The Backlash to Decolonizing Intellectuality

Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 31, Issue 1, pp 11–40, ISSN 0193-5615, electronic ISSN 1548-1409.© 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Direct all requests forpermission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’sRights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

The Backlash to Decolonizing Intellectuality1

JOANNA OVERING

Department of Social AnthropologyUniversity of St. AndrewsSt. AndrewsFife KY169ALUnited Kingdom

SUMMARY How do we develop an anthropological gaze that avoids the fallacies ofthe superior position? How do we decolonize intellectuality when translating otherpeople’s knowledges and ways of thinking? To answer such questions is first and fore-most a political endeavor, but it is also crucial to the future intellectual and academicsuccess of the discipline. The present culture of audit and accountability attachedto governmental and university managerial strategies works against the task ofcreatively rethinking knowledges other than our own. This article begins with thesecrucial questions and turns to Amazonian ethnography as a case for consideration ofsuch issues.

A main question being raised is, how do we understand an Amazonian aestheticsof egalitarianism in sociological terms? Within such aesthetics we find a well-devel-oped consciousness of power and rich poetic expression of it. This article argues thatit is necessary to revise considerably our notion of “the sociological” to achieve theconceptual means sufficient for the task of capturing the dignity of Amazonian egali-tarianisms. In recent years, the postcolonial critique within and beyond anthropologyhas worked toward a decentering of certain key grand narratives about Society, and ithas been especially productive toward this end. While it is the wisdom of modernistsocial thought to place all the richness of living and everyday life outside the bound-aries of “Society,” beyond the pale of the sociological, many postcolonialists see poet-ics as central to the social. In line with such a view, this article considers the role ofthe genre of the grotesque as it is used by narrators of myth among Piaroa people ofthe Orinoco Basin. In their narratives the political concern is to unfold codes of deco-rum and the arts of folly in order to enable a congenial sociality and disable tyranni-cal hubris. Reflecting on these lessons, the article concludes by outlining some of thedangers of a neoliberal academic backlash against our more recent endeavors to decol-onize intellectuality and to establish interesting conversations with alternative waysof thinking about polity and the social. The backlash is a reaction taking place in thewake of the increasing establishment of neoliberal and governmental policing andmanagerial technologies, emerging today as a culture of audit and accountability thatis becoming general both within and outside of academia. The relentless process ofaudit culture has strong political implications that work toward blocking the intellec-tual creativity required to engage in conversations that might lead to reflections aboutthe myriad follies that lurk within the social and political processes through which weourselves live. [Keywords: Amazonia, egalitarianism, poetics, decolonizingintellectuality, audits]

How do we develop an anthropological gaze that avoids the fallacy of thesuperior position of Western civilization? That is the question. How do wedevelop anthropological writing that does not silence the other? How dowe decolonize intellectuality when translating other peoples’ knowledges andways of thinking (see Fardon ed. 1995)? How do we capture their voices (inpresent jargon) with respect to this matter of knowledge and thinking (seeOvering, ed. 1985; Overing 1987)? To answer such questions is first and foremosta political endeavor, but it is also crucial to the future intellectual and academicsuccess of the discipline. The present audit and accountability culture attachedto government and university managerial strategies works against the task ofcreatively rethinking knowledges other than our own. As a hopeful sign, thistask of decolonizing intellectuality fits well the specific talents of anthropology,with its emphasis on multi-perspectivism and high valuation of understandingdifferent points of view. But will anthropology’s own history, along with thepresent-day globalized political climate, work hard against such an effort? Ishall conclude with a few remarks on this problem. Multi-perspectivism hasalways been difficult to hold on to. There has always been a tug against it.

As we well know, anthropology had its birth as an academic discipline in thelate 19th and early 20th centuries, during the height of what we now term“modernist thought.” This was also a period at the apex of Western imperialistendeavors. As anthropology could be but the child of its times, the intellectualand political climate of this era was deeply implicated in its own development,and remains so to this day. There was the dream of carving out anthropology’sown intellectual space, over which it could be the guardian of truth and objec-tivity. Anthropology needed to produce its own object (a topic upon whichFabian 1983 has most famously dwelt). This object, of course, is that of theWestern imperialized other (sociology had the task of objectifying the West’sown internal subaltern classes). Thus the “object” of anthropology became the“marginals” of the world, the underclasses, the “unhomely,” as Homi Bhabha(1994) has coined them. Anthropology emerged as a study of the “periphery.”It has created for the West its “science of alterity,” and thus the technical vocab-ulary and objectified imagery through which those peoples who were con-quered and assimilated by Western states could be digestibly incorporated (asprimitives) into a European mental framework. We’ve naturalized these peo-ples, these societies, viewing them as weak, unevolved, and underdevelopedin culture, politics, technology, economic relations, and mind. We’ve trans-formed them into objects of nature to be transcended by modern civilization,to become dominated and tamed by it (Mason 1990:13–15).

Much of anthropology’s analytic language denotes notions of primitiveness.We write about peoples who belong to “preliterate,” “prestate,” “pretechno-logical,” “preindustrial” societies. They are stagnant, while we have progress.Anthropological discussions of Amazonian polities and social life are riddledwith such ideas. Peter Rivière (1984), commenting on the state of Amazonianethnography, notes that through it Amazonian peoples are best known not forwhat they are but for what they are not: stateless, with no government or polit-ical authority, and little social structure. In other words, they do not have muchpolity or, for that matter, “societal order.” As such, so the narrative myths of theWest go, they have precious little creativity, moral order, or aesthetics. We havepretty well erased them, with a certain assumption about peoples having

12 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 31, Number 1

different degrees of society, or polity, or creativity (Rapport and Overing 2000).Through Western narratives we completely miss the point about Amazonianpeoples—and their horizon of concerns.

Am I being too harsh?Just try to capture the dignity of an Amazonian egalitarianism, with its par-

ticular rhetoric and intellectual underpinnings—long a dream of mine. Whatkind of polity can be created through this particular egalitarianism? Try to talkabout the political implications of Amazonian poetics. Try to translate theirtropes and their place in the creation of Amazonian socialities. Just try to tell usabout the dignity of a political sort that attaches to the status of being an adultwoman within an Amazonian community.2 Try to talk about a woman’s polit-ical freedom. Try to express any of these things through the patronizing gazeand vocabulary of Western social theory. I vividly remember a colleague ofsome renown displaying ferocious annoyance over the notion that the idea ofcreativity might be relevant to an understanding of Amazonian lifeways. Thiswas just the beginning of the backlash, for he was sufficiently intelligent tounderstand the implications of such an idea for Western theory.

It is clear that to begin to understand Amazonian ways of thinking we mustobviously set ourselves the task of decolonizing Amazonian intellectuality, andto do that, we must decenter Western narratives of the social and also the polit-ical with great determination (see Overing and Passes 2000). The language inwhich these grand myths are told tells a good story about the West, one thatdepends on the inferiorization of the other. Given who the Amazonian peoplesare, their value orientations and distinctions of worth, the specialized languageof Western social theory becomes without a doubt a political technology of nega-tion. Plainly, we cannot begin the job of decolonizing Amazonian intellectualitythrough it. The underlying social evolutionism, attached as it is to the tenets ofEnlightenment rationalism and modernist distinctions of worth, is too thor-ough. I challenge the reader to use the language of Western modernist theoryto successfully say anything with a ring of authenticity to it about Amazonianegalitarianism, aesthetics, poetics, sociality, or polity.

This translation business is quite a task; it requires chipping away at thearmor of modernism. This is a process that should occur naturally as one con-verses with Amazonian peoples, for through such conversation you begin tounderstand better the rhetoric of our own social theory. I have found that theoratory and everyday talk of Piaroa speakers (who are of the Orinoco Basin,and people with whom I studied) can shed considerable light upon our owngrand narratives about evolution, the individual, society, and rationality.

Anthropology clearly has much to answer for. Was anthropology a hand-maiden of colonialism? The answer is not so clear. However, thus far the stresshas been upon the superiority of the anthropological investigator and the gazedismissive of much of what the rest of the world had to say. Where the desirewas upon the progress of science and the primary concern was the abstract andthe sociological, the universal (i.e., that which was local to the West), anda rationalist, formalist, and juridical model of a “rights”-centered view of soci-ety—and not with conscious, living, sensuous, experiencing, reflecting, laugh-ing, weeping, talking, telling, admonishing, singing, punning, playing humanbeings—then anthropology did serve the modernist programs of colonialism(see Overing 1998, Overing and Passes 2000, Rapport and Overing 2000).

Overing The Backlash to Decolonizing Intellectuality 13

One thing is certain. The anthropology of today is not what it was a couple ofdecades ago, for we have experienced an overwhelming shift in point of view.This is due in large part to the blossoming of postcolonialist literature. As anthro-pology was the academic discipline most overtly involved in an objectifiedimagery of otherness, it became the obvious target of much postcolonial critique(see Asad 1975, Said 1978, Fabian 1983, Thomas 1994, de Certeau 1997, Bauman1995). To a certain extent, we entered into a period of confusion, of breast beat-ing, as each new postcolonialist treatise was published. The anthropologist wasfound to be replacing the missionary as the “bad guy” of the Western world.Nevertheless the breeze of postcolonialism proved refreshing for many of us,and the program of decolonizing our ways of thinking about otherness has trans-formed the discipline. The good irony is that because of its historical expertise inthe study of otherness, anthropology’s specific voice can be a strong one raisedagainst the dark side of colonialist excess. It understands the importance of theparticular, and thus the local, over and against the universal and the global.

The postcolonial rhetoric has been exciting—even invigorating—for ourwork. The main cry has been: “Where are all the people? Please, let’s see andhear the people!” Let me give you a few examples, both within and withoutanthropology: For a start, more and more scholars are working at the intersec-tions of disciplines and methods, bringing together the concepts and proce-dures of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, poetics, andhistory. Michel de Certeau is one such person. In Culture in the Plural (1997), thefirst heading of de Certeau’s first chapter is “Against Unconsciousness.” In ThePractice of Everyday Life (1984), de Certeau calls for studies of the arts of every-day practices—the arts of cooking, the fine art of dwelling. Meaning is to befound in the arts of the everyday, in their tactics, and in poetics and trickeries.As de Certeau (1984:6) proclaims, we must dislodge the rigid boundaries of thescientific endeavor that turn the lifeways of living, experiencing people intomere leftovers and footnotes.

Roy Wagner, in a remarkable article entitled “Poetics and the Recentering ofAnthropology,” notes the hidden politics of doubt in Descartes’ game. Wagner(1991:40–42) attacks “Post-Cartesian, objective science,” observing that “thisworld is a civilization of bland surrogates, human realities nickeled and dimedto death by degrees, the degrees metered out by those merchants we call pro-fessionals” (i.e., anthropologists). Ivan Brady (1991), on the other hand, noteswith relief that anthropology is rediscovering its poetic base to become againan “artful science.” He suggests it is time that we salvaged what has been“heaped on the cutting room floor of the Enlightenment scientist” by capturingthe “elusive culture of ordinary reality” (1991:8), a level of existence that hasbeen “neglected, trivialized, or upbraided by the analytic conceit that equatesall (or the only so-called ‘true’) reality with its own ideations and conclusions”(1991:9). Brady’s rhetoric is good. He notes that we must avoid “the danger ofhovering over the facts forever in ‘analytic neutral’ ” (1991:22; also see Marien1988). Thus Brady attacks the “silver bullet” mentality—the quest for themonologic “one shot” that will explain everything.

There is also the philosophical counterculture to pay attention to, whichincludes such scholars as Feyerabend (1975), MacIntyre (1985), Charles Taylor(1985), Toulmin (1990), Hesse (1983), Goodman (1968, 1978), Baier (1994), andBenhabib (1992), all working toward critical decenterings of certain key grand


narratives of Society, those that work against the creative success of science.More overtly political, Homi Bhabha (1994) calls for the development of a lit-erature of self-empowerment and recognition through which marginal peoplesof the world could discover their own voices (Overing 1998, and Rapport andOvering 2000, “The Unhomely”). Such writings could have revisionary force inthe destabilizing of traditional relations of cultural domination. Thus thosewho have been categorized by Western civilization as beyond the pale couldthemselves do the job of translating who they are. They could express theirnausea with the progressivist claims of establishment thought. There is muchat stake here with this new cultural discourse being called for from the mar-ginals of the world (see de Certeau 1997).

Zygmunt Bauman sees the most difficult goal, especially in academia, to be thatof overcoming the modernist’s radical techniques of inequality (the axiomaticstarting point of most Western argument being the superiority of the West) andalso its program for erasing difference. In Life in Fragments (1995: 166–167), Baumannotes that “modernity was the time of cultural crusades, of merciless war againstprejudice and superstition . . . and the ‘dead hand’ of tradition.” It disqualified anduprooted all those particularizing authorities seen to be standing in the way of themodernist dream of human homogeneity: the dream of a world populated by“uniformly perfect beings,” reached solely through the dictates of reason.

We must ever return to this stance of the modernist anthropologist. It hasnot left us. Remember that the received wisdom of sociological theory placesall the richness of living and everyday life, aesthetics and poetics, outside soci-ety’s boundaries—as pertaining to (irrational) domains that sit beyond the paleof the sociological.

The postcolonialist critique has truly opened up anthropology, as we cansee by the wonderful ethnography and rhetoric to be found within the disci-pline over the past 10 to 15 years. There is the idea of the dialogical emergenceof culture (Tedlock and Mannheim 1995) and of an emphasis on the notion of“culturing” (see Rapport and Overing 2000). There is an emphasis once againon practices in the world, and their ongoing relationship to (conscious) con-cepts (Ingold 2000). There is the development of an anthropology of con-sciousness, and of the everyday (Brady 1991, Wagner 1991, Fabian 1998, andmany others). There is the insistence upon the crucial role of the ethnographyof speaking within our ethnographic studies (bowing to the wisdom of DellHymes [1981]). There is the concerted attack on representational theories ofmeaning. For the moment, grand abstractions and universalisms seem to behaving a difficult time. It is rich ethnography that is essential, with people talk-ing to and experiencing each other. People can be truly interesting, warts andall (and think of all the bawdy poetics in Kulick’s [1992] description ofwomen’s speech within a New Guinea village). We have rediscovered the factthat people tend to be (overtly, consciously, amazingly) creative in a multitudeof fascinating ways. We find that we must work against those methodologiesthat privilege the creativity of the analyst and disparage the worth of indige-nous creativity. The anthropological goal of “discovering” all those uncon-scious, “underlying structures” of other people’s societies (and thoughts) canbe highly questionable. It is no longer acceptable to claim the supremacy of ourown consciousness and assume the inferiority of others.

* * *


We have been obviously in need of new visions of “the sociological,” awidening and extending of the anthropological endeavor beyond the restric-tive, self-serving borders of modernist sociological theory.

The “sociologically” wayward ways of peoples of Amazonia have becomemore accessible within a new sociology of knowledge, one that once againallows for aesthetics and poetics. Through it, we can begin to recognizeAmazonian visions and narratives of the social, and the sociological implica-tions of the insistent entanglement of their everyday practices with aestheticjudgment (see Belaunde 1994, 2000, 2001; Echeverri 2000; Kidd 2000; Lagrou1998, 2000; Londoño-Sulkin 2000; Overing 1989, 2000; Passes 2000). We canbegin to understand why it is that beauty in daily practice (e.g., in their culi-nary arts, in their modes of intersubjectivity) is, for them, an expression ofmoral and political value (Overing 1989).

We can begin to understand the link in Amerindian ways of thinkingbetween aesthetics and sociality, and that between poetics and the political. Wecan now talk about “freedom” as a political issue for Amerindian people.We begin to relate to the indigenous peoples of the world as who they are inthe here and now. We can relate to and converse with them in today’s time andnot as a fictive example of “primitivism” belonging to our own past.

We nevertheless have much baggage to shed—all those self-valuations ofmodernist theory, where it was assumed that it is only we moderns who havethe means for conscious doctrines of egalitarianism and individualism (see, forexample, Abercrombie et al. 1986, Dumont 1977, Macpherson 1962, Mauss1985). These are the doctrines, we fervently believe, that uniquely define uspolitically and socially as “moderns.” As I have noted, anthropologists havehad great difficulty finding much Society and Polity among the peoples ofAmazonia. A number of us, through an anthropology of the everyday, havehoped that we might have come closer to understanding a sociality and polity,one that is typical of Amazonian peoples, where the moral virtues and aes-thetics of interpersonal relationships are the major concern (e.g., Overing andPasses 2000: see especially the contributions by Ales, Belaunde, Echeverri, Gow,Kidd, Londoño-Sulkin, and Overing). Lagrou (1998), writing on Cashinahuavillage life, speaks of this cluster of values as an aesthetic praxis of community.We may in the end arrive at a comparative aesthetics, moral philosophy, andsocial psychology through which we could begin interesting conversationswith peoples of the Amazon. That would be a dream.

Forget about the science of alterity for a while and establish instead theseinteresting conversations about freedom and personal autonomy, about theviolence of power and also its creativity, about types of collectivities that canand have been created through means other than those we modernists arefamiliar with.

How do we go about understanding an Amazonian form of egalitarianism?Amazonian peoples are highly conscious of political matters. Certainly thePiaroa people with whom I lived talked about them on end. They have highregard for personal autonomy and are also strongly attached to their own col-lective ways of doing things. For them, all social relationships are personal andinformal, founded on a good dose of conviviality and personal trust, valuesoften stressed by other peoples of Amazonia (see Overing and Passes 2000,especially Belaunde, Gow, Kidd, Lagrou, Passes, and Santos-Granero; also see


Overing 2003a). The collectivity is premised upon the satisfactory creation ofaesthetically pleasing relationships of mutuality. They understand that theachievement of such a social state is difficult to do, but to do so is for them apolitical matter. As you see, I am not at all hesitant about talking about Piaroapolitical philosophy.

We are beginning to see a common theme to Amazonian polity. The themeof Adolfo de Oliveira’s recent Ph.D. thesis (2003) carries a similar message; heargues that for the Mebenkogre (Kayapo) people of Central Brazil, the politycontinuously emerges through the creation in daily ritual of a personalizedintersubjectivity, comprised of freedom-demanding individuals. We are begin-ning to arrive at a common set of questions that we must answer: Why doAmazonian people have such distaste for institutionalized hierarchy? Why domany consider even a hint of coercive behavior so dangerous? On the otherhand, why is it that many Amazonian people adamantly talk about creating“good/beautiful” people, who can live a tranquil, sociable life together (forexample, see Ales 2000, Belaunde 2000, 2001:54–59 on the Airo Pai, Gow 2000on the Piro, Kidd 2000, Overing 1989)? Why do Amazonian peoples place suchhigh value upon good humor, affective comfort, and sociable mutuality in theireveryday practices of community living? Why is it that they also talk at lengthabout the difficulties and dangers of the processes of achieving this task (seeGonçalves 2000, Londoño-Sulkin 2000, Rivière 2000, Rosengren 2000, Santos-Granero 2000)? How are the arts of social living achieved? All of these areAmazonian questions and indeed are raised as daily topics for consideration.As such they have political value, saying much about their own distinctions ofworth. But to understand the whys and wherefores of such questions—forinstance, from Piaroa, Yanomami, Cashinahua, or Kayapo points of view—weneed to know a good deal more about the cosmic backdrop of such concernsand the mythic narratives through which the history of the cosmos is unfolded.I shall speak briefly to the cosmic backdrop of a Piaroa view.

Poetics and the Political: The Genre of the Grotesque in Mythic Narrative

It is important, politically, that the genre of the grotesque is so evident inPiaroa narrations of the mythic.

I have written elsewhere (2000) on the powerful part that the ludic hasto play in the practices of everyday life within Piaroa communities, where aslapstick, bantering, punning, and even bawdy humor is constitutive of suchdaily social activities as gardening, gathering, and food preparation. It is alsostrongly evident in the narrations and ritual of their shaman-leaders, who arethe grand masters of rich comic rhetoric and play. A Piaroa leader is first andforemost a highly skilled jokester, and to a certain extent a trickster, and teacherto others of the art of the ludic, a socially necessary practice that makes possi-ble a convivial existence. What are the political implications of this social stresson the ludic, where work cannot be done without it, nor any other cooperativeendeavor? We see that for Piaroa people folly plays a significant part in thedaily attainment of a comfortable, knowledgeable, and therefore successfulsociality. It would be appropriate here to speak, as Peter Berger (1997) does, ofthe comic as a mode of knowledge. And, like him, we too might come to thinkhighly of those who live in recognition of a comic worldview. Because of the


prevalence of such a value among Amazonian peoples, where wisdom is oftenassociated with a deep knowledge of the ludic, we ethnographers must cometo understand the capacity of the ludic to enhance understanding.

In recent work (2003b, 2004), I have been exploring the link between theludic sociality of the Piaroa and the genres of their mythic narrations (the per-formance of which are an everyday occurrence for them). There is a poeticsinvolved in this mythic narration, which is linked to cosmological and moralperceptions, and an unfolding of ways of being in the world (see Hymes 1981and Vernant 2002; their understanding respectively of the Amerindian andancient Greek poetics goes a long way toward the decolonizing of intellectual-ity). Piaroa poetics with its bawdy, raucous genre of the grotesque is framed bya rich philosophy of folly. Through it, I argue, we can understand the politicalstance of the Piaroa, and their sociality.

The mythic narrations are most concerned with the implications for thehuman condition of the mighty modes of power let loose in mythic time, whichallow for life on earth. Mythic time was when the landscape of what becametoday time on earth slowly unfolded through the sorcery and antics of power-ful creator gods. These powers of the gods, which were sufficiently mighty forcreation, were wild, violent, and poisonous (the comparison with the myths ofancient Greece is appropriate). There is an enormous pleasure in experiencingthe event of a mythic narration, for there is all that cosmic foolishness and chi-canery, the telling of which is hilarious and also robustly lewd.

There were the crazy jokes and interesting transformations: the reversingof head and buttocks of an armadillo, the grabbing of a penis hovering in theair for the creation of men, the day that human beings lost their shiny blue arse-holes. There were the battles of the gods, with their devious traps, and thebackfiring of intentions. More seriously, the gods also zapped each other withforce fields of madness, a form of paranoia that gives you delusions ofgrandeur, makes you crazy, makes you kill your own grandmother. Creationtime, much as in Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle, moves from a kind of naughtyirony to a more grotesque, dark place of the tragedy of hubris. Thus creationtime was when folly really went astray. A vengeful ridiculous universe isunfolded, with the end of creation time best understood as consisting of ahighly colorful landscape of monsters.

Which was not surprising, given that the father of all cultivated food andcreator god of the mighty culinary arts—all those mighty forces enabling ofgardening, hunting, curare, and cooking fire—was also a tyrannical, grotesquemadman. His name is Kuemoi, and he is portrayed as a diabolical buffoon, rau-cously laughing with each plot he hatched, shrieking in outrage when foiled;he stamps his feet when thwarted: a figure of high comedy, not tragedy. Whenovertaken by total madness, he runs endlessly around in circles. (He remindsme of Robert Nye’s depiction of the devil in Merlin: “He grins like a fox eatingshit out of a wire brush; the Devil is ‘snoring as loud as a pig’; ‘he giggles andhe writhes’ ”—the hilarious, absurd, and mockable side of wickedness.)

This creator god of civilized eating was the owner of what Piaroa call the“crystal boxes of tyranny, treachery, and domination.” Kuemoi released all thehorrors from these boxes of primordial powers full blast into this world. It washe who was the owner of the crystal boxes of Night: It was he who in great gleereleased night and all its dangerous creatures into earthly space. All of these


vicious beings were his weapons. In fact all of his creations serve as hisweapons, including the culinary arts. All have powers either to kill or to poi-son. He transformed himself during his escapades as jaguar, vulture, mudfish,or anaconda—through which he achieved the clothes of physical might. Asmall but monstrous two-headed figure (in “normal” form), he had one headto eat meat raw and one to eat meat cooked. Kuemoi is the archetypically evilfigure of creation time, and its most ridiculous.

This very foolish god who has all the knowledge of the culinary arts (gar-dening, hunting, and fire) speaks to a highly sophisticated theory of ethicalbehavior and to the side of human nature, as Piaroa perceive it, of the poten-tiality of all human beings for odious and wicked behavior. A deep cruelty droveKuemoi and the use of his might. The power of his thoughts for sorcery thathad their source in the poisonous hallucinogens he took from the rust of thesun, the down of the sun—power sufficiently mighty to create the culinaryarts—continually poisoned his will. Overtaken by total madness, Kuemoialways acted without reason. He had no dignity. Evil here is clearly being asso-ciated with knowledge (thus too much power) and Kuemoi clearly had far toomuch of both. He forever experienced an extreme poisoning of his emotions(the disease that the Piaroa call ke’raeu—paranoia, hubris, the desire to mur-der). This condition of suffering poisonous unmastered knowledge is firmlyattached to an imagery of madness and buffoonery.

Toward the end of creation time, almost all creator gods and other beingshad become struck down by this disease of paranoia, the disease of civilizedeating, the disease of twirl round, fall down. Thereafter, creation time’s terres-trial landscape descended into increasing grotesquery and chaotic violence tobecome a world where hubris reigned. Community became set against com-munity. They devoured each other like animals by transforming into Kuemoi’sjaguar forces.

This cannibalistic holocaust ended with a female goddess, Cheheru, thepromiscuous sister of the creator god of human beings, the mother of perfumesand monkey urine madness, gathering together all of Kuemoi’s deadly forcesfor the culinary arts and taking them to the safety of a celestial space, high inthe mountains, where they are still, today, kept locked within their crystalwomb boxes of origin. Nowadays, Piaroa shamans can collect theseawful/wonderful powers, but only bit by bit, to give to each of the members oftheir community.

Thus, the Piaroa have within them the violent forces of creation time, thepoisonous culinary arts of Kuemoi, which they understand to be the source ofall their fertility, their creativity. They are the seat of each person’s personalpower. They are the forces through which each person can create a human wayof living today. It is the responsibility of each individual to master those culi-nary forces within them, to make them beautiful by cleansing them of their poi-son, thus making them useful for creating this human sort of life, whererelationships are not poisoned by paranoia, by hubris, and by delusions ofgrandeur.

The point is critical that the monstrous mythscape of creation time is everinteracting with every practice in which the Piaroa engage within everydaytime. The crazy creations of the gods set all the possibilities for being in thisworld, for acting within it, existing within it. The practices of the creator gods


also established all the conditions for relating within a world, and betweenworlds of the multiverse within which the Piaroa are a part. It is important totake note of the fact that the practices of all the creator gods became progres-sively grotesque. This fact gives a decided edge to the story. The arts of the culi-nary skills, which in due course did become the human condition, included themost dangerous modes of power—that is, practices—of all. They can make youcrazy. They can make you a tyrant. They can lead you to murder.

The Interplay of Everyday Practices and the Genres of the Grotesque

Daily life, living within a Piaroa community, struck me as exceedingly com-fortable, easygoing, and immensely safe. Children played freely. Husbands andwives planned together their activities for the day. Later, adults and childrenreturned to the village from hunting or gathering forays in the jungle or fromharvesting from the gardens, to be greeted enthusiastically by those who hadremained behind. Within the large communal house, women relaxed, chatting,peeling cassava roots. Men nearby were making darts, weaving baskets, join-ing in joking with the women; men and women entertaining each other, tellingamusing experiences of the day—in the gardens, in the jungle; grandmothersand young girls returning to the plaza with firewood and water; boisterousteenage boys playing badminton, using their hands to strike corn-husks; thedaily baths in the very cold stream, a small upriver tributary of the Orinoco;convivial shared meals; bawdy joking and banter; visitors arriving, happilygreeted, looked after, and fed.

It took a long while for me to begin to relate such tranquility to the grotesqueand absurd imagery of shamanic narrations. I was, nevertheless, frequentlytold of such connections, which were clearly rich, many-layered—and oftenvery surprising. To begin to understand the significance of such linkages wasanother matter. The social, cultural, and political life of such a communityturns out to be much more colorful, exciting, interesting—and by all meansintellectual—than the innocent eye detects. The tranquility I observed is ahealthy community spirit carefully worked at and hard-won. It also speaks ofan egalitarianism that is quite alien to the modern Western imagination. Therewas a tremendous freedom to this Piaroa way of living, but it was not a free-dom easily understood by us Western academics. From a different aspect, theimagery of a wonderful (intellectual) mystery story unfolds: Slowly the extraor-dinary pieces come together.

First there are the ruwatu, or shamanic leaders. These are skilled wizards,outer-space warriors, doctors, psychologists, kindergarten teachers, professors,philosophers, cosmologists, comedians, poet laureates, and agronomists. Theyare responsible for the fertility of their people and of the land they use. Theirpower is great and their intelligence impressive.

That first night I spent in the large communal house of a powerful ruwa,along a small tributary of the Orinoco called Paria Chiquito. It was both awe-some and terrifying. My husband, Myron Kaplan, and I had been welcomedinto the Maparæku community, our hammocks strung up for us in the appro-priate space around the sleeping circle. A table was lashed for us to place ourbelongings. We were included in the evening meal, after which we all preparedto sleep—or so I thought! We were exhausted after a two-day trek through the


jungles of the Guiana highlands, and so I immediately fell asleep—only to beawakened by very eerie sounds. Some sort of ritual chanting was going on, andI had no idea what it meant. Were we a danger to them? Was it directed at us,the strangers in their midst? Would we live to see daylight? I peered into dark-ness and saw that across the circle of hammocks, all the men of the communityhad strung their hammocks up at the hearth of Carlos and Camilla, the leadersof the community who were respectively referred to as ruwa and ruwahu. (Inever learned their original given names, for to do so would have been a terri-ble insult to them. I was later informed that to use a person’s name after theyreached the age of five was paramount to displaying their genitals to publicview.) I listened very carefully to the strange noises coming from the leaders’hearth and discerned a pattern. Carlos would chant for a while in a nasal,none-too-melodic manner and the men would answer in chorus. And so it con-tinued gutturally, hour upon hour. Caution and exhaustion returned me tosleep. What would happen would happen. A wise decision, for the next morn-ing my husband and I awoke in the safe security of our hammocks. On theground between us stood a pineapple—a morning treat that the oldest womanand her granddaughter brought us. One pineapple sat at each hearth of thehouse. As for the chanting, it continued nightly—four to six hours a night—forthe remainder of our yearlong stay at Maparæku.

These chants proved to be immensely important to Piaroa everyday prac-tices; 35 years later I am still figuring them out. During that first fieldworkperiod I managed to learn the bare bones of their significance. Chanting, for theruwa, is concerned with the health and fertility of the members of his commu-nity. The ruwa protects them by going to war against all the great predators ofthe night that might harm them. He chants for safety in eating and, in so doing,transforms the animals that the hunters seek to kill the next day into safe veg-etable flesh. Piaroa have jokingly told me that they are therefore vegetarians.The ruwa chants also for the safety of pregnant women in childbirth and pre-vents the primordial penis of the Father of the Animals beneath the earth fromimpregnating the women at night with the monstrous semen of the animals. Inorder to protect and cure, the chanting ruwa sends his “master of thoughts”(ta’kwaruwa) traveling through the many worlds of the Piaroa multiverse3 tofind the creation time antics that are causing a specific illness of a person withinhis own community. He sends his “master of thoughts,” ta’kwaruwa (his per-sonal spirit that oversees both his “life of thoughts” and his “life of thesenses”4), to the houses of the present-day gods, to ask them to help him battleagainst illness. The gods might then transform into great predator forces, suchas jaguar or bear, and travel from their home in the sky to devour specific forcesof illness that are dwelling in the body of the ill person. These chants of theruwa unfold cosmology: the history of the universe, the history of the creationof earthly space, and all that is contained within. They tell of all the otherworlds that might adversely, vindictively, affect Piaroa daily routines. Eachnight the ruwa blows all the words of his chanting into a container of water(and one of honey for children), which all members of the community drink thefollowing day to incorporate the protective potency of the words of the chantsinto their bodies.

The foregoing statements are intentionally general: The whys and where-fores of this malevolent Piaroa multiverse and its relation to the understanding


of what it means to live a human sort of social life, of egalitarian and safe exis-tence, need to be fleshed out with much more investigation.

What about the ruwa—and his wife, the ruwahu—he who has powerfulforces within him to travel the multiverse, she the creator of large and beauti-ful gardens?5 How do they relate to egalitarian lifeways?

Before our arrival at Maparæku in 1968, my husband and I had traveled var-ious tributaries of the Orinoco to learn of other Piaroa settlements within whichwe might live. At one point we were traveling in a canoe, with capableGuahibo guides, up a small tributary of the Sipapo. We had been advised of aninteresting community upriver. Having seen no signs of human existence theentire day amid this beautiful jungle terrain, and having spent the previousnight on a rocky outcrop in torrential rain, we arrived in the late afternoon atwhat appeared to be a huge village. We saw three large thatched communalhouses and people aplenty. There must have been at least three hundred peo-ple. Simultaneously to our arrival a number of men were returning from a suc-cessful hunting trip, carrying at least 30 wild peccary on their backs. We hadarrived in the midst of a Sari festival, the great-increase ceremony which Piaroahold every year if they can. As we stepped ashore, we were greeted by a cheer-ful little old man who we soon realized was to be our attentive host during ourstay. He showed us around, walking us to the large communal house where allthe women were preparing food and making beer. He sat us down and teasedus into learning some Piaroa phrases. The first word we learned was adi’wa,meaning “good,” “beautiful.” He made it clear that we were “adi’wa” people,but that I was “adi’wahu,” the feminine form of “good.” From the start he madeus feel safe and happy and provided each of us with a great plate of deliciousboiled wild peccary liver. He later showed us our comfortable sleeping arrange-ments. On the next day he said his farewell and warmly invited us to comeback and live with them.

Who was this kindly man? I have to admit that we took him for a verygracious elderly person who was not needed in all the hustle and bustle of cer-emonial procedures and who had found time for the likes of us. Well, as welearned later, this lovely man was the great ruwa, the great and powerful cer-emonial leader and owner of this spectacular, month-long festival. Most of thepeople attending were his guests from neighboring communities. The Sari isthe most dangerous ritual that Piaroa ruwatu perform. It is a great-increaseceremony, that of filling the jungle with wild game. This “little old man” wasresponsible for the entire production of the Sari, including protecting the par-ticipants from the ravages of the screaming spirits of the dead, who yearn fortheir living relatives and want to steal them to take back to the “land of thedead.” They also want to steal the beautiful music of the Sari festival. It is thefestival where the ceremonial ruwa initiates young men into the ceremonialhouse. He gives them their first rituals to attain their hunting skills. It is thefestival that ends with the great ritual of atonement, when all adults arebeaten (lightly!) for their guilt in consuming the meat of game, which is ipsofacto an act of cannibalism, for all animals of the forest were once humanbeings, and they remain so in other worlds of the multiverse. This old manwas one of the most powerful of shaman leaders in Piaroaland. In this festivalhe transformed humans who lived beneath the earth into game animals to beconsumed by his people. He gave the young men the forces of thoughts from


the crystal womb boxes owned by the goddess Chehehu, through which theycould hunt this game.

Why do the most powerful among Piaroa people also have the most humbledemeanor? In the case of each and every powerful ruwa we met, the samepresentation of self was evident: the merry tease, the impoverished dresser(a not too clean loincloth), the gracious respect, the generous host.

It was also explained to me that all men are ruwatu, and all women ruwahutu.All have received the forces of thoughts from the present-day Tianawa gods tomaster the skills for their daily use of culinary arts and social living, appropri-ate to their gender. From childhood, they are formally taught the skills for con-vivial living6 by the ruwa. At their first menses, girls go through the ritual withthe ruwa, through which they receive from the crystal womb boxes of thegods their forces of thoughts that enable them to master their own fertility7 andtherefore be responsible for their own birth of children. Boys, when about 12years old, ritually receive their forces of thoughts to become accomplishedhunters and fishermen. Such “lessons” can continue, if the person so desires,later on in life: Skill is always a relative matter and is to a large extent chosen.Only a few have both the intelligence and the desire to go through the ordealsto become great ruwatu or ruwahutu. Nevertheless, as Jesus (Carlos’s highlyintelligent 18-year-old son) further clarified in a significant joke: “I also am aruwa!” Surprised, partly because of Jesus’ humility in face of shamanic knowl-edge, I asked, “How so?” “Well,” he replied, “I am the ruwa of my hammock,the ruwa of my penis!” He is saying that, in truth, he is master (has responsi-bility for) his own sexuality. At first I misunderstood him, thinking that he wasonly joking. Jesus’ proclamation will make further sense in light of the follow-ing vignette from mythic time, often used by ruwatu in their nightly chants,especially if their houses contain teenagers. It is a favorite narrative of that agegroup, and the ruwatu take pleasure in telling it. This vignette is about the sig-nificant day when Piaroa lost their blue, shimmering, crystal anuses and geni-tals. I enjoyed this episode too. The story, a version told to us in 1977 by a ladwhose name was also Jesus, goes as follows:

The Piaroa Loss of their Shiny Blue Anuses

Paruna (the creator god of white man’s goods, and the husband of Cheheru) wasn’table to find hallucinogenic yopo plants (banisteriopsis) in the vicinity of his house, sohe left and traveled to Caracas to find some. During this period Wahari (the creatorgod of people, and the twin of Cheheru) decided to pay a visit to the house of Parunaand his sister, Cheheru. He could find no yopo plants near his own house andthought he could obtain some at the home of Paruna and Cheheru. To acquire someyopo, Wahari copulated with his sister, Cheheru. From this union with Wahari,Cheheru was able to remove a yopo plant from her vagina to give to her brother. Inthe meantime Paruna, still in Caracas, checked on his house through the force of histhoughts: He was able to see Wahari calmly grinding yopo—and, next to him,Paruna’s wife, Cheheru, lying about stark naked in her hammock! He knew he hadno yopo at home! Infuriated, Paruna hurried back home to demand of Wahariexactly where he had found this yopo. Arrogant Wahari replied, straight-faced, thatit was growing all around Paruna’s house. Hadn’t he seen it? The brothers-in-lawbegan arguing over the incest of Wahari with Cheheru and just couldn’t stop. Youcan find them today, still arguing, on the edge of the earth.

It was at that time, the instant the quarrel began between Paruna and Wahari, thatthe Piaroa lost their blue, shimmering, crystal anuses and genitals. Ever since their


nether parts lost the colorful sheen, the Piaroa have been able to order their own sexualitythrough their thoughts and not their anuses.

Both males and females must consider—reflect upon—the consequences oftheir sexual lives. Piaroa, male and female, are strongly attached to their rightto personal autonomy in all decision making. “Cha’kwakomene!” (“It is my wayof doing things!”) This emphatic statement of personal autonomy or purposewould often be expressed by Piaroa in answer to anyone asking directly whythey were doing this or that. The only “rule” or “restraint” I ever came acrossthat a Piaroa would admit to is the one that decreed that a young man mustremain at the house of the girl that he had “knocked up”—and stay therethroughout her pregnancy. To protect both her and baby, it was necessary forhim to join the chorus that responded to the chanting of the ruwa each andevery night. If he neglected such duties, and either the girl or her baby becameunwell—or worse, died, he had to pay her parents a very heavy fine. Clearlyan incentive to think carefully before you jump: to be ruwa of your penis, andruwahu of your vagina, rather than to act helter-skelter through your anus—your life of the senses. Personal autonomy is a social concept as Piaroa explainit: You must always consider the effect that your own actions might have onothers. It must not be your business to harm others.

The mastery of one’s own fertility is the crucial point here. The crazed cre-ator gods were never able to manage this feat. Controlled by their own wilddesires, their fertility sat in their nether parts. Too controlled by arrogance, theywere never able to give birth to progeny in the normal human way. Most fer-tility of the mythic sort was terrible folly, producing its issue through defeca-tion (diarrhea), projectile vomiting, and the violent expelling of other wasteproducts from the body. This is the great contrast between the monstrous fertil-ity of the creator gods and the mastered fertility that Piaroa understand to be theonly means to proper human reproduction, where fertility is a social matter. Itwas by studying the language of the chants more intensively in 1977, throughthe teachings of ruwatu from various regions of Piaroaland, and with the ded-icated help in exegesis by several young Piaroa men, that I gained a far richerknowledge of Piaroa cosmology and its violent cosmogenesis.

I came to pay special attention to the subject of bodily excretions and theirdifferent kinds of fertilizing potencies. To Piaroa, creation is accomplished in allmanner of possible ways. Creation also can be intentionally benevolent, or itcan be intentionally malevolent, and it can be inadvertent. In the followingvignette on the creator god Wahari’s creation of curare, all three possibilitieswere present:

Wahari Makes His Own Curare

(From the chant of Jose Luis Sucre, of the Upper Cuao)

Wahari, the creator god of people, sends his wife, Maizefood, to get some curarefrom her father, Kuemoi, the crazy owner of curare (and of all the other culinaryarts). Wahari wants to give curare to Piaroa people to help them with the hunt.Maizefood succeeds, returning home with a small packet of the precious resin, butWahari, understanding that Kuemoi once again wants to eat him, quickly finds thathis father-in-law has set a trap for him. The crazy old man has placed within his giftof curare a poisonous stone that would zap its user to the heart with poison, instantlykilling him. So Wahari decides to make his own curare. He was quite crazy


(paranoid, aggressive, willful, arrogant—generally out of control), from simplyhandling the packet of Kuemoi’s curare.

Wahari sharpens the point of his blowgun dart in order to go out and kill Toucan(Yaho). He sends for his older brother, Buok’a (a simpleton), to join him on this hunt.Wahari uses a strong resin on his dart that he divines from the jungle, while Buok’auses a weaker resin that he divines from the rivers. The Waikwoni (Wahari andBuok’a’s sister’s sons) also join the expedition into the forest. They all set out to hunt.Toucan is sitting in a tree (seje), happily eating its fruit. Wahari shoots Toucan, and heflies away. The Waikwoni cry, “Father-in-law, Toucan has flown off!” Wahari answers,“No, he will come back to die because I am still young.” Wounded, Toucan flies allaround the world, divining all types of curare plants. Toucan names them allaccording to their kind and the place where each grows. (A long list of names follows.)

Toucan flies around all these places, and wherever he defecates and vomits curareplants grow. After this ordeal, he returns to his fruit tree and falls to the ground dead.Wahari then proceeds to transform the dead toucan into the living Tapir/Anaconda(Ofo’da’æ), the monstrous lord of the underworld. Wahari does this in order to kill hisbrother, Buok’a. So Wahari sends for his older brother, Buok’a, and orders him, “Goand find my toucan that fell dead.” Buok’a departs to this task but finds theTapir/Anaconda monster at the place where Toucan fell dead. Terrified and shaking,he returns to Wahari but could say nothing. Buok’a wasn’t able to utter the word“younger brother,” because Tapir/Anaconda would kill him if he did. Buok’a knewthis. So Wahari orders his sons-in-law, the Waikwoni, to go find Toucan. TheWaikwoni then walk happily down the path to get Toucan—but come acrossTapir/Anaconda instead. Terrified, they run back to Wahari. Now, although his sons-in-law are frightened, shaking, Wahari orders them to try to find Toucan again. Thistime they take another path to escape the awful monster and wisely do not return toWahari. Annoyed, Wahari himself goes to Toucan, knowing he is Tapir/Anaconda.Wahari takes his blowgun and hits Tapir/Anaconda over the head with it,transforming the monster back into Toucan. He picks Toucan up by the bill, and bloodflows from his anus. So he lifts Toucan up by his feet, and Toucan then vomits blood.

Wahari proclaims: “All people who live after me will suffer from this. When men killanimals with curare, and people then eat this game, they will suffer from vomitingblood and blood flowing from the anus and vagina.” So said Wahari.

“Because of this,” Jose Luis chanted, “it is dangerous for pregnant women to eatanimals killed with curare if this protective chant has not been performed. Otherwisethe woman miscarries.”

Now we are drawing nearer to a Piaroa understanding of the connectionsbetween the grotesque events of creation time (as unfolded in the chants of theruwatu) and present-day sociality. The behavior of the mighty Ruwa Wahariwas decidedly not the sort that would engender comfortable familial relation-ships. He arrogantly orders his kinspeople around, plotting death! In contrast,within a Piaroa community, it is unacceptable for anyone to give another anorder, and it is especially wrong for a powerful ruwa to do so. The shamanicleader must ever display his concern for the health of members of his widerfamily. Unfortunately, Wahari’s will became poisoned by all the tempting trapsthat the creator god of the culinary arts, Kuemoi, set for him. Losing all com-passion for others, Wahari became a treacherous companion. Instead of mak-ing life wonderful for the Piaroa, his primary aim, he accidentally (andviciously) created most of life’s hardships—especially ill health and bloodflowing from unexpected orifices.

The dart of Wahari’s blowgun perversely impregnated Toucan, whoseflowing blood then created miscarriage. Fertility of a mythic sort was notably


associated with both violence and a perverted, deviant sexuality. And as men-tioned, creation was often linked to defecation and diarrhea, or with expellingfrom the various orifices of the body—the anus, vagina, and mouth: misfiredattempts at more constructive creation. In the chant on Toucan, his bleedingvomit and excrement are understood to have male fertilizing powers somewhatakin to semen. As curare issues solely from a male source of fertility, gamekilled by curare is dangerous for women. Likewise, menstrual blood and after-birth, purely female sources of fertility, are dangerous to men.

The curare plants that Toucan’s blood gave birth to are not, however, thesource of the resin that the Piaroa use to make their poison for the hunt.Toucan’s “plants” are rather the disease of miscarriage, itself a false, perversepregnancy. Wahari’s attempt to create useful hunting curare was for naught;instead he created a terrible illness that he proclaims will be the future for peo-ple. And this was the scenario for all his attempts to create his own culinary arts.The chants on Wahari’s attempts to create fire, fishhooks, bows and arrows,curare, and so on, unfold the other horrors he created. All were perverse cre-ations, nasty diseases, gonorrhea, paralysis, blindness, skin fungus, burns, sorethroat. The very worst treachery of Wahari was to invite all his own kinspeoplefrom the jungle to a grand feast. A generous host, he got them roaringly drunkand then proceeded to transform them into animals to be hunted as game. Hewithdrew all their thoughts that had allowed them to use the real and effectiveculinary arts of gardening, hunting, and fishing and instead gave them all of hisown perverse creations (as thoughts) through which the animals would thenimpregnate the people of Piaroaland with most of the illnesses they wouldthereafter suffer. In retaliation for all this treachery, Wahari’s own kinsmenkilled him: They hunted him down like game in the forest and shot him dead.

At Maparæku, the first important thing I learned about Carlos’s chantingwas that he was protecting the members of his community nightly from these“diseases of the animals.” His son warned us to be careful not to step on theurine or feces of animals in the jungle, for it was especially through these excre-tions that diseases were passed on to human beings. Jesus explained that theodor of these excretions was a potent conduit of disease, as too was the odor ofanimal blood. At various times I came upon a hunter with his wife carefullybleeding large game such as peccary in the river and cleaning it of its bristles,thereby preparing it for butchering and safe eating.

It was years later that I came to realize that in Piaroa reasoning there was astrong linkage between how they thought about perverse fertile excretions ofcreation time, the disease-carrying excretions of animals, and the waste prod-ucts of human beings. All three had the fertile powers to perversely impregnateothers. It was the time spent on Jose Luis’s chant about the origin of Wahari’screation of Toucan curare that allowed us to understand excretions, in general,as potent means to perversely impregnate others, and thus disease itself as animpregnating process with reverse effect to procreation. The two young men,Jesus II and Antonio, worked enthusiastically with us to understand the lan-guage of this chant and the innuendos of its complex metaphors. To help usunderstand, they turned to joking and wordplay in which they indulged ineveryday banter.

Antonio and Jesus II enjoyed pointing out the interesting connections madein their language for waste products of the body. They explained that all bodily


excretions are labeled as i’sæwa, but the most interesting aspect of the Toucanchant was that to defecate, to vomit, and to ejaculate are referred to by the sameterm: edéku—or edekwa’a, the bad odor of the results of all or any of theseprocesses. More puzzling still, they pointed out that the word for miscarriage,pui’kwa, also means ejaculation. What is the similarity? The (albeit obvious)thought occurs to me that as a woman in miscarriage loses the benefit of fertileejaculation, a man in ejaculating loses the potency of his ejaculation, whichgoes to the woman’s body and not his own. The potency now resides with her.For Antonio and Jesus II, the chant on Toucan brought to mind the banteringbetween young men that often occurred when one of them farted. Farts amonga group of Piaroa induce gales of laughter, as would be true for many otherpeoples. Antonio and Jesus II said that “fart” in their language is called “shitsmoke” (tité iso’pha). If a friend farts, the young men have at hand many father-in-law jokes. Their vocabulary is large to express such ideas as “your father-in-law is shitting!” or “he’s shouting!” or “he’s vomiting!” The teaser might alsoexclaim, “You are vomiting your father-in-law!” which refers to the hallucino-genic drugs the man uses. To make such off-color comments is good mockingfun, but intent goes further to express the desire for your farting friend’s goodhealth, somewhat akin to the use of the German phrase gesundheit in responseto a sneeze. The young man’s father-in-law is surely a man of greater knowl-edge than his son-in-law. He is a more powerful ruwa. As such his bodilyexcretions—his sweat, his urine, his ear wax, his excrement, his farts—are dan-gerous to the health of those with whom he lives who have less knowledge.The lad, in farting, is getting rid of some of the dangerous contamination thathis father-in-law imparted to him. His shit smoke is, however, also a danger tohis friends, entailing the transference of dangerous power from him to them.

Time and time again, as Antonio and Jesus II enjoyed stressing, the evidencepoints to the sexuality, fertility, and possible perversity of all bodily functionsand excretions of the body.8 In the chant narrations, there is frequentlyexpressed the very hilarious side to such dangers. In a mythical vignette ofWahari’s creation of people sung by both Carlos and Jose Luis, it is told that hemade brains for people from the pus of boils of his own venereal disease(Wahari was even born inside Tapir/Anaconda’s crystal box of gonorrhea). Thename of that box of gonorrhea, as Antonio and Jesus II gleefully informed us,is “lusty old man” (unæsæyu). The boils have the same name, iwá mæruwa, asthe facial paint that marks a woman’s knowledge of her menstruation. Thisface paint is named k’eræu, and it proclaims the dreaded paranoia and self-aggrandizement that Wahari continually suffered from and that caused histyrannical behavior. Male and female are equal in their dangers—as well asusefulness—to one another. The excretions of any adult can be dangerous tothose with whom they live, the most dangerous being, of course, those of thepowerful shaman-leader (who is inevitably also a father-in-law).

On the other hand, this transference of power between people who livetogether is crucially procreative in the positive sense. Piaroa understand thereceiving of life to be a continuous and complex process. A number of factors,acts, and events are said to contribute to the creation or transformation of a per-son’s own life forces. The act of endowing knowledge is a reproductory act: Itis work that procreates. As people mature they become healthier both mentallyand physically, and so they become more knowledgeable and skilled in the


culinary arts. They incorporate into their bodies more and more of the creativeand fertile “forces of thought” (takwanya) from the crystal boxes of the godsthat allow them to live a skilled, fertile life on earth. People who live in com-munity are continuously involved in a process of mutual creation through theprinciple that relates to the transference of creative powers. All the work that aperson does contributes to the endowment of life of the members of the samecommunity. Kinspeople are created not only through the reproductive capacityof married couples but also through the continual work carried out by all thosewho live together. More specifically all work has a reproductive effect on thosein daily close contact with one another. When eating the food processed orhunted by another, a person incorporates into self the personal powers of theproducer’s “life of thoughts.” The food one eats is usually as much a result ofthe efforts of others as of oneself, and as such a product of their thoughts as wellas one’s own. People are surrounded in daily life by the powerful products ofthoughts created by others—their blowguns and traps, their combs and ham-mocks, the plants of the gardens, the children, their laughter and language, thechanting of the ruwa, and even the house within which they live.

Nevertheless, the culinary art skills that the Piaroa receive from the crystalboxes of the gods remain those that the terrible Kuemoi created. In his hands,they were monstrous forces for predation and cannibalism. The benevolentpresent-day gods continually cleanse these violent forces, making them beau-tiful before giving them to Piaroa, for each to keep safe within their interior“beads of knowledge” (see Overing 1985, 1989). Each person must be vigilantto master these interior forces from the gods so as not to cause harm to himselfor to others with whom one lives. Each has the responsibility continually tocleanse and beautify their internal forces for life and constantly to reflect upontheir use. Each night the powerful ruwa, the shaman leader, spends tremendousenergy cleaning and beautifying his powers of sorcery through which he trav-els the multiverse. This cleansing is necessary for him to achieve his strengthand protect all those with whom he lives. The intelligent use of the powerfulgifts from the gods allows a person to live a fertile and tranquilly safe socialexistence within a community, one where no crazed tyrant may live. This, atleast, is the theory. In fact it is impossible for anyone to control completely theperversity of the life forces within themselves. This is the dilemma that Piaroaconfront: The forces for life incorporated within the body that the individualcannot master or domesticate are shed as excretions. These excretions—semen,menstrual blood, urine, sweat, pus, vomit, excrement, miscarriage—are under-stood to be particularly potent but unmastered manifestations of a person’s fer-tility, with the potency to impregnate your kinspeople with illness.

Excretion is nevertheless important to health and power. As the singer JoseLuis explained, a woman menstruating is understood to be shedding her ownunmastered forces, some of which are the willful forces of others with whomshe lives and which she has inadvertently incorporated. The menstrual processtherefore allows her to become cleansed of dirt and thus both powerfully andproperly fertile. Yet there is still a price to pay. In a chant of lament, I have lis-tened to a woman telling of her guilt of menstruation. She worries that she ismaking vulnerable children and young men ill through the odor of her blood.Jose Luis told us that shamans also menstruate, with results similar to those ofwomen. A shaman acquires his great fertile powers of sorcery, he said, through


self-inflicted twice-yearly rites of menstruation. To menstruate, he forces astingray spine through his tongue. In so doing, he rids himself of all the “dirt”or unmastered fertility such as the menstrual blood of women that he hasaccumulated from other members of his community. This is a ritual that alsoenables him “to keep his thoughts in order,” clear of unmastered perversities.It therefore works toward preventing him from becoming a tyrant. The greatruwa must carefully watch his own personal behavior for signs of hubris.

Unmastered fertility makes you unsociable. For the young it can lead todiarrhea and inappropriate laughing. It can make you demanding and difficultto live with. They receive a shaman’s cure, a cleansing, to help them get their“thoughts in order.” A shaman’s unmastered fertility is much more serious(Overing 1985). He is handling and dealing with some of the most dangerousforces of the multiverse: Poisoned by them, he would become truculent, self-centered, aggressive, even paranoid—prickly rather than entertaining. Hewould taunt rather than tease, causing anger in others. These are serious prob-lems. Piaroa often told me, and in great detail, the ways in which they guardagainst the possibility of a tyrant in their midst. Both women and men carefullywatched the behavior of a powerful ruwa for signs of being out of control. Isaw a group of women at Maparæku teasing a grumpy Carlos for too sharplymocking white people’s food (we had unwittingly offended him by feedinghim our own humble fare of pasta and sardines, during the course of his teach-ing us about chant narratives). They teased him out of his mood. Young peopletold me how everyone had carefully watched Carlos during his ascent as apowerful ruwa. No one referred to him as “ruwa” until he had successfullypresented three great ceremonial festivals of the dangerous Sari without a sin-gle child dying or falling ill. Only then was he recognized as a great ruwa. Inprotecting all the children from the hungry spirits of the dead, he demon-strated the mastery of his thoughts—at least thus far.

Capita, a former powerful ruwa who dwelt in a neighboring community ofMaparæku, did not fare so well. Made crazy with jealousy when membersof his own community began to leave him to live with the up-and-comingCarlos, he began cursing and sending spells to attack the children of his rival’sand even other communities. Children died. Capita believed everyone wastalking about him, telling lies about him. He was suffering badly from para-noia, the madness disease of k’eræu, the “twirl round” “fall down” disease ofKuemoi. He was suffering the tyrant’s lack of control. As an unusual event, allthe ruwatu of the territory met and decided that his will had been irreparablypoisoned. To prevent further violence, they made the rare decision of ceremo-nially taking away all his thoughts of shamanic practice, a task they success-fully achieved. Thereafter Capita lived alone, except for a young orphan girl tocare for him. Occasionally, though, Carlos kindly invited him to come toMaparæku to chant for them at night, which he did. It did no harm. He nolonger owned the forces of a mighty sorcerer.

Avoiding the Tyrant: A Poetics of Egalitarianism

Sitting within the narrations of the myths, and, more generally, within theverbal play of everyday life, we can discern a full-blown political philosophythat states loud and clear the necessity of egalitarianism as the only path pos-


sible for a human sort of social life. The political concern is to prevent thetyrant. In the narration of mythic vignettes, the narrators unfold codes of deco-rum and the arts of folly: One learns those forms of folly that enable a com-fortable, congenial existence, and those that are destructive of it (Overing2000). Thus the narrations disclose the subtle lessons of two-edged folly.Erasmus’s depiction of the message of Lady Folly fits well here.

One good reason for Piaroa adamantly denying a rule-bound structured exis-tence is that rules and regulations are just too literal to take into account eithercosmic or social incongruities. The hierarchical solution to sociality is toostraightforward to take into account the absurd ironies of human existence andthe grotesqueries lurking within (Overing 2003b, 2004). The nuances of inter-personal relationships, the affective conditions for them, are too complicatedintellectually and emotionally, as too are the intrusions of undomesticated,treacherous cosmic mythscapes into the domain of the social. For they still existin the here and now. A Piaroa multiverse is motivated and animated with muchscope for malevolent mythscapes. One can see why the crucial political ques-tion, from a Piaroa point of view, is the following: Against the mythic backdropof monstrous, social disaster within which they must still operate, how is the artof social living to be achieved? There is a social psychology here that anthropo-logical constructs are poor at handling. The same can be said for the subject ofegalitarian—as opposed to hierarchical—process. Piaroa egalitarianism cer-tainly relies on the continuous use of many-layered tropes, on the startling useof poetics, and on the recognition of the merits of strong slapstick humor.

My conclusion is that their social and political sensibilities are attached to awell-formulated philosophy of folly. Thus instead of social rules and regula-tions, there is a need for a nuanced social psychology—this lavish philosophyof folly—and a constant accounting for cosmic foolishness. Folly lies at theheart of the social. The human social condition can only be accomplishedthrough the spirit of convivial folly.

In other words, the link between Piaroa poetics (evoking the deep absurdi-ties of human existence) and their sociopolitical practices is, “sociologically”speaking, a key factor. Each Piaroa has within his or her beautiful interiorbeads of life the forces for crazy tyrannical behaviors. It is becoming clear thatour notion of “the sociological,” along with a good many other fundamentalconcepts, is in need of a good spring cleaning.

Why the Genre of the Grotesque

The genre of the grotesque is used calculatingly by Piaroa narrators ofmyths. What is its purpose? Wisdom here depends on understanding the mes-sage of the grotesque. While this wisdom may be part and parcel of a particu-lar Amazonian egalitarian doctrine, it is not that of the received wisdom ofmodernist sociological theory. Why should this be so?

Partly, it is all this “bodiliness” upon which the grotesque relies. Modernisttheory has no regard for the body. Moreover, throughout the 18th and 19th cen-turies, Western scholars developed a pejorative view of the grotesque, judgingit as a vulgar species of the comic, deprived of serious thought. It was viewedas a genre of ludicrous exaggeration and of the fantastic. In more recent years,there have been interesting reassessments of the power of the genre, due in part


to the important work of Bakhtin on the poetics and political force of the genreof the grotesque.

In recent evaluations there has been a highly interesting observation relevantto our insight into the political force of this genre, that it is more attached to real-ism than to fantasy. We can now speak with strength and reason of its potentialas a sociological force. True, the grotesque is extravagant to us. But it is not fan-tastic. The insight is that however strange the grotesque world is, it is also ourworld (Bakhtin 1968, Thomson 1972). It has been my argument that mythic nar-ration, in partaking of this genre, has as its first and foremost aim, that of express-ing the problematic nature of existence. The grotesque jolts one into transformingone’s perspective of what reality really is. It makes us see the real world anew.The wisdom of a successful narration of myth is that it achieves this aim.

In Piaroa narrations, the genre of the grotesque reveals the madness of thetyrant and the tyrant as buffoon—the asocial, solitary tyrant, with monstrous,excessive power (the tyrant is incapable of forming personal relationships). Itreminds the audience that the best reaction to pretensions of grandeur and greedis a spirit of mocking irreverence. It also teaches the members of the audience thevalue of self-mockery, for all those absurdities of their mythscape rest within,corporeally so to speak, each person. All of those skills (of the culinary arts) thatgrant on the one hand personal autonomy to each adult, and that are enabling ofa community of social relationships, can on the other hand easily be destructiveof that life, that sociability, that freedom, that personal autonomy. This is the mis-ery of Cosmic Folly. Convivial egalitarian relationships must really be worked at.

As Peter Berger (1997) has suggested, it is the comic as a mode of knowledgethat provides the insight into this downside of folly: By knowing it, and prac-ticing it in light of such knowledge, we can, for a time at least, fool the cosmiccomic incongruities of existence. Piaroa people, through their wordplay andslapstick humor, practice the arts of folly and, in so doing, understand the partthey play in the attainment of a comfortable sociality, their relationship toknowledge, and their possibilities, politically speaking, for freedom. Now thatis a good lead for anthropologists to investigate sociologically.

Piaroa people know full well the dangers of the powerful relation of knowl-edge to power. In everyday life, Piaroa are ever watchful of signs indicating theemergence of a tyrant, tyranny and self-centeredness, that inflated ego thatbecomes disrespectful of personal relations, that becomes disdainful of the dig-nity of others within the community and of the relationships in which they live,that ignores the relationality of power. Tyranny is foolishness. It is to bemocked. We can perhaps better understand the fact that the Western abstractsense of society, with its jural rules, its hierarchical structures, its heavilyrepressive mechanisms, its impersonality—all of these things—is offensive tomost Amazonian peoples. I’d say that the peoples of Amazonia have a well-developed consciousness of power and a rich poetics through which to expressit. Freedom is a political matter for them.

Now to the Backlash in European Academic Life

In the last 20 years there has been a general movement of governments inEurope, and especially in Britain, to the right-wing direction of neoliberalism.The neoliberal agenda has had a drastic effect on academia. What has this


neoliberal agenda been? A new form of coercive, punitive, and authoritariangovernmentality, in the form of an audit culture, has led to the draconianincrease of government control of universities, where an audit and accounta-bility culture has become merged with policing and managerial technologies(see particularly Amit 2000; Shore and Wright 1999, 2000; Strathern 2000;Wright 1998, 2003). The techniques of corporate management, modeled on thevalues of the business world, have become an integral aspect of academic life.Accountancy is taken as the model of efficiency, while the constant surveillanceof “productivity” has spiraled upward.

A new semantic cluster has emerged that is associated with present-dayauditing (see O’Donnell 2003). Some of the slogans of this Enterprise Cultureare as follows:

Benchmarking: the use of exterior criteria to compare and judgeLeague tables of performancePerformance indicatorsTransparencyStakeholdersEnd users (i.e., business and government, which are critical forresearch grants)User groups (the same as above)Marketing skills, which university courses are to engenderQuality assurance procedures (i.e., policing of teaching and research)

Audits are relentless. There is the ongoing “quality assurance” of teaching,and yet another of research. These require enormous amounts of energy andtime on the part of the academics who are depended upon by the universities toprepare for such audits. The preparation for each audit often takes six months ofwork of the best university minds. There has been a reinvention of professions asunits of resources, and this is how they are perceived by both government andthe general populace. Students are “consumers,” teachers are seen as“resources,” “personnel” has been renamed as “human resources.”9 The systemsof surveillance of these resources are deliberately kept volatile, slippery, andopaque, each having about a two-year shelf life. Add to this the fact that the uni-versity and research-granting boards have taken on an instrumental commercialatmosphere. Research, for instance, is privileged when it serves capitalist ends.

Some of the effects of this accountability culture, which is conjoined withgovernmental policing, are as follows. First, the systematic competitive rank-ing of individuals, departments, and institutions (in the form of league tablesof performance) is proving to be a threat to collegiality. The value, here, isplaced on the individual and not on the community of scholars. Such anemphasis has led to intense institutional, departmental, and individual rivalryso that the notion of a collegial community is lost, as is its practice.

Second, the policing has led to a climate of fear, and thus a culture of fear isbecoming clearly discernible. The policing of peers is expected: The whole sys-tem has acquired a punitive and divisive character. The punishing proceduresof “underperforming” can be extreme for the institution, the department, andthe individual. The realistic fear of departments is that they will be closed iftheir rating is not sufficiently high on the league tables of performance, for the


government measures its financial obligations to universities in accordancewith these league table accounts of success. There is the fear of individuals: Ifclassified in the audit process as only of “national” and not “international”standard, they might be classed as “teachers” only, not “high flyers,” andthereby lose their research status.

Third, with policing being used with a vengeance, the lack of trust is suchthat management is almost impossible. Academics are internalizing the newpolitical techniques of policing in myriad ways: If under threat, they police themanagers and may demand “transparency” with a vengeance. Also, responsi-bility is increasingly imposed on individuals without power. Junior membersof staff are being made “heads” of department, with “top-down management”(beyond the departments) becoming guaranteed.

Fourth, a process of “dumbing down” is accelerated. The idea of criticalthinking, and the engendering of it, now sounds heretical. The emphasis is onthe standardization of disciplines, with the appraisals being based on measuresof numerical value, which then becomes mistaken for actual quality. Lessons inteaching (increasingly insisted upon) are based on the skills for boardroompresentation: The stress is on orderly sequences, repetition, no weavings ofcomplexity—no charisma. The value is to instill finite, tangible, transferable,and especially marketable skills to the students. No one dares say standardshave declined. A regulated market regime is made effective at the routine level.

In sum, the values being internalized are the conformity to authority, indi-vidual competitiveness, and an instrumental attitude toward education. Thevalues sorely missed are autonomy and flexibility, critical thinking and engage-ment. Collegiality becomes exceedingly difficult to achieve.

The culture of fear has also been intensified by global events, such as theattacks of September 11. At the same time the robust voices of indigenousmovements are beginning to be heard and are having effect. The “other” is indanger of becoming our equal, and thus a threat. “Cultures” are being per-ceived as dangerous, wrong—in judgments made by academics. The values ofneoliberalism are clearly affecting academic judgment. There has been an obvi-ous backsliding in many quarters from the forward-looking programs ofresearch and methodologies of the last 20 years, taking the form, for instance,of a descent to positivism and to political-economy approaches. The effect ofthis deep neoliberalism is indeed creeping into academia. There is one Culture,and it is the right, true one.

As a result, the better our translations of other peoples’ horizons of concernsand their political and social philosophies, the more angry and hostile can bethe display of response by fellow academics: for example, “these Amazonianpeoples will not be around anyway in 10 years’ time.” Any culture attached toreligion (e.g., a cosmic worldview) becomes dangerous to the necessary globaltakeover of neoliberalism. “Community” itself becomes a dangerous concept.Relationality is a dangerous concept. Now, such reactions are not general ones,but they are becoming strident, angry, and visible.

So we may ask: What is happening to conversations and to the idea of mul-tiple voices? This opening up of conversations is ending in a rallying of theright wing. Perhaps we can compare what is going on with the academic pro-cedures of the enlightenment (or Toulmin’s 1990 insights of it) and the cultureof fear created by the religious wars of that period, when monarchs wanted


easy answers and solutions; when there developed a seeking for securitythrough the monologic route of universals; when there developed an intoler-ance of Renaissance tolerance and its desire for conversations (as withMontaigne). It is hard to work against these new techniques for policingthought that are being developed in the 21st century.

Conclusion

Terry Pratchett’s novel The Carpet People explores the uneasy relationshipsbetween the interestingly different peoples who shared the “Carpet” as home.These people were often foes. This was because they strongly differed over moraland aesthetic matters and over political doctrine as well. There were empires,kingdoms, chiefdoms, and priesthoods. Some valued fighting or warfare as a wayof life, while others used their intellect to master their world. Some were serious;others valued the jokester. Some paid allegiance to destructive gods; others sawno use in gods. Some liked protocol; others enjoyed informality. Despite such dif-ferences, they found it necessary to become allies when the need arose and joinedin battle against the monsters of the Carpet. It was then they found the need toreflect upon, and partially resolve, the problem of their incommensurable pointsof view, their different horizons of concern. It was not an easy task. For instance,take the matter of Counting, an essential life force of the bureaucratic people ofthe Dumii Empire. Other peoples despised Dumii Counting. As Brocando, kingof the Deftmenes, explained, his people didn’t count, and he himself hated Dumiipeople because they did. He had fought them in the past because:

They straighten roads, and number things, and make maps of places that shouldn’tbe mapped. They turn everything into things to Count. They’d make the hairs of thecarpet grow in rows if they could. And worst of all . . . they obey orders. They’drather obey orders than think. That’s how their Empire works . . . [but worst of all]they don’t know how to laugh and at the end of it all it’s things in rows, and orders,and all the fun out of life. [Pratchett 1992:57]

Thus, for some peoples of the Carpet, it was terrible when it wasn’t properto laugh and to have fun. Glurk, a warrior tribal chief of the Munrung, wellunderstood the social worth of laughter. In conversation with his wife, he waswondering about those people called philosophers whose main preoccupationwas “to think.” His wife noted that he too sometimes just sat and thought. Heconcurred that yes, he did sometimes sit and think, but “it’s not just thinking.You’ve got to be able to talk about it entertainingly afterwards” (Pratchett1992:60). Glurk acknowledged the wisdom of folly and his duty to it as a triballeader. Through it, he was able to achieve and maintain the high morale of hispeople. What is more, in dangerous situations his ludic skills were absolutelyessential. At those times, he says, it was important to keep people busy, and“the only thing to do was work, laugh loudly, or sing and march about withspears, before everyone’s fears got the better of them” (Pratchett 1992:28). Andas the story goes, it was his people who were best able—as individuals—toconquer the monsters of the Carpet. Without so much fear, they were able toassess dangers better. In contrast, the people of Dumii, so accustomed to obey-ing, were easily enslaved by monsters: They were without the imaginativemeans to battle the monsters who took over (gobbled up) their empire.


There are many points to make, and only a few can be touched upon here.The Empire of Dumii does sound familiar. All that counting makes us in

Europe vulnerable. The dumbing-down process and the absolute dependenceon statistics that it facilitates may well leave us without the moral fiber andimagination to overcome dangers within academia, such as the increasing col-lapse of academic collegiality and the creativity that comes in its wake. Wemust also beware the processes through which we academics are becoming,through governmental strategy, a new category of internal subalterns.

We are in need more than ever of engaging in conversations with those whohave different narratives about community and society, equality and freedomthan our own. To achieve the message that our own understandings of society, theindividual, freedom, and equality are ideas local to us, and as such attached toour own Western history and its horizons of concern (e.g., the arrogant valuesof domination and superiority), would make a brave start. Our monologicroute of universals has repeatedly caused damage to a large proportion of peo-ples of the world. Such values as freedom and equality always sit within par-ticular frameworks of social activity, which include their particular histories.10

In our specific case these values emerged within the context of a stratified soci-ety that remained stratified after their creation, although divided over time intoother hierarchical configurations.

Thus we must not be naïve. We academics cannot, through our intellectualforays, easily transform such forces of stratification—the forces of government,capitalist globalization,11 and our legalistic and rights-centered sociality. Wemust be shrewd. It would be for naught, for instance, to suggest to our audit-ing managers and politicians that academic productivity would immenselyimprove if only they carried out their everyday leadership duties through the“arts of conviviality,” or a wise spirit of folly and a poetics of practice. Equally, astempting as it might be, it would not be good strategy for academics to inter-act with managers in a spirit of mocking irreverence, debunking all signs ofpretensions to grandeur. Such play would be considered “out of order” andvery foolish—a sign of weakness. Through it the hubris and tyranny of leader-ship would not be kept at bay. Western leaders are usually very attached to for-mal protocol. In the “serious” business of their governing, relationships arekept formal and to a large extent without humor. Attributes that Amazonianpeople would view as a breakdown in leadership (the giving of commands orpronouncement of rules and regulations, displays of arrogance and contempt,distancing procedures) are firmly understood as enabling of our bureaucraticprocess, whether within our universities or government. This is the pessimisticmessage.

On the other hand, there is no reason for academic work to be framed by thevalue judgments of the bureaucrat or auditor. When scholarship and teachingare at issue, a very different horizon of concern must be defended and re-cre-ated by scholars on a daily basis. It is one through which collegiality can be fos-tered. A spirit of collegiality can only sit well within a community of equals ofa particular sort, one that is as dependent on affective mutuality as it is on intel-lectual mutuality. The value orientation that allows for a spirit of collegiality isone that cultivates the tranquility, high morale, and the wide-ranging play nec-essary for creative thought. On this issue, academics can find wisdom inAmazonian social philosophies of folly. The creative health of communities of


scholars and of Amazonian people alike requires a sense of community thatconjoins aesthetics, moral value, and sociality in everyday practices. I am hereappealing to the survival of an entire philosophy within our own historicalpast, but one more Renaissance in spirit than Enlightenment.

The strong aesthetic praxis required for a spirit of artful collegiality is as dif-ficult to achieve as that of the comfortable, playful, flexible sociality for whichAmazonian peoples yearn. To retain good-humored, generative practices, thesemust be daily reflected upon and worked for. The reason for such diligence, asthe wisdom of folly teaches us, is that the very skills that allow for a healthyacademic community (e.g., high intellect, creative vigor, academic ambition)can themselves become destructive of that life. Here we have the story of thevery monsters of our own mythscape that intrude on daily practice, all thosevalue orientations disruptive of collegiality that therefore linger within us.Through a strong spirit of collegiality we, individually, can then better under-stand them, aware of monsters both within and without, of ourselves and ofothers. It might be wise to note that it is the expression itself of a knowledge-able decorum of folly that becomes a very strong sign that the skills academicsare using in their everyday practices are in fact keeping hubris and tyranny(including their own) at bay. It is through these skills of the ludic that highmorale can be created. It is only through high morale that academics are alsoable to create broad-ranging, fluid, pluralistic networks of collegiality throughwhich they learn to engage in interesting conversations and, in so doing, dis-close other ways of viewing the world. It is also only through high spirit thatacademics will be effectively able to resist the dumbing-down consequences ofgovernments’ “naming and shaming” policing of academics.

Notes

1. This article is partially based on a lecture I delivered to open the 5th internationalMercoSul Anthropological Meetings, Florianopolis, Brazil, November 30, 2003.Published as “A Reação contra a descolonizaçao da intelectualidade,” in Ilha: Revista deAnthropologia, 2004.

2. See Heckler’s (2004) excellent ethnography on present-day “big women” amongthe Piaroa of the Orinoco Basin.

3. See Overing (2004) on “mythscapes” of the Piaroa “multiverse.”4. See Overing 1985 on the topic of ta’kwaruwa and its relation to a Piaroa theory of

mind that stresses the interplay between intentionality, a “life of thoughts” and a “lifeof the senses” (or otherwise phrased, the interplay between mind, will, and desire).

5. See Serena Heckler’s recent article (2004) on present-day powerful gardeners(ruwahu) among the Piaroa, who are clearly equals of the “big women” of the 1960s.

6. See any, or all, of the contributions to Overing and Passes 2000 for examples ofAmazonian peoples who stress the value of the convivial arts and who are as wellhighly reflective about the difficulties of achieving them.

7. Piaroa told me of earlier times when ruwatu knew the chant for prevention ofpregnancies. They told me sadly that they had lost it. However, after the ritual for herfirst menses, the young woman is regarded as in charge of her own childbearing: She is,for instance, to choose when to become pregnant, and by whom.

8. For further discussion on the surprising semantic associations in Piaroa languagethat speak to the mutual danger of the genders, see Overing 1986.

9. In universities in Britain, we no longer have “Personnel Offices.” We now areoverseen by “Offices of Human Resources,” accepted so far as I can see with little mur-mur from faculty members.

10. As Charles Taylor (1985:276–277) so ably argues, the notion of equals has no real-ity independent of how it is attached to a specific context of practices and horizon ofconcern.


11. However, there are today many faces to globalization. Alongside the unidirec-tional and nondialogical type of globalization, there is one that is sustained by an “aes-thetics of diversity, a poetics of relation,” as Glissant phrases it (1990, 1996, 1997; see alsoPasses 2003). Its unbounded universe of pluralistic relationships fosters a type of relat-edness that reflects a non-absolutist, non-essentialist style of thinking. Through it, aca-demic conversations with interesting others can certainly thrive.

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The Backlash to Decolonizing Intellectuality