The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and PersonhoodFernando Santos-Granero University of Arizona Press, 2009 M10 15 - 288 pages Native peoples of the Amazon view objects, especially human artifacts, as the first cosmic creations and the building blocks from which the natural world has been shaped. In these constructional cosmologies, spears became the stings of wasps, hammocks became spiderwebs, stools became the buttocks of human beings. A view so antithetical to Western thought offers a refreshing perspective on the place and role of objects in human social life—one that has remained under-studied in Amazonian anthropology. In this book, ten scholars re-introduce objects to contemporary studies of animism in order to explore how various peoples envision the lives of material objects: the occult, or extraordinary, lives of “things,” whose personas are normally not visible to lay people. Combining linguistic, ethnological, and historical perspectives, the contributors draw on a wealth of information gathered from ten Amerindian peoples belonging to seven different linguistic families to identify the basic tenets of what might be called a native Amazonian theory of materiality and personhood. They consider which objects have subjective dimensions and how they are manifested, focusing on three domains regarding Amazonian conceptions of things: the subjective life of objects, considering which things have a subjective dimension; the social life of things, seeing the diverse ways in which human beings and things relate as subjectivities; and the historical life of things, recognizing the fact that some things have value as ritual objects or heirlooms. These chapters demonstrate how native Amazonian peoples view animals, plants, and things as “subjectivities” possessing agency, intentionality, and consciousness, as well as a composite anatomy. They also show how materiality is intimately linked to notions of personhood, with artifacts classified as natural or divine creations and living beings viewed as cultural or constructed. The Occult Life of Things offers original insights into these elaborate native ontologies as it breaks new ground in Amazonian studies. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Part I Artifactual Anatomies | 31 |
Part II Subjectivized Materialities | 103 |
Part III Materialized Subjectivities | 171 |
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agency Amerindian animacy animals Anthropology apapaatai artifacts ayahuasca baby Barcelos Barcelos Neto beautiful become blowing tobacco smoke bodily body ornaments capacity Cashinahua ceremonial chant owner classifier sets context cosmologies creation cultural curing dead Descola designs egaando ensoulment Erikson exchange feather female fish flutes gender gourd groups hammock Hugh-Jones human identity cards identity documents igbo images indigenous jaguar Kawoká kawoká-mona Kayapo Kichwa Kuwái Lagrou Lévi-Strauss living malikái Mamaindê manioc Manuel masks material Matis musical myth mythic Nambikwara names native Amazonian nêkrêtch nonhuman notion numeral classifiers ontologies painted panpipes performance person personhood perspectivism possess primordial production rattle lance relations relationship ritual objects San Gonzalo São Paulo shaman shamanic stones singing social Society songs soul species spirit stools subjectivity subjectivized things tion tobacco smoke transformation Tukano Tukanoan Turner University Press Urarina Vilaça village vitality Viveiros de Castro volume Wakuénai wasain Wauja women Yanesha Yompor