The Fabricated Body: Objects and Ancestors in NW Amazonia.

Stephen Hugh-Jones,

Contemporary Amazonian ethnography has given relatively little attention to the

world of objects. One reason for this might be that ‘material culture’ was the focus of

an earlier, no longer fashionable approach to the region. There is also the salience of

animals and plants in Amerindians’ everyday experience and cosmological thinking,

one that has its analogue in the prominence of ‘nature’ in European constructions of

Amazonia and Amazonians. Against either version of this animated backdrop,

inanimate objects seem to pale into insignificance. In the three main theoretical styles

of recent ethnography on the region (see Viveiros de Castro 1996), there is also an

inbuilt tendency to downplay the significance of objects. This is evident in Rivière’s

(1984) characterisation of the Amazonian political economy as one more of people

than of goods, in McCallum’s (1988) denial of the relevance of notions of wealth or

political economy, and in claims (see Overing and Passes 2000) that Amazonian

societies are inherently egalitarian. The diminished sociological weight of objects is

also implicit in the view, shared by all three styles, that Amazonians fall under the

rubric of Collier and Rosaldo’s (1981) bride-service societies where, in contrast to

bridewealth societies, substitutions between people and things do not occur.

Implicitly or explicitly, in this ethnography, Amazonians are also being

compared to the peoples of other regions - the Andes, Melanesia, or ‘the West’. Such

comparisons often take present conditions as representative of all times and neglect

both the archaeological and historical reality of the region and the extensive material

and intellectual exchanges between highlands and lowlands. 1 The analogue of this

temporal flattening is the spatial homogenisation that occurs when particular

manifestations of Amerindian society and culture are taken as typical of the whole.2

In a paper that extends his arguments concerning perspectivism to the world of

artefacts, Viveiros de Castro writes ‘the idea of creation ex nihilo is virtually absent

from indigenous cosmologies. Things and beings normally originate as a

transformation of something else…. Where we find notions of creation at all, what is

stressed is the imperfection of the end product. Amerindian demiurges always fail to

deliver the goods…. And just as nature is the result not of creation but of

transformation, so culture is a product not of invention but of transference…. In

Amerindian mythology, the origin of cultural implements or institutions is canonically

explained as a borrowing – a transfer (violent or friendly, by stealing or by learning,

as a trophy or as a gift) of prototypes already possessed by animals, spirits or

enemies’. He goes on to oppose the Amerindian emphasis on transformation and

exchange to a Western emphasis on creation and production and speculates that this

may be connected with an Amerindian emphasis on affinity over consanguinity. This

difference is reflected in myth: if old world mythology is haunted by parenthood and

especially fatherhood, the protagonists of the major Amerindian myths are related

agonistically as in-laws (2004: 477-8).

In this chapter I want to discuss a set of Tukanoan myths from the Uaupés

region of NW Amazonia that are indeed about creation ex nihilo and squarely in the

idioms of parenthood, myths about divinities who, in the end, do indeed deliver the

goods - and do so by means of goods. My aim is not to prove Viveiros de Castro

wrong – he is already well aware that the Tukanoans fit uneasily into the general

Amazonian pattern.3 Instead I want to suggest that, in effect, he is right, for the

Tukanoans’ patriliny and exogamy produce a transformation in mythic structure that

can be predicted from his suggestions above. This transformation, which plays lineal

inheritance and transmission off against themes of affinity, violence and theft, is also

reflected in a shift away from the violent appropriation of body-parts and trophies,

characteristic of the Tupians and others, towards the elaboration of sets of highly-

crafted artefacts that become personified heirlooms transmitted across the generations.

These heirlooms are both the spirit manifestations of ancestral powers and

objectifications of body parts that point to human capacities, intentions and

responsibilities. All this suggests that we should avoid over-hasty generalisations

about Amazonia and Amazonians. As they have varied patterns kinship, shamanism,

architecture, etc, so they may have different theories and ideologies of materiality (see

Miller ed. 2005) and live in different object worlds.

Despite the universal theme of ‘ensoulment’ (Santos Granero, this vol.: X.) of

objects by those in their proximity and the frequent associations of bodily ornaments

with ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ (Hill, Miller, Turner this vol.), one thing that emerges clearly in

this volume is diversity and variation. There are not only ‘multiple ways of being a

thing’ in particular Amerindian societies (Santos Granero this vol., p. X) but also

significant differences between the overall object regimes of different groups. The

collectively owned valuables and heirlooms of northwest Amazonia and central Brazil

(see Turner, this vol.) are a far cry from the shamanic stones of the Yanesha and

Urarina (see Santos-Granero, White this vol.). Likewise, the intense circulation of

ritual objects and ordinary possessions in Northwest Amazonia and the upper Xingú

(see Barcellos Neto, this vol.) contrasts with the Matis’ insistence on the moral

imperatives of self-sufficiency (Erickson, this vol.: 1). One aim of this chapter is to

suggest that there is a certain fit between different object regimes, different social

structures and different cosmologies.

The Myths

The creation myths I have in mind can be found in a remarkable series of

publications, the Coleçao Narradores Indigenas do Rio Negro, each authored by an

elderly Tukano or Desana kumu (priest-shamans – see Hugh-Jones 1994), paired with

a younger, literate amanuensis.4 As Andrello (2004: 258-9) points out, these books are

themselves a recent addition to the set of heirlooms just mentioned. The myths are

close variants of those discussed by Hill (this vol.); his chapter should be read as a

performative, musical accompaniment and complementary vision to this one5.

Starting from an initial, dark, formless and invisible state, the myths run

through several attempts at creation that culminate in the emergence of the fully-

human ancestors of the peoples of today. This process involves a progressive

materialization and embodiment from an initially immaterial, disembodied state and a

transition from a pre-human, artefactual mode of reproduction to a fully human,

genital mode.

Briefly summarised and keeping objects to the fore, a Desana version,

complemented where appropriate by other varaints6, runs as follows:

[19-26] The Grandfather of the Universe (GFU), who is both Thunder and the Primal

Sun, appears spontaneously in a state of total darkness. He lives alone {TG 27: lives

with his daughter and the Master of Food - see below} in a house in the sky. He had

with him the following items, the Instruments of Life and Transformation (ILTs):

rattle lance7, shield8, stool, cigar, forked cigar-holder9, gourds of coca and other

substances, gourd stands10, adze11, split-palm screen12, and maraca, each made of

white crystal {NK 21, 27 and each a part of his body}.

On a support made from two crossed rattle-lances, one of female bone, the

other male, he places 5 sieves, spinning them round to make a layered world

compared to a spherical gourd on a stand. He spreads palm-splint screens on the earth

to bring Yepa Büküo, Old Woman of the Earth13, Ǖmüari niko, the Grandmother of the

Universe (GMU) into being.

Blowing spells, GFU conjures up a stool on which he then sits, eating coca. To

create people, he smokes a cigar held in a cigar holder blowing smoke and blessings

over a gourd of sweet kana berries14 covered with another gourd and placed on a

stand. These gourds are GMU, the earth itself. Seeing that, as a man, GFU has failed

to create life, GMU takes over, blowing smoke and spells on the gourd (illustration I).

Five male and two female beings, the Universe People, Ǖmüari Masa {NK 22: Yepá

Masa, Earth People; UT 52: Thunders) come to life and emerge from the gourds: 1.

Sun (Abe15); 2. Deyubari Gõamü16, Master of hunting and fishing; 3. Baaribo, Master

of cultivated food17; 4. Buhsari18 Gõamü, Master of time, seasons, nature, and living

beings; 5. Wanani19 Gõamü, Master of poison; 6. Amo; 7. Yugupó.20

[35-41] Wanani creates a woman for Deyubari Gõãmü, vomiting her up after

drinking water mixed with sap from forest vines21. Like all women at that time, she

has no vagina; they make her one using the cigar holder’s pointed end as a knife. {TG

49-51: Getting up near dawn, Abe’s son Kisibi vomits up two women, Pui/Diakapiro

and Wisu/Yuhusio. Had he obeyed his father and got up earlier, these women would

have been men, beings capable of reproducing themselves by vomiting - without the

need for women, for transformation and for birth}.

[143-155] The Universe People needed yagé to enable the future humanity to

have visions and improve their knowledge. Realising yagé was in their own bones,

they decide to kill and eat their younger brother Wanani Gõãmü now under the name

Mirupu. They turn him into a caimo fruit which they offer to their sisters Wisu/Amo

(see below) and Yugupó to eat. Yugupó refuses but Wisu eats and becomes pregnant.

Lacking a vagina, she is delirious with pain, her delirium being also the effects of

yagé. Abe cuts a vulva with his gold earring using the arms of the cigar holder as a

template. As the house fills with blood, the visions of yagé, Mirupu is born as Yagé,

his body made up of all varieties of the plant. The Universe People eat Yagé’s head,

arms and legs, leaving his denuded trunk as a penis/flute. He now assumes the name

Yuruparí, Master of forest fruits; his body parts are flutes, forest fruits, birds, animals

and fishes.22

Yuruparí later avenges his brothers’ shameful act by eating their sons. They, in

turn, burn him on a fire. From his ashes springs a paxiuba palm which is cut up and

distributed to all Tukanoans as their yuruparí flutes, Yuruparí’s bones.

Wisu and Yugupó steal the yuruparí flutes from the men causing the musician

wren (Cyphorhinus aradus), the flutes’ soul and voice, to abandon its home;

henceforth the flutes’ voice will be the breath of men. {NK 141: Urged on by

Opossum who tells them that they do not need women and can emulate his own extra-

uterine, marsupial mode of reproduction} the men recapture the flutes from their

enemies, the women. As they seize the flutes, the women also hide them in their

vaginas. Wisu flees to the West and Yugupó to the East. {MM 33-9; TG 70-71, Wisu

becomes Amo, Mistress of feather oranments and ceremonial goods, in a house made

from the moulted plumage of migrating birds. The younger sisters go to the East

where they become Clothes Women who transform ceremonial ornaments into guns,

motors, aeroplanes, hammocks and other manufactured objects that they send to their

brothers upstream}.

[163-177] GFU and Buhsari Gõãmü decide to transform the Universe People

into true human beings. GFU has two transformation gourds, one in the sky and one

on earth. The Universe People fly up to the upper gourd and from there, travel via a

kana vine down to the lower gourd, the Milk Lake in the East where they become

fishes. They make the Anaconda-Canoe of Transformation (Pamüri pino, p. gasiro)23.

{MM 40-43: Sky/Sun and Earth/Moon seek help from GMU and GFU in the sky.

GFU vomits up paired ceremonial ornaments onto a split-palm screen, each set

corresponding to a future Tukanoan group. Sky sends two avatars down to the Milk

Lake in the East. In the underworld, Earth acquires a maraca and a stool with three

different designs, gaining strength and becoming Yepa Oakü or Yepa di’ro masü,

(‘earth flesh man’). One of Sky’s avatars becomes Transformation Anaconda, a

female snake who swallows her children, the future humanity in the form of fish}.

Inside this anaconda-canoe, the Universe People travel westwards towards the

centre of the world {MM 44: guided by Yepa Oakü using his rattle-lance as a

compass, gnomon and instrument to create rivers and paths}, accompanied by animals

and fish. Made by the anaconda’s tongue, the river up which they travel is also a kana

vine umbilical cord that nourishes them with milk and sweet juice. As they travel, the

Universe People undergo a gestation, leaving animals and fish behind them and

becoming diversified Transformation People, each speaking a different language and

now related as cousins. After nine months of travel, they arrive at Ipanoré24, the centre

of the world, emerging through a hole in the rapids as fully human ancestors.

As they emerge, GFU gives them ritual goods according to their status: a ball

of feather down, rattle-lances, a shield, necklaces, flutes and dance ornaments; the

ancestors of White People and Makú receive nothing. GFU offers the ancestors five

gourds (for future generations, blood, milk, pure air, and health), a hat and a gun (the

sources of technical intelligence and manufacturing industry) and two more gourds:

for white skin and for skin changing and eternal life. The Indians’ ancestors ate from

the first five gourds but showed no interest in the rest. The White peoples’ ancestor

eats from the five gourds, then bathes in the gourd for white skin but does not dare 1 For a very different picture, see McEwen et al 2001.2 On this see Hugh-Jones forthcoming.3 See Viveiros de Castro 1993.4 See Umúsin Panlõn Kumu & Tolamãn Kenhíri 1980 (UT), Diakuru & Kisibi 1996 (DK), Ňahuri & Kümarõ 2003 (NK), Maia & Maia 2004 (MM), Tõramü Bayar & Guahari Ye Ñi 2004 (TG). 5 See also Cornelio et al (1999), Barbosa et al (2000) in the same collection.6 Based on the text in DK with relevant page numbers in []. Variants and additions, in {}, are from the sources in note 5 above and use the shorthand references therein. Orthography for indigenous languages has been standardised and simplified. Tuk, Des and Bs refer, respectively, to the Tukano, Desana and Barasana languages.7 An approx. 2m. long staff decorated, at one end, with feather mosaic, engraved designs of the sun and moon and two bone or teeth prongs. Above the other, pointed, end is a bulbous maraca-like swelling that contains small crystal pebbles. Used as a musical instrument to mark divisions of time in major rituals (see Koch-Grünberg 1909/10, I: 345-6, abb. 219-221).8 Accompanies the rattle lance (see Koch-Grünberg idem: 344, abb. 218; 346, abb.221). 9 See Koch-Grünberg idem: 281-2, abb. 159-6010 Hour glass in shape; made from a bundle of split palm splints (see note 12 below) bound in the middle and twisted, with the splayed ends then woven in position with Heteropsis vine (see Koch-Grünberg idem: 266, abb. 145).11 See Koch-Grünberg idem: 350. abb. 225.12 Made from the split trunk of the Iriartella setigera palm - also used to make blowpipes (see Koch-Grünberg 1909/10, II: abb. 18, 19) Used to construct fish-traps and temporary compartments for the seclusion of young men at initiation and young women at menarche, to isolate officiating shaman-priests during major rituals and as a mat on which to lay objects to protect them from dirt. Called parí in Lingua Geral. Yuruparí, the name of the NW Amazonia mythological hero, decomposes into iuru-, ‘mouth’ and –parí, ‘enclosure, trap’. 13 Also Yepa Maso, ‘Earth Woman’, the Grandmother of Transformation (MM 21); also Romi Kumu, ‘Woman Shaman’ (Hugh-Jones 1979).14 Fruits of Sabicea amazonensis and related species of vine that grow in abandoned clearings; a key ritual item (see C. Hugh-Jones 1979: 126)15 Muhihu (Tuk) or abe (Des) is a composite ‘sun/moon’. In Tukanoan mythology, Sun and Moon sometimes change roles (see Hugh-Jones 1979: 272-3). Sun and Moon are also ancestors of the Desana (Sky/Day People) and Tukano (Earth/Night People). This, and the affiliation (Tuk/Des) of the narrator, will affect who is specified and in what order (as EB vs. YB).16 Deyubari from (Tuk.) deyu-, ‘to limp’? (Des) Gõamü, (Tuk) Õakü, glossed as ‘God’ by Tukanoans, could also be glossed as ‘man of bone’ (compare the Wakuénai Iñápirríkuli, ‘he inside of bone’ – see Hill, this vol.). (Tuk) Yepa Oakü is (Bs). Yeba Hakü; hakü, ‘father’ is phonetically and semantically close to oakü.17 His body is made up of all varieties of manioc and cultivated plants (NK 19) as Yuruparí’s body is made up of forest fruits (NK 42) and ancestors of White people are sometimes described as having bodies made up items of Western merchandise.18 (Des, Tuk) buhsari = ‘ornaments’.19 (Bs) wanari is the aquatic darter bird (Anhinga anhinga).20 Variants: A. NK 34-5: GFU creates 1. Moon, Yepa Oakü/Muhihu; 2. Deyubari Oakü, 3 Wanani Oakü; 4. Yupuri Basebo (i.e. Baaribo); 5. Buhtuiari Oakü, Master of nature; 6 Amo; 7 Yupakó (probably Yugupo – see above in text) and three other women.

confront the snakes, spiders and other poisonous creatures around the rim of the gourd

for skin changing. Instead he puts the hat on his head and fires the gun into the air.

Angered by his pushy behaviour, GFU sends the White peoples’ ancestor to live in

the East and the ancestor of the Makứ to live in the forest, armed with a bow and

arrow. The Indian ancestors now bathe in what is left of the water – only enough to

whiten the palms of their hands and soles of their feet. {MM 46-51: The

Transformation People acquire the ILTs, now as their own bones, Wa’î-õari, ‘fish

bones’}.

[177-188] The myth ends with the dispersal of the different Tukanoan groups,

an account of the internal composition and hierarchical ranking of the Desana, the

distribution of ritual goods amongst them, their post-mythical history and the

genealogy of the narrator’s own group.

The sexual life of things

B. MM 22-23: 1. GMU creates ümükoho-masü, Sky Man (Desana ancestor i.e. Sun) and Yepa-masü, Earth man (Tukano ancestor i.e. Moon).

C. TG 29-30: Thunder’s daughter, impregnated by Baaribo (see footnote 22 below), gives birth to 1. Yuruparí; 2. Sun; 3. Moon; 4. Kẽri; 5. Buyarü; 6. Wehetero; 7. Kẽri Pino Maku; 8. the EB of the Diroa; 9. Goamügoro (‘true god’); 10. Butari Goamü, Master of laziness; 11. Deyubari Goamü; 12. Suribo Goamü, ancestor of White people and Master of merchandise; 13. birds with coloured feathers used to make ornaments.

D. UT 54-6: GMU creates five thunders followed by Yeba Goamü. She decorates his rattle lance with feather ornaments to create the Sun. He then creates the layered universe.21 Tukanoans use the pulverised cortex of various vines (Bs somo misi, ‘soap vines’) as cleansing vomifacients.22 Variants:A. TG 241-2; 261-3: To create yagé, Kisibi, S of Sun and Deyubari ñgoamü give their Zs coca impregnated with yagé. The yagé impregnates the EZ via the egret-bone tube used to ingest coca. She gives birth to Yagé but this proves unsatisfactory. Later, they give her caimo-fruit juice impregnated with Yagé that dribbles to her vagina. She gives birth to Yagé. His umbilical cord becomes a coral snake, he becomes various other snakes and his placenta becomes a ceremonial shield.B. MM 57-61: Sun and Moon have a Gourd of Life containing coca and guarded by creatures with special reproductive powers: they can change their skins (poisonous insects) and carry their abundant young in bags on their stomachs (spiders). Using the gourd, a cigar and cigar holder, the brothers try in vain to emulate the creatures’ reproductive powers. Their two Zs, created when the men vomit water mixed with vine sap (see above in text), smoke the cigar and eat from the gourd. This gives them the power to reproduce through pregnancy but diminishes the powers of the cigar and gourd. The women become pregnant but lack vaginas. The men give them blessed caimo juice to drink; a falling drop indicates where their vaginas should be. Using the cigar holder’s legs as a template and its point as a knife, the men make their vaginas. The EZ gives birth to Yuruparí; the YZ gives birth to birds with coloured feathers, to snakes and to Yagé.C. UT 65; 115-6: The EZ, pregnant from a cigar, gives birth to Yagé who is Yuruparí; the YZ, pregnant from coca, gives birth to birds with coloured feathers.D. TG 29-30: Making a vagina (also referred to as a gourd) for Thunder’s D with his cigar holder (‘bone for multiplying’ made from his right rib) and his metal earring, Baaribo inseminates her with coca and tobacco smoke. She gives birth to the Universe People - see note 20 above.23 (Tuk) Pamü- ‘to emerge, to surface, to ferment’. Thus the anaconda-canoe is also the canoe-like trough (Bs kumua-hulia, ‘canoe section’) in which beer is brewed.24 On the Uaupés river close to Brazil’s frontier with Colombia.

The Italian artist Archimboldo made paintings of human heads composed of

natural objects - vegetables, fruits and fishes; in their creation myths, the Tukanoans

not only envisage the human body as made up of cultural artefacts but also present

creation as human reproduction carried out in the modes of fabrication and

assemblage. The following correspondences between objects and body parts are all

evident in complete versions of the myths summarised above:

stool: placenta, pelvis, buttocks;

rattle lance: bone, vertebral column, penis, body;

shield: placenta, skin

cigar holder: penis, legs, labia25;

cigar/tobacco: penis, part of vertebra; bone marrow, semen

tobacco smoke: semen;

gourd: vagina, womb, stomach, heart/soul, head;

gourd stand: human body, especially thighs, waist and thorax

caimo & kana fruits/juice: semen, milk;

coca: bone from vertebral column, semen, milk

gourd & kana vines: umbilical cord; women with fruits as children

yuruparí flute: bone, penis, vagina

feather ornaments: skin

adze: tongue

all ILTs: fish bones

Beyond such term-by-term correspondences, some ‘cross-references’ should also be

noted. In the myths, the world (a gourd or pile of sieves) is supported on crossed

rattle-lances that form a stand - Bs. saniro, also ‘holder, enclosure’ - a term that also

applies to the cigar-holder - Bs muno [tobacco] saniro. The cigar-holder has stool

shaped ‘hips’ (Bs isi-kumuro, ‘buttock stool’) that are often carved as paired stools

separated by a gourd stand (illustration II a). Functionally stools are also stands or

supports.

The cigar-holder and rattle lance are both made of dense, red Tabebua wood

and both have sharp points that are stuck in the ground - and used as a penis. The

upper prongs of the cigar holder are also reproduced in miniature in the bone or tooth

prongs on the top of the rattle lance (illustration II.b.). When seen from the side, the 25 ‘For the elders, the arms of the cigar holder represent the labia of the vulva…. (with) the cigar as penis held in the labia to give rise to the Universe People…. The sperm is like the juice of the Caimo fruit’ DK 23, fn, 18.

two roundels below that represent the Sun and Moon can also be read as either stools

or gourd stands. Inverted, the cigar holder resembles a man with cigar as an erect

penis. Finally, the spiral-wound cigar appears as a miniature Yuruparí trumpet (see

Koch-Grünberg 1909/10 I: 282 abb. 160), an object that is also bone and penis.

The ILTs fall into three classes: 1). tubes: flute, cigar, rattle lance; 2).

Containers: cigar-holder, gourd, shield, canoe, beer-trough, screen enclosure, feather

box, feather ornaments26, house; 3) supports: stool, gourd stand. These also

correspond to the major skeletal features and organs of the body; in the myth, the total

human form is imagined as a cigar in a holder stuck inside a gourd supported a gourd-

stand and standing on a stool (see illustration III and DG: 261).

In the myths, the ILTs appear in male-female pairs and some of the objects

themselves form ‘natural’ pairs: cigar + holder, rattle-lance + shield, flute + gourd

(see Hugh-Jones 1979). If these pairings have to do with sexual reproduction, they

also displace and substitute for it for the myths present normal bodily sex as a sterile

diversion from the urgent task of creation, a sign of laziness and a cause of

disharmony. Instead of sex we have insemination and gestation in artefactual modes.

Divine bodies made up of tubes: cigars, flutes, rattle lances - spew forth seminal

breath and vitality in the equivalent registers of colour and sound: tobacco smoke,

fruit juice, flute music and feather ornaments, a fertile, dangerous synaesthesia

encapsulated in the figure of Yagé - at once blood of parturition, coloured vision,

throbbing ears, Yuruparí, coloured, singing birds and coloured, biting snakes. Like

manioc mash mixed with saliva, the stuff that fertilises beer (see Butt 1957), these

seminal substances then fill gourds and beer troughs where fermentation culminates in

new life, the Tukanoans or ‘Fermentation/Transformation people’ (Pamüri masa).

Consistent with myths concerning creation and parenthood, it is clear then that

tubes and containers stand (in) for the normal reproductive organs that the divinities

lack. This substitution between artefact and reproductive organ is underscored in the

spells that accompany the the divinities’ acts of creation. Recapitulating these acts as

they sit on stool and blow smoke over gourds of coca and kana fruits, human kumus

now use these same spells to manage pregnancy, birth and naming. It is only when the

ancestors become fully human that they fully internalise and embody their

reproductive and other organs, only then that cultural artefacts are externalised and 26 Note that Amo’s house (= container) is made from feathers and that (Bs) hoa, ‘feather, fur, hair’ is also ‘bag’.

disembodied as objects and possessions, and only then that men and women become

fully distinct. This brings us to the issue of gender.

From Sex to Gender

If, in the myths, there is no separation between persons and things, there is

also no separation between genders. Rather, a set of androgynous demiurges with

overlapping identities and ambiguous kinship statuses inseminate, and are

inseminated by, each other. This androgyny, latent in the fuzzy boundary between

tube and container (or anaconda and canoe), is encapsulated in the cigar holder, an

object that inseminates gourds and women and, by implication, the smoker as well. At

once a man with an erect penis and a penis thrust between female legs or labia, the

holder encompasses gourd-stand, stool and rattle lance within its own form.

This androgyny also applies to normal human beings. In most respects the

bodies and body parts of men and women are quite similar and the penis and

vulva/vagina that we treat as diacritics are here imagined as transformations of one

another, androgynous object-organs that are simultaneously given up (flute-penis) and

retained (as flute-vagina) following the women’s theft of yuruparí flutes.27 This same

androgyny appears in the Makuna idea that women have a right-male and left-female

side and that menstruation is the yuruparí of the left side (Århem et al 2004: 184,

207). All this suggests that, with respect to Amerindian mythology, we should avoid

reducing gender to sex and should recognise that gender, as one kind of relation,

serves a device to imagine many others. Rather than seeing myths as a discourse

about human sexuality in the code of material culture, a flaw in Reichel-Dolmatoff’s

work on the Tukanoans, it would be more appropriate to see artefacts as expressions

of more abstract capacities and dispositions shared in common by men and women,

albeit in different gendered modes.

If women’s ability to create life is primarily bodily and only secondarily

artefactual – in the analogous culinary processes of cooking and fermentation, the

story of the theft and recuperation of yuruparí suggests that for men, the terms are

inverted – in getting back as artefacts what women retain in their bodies, men’s role in

sexual reproduction plays second fiddle to their rituals of reproduction and dominance

of ceremonial goods. This is the message Opossums who link flutes to their own

extra-uterine, marsupial mode of reproduction (see p X above), of men who sleep too

27 See also Hugh-Jones 2001

long and thus forgo the ability to reproduce solely by vomiting (see p. X above), and

of women who, in stealing the ability to become pregnant, diminish the potency of the

men’s Gourd of Life (see note 22).

As androgyny is transmuted to the ambiguities of ethnicity, the play between

male and female, body and artefact, reappears in the pairing of bows with guns and of

feather ornaments with merchandise. Today, men dominate all such objects but, in the

myths, if bows/guns are ‘male’ – chosen by the male ancestors of Indians and Whites

– ornaments/merchandise are unequivocally ‘female’ – controlled by two sisters who

stand for Indians and Whites. All theseobjects are ultimately forms of ‘clothing’,

things made from transformed body ornaments by Clothes Women. They are signs for

gendered capacities and dispositions, ‘destruction’ in the case of weapons and

‘creation’ in the case of ornaments and manufactured goods. Clothes are also

changeable skins, things that can be taken on and off to produce transformations in

being and appearance equivalent to the ecdysis and pupation of insects or the

sloughing of skins by snakes. Clothing, the Clothes Women and Amo (Bs gamo),

whose name means moulting, sloughing the skin, ecdysis, pupation and menstruation

(itself understood as an internal change of skin - see Hugh-Jones 1979) and whose

house is made from moulted feathers, all encapsulate reproduction, transformation

and periodicity. Like the feathered wings of birds, the paws and claws of jaguars, or

the spiked shoes of an athlete, clothes are affects (see Viveiros de Castro 2004: 474),

at once sign and substance of capacities and dispositions.

From Objects to Affects

In myth, divinities, prototypical kumus existing as pure spirit, act through a set

of artefacts that stand (in) for absent bodies. As their blessings make clear, these

artefacts are the outcomes and indices of their thoughts and intentions and signs of the

capacities of the human bodies they will eventually create, a creation that moves from

thought through artefact to body. Likewise, in ritual contexts, invisible ancestors are

made present by assembling the ceremonial items that correspond to their body parts

(see Hugh-Jones 1979: 153-4). At birth, naming, puebrty and initiation, the kumu

controls bodily transitions and transformations by manipulating artefacts identified

with body parts. This identity is affirmed in blessings first uttered by divinities but

here the process moves in the opposite, direction – away from concrete bodies and

towards more abstract artefacts that serve as signs for the ‘spiritual’ components of

those bodies, a device that allows the socialisation of thoughts and behaviour

(compare Mamaindê ornaments as ‘souls’- Miller this vol.).

This move from body through artefacts to thoughts, intentions and

responsibilities is clear in the following extracts from a Makuna text (Århem et al

2004, my trans.) “During the first stage of the life cycle, the kumu’s blessings relate to

the maintenance of the baby’s stools of birth. These stools, that contain the life and

thoughts of the newborn child, relate to its mother’s arms and legs because it is these

that give it comfort and support in its first months. The baby is not given other stools

as it does not yet think about its own future; so the kumu gives it a stool of infancy,

the legs of its mother. At this stage it will also have the stool of crying and tears. At

the second stage of the life cycle, at puberty, the kumu changes the stools of birth for

stools of thoughts; for boys these relate to yuruparí and for girls to menstruation. At

this time, the stool of the mother becomes prohibited; the child is isolated from the

mother and takes on another life, the ‘stool of forgetting the mother” (200).

Through the blessings she receives when she begins to menstruate, the young girl

changes her skin and changes her childhood stools for those of thoughts, the stools of

cultivated plants, of coca, of tobacco, of manioc, of menstruation and of red paint.

From this time on much of the life of the young girl will depend on looking after these

stools” (205). “Because women are the only ones who can give life, they are

considered to be the ‘birth stools of the universe’” (184). “When boys see yuruparí

for the first time, the stools of thought that are blessed are those of coca, tobacco, red-

paint, yagé and yuruparí” (215)

If containers and tubes relate to more immediate capacities and processes of

reproduction, these extracts suggest that stools or supports relate not just to different

capacities but also to the different behaviours, competencies and responsibilities

involved in human life as a whole. For the Tukanoans, as for their Witoto neighbours

to the south (Pineda 1994), a ‘stool’ is not just an object or part of the anatomy (see

above) but also an abstract notion of support, base, foundation, location and

comportment, When a newborn child is named, the kumu gives it a stool to fix its

name-soul in its body; at puberty this stool is changed for a new set of stools, the

gendered thoughts, concerns and responsibilities of adult life. Similarly ‘sitting, an

activity’ described as cooling, relaxing, and peaceful, is synonymous with learning,

thought, contemplation and meditation and has connotations of stability, rootedness,

and fixity. A wise person has a ‘cool seat’, an irritable person a ‘hot seat’ and a

thoughtless or flighty person ‘does not know how to sit’. A person’s ‘stool’ is thus an

aspect of their character.

Stools are also an index of rank and authority, things reserved for men of

higher status, the dancer and the kumu. The kumu sitting on a stool (Bs. kumu-ro,

“kumu’s thing”) is a gourd filled with knowledge and wisdom who travels between

the layers of the cosmos with smoke as mediating breath and stool as clouds and sky

resting on mountain-legs (see Beksta 1988). Sitting in a canoe (Bs. kumu-a), the kumu

also travels in horizontal space in a vessel whose counterparts is the beer trough

(kumu-a hulia, “canoe section”), the Anaconda/Fermentation-Canoe.

In short, and as the myths suggest, stools and gourds are not only objective

forms of shamanic knowledge but also objectifications of human life and capacities,

not just buttocks and wombs but also hearts, souls, heads and minds. The myths also

suggest a theory of mind and agency in which thoughts, designs and intensions are

given material form in the objects that such intensions produce. A theory in which a

diversity of artefacts connotes not only different body parts but also different bodily

capacities and dispositions controlled, regulated and inspired by different areas of

self-discipline and responsibility.

Making and self-making

In Tukanoan society, technical and symbolic competence go hand-in-hand.

The ability to make objects is a mark of adult status, leaders and ritual experts are

typically expert craftsmen, and the objects they make are the hallmarks of a particular

civilisation. If people are progressively built up and socialised as assemblages of

objects, so objects may socialise people. Girls undergoing puberty seclusion spend

their days making things pottery whilst initiate boys are trained to make basketry.

This training is as much moral, intellectual and spiritual as it is technical for sitting

still and making things are forms of meditation. Post-initiation is also the favoured

time for more knowledgeable adults to make feather ornaments and other ritual

objects, a dangerous activity whose female counterpart is the production of red paint:

both involve the seclusion and dietary restrictions that mark bedise, a bodily state akin

to that of menstruation.

The seclusion, fasting, and other bodily regimes that follow first menstruation

and initiation are processes of transformation in which the body is trained to make

objects of beauty and is itself made into an object of beauty. Beauty is a social not

natural quality: natural materials such as feathers only become beautiful when they

have been transformed, a socialisation of nature that parallels the way that the making

of things and the wearing of ornaments socialise the body. The recursive relation

between bodies and objects is manifest in the decoration of ritual objects in the

manner of bodies: the same designs are applied to baskets, to the skin of dancers and

to the stools they sit upon. The same relation is also underlined in spells and other

shamanic discourse concerning training, discipline and socialisation where the subject

is portrayed as an artefact - a solid, contemplative stool or a basket that is

progressively filled with knowledge, wisdom and responsibility28. Making things is

thus self-making and the mastery of technique a mastery of the self.

Possessions - Gaheuni

Human artefacts are referred to as Bs. gaheuni29 and distinguished from living

creatures and plants but, above all, gaheuni are the ILTs. In mythological terms, the

ILTs are not human productions at all but divine bodies existing as bone and crystal,

substances, whose qualities of hardness, durability, scarcity, whiteness, purity,

brilliance and luminescence all emphasise their otherworldly nature. In more human

terms, gaheuni are quintessentially highly crafted objects made from fine hardwoods

and decorated with intricate painting, engraved designs and delicate featherwork. The

few who know how to make such things are deemed to possess special gifts. Gaheuni

are thus items of wealth and objectified forms of shamanic knowledge whose value

condenses labour, know-how and controlled power.

Many of these valuables are heirlooms that connect their owners to the known

past of previous generations; all of them connect to otherworld of ancestors and

divinities. They, their names and the names of their owners are collective group

property that signal group identity and embody its vitality, spiritual powers and

potency, items quite similar to the Kayapó nêkrêtch (see Turner this vol.). They are

accumulated and displayed as inalienable possessions but were once the prime object

of inter-group raiding and occasionally enter into prestigious exchanges. They thus

have connotations of alterity, primarily that of divinities and dead ancestors and

secondarily that of other peoples and affines.

28 For comparable Witoto ideas see Candre and Echeverri 1996: 49. 29 Gahe-, ‘other’, -uni, ‘thing(s)’

As animals have degrees of animality,with jaguars occupying pride of place,

so objects have relative degrees of materiality. These hierarchies of subjectivity and

value also correspond to the social hierarchies of rank and prestige that are a

characteristic feature of Tukanoan society. Members of the higher-ranking clans

typically control sacred ritual paraphernalia. Like their possessions, such people are

‘big’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘heavy’, more material than the less substantial commoners

(compare Turner ibid).

As immaterial possessions that define Tukanoan clans or house (Hugh-Jones

1995) language and names are also gaheuni. Likewise, material valuables come

attached to mythological pedigrees that are recited when the objects are displayed and

that serve to differentiate apparently similar objects as the body parts of different

group ancestors. We have already met this verbalisation of things and materialisation

of language in the synaesthesia of colour and sound, the identity between tobacco

smoke, flute music, and feather ornaments mentioned above. As I have shown

elsewhere (Hugh-Jones 2006), names and ornaments are like two versions of the same

thing, both of them manifestations of soul. Thus feather ornaments and the name-soul

are both described as a ‘second body’, and naming at birth also confers a protective

covering or barrier (Bs küni oka) made up of invisible artefacts, split-palm screens

and shields. Artefacts are the material traces of thoughts and intentions as name and

spirit point to artefacts. In Andrello’s words, in the Tukanoan case ‘objectification is

the same as personification’(2004: 240).

Clothing and Merchandise

Manufactured goods are also gaheuni but here again some are more so than

others. In historical times, at the top of the hierarchy were guns, swords, machetes and

axes, potent tools and weapons also used as items of dress and adornment alongside

glass beads, clothes, silver coins and mirrors. There were also bibles, images of saints,

calendars and letters patent, paper items treasured more as potent objects in their own

right than as materials to be read. Coming from far away peoples and places and

possessed with extraordinary qualities and efficacy, White peoples’ objects were also

considered as things not made but which simply existed - and to some extent they still

are. Today, this hierarchy is giving way to one of electrical and electronic goods and

the land titles and other bureaucratic documents involved in dealings with the state. In

addition to their control of ritual goods, it was typically high-ranking individuals who

controlled trade with White people, who were appointed as chiefs by the colonial

authorities, and who received the hats, swords, epaulettes, medals and letters patent

that went with such appointments (see also Andrello 2004; ch. 4). Today too, there is

still a strong correlation between traditional rank and status and occupancy of

positions of leadership in indigenous organisations and local government.

As gaheuni, ancestral heirlooms and White peoples’ goods are alternative

versions of the same thing, objectifications of capacities, powers and knowledge that

come in two different but complementary forms. This is suggested by the notion that

the world of the dead is like a White peoples’ city, a place with street lights and

abundant wealth and by the fact that Stradelli, an C19 Italian explorer of the Vaupés

region, was believed to have obtained money and wealth from the region’s mountains

and rapids, the transformation houses of the Tukanoans’ ancestors (Andrello 2004:

233-4). The point is also clear in a series of mythic choices and permutations. In the

case of yuruparí, women had to give up flutes to men but retained them in another

bodily form - flutes are thus the objective material correlates of women’s reproductive

capacities. This incident then results in a differentiation between two sisters, one

becoming Amo, the Mistress of Dance Ornaments who lives at the headwaters where

Indians live, the other becoming the Mistress of Clothing who lives downstream

where White people live. Clothing, a metonym for all merchandise, is an exotic

version of moulted feathers and the shed skins of insects and snakes, the objective,

material correlates of menstruation and reproduction, capacities encapsulated in the

name Amo, ‘chrysalis/menstruating woman’. Finally there is a fatal choice that

determines the difference between White people and Indians. This choice is presented

in three different registers: a bath that determines skin colour, a choice between the

weapons, and a choice between items of clothing. These registers suggest that the

difference should be understood as simultaneously physical, technological,

behavioural and moral. One reading of all this would thus be that women and White

people stand together as thieves who stole goods, powers and capacities that rightfully

belong to men. The other would be that, in their use of ancestral heirlooms and White

peoples’ merchandise, men are appropriating, in object form, the powers and

capacities of those in the position of potent Others: women, enemies or potential

affines.

Separations and continuities

In Amazonian mythology there is typically no separation between humans and

animals. After the appearance of sex, death and time, humans and animals become

separated in this world but remain united at the level of spirit or soul in a parallel

world of myth where human culture is the norm. If this is also true in the rest of their

mythology, what is striking in Tukanoan creation myths is that objects appear to take

up the space normally occupied by animals. People and thing are not separated, we

see a profusion of different artefact-body parts, and instead of an elaborate external

differentiation of animal species, animals are reduced to the single term ‘fish’, a

generic category of which aquatic fish are the prototype, the anaconda is the Master or

hyper form, and land animals (Bs wai büküra, ‘mature fish’) are a sub-species. In this

scheme of things, objects also play a key role in the differentiation between men and

women (flutes), Indians and White people (weapons, clothes), humans and fish

(ornaments). We have discussed men / women and Indians / Whites above. Following

Andrello (2004: 367 ff.), let us now turn to humans and fish.

After a journey, at once a gestation, childhood and socialisation, the ancestors

emerge from a hole, a birth and initiation. As they emerge, they abandon their fish

skins and put on ornaments. Appearing towards the end of the story, ornaments are

the final additions that allow the ancestors to achieve a fully human status, external

skins added to internal organs that figure as stools, gourds, flutes, etc. It is precisely

these ornaments that serve to demarcate the ancestors from fish and to underline their

new, definitively human status. They underline this transformation because, from the

perspective of the divinities, ornaments are themselves people. Humans are thus

doubly human: they clothe their bodies with goods that are not just aspects of persons,

their skins, but also persons in their own right. This means that Tukanoans are

different from both animals and other peoples not only in their own eyes but also in

the eyes of the divinities that have tried so hard to create them. They are Real People

(Bs. masa-goro).

This foregrounding of objects ahas knock-on effects on the relations between

humans and fish. If people see themselves as human and fish as fish, fish too see

people as humans and not only as predatory animals. Because fish are jealous of

humans and resentful at having failed to make the grade, they seek to drag humans

back down to their own level by making them ill and dragging their souls down to

their own aquatic houses. Thus Tukanoans hold Fish-People (Bs wai masa)

responsible for the most of their illnesses and afflictions (see also Lasmar 2006,

Cabalzar 2006). From the human side, to see fish as human would be to go along with

these plans, an invitation to sickness or death. So rather than a transitive or affinal

relation between people and fish where each sees the other through human eyes we

have a linear, non-reciprocal relation between fishes, humans and divinities which

appears to correspond both to an emphasis on hierarchy and to creation in the idioms

of fabrication and parenthood.

But affinity is not entirely absent from the picture. Tukanoan creation myths

move from the universal to the particular, from alterity to identity, and from potential

affinity though real affinity to consanguinity. More concretely, they move from major

generic divisions between (1) men and women, (2) humans and fish, and (3) Whites

and Indians, then deal with the differentiation of the Tukanoans into affinally related

groups end with the genealogy and ranked internal divisions of each.

In the earlier stages of the myths, women, fish, and White people all figure as

hostile enemies. From these virtual affines humans appropriate spiritual powers and

capacities objectified in flutes, feather ornaments, exotic names and White peoples’

‘clothing’. In the middle stages, these generic powers and their material correlates are

divided between different Tukanoan groups, as their ancestral inheritance and

inalienable heirlooms. These Real People, related as real affines of the same general

kind, order their lives by exchanges of sisters and ritualised exchanges of goods.

Some of the items we have met above – yagé and beer, coca and tobacco, stools and

gourds – figure prominently in these exchanges. Flutes and feather ornaments,

inalienable objectifications of group spirit and potency, are more typically displayed

than exchanged, their display being an affirmation of both power and rank. But when

they are exchanged, the groups involved enter into a special kind of ritual or spirit

alliance (Bs. hee tenyü ‘ancestral affine’) as if they had exchanged sisters - or as if

goods and people were equivalent and substitutable. If this is not quite bridewealth

there can be little doubt that, for the Tukanoans, objects can also be subjects and

persons.

At the end of the myth, these same goods underwrite internal differences in

rank and status. At the level of groups, such goods are the prerogatives of high-

ranking clans and part of a politico-ritual system that allows them to dominate lower

ranking groups. At the level of individuals, power and influence go hand in hand with

control of sacred property - and of White people’s merchandise, technology and

learning.

Tukanoan culture and society thus displays two complementary tendencies. At

the level of shamanism, these two tendencies are those of the kumu or priest and the

yai or jaguar-shaman (see Hugh-Jones 1994). The former is concerned with ‘vertical’,

hierarchical relations of divine creation, lineal transmission and ancestry and controls

relations between the living and their ancestors by processes of personification and

objectification. The prototypes of the kumu are the Grandparents of the Universe

sitting on their stools blowing out tobacco smoke, the creator divinities that figure

throughout this discussion. The latter tendency is more concerned with horizontal

relations, a more typically Amazonian domain that is the focus of a different,

complementary body of mythology where humans and animals intermarry and

exchange perspectives on equal terms. And here, as for the Sanuma and Mamaindê

(Guimaraes, Miller, this vol.), objects figure not as divinities whose human creations

were once fish but rather as of the body parts of birds and animals who were once

people In these other myths and as Viveiros de Castro would predict (2004: 477-8),

the origins of cultural institutions are indeed explained as borrowings of prototypes

possessed by animals, spirits and enemies - i.e. taking. Virtual affinity and transfers

from enemies also figure in Tukanoan creation myths (see above) but here they are set

alongside themes of creation in the bodily and artefactual idioms of parenthood and

fabrication – i.e. making.

I suggest then that, as in the case of the physical and symbolic elaboration of

their architecture (Hugh-Jones 1995), the physical and symbolic elaboration of the

Tukanoans’ Instruments of Life and Transformation and the parental idioms of

creation that these artefacts imply, are part and parcel of the Tukanoans hierarchical,

lineal character.

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