirety of language be reduced to a realm of misrecognition. Amerindian people have never needed Lacan to tell them that their words were not their own. They already knew it, embraced it, and indeed, based entire ritual, social, and cosmological complexes on it (Course, forthcoming). Yet the Amerindian “recognition” of the alterity of language that I have highlighted above is itself encompassed by an ever greater problem. Put simply, most Amerindian people, unlike French intellectuals, do not locate language solely within the Symbolic; for them, the relationship between signifier and signified is anything but arbitrary. Yet while the importance of word as index and as icon is central to many Amerindian language ideologies, it has been more or less eradicated from the Saussurean strand of thinking on language to which both Lacan (and to a lesser extent, Clastres) subscribe. The Shuar classification of this world as “symbolic” does not imply that language is wholly symbolic, for language is not confined to this world. Witherspoon’s (1977) classic ethnography of the Navajo also described an ontology in which this world is composed solely of “symbols” of inner forms, yet it is precisely words—nonarbitrary, nonsymbolic words— that allow Navajo to go beyond the “symbolic” outer world and access the “true” forms of the inner world. Language, or

Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar

at least certain kinds of language, seem to fulfill a similar function among the Shuar. For it is clearly the speech of the aru´tam waka´n that is at the heart of the visionary experience, provides the vision seeker with power, and gives the seeker access to “truth.” I wonder, then, how can speech and vision be respectively opposed as the realms of misrecognition and recognition? Put simply, Lacan’s confinement of language within the Symbolic is actually the universalizing of one very particular language ideology. Language undeniably has a symbolic aspect, but as the Shuar seem to understand well, it is also a lot more than that. In different contexts, speech means different things, and it “means” them in different ways. While the speech of the everyday may indeed be “false,” it seems that the speech of the aru´tam waka´n is, quite literally, the essence of truth and recognition. A Lacanian (mis)understanding of language cannot help us here.

Tony Crook Department of Social Anthropology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, United Kingdom ([email protected]). 19 X 11 It is instructive that the Shuar not-speaking about their visions should provide Rubenstein with a platform to speak and speculate about such an all-encompassing and wide-ranging vision of his own. The capacity to enchain and reconcile examples, encounters, topics, and theorists in this particular way surely owes something important to the aesthetics of Shuar knowledge-practices. But saying this is intended to mark a different way of approaching ethnographic method and understanding the disciplinary project. Since the so-called crisis of representation in anthropology, questions of voice have created an apparently causal elision between what informants and anthropologists do and do not say and between textual and political representation, and hence they have created a reluctance to speak for others or put words into their mouths. The gaps in ethnographic analysis caused by “secrecy” provide a case in point. As Rubenstein suggests, identifying something as a “secret” appears to immediately raise questions about what else people are unable to speak about and to set off ramifications for what an ethnographer might reasonably ask or expect to hear and subsequently what might have to be left to speculation, history, or theorization. “Partial Truths” provided the literary turn’s manifesto (Clifford 1986) and accustomed a generation of anthropologists to a particular conceit of art imitating life, whereby one mark of authentic anthropology enables the culpable admission of the limitations and deficiencies of one’s own data, analysis, and interpretation to stand as a methodological marker of sociological accuracy and ethnographic faithfulness. Although these mimetic elisions (“the closest anyone can come,” in “The End of Analysis”; “fieldwork is my maı´kua and Shuar are my aru´tams,” in n. 76) provide Rubenstein—

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quite understandably and inevitably—with an arbitrary ending point, it would be disingenuous to ignore the wider importance of the question posed here: What are anthropologists to make of unspoken secrets and unvoiced visions? Based in the Angkaiyakmin village of Bolivip in Papua New Guinea and dealing with Melanesian knowledge-practices and anthropology’s depiction of “secrecy,” my own work (Crook 1999, 2007) might provide a basis for a comparative comment here. And yet this is to rely on a commitment to “knowledge” and “secrecy” as culturally variable manifestations of universal forms or to identify instances of the unspoken or unvoiced as forms of the “secret,” while it is the further notion of implicating a correlate social division that marks the apparent basis of comparison. Such tropes appeal to a separate domain of knowledge as constituting a separate domain of reality and a separate domain of people (most often men). That these equivalences make ready sense is precisely the problem. Indeed, the deployment of these tropes and a reliance on a model of knowledge derived from Euro-American metaphysics was responsible for creating the “Min Problem”—a supposed “black hole” where an assumption of indigenous “secrecy” led to the failure of anthropological analysis: I argue that this approach is exemplified in Barth’s pioneering work on the Baktaman (e.g., Barth 1975, 1987, 1990, 2002), which remains a prominent theorization of secrecy, in Melanesia at least. While derived initially from Melanesian materials, Herdt’s (2003) influential theorizations of secrecy develop Barth’s model (Herdt 1990) and an approach to an “alternative, hidden cultural reality” (Herdt 2003:xi) and yet also trace “the role of the anthropologist as cryptographer of secrecy” (Herdt 2003:27) back to an Iroquois-mimicking Victorian gentlemen’s club initiated by Lewis Henry Morgan. Because any anthropological project seeks to come to know through mediating a social division—classically, to understand the inside of a culture by becoming an insider—then this elision of epistemological and sociological domains can appear self-evident, and yet it implicates what I call “anthropology’s secrecy” as a methodological premise: valuing the knowledge not known and valuing the participation that facilitates and marks it, ethnographers might readily imagine that one is inseparable from the other—for all concerned. These analogies can sit comfortably with social constructionist commitments and afford affinities with other dualisms, such as Lacan’s and Saussure’s, even when the place of the arbitrary is reversed. But this is to imagine a particular articulation between “knowledge” and “society” and corresponding expectations for certain kinds of conversations. Ethnographically, Rubenstein’s argument turns on the interpretation of the consequences of Shuar warriors’ calling the name of their aru´tam spirit on the eve of a fight: the effect is to conjoin the men, but rather than abandoning, and being abandoned by, the aru´tam—whose importance appears indispensible—might it be that the calling serves to conjoin the aru´tam, too, if only as further evidence of the stakes that

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the warriors share? But perhaps this is to think in Melanesian terms, for as much as Weiner’s (1995) Lacanian anthropology or Gillison’s (1993) or Mimica’s (2008) engagements with psychoanalysis, Harrison’s (1993) ethnopsychology of warfare also comes to mind here and suggests some other conversations that might be had.

George Mentore Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, 100 Brooks Hall, P.O. Box 400120, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 22 IX 11 Experiments should be applauded. Ovation should rise, raising the roof, its clamor rain down on the audacity of research. The impudence to confront the intellectual monster of the unthought by thinking it into being deserves a drenching in acclaim. To think the unthought is to presence it into being. The unthought, like secrecy, comes into being instantly expressive of itself and all that it claims to conceal. Anthropological thinking similarly appears to presence the unthought, providing contemplation “about” the thoughts of cultural others while simultaneously concealing and revealing the presence of its own bourgeois Euro-American thinking. Yet what to make of an anthropological contemplation “around” the aru´tam waka´n, which makes effable that which is ineffable in Shuar experience? Like the Shuar body—folded around an aru´tam and empowered by its ineffable presence—these experimental thoughts wrap themselves around an anthropological other, bringing themselves and their other into being and empowerment. Nonetheless, they preserve the tension of a difference. The Shuar experience of visions can overcome any notion of specular subjectivity and permit a capacity for intimately feeling the heightened presence and the exercised power of a tactile being. In one motion, their vision experience touches and is touched, thereby traversing any interlude between self and other by denying difference its separate reality. Or is it that “the tactile . . . precedes, or perhaps more accurately defers, the separation of the subject from its objects” (Shildrick 2006:45)? In either case, while operative in both spiritual and material worlds, it is in the world of spirit that the intimacy of truth arrives directly—unmediated by the singular corporality of the other. And if we can here understand kakarma (power) to be possessed in ways that allow it to be harnessed and circulated, we can nevertheless still be arguing that not even its ephemeral concentration will be as significant as its use. We would, of course, need the additional Shuar notions and experiences about temporality in order to judge how effective our algorithms would be for a fuller understanding of their representations of power and subjectivity. The anthropological attempt to fold thinking around the subject turns, in challenge, from surface and reflection and

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their technique of penetration to tsentsemp, tsa´ank, and maı´kua and their specific tactic of encompassment. Bodily ingestion of these forms of power permits enentaimsatin (think/feel), a power experienced tangibly through vision. In the way Shuar bodies enfold the plant-granted visions, empowering them with enhanced thinking/feeling, the anthropological contemplation of this process similarly encompasses the reflective thinking of the specular bourgeois. In other words, its speculation of the specular successfully experiments with the possibilities of vision, just as Shuar successfully test the potential of the aru´tam. And here let us draw attention to the Shuar neka´p-ra (“to feel,” presumably in its primary sensual, rather than emotional, meaning of “to touch” but apparently also meaning “to experiment”). As we applaud loudly the anthropological thinking of the unthought, let us additionally pay tribute to the Amerindian experience of touching/experimenting. Let us not forget to compliment the Amerindian effort at research, which invariably “unfolds along the lines of a metaphysical experimentation with substances such as blood, flesh, semen, and bones” (Maranha˜o 2003:68). And if we grant in ourselves this recognition and praise for their testing of ways to be human, different from our own, could we not also push to our consciousness (and morality) the acknowledgement that “[i]n killing an enemy or an animal, the killer spills blood, may lose some of his own, concretely or symbolically, and alters the balance of flesh in the world of the living and the world of the dead” (Maranha˜o 2003:69)? If we can, then their restoration of “metaphysical balance” should not be thought of primarily in terms of a “war machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 2000) or of a “power . . . possessed” (Foucault 1979:26). Such modernist thinking, carried over to the indigenous Amerindian experience, does not allow us to avoid the monster of the unthought, which comes concealed in the anxiety of the ineffable. In the way that Shuar appear skeptical about the reality of the material world—preoccupied as they are with the truth of the world of spirit—we appear “concerned . . . with a repudiation of the everyday: with a sense of being shouldered out from our ways of thinking and speaking by a torment of reality” (Diamond 2008:71). We cling to thoughts of power and reality in terms of material magnitude. Amerindian socialities seem to prefer doing so in terms of spiritual intensity. The difference in the traversal of the interlude has to do with an experience felt rather than observed.

Reply One can write an essay as speculative as this only in the hopes of inviting constructive and stimulating response; it is gratifying to know that I succeeded. Most of these comments point to research I have not yet done, and all I really can do

Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar

is thank the reviewers for their engaging thoughts and for pointing out new directions. I appreciate Calavia’s warning against grounding an argument about an Amazonian culture in a theory that may be inseparable from bourgeois material culture and worldviews. He also urges me to consider work by Brazilian anthropologists emphasizing alterity over identity. I confess that of the structuralist legacy, I am more interested in the dialectic, the perpetually unstable relationship between being and becoming, than in binary oppositions as such (see Lacan 2006 [1955]). Course suggests that Lacan’s inherently structuralist language ideology obscures the Shuar view of the relation between language and experience. To address this strong argument, I clarify below my use of Lacan’s dialectics and Peirce’s semiotic. I am profoundly grateful for Mentore’s insightful suggestion of further exploring Shuar practices and conceptualizations of tactility, a line of inquiry that I suspect will become crucial in my future attempts to advance my understanding of the nonsymbolic and nonlinguistic parts of the aru´tam vision. I admire Crook’s efforts to think in “Melanesian” terms— I tried to think in “Shuar” terms. He questions whether or how “secrecy” can be emptied so as to function as a (universally applicable?) heuristic device. For me, the challenge is how to write, when Shuar and psychoanalysts both tell us that some thoughts resist entry into speech or that some meanings resist entry into thought. In Crook’s own work, secrecy often becomes a sign of incompleteness; perhaps we are each trying to reconfigure absence as presence and explore its effects. He also points out that ethical and representational issues arise when anthropologists take on the role of the cryptographer of the unspoken secrets of other cultures. This point demands continued consideration; I note for now that my own point of reference is not the “crisis of representation” but earlier reflections by Hymes (1969) and more recently by Taussig. As I read them, the aim of their reflections was to comment not merely on “the limitations and deficiencies” of anthropology but rather on the colonizing power of the European and settler states. So I was a little surprised that none of the commenters engaged with what I consider to be my more significant argument: the critique of our own bourgeois culture. I hope that by clarifying this issue, I may also reply to their main points. Since graduate school, my work has been motivated by an attempt to understand how a warrior society was so quickly subjugated by commodity and wage-labor relations. In my life history of Alejandro Tsakimp, I remarked that his discourse echoed both the possessive individualism of bourgeois culture and the nonpossessive individualism of pre-Federation Shuar culture (Rubenstein 2002:11). The idea for this essay emerged as I reviewed new accounts of childhood experiences of mission boarding schools. My informants were angry about epithets like “savage” or “Jı´varo,” but they seemed to view them less as attacks than as mistakes, as forms of misrecognition. This made me wonder whether one might productively

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analyze Tsakimp’s discourse in terms of a misrecognition. My essay argues that Shuar were willing to exchange one regime of violence (which produces an egalitarian society and a specific kind of political subject) for the other (which produces a stratified society) because a difference was misrecognized as an equivalence. This task led me to adopt Lacanian theory as a heuristic device for teasing out the differences between processes of subject formation in pre-Federation Shuar society and those in our own. I found Deleuze and Guattari’s and Zˇizˇek’s analysis of repressed dynamics such as the Oedipus complex very helpful in understanding how we bourgeois come to desire our own subjugation. It seemed to me that Shuar must have a locus for some dynamic that is formally comparable but can function to produce an equally powerful desire not to be subjugated. I began writing this essay when, reflecting on Lacan’s dialectical approach, I first considered approaching my informants’ refusal to tell me the contents of their visions not as an obstacle to my understanding their importance but as a clue to that locus. What would an ethnography of the Shuar look like if one began with the claim that the true reality is accessible only through secret visions? Could I refigure these secrets not as an absence in my knowledge but instead as a presence in the lives of Shuar? Thus, my use of Lacan and other theorists is meant to help clarify both the key similarity and the key difference between the violence of headhunters and the violence encoded in the contract that a capitalist enters into with a worker or the state with its subjects. This would help me understand how Shuar could misrecognize the liberal contract—with a capitalist or the state—as a form of power equivalent to the power of the wordless aru´tam. This is why I feel able to claim a moral equivalence between capitalist wage labor contracts and warriors’ murders of settlers or police (see “Colonialism”). This is my attempt at an authentically anarchist anthropology, which examines “societies against the state” in order to further our critique of our own liberal state. I admit that, as Calavia notes, my approach to Lacan is risky. I have deliberately attempted to use psychoanalysis “as a sort of Western folk knowledge” deeply rooted in the furnishings of the capitalist economy and the liberal state. I am interested in insights into bourgeois culture, both because it is ours and because it is this culture that is colonizing the Shuar. This is an attempt to avoid the trap of assuming universal validity of a particular model of subjectification. Rather, I think that my analysis shows how Lacanian theory is bound to bourgeois society, how it must be retheorized to describe the process of subject formation in societies with other technologies of recognition, and what happens when these two regimes of subjectivity meet in a colonial process. Course critically asks how speech and vision can be opposed, respectively, as the realms of misrecognition and recognition. I do not mean to suggest that Shuar believe that recognition is impossible in language. These terms are op-

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posed only in a dialectical sense: the mutual negation is also mutually constitutive. If Shuar believed that all speech is reliably and predictably false, then they would have no ambivalence about speech. Indeed, one can use words to deceive only if there is a pretension of accuracy. Shuar I know value words and care very much what others have to say but are often highly suspicious of words. This form of sociality is one effect of the authentic recognition of the aru´tam waka´n
, as is the violence of the warrior. Course is right that Lacan’s structural language ideology obstructs our access to meaning outside of the realm of the Symbolic, but I do not think that my argument hinges on an equation of language with the Symbolic. Using Peircean concepts, I suggest that the speeches of the kaka´ram are iconic of the power of the aru´tam waka´n
. Here speech has nonsymbolic functions (see the discussion of paan chicham in “Shuar Culture through the Looking Glass”). I did not mean to suggest that the words of the kaka´ram’s speech are those of the aru´tam waka´n
. Ethnographic sources agree that a person who has received the power of the aru´tam waka´n
cannot talk about it without losing it. So speech is only one portion of the visionary experience. The power of the aru´tam is incorporated into the being of the Shuar and thus transformed in the process transforming the Shuar; this is not accomplished through speech. These dialectics thus constitute that basically anarchic power that for so long stood against the state. Maybe we bourgeois need psychoanalysis, but my point is that Shuar need the aru´tam waka´n
. —Steven Lee Rubenstein

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