1.0 The Phantom gringo Boat. Shamanic Discourse and Developmente in Panama. Stephanie C. Kane. Smithsonian Institution Press. 1994
1.1 Intro
1.1.1 The Embera are part of a culture area that may be characterized by the surreal dimmension of its discourse and image-making. The post-Conquest conjuncture of Indian, black, and Spanish -a history of violence and strange alliance- imbues reality here with a magical cast. In a semiotics of the unnatural, the fantastic and incongruous images of the surreal remain out of keeping with the social ordinary, reminding of the cruel possibilities of disruption that have so often destroyed the continuity of everyday life in this part of the world. In this sence, the surreal is an awareness of historial extremes, a reminder of civilization’s barbarities, and a source of power that expands the possibilities of discourse and evades control of outsiders. The magical real is a form of cultural resistance that is trained to history. PPXV
1.1.2 While the culture area oriented toward Colombia is bound together by history and the popular imagery of the magical real, participaton in the nation-state, although drawing strategically on the notion of culture, relies more heavily on a discourse of ethnic politics and development. The tension between these two orientations is an underlying theme of this ethnography. XVII
1.1.3 Through analysis of event and habit, the kind of phenomena that would be consistent with what the Embera refer to as the Embera way, I sketch the dimensions of social life that pertain to ecology, economy, politics, health, and memory. meaning condenses around images, words, embodiments, quantifications, and secrets. in tellings gleaned from the everyday, the implicitness and ineffability of social knowledge is explored(cf. Taussig 1987:4, 287-88, 367). Shaded with lines ofdifference, perspective, and translation (this author’s among others), the range and complexity of ‘the personal’ is evoked. PPXVII
1.1.4 ...myth and magic are integral aspects of social life. the basic assumption underlying this interpretive theme is that empirical knowledge is always partial and partially imaginary. PPXVII
1.1.5 [chpt 2 deals with]the imaginary figure of the Indian, a negotiated fantasy that traces the ramifying paths of foreign intrusion in the context of Conquest, colonialism, and flood. PPXVII
1.1.6 [chpt 3 shows]...how celebration and taboo regulate the links between culture and ecology. Focusing particularly on sexual taboo, a basic principle of Embera cosmology is elaborated- namely, that the potential for danger and creation is intensified by the tendency of human transformation (as that which might be experienced by people engaged in sexual intercourse) to attract other cooccurring transformations. PPXVIII
1.1.7 [Chpt 5]...the events described include the ethnographer’s discovery of ‘double vision,’ that is, the opening of analysis to the magical as well as material dimensions of transforming a tree into a canoe. XVIII
1.1.8 The ninth and final chapter analyzes women’s contradictory position in cosmological and political economic terms, showing how women’s everyday activities provide the foundation for not only Embera culture but also the local development of the modern nation-state. It grapples with the way ‘tradition’ figures in the struggle to control reources, a struggle in which landownership and household autonomy are particularly at issue. The question here is not one of authenticity but, rather, of how this thing called tradition is invoked differently by representatives of state power (including some scholars) and by those, like indigenous women, who are marginalized by state power. Finally, the chapter assumes an Embera perspective on global politics, including an allegorical version of the U.S. invasion of Panama. Viewed from Embera frames of reference, the book tries to shake Euroamerican conventions that place themselves -and the discourse of global politics-so firmly in the ‘real.’ PPXIX
1.2 CHPTR 1/Contours of social Space
1.2.1 Promises that come from unknown territory and cannot be ignored draw the Embera onward, only to recede again into the mist before they can be realized. So seem the grand schemes of Panamanian development in the 1970s and 1980s...PP1
1.2.2 Development is perhaps no more real than the gringo boat that the grandson tells me in 1985 can in special cases be seen tied up next to one of the village houses in the Chico River, where the grandfather shaman brought it those many years ago. The footless spirit crew and its headless cpatain, once captured by the grandfather, are irresponsibly freed from shamanic control in the course of his death. A generation later, their mutilated forms are yet wandering the village outskirts, threatening its youth with maddening spells of confusion. How like the chaos of war, abridged to the proportions of local memory. [sounds condescending]PP2
1.2.3 The phantom gringo boat crosses the gap between known and unknown, testing the field of forces between cause and effect. A motorized archetype of desire, it pierces the distance, reaching both forward and backward toward the originary powers of conquest, colonization and development. Such a force field defies the limits of participant observation. the ethnographer’s basic method. And so I adopt an Emberá remedy for partial knowledge, allowing the possibilities of extraordinary vision to expand the empirical frame of direct experience. Shifting between scientific and poetic registers, i search for currents to cary the intentions of those with whom I speak and to mine the discorse of magic to convey the doubled experience of local and global scale. PP3
1.2.4 Traditionally (where traditoin is understood as an indigenous response to Conquest and colonialism as much as an active connection to some version of the ancient past), the Embera place their houses in a dispersed pattern...By the mid-1980s, about two decades since the Embera began to think of village formation as a viable survival strategy, concentrated settlements with anywhere from a handful to nearly a hundred houses are a common sight. PP4
1.2.5 The political economy of the times can be read in the river, the ‘highway of the Embera.’ Along the banks, reeds and grasses resistant to the sun’s blaze colonize areas that have been repeatedly burned for cultivation. They once were common only downstream. Nut now that villages are established upriver and agricultural production intensifies, areas of reed and grass increase, replacing forest trees that once shaded travelers. Without the hold of strong tree roots, banks are worn down by yearly floods, and riverbeds become wider and shallower. Along the entire inhabited lenth of the rivers...cool forest has been pushed back from the banks. Only beyond the last village, as the mountainous headwaters approach, does the canopy reach far enough across the water for monkeys to jump from one side to the other. PP5
1.2.6 Fulfilling the migratory potential of their culture, the Embera move their household seedlings across the water in the belly of a sculpted tree (canoe) and center it anew on a hearth high above the ground. Using their special knowledge and skill, the Embera, together with their sister linguistic group the Waunan, manage to survive. But the customary practices of household autonomy, upriver retreat, and limited exchange with neighboring groups, which have served them well since the conquest, appear to have reached the limits of success. Finding themselves between forest edge and the center of international capital in Panama City, the Embera people turn to meet the world, choosing leaders to fight for their land and the manna of development. PP5
1.2.7 With one hand, Torrijos increased the competition for land in Darien by bringing in campesinos. With the other, he offered the Emberá and Waunan grade schools, health posts, and voting boooths in their upriver forest settlements. His strategy echoed that of the first waves of Spanish conquistadores and missionaries, whose repeated attempts to induce the indians into villages failed. Torrijos offered these things with the understanding that the emerging Emberá political structure based on village formation would support his ruling military party. the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), in regional and natoinal elections. Most important, they could work successfully, he promised, toward the establishment of their own semiautonomus reserve, a comarca. The partial fulfillment of these promises began to shift the balance of power toward the Indians and away from the blacks, for it created routes of exchange and systems of patronage that bypassed those that the blacks had created and controlled. Indee, Torrijos’s development strategy, whether intentional or not, served to weaken the links that connect the past and peoples of the Darien to each other and to the Colombian Chocó, creating greater dependence on Panama City, his center of power. PP8
1.2.8 At the local level, whenever possible, the Emberá have tenaciously resisted ceding authority in the domain of extended family households, the unit of autonomy that has provided for Emberá survival since what they call Ancient Times. PP9
1.2.9 From the perspective of Emberá newcomers just arriving in darien from the Chocó in the 1980s, however, there are a number of adjustments to make. Newcomers find themselves resettling, not a comfortable distance of a river bend apart, as before, but just a few feet apart, within sight of unfamiliar neighbors. This situation breaks common magical codes at the same time as it requires elaboration of uncommon political codes.PP10
1.2.10 Villagers are represented to the state by a political structure that bears the name of the people but is in many respects experienced indirectly...Each...comarca is governed by a ‘traditional’ cacique, or chief, who is traditinal only insofar as he is an unpaid older man who does not read or writte and who draws legitimacy from family settlement history and kin networks. There is no evidence of a ‘tradition’ of stable chieftainships existing, except maybe the one that the conquistadores and missionaries called forth between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to address representatives of indigenous groups with whom they were at war, whom they used as laborers, or whom they taxed...In Torrijos’s time, the contemporary Emberá chieftainship tradition is a reinvention based on the Kuna model. The new traditional Emberá caciques represent the political authority of a people who never before needed this kind of representation. PP10
1.2.11 The liason between traditional caciques and the young educated leaders produces communications that are regarded skeptically by villagers, most of whom do not attend political congresses themselves and hear reports only through their representative village heads. this skepticism derives from strongly held beliefs in household autonomy as a survival strategy and distrust of anyone who claims leadership, even when survival is now also frame in terms of struggling politically as an indigenous people for a land reserve through elected leaders. informing this skepticism is the ecological knowledge that household dispersion is a more sustainable settlement pattern in the rainforest environment than is the concentration of households and food production areas in and around villages. PP11
1.2.12 I realized that the two to to five days of travelling back and forth between village and capital represented more than a journey across space. It was a journey through a transnational structure of political and symbolic economies. PP15
1.2.13 I, who may have actually swum with DEA agents, had no more idea of what was going on than the Emberá did. Copresence does not guarantee knowledge. The shifting political and economic forces that impinge on our lives are perhaps strangely felt but nevertheless remain largely unknown- unless catastrophe reveals them, that is. The display of forces in the U.S. invation and postinvasion revelations fills in the public ater the fact. Up until the point where things blow up, gaps in perception, where sensed by the state and its citizenry, are traversed with imaginative insight (e.g.,the Ember’s phantom gringo boat), repressed through information control (e.g., the CIA), bred to produce terror (e.g., Noriega’s dictatorship), and resisted through uncensored channels (E.G., PANAMA’S OPPOSITION). WHERE THREATS OF VIOLENCE SHAPE SYMBOLIC PROCESS, AS IN THIS CASE, THE PARTIALITY OF KNOWLEDGE CAN BE A NERVE-RACKING PROBLEM. PP16
1.2.13.1 ME: IF NOT, ASK THE HAITIANS.
1.2.14 ...ethnographers learn to replicate the anxiaties and exploit the possibilities of intercultural and interracial contact that characterize the region in which they work. In this transformative process, the unconscious may ben the intellect’s chosen stance of objectivity. it is this slippage of, not quite identity, but modes of perception and thought that lends authenticity to the ethnographer’s voice. PP18
1.2.15 Ethnographers are now more conscious of the political implications of our changing roles...To cope, we search (like shamans) for new strategies of representation that elude dominant regimes, that are open and quick to convey the instability and proliferation of meaning along the contours of social space. With doubts in tow, we push the forms of classic ethnography-our inheritance- into new shapes...As before, we mark off areas apropiate for description and frame moments of experience for telling. but these are no longer joined in a classicly ordered sequence suggesting mastery through knowledge...Instead, systematic data are juxtaposed with interpretation in order to find a more resilient kind of truth. PP18
1.2.16 In a reversal of classic ethnographic style, I do not describe the everyday in order to provide a foundation for intellectual abstraction. Abstractions with which readers are by now probably familiar (e.g’ the Indian, the state, magic, ideology, the Emberá, the Darien), are used as entry points. Like stage pops, their usefulness lessens with the accumulation of the reader’s local knowledge. the reader’s experience thus mimics that of fieldworker and writter, who learns to appreciate the significance, complexity and unruliness of the mundane. the goal is no more or no less than that. With a dash of intuition and wonder, the writter happily sacrifices her measure of ethnographic authority. PP18
1.2.17 A leap of imagination is required to grasp the local and global effects of power that are refashioning our planet and our selves, a process involving infinite sets of quandaries regarding agency and scale. That leap of imagination can be formulated in diverse mode of human thought and perception, but here i focus on one named ‘magic.’ Magical discourse begins where empirical observation (science) finds its limits. Among the Emberá, magical discourse, fouded on the ancient and global practice of shamanism, is the language of argument and interpretation used to cross the gap between the known AND THE UNKNOWN. In large part, emberá magical discourse rides over the same semantic domain as that which Euroamericans call politcs and healing, with the important exception that it omits much of the patriarchical presumption common to these domains in other cultures. PP19
1.2.17.1 NOTE IN TEXT: This conceptualization is a variant of Buchler’s (1984) definition, drawing on levi-Strauss and Lacan, of the mythical. According to this definition, the mythical is that which fills with signs the ontological gap between self and other, event and meaning. PP202
1.2.17.1.1 Me: Maybe from the white man’s perspective. i doubt such a negative definition will do for a native with respect to His myths.
1.2.18 Ethnography is like shamanism in its attempt to cross the gap between known and unknown. According to the empiricist pressumptions of classic ethnography, however, the ethnographer and ethnographic analysis are rooted firmly in the known and knowable. the non-empirically verifiable unknown is broached only indirectly via the beliefs of othr cultures. Euroamericans mediate their fascination with magic by using other cultures as alibis. The distance they impose between their idea of themselves and their idea of magic is demonstrated in texts that clearly mark off the magical discourse of natives from the explanatory discourse of scientists and humanists. in contrast, this book does not dramatize the boundary between magic and empirical reality by contrasting voices of native and ethnographer. out of respect for Emberá magical discourse, and as a structure for conveying to the reader the structures of feeling associated with it, I let its language and principles impinge in the ethnographic text in a less tractable way. Following memories’ sensation, i try to write the magical real into the politics of the everyday. PP20
1.2.18.1 Notes in text: Raymond Williams (1977:132) writes that in talking about structures of feeling, ‘We are talking about the characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed, its specific hierachies.’ PP203
1.2.19 Chptr 2 Authentic Discontinuities
1.2.19.1 In Ancient Times animals were people. Then the world changed. Woodpecker and Horned Lizard were skilled axmen. When the world changed, they were swinging their aes. And there the axes stayed, right on top of their heads. Such words from the past remind us of the wonder and precariousness of human being: if the world changed once, it could change again. When it does, humans may find their positions reversed in the planetary hierarchy. And like the armies of deposed dictators, they may be subject to just retribution. But it would be far worse than even this, because as for the animals, the loss of power will be accompanied by a loss of speech and consciousness. PP21
1.2.19.2 Since ancient times of the Emberá, being human is conceived in relaton to that which human being is not. through story, conception is lent reality....All humans define themselves in reference to that which they are not-in the unconscious (Freud 1913), in language (Saussure 1960), and in myth (Lévi-Strauss 1975)...Time, race, culture, class, and forms of devience are common parameters of difference that bind human identities. Humans cultivate social relationships along these parameters, devoting themselves to those that they hope will fulfill expectations, sometimes reaching for the norm, sometimes for the unknown, evanescent, or unpredictable. Selves, cultures, and nations manifest themselves through their never ending and often conflictive process of identification and separation. A great heterogeneity results. In this, each new historical intervention shifts the particular combination of distinctions used to create human order. PP24
1.2.19.3 because it is a discipline that tracks the shifting aspects of identity and difference, ethnography is deeply rooted in this paradoxical process. By stepping out of their own culture ethnographers use disorientation to simulate independence from the particular set of distinctions embedded in their psyches. While this method is a useful way to understand and act on the world, it has also proved to be a way for Euroamericans to create themselves as the West, the First world...The diverse array of people who have been categorized as native others are no longer fixed safely in remore peripheries, however. Nor do they remain silent and unread. It is their challange that currently enlivens debates. PP24
1.2.19.4 Desire and deceit motivate culture’s dynamic of difference in this Emberá tale, part of a vast genre of animal tales told by indigenous groups throughout North and South America. tethered loosely to empirical observation, an allegorical array of personifications become points of reference for interpreting the profound complexity of life, which, like an ax on woodpecker’s and horned Lizard’s heads, got stuck in some confounded place. the Emberá stories from Ancient times reassertthemselves with joy and urgency, contributing a lively moral code to the pandemonium of the political unconscious in the lowland forest. PP26
1.2.19.5 Defeated but circulating still in the historic atmosphere of the Panama canal is the unnamed Indian Cacique who, having captured two Spanish marauders, fastened them to the ground, propped open their jaws, and pured molten gold down their throats while saying: ‘Here’s gold, Spaniards! Here’s gold. Take a plenty; drink itdown! Here’s more gold’(abbot 1913:50). PP26
1.2.19.6 In the rush of the conquest and the many arduous incursions into the dense and lonely bush of darien that have occurred since, foreigners have brought with them an array of mismatched images that hang rather sloppily onto the figure of the "Indian" . Because foreigners arraived with and sustained a disproportionate level of power, indigenous people have had to find ways to adjust to their strange vision. because the array of images is inconsistent and changeable, adjustment has been a never-ending part of everyday life. Regional history canotbe understood without analysis of foreign imaginaries, because they mediate all indigenous understanding of foreigners and ...of themselves as mirrored in the speech and action of foreigners...Indigenous people have negotiated these images, partially internalizing them or, better said, accepting the reality of the foreign imaginaries that are in their best interest to meet partway and doing their best to subvert or ignore the rest. In this process, they have developed a complex notion of who they are, as humans of a kind, compared to those others from a once-outside world. these egotiations, the contexts in which they have taken place, and their impact on indigenous culture are encoded and interpreted in stories from Ancient Times. PP27
1.2.19.7 The figure of the Indian is an essentializing concept historically bound to the feature of race -that is, it is a concept that lends a natural, homogeneous basis for identity to those who would call themselves or be called by its name. the figure erases differences among indigenous peoples and draws boundaries between them and other races. Such boundaries structure the distribution of resources and political power. PP29
1.2.19.8 ...in today’s crowded world, remoteness is another concept that seems to stir the imagination and invite sporadic manipulation by outsiders. In terms of market logic, remoteness inhibits efficient distribution of goods and services and is therefore seen as a negative quality, something to be overome with development. a place that is remote (as defined by outsiders) has a certain allure as well-the next place to open up, full of hidden treasure, where adventure awaits, where the layers of domination are stark and thin and allow a different kind of freedom. PP31
1.2.19.9 The indian is a fiction onto which the savagery of Conquest can be projected and through which the powers of terror and healing can be forged (Taussig 1987). The Indian is a fiction through which the optimism of capitalist development and pessimism of military dictatorship can be managed. the indian is a fiction that focuses the sight lines of salvation sellers, wildlife protectors, and ethnographic knowledge producers. Into this field of contrasting figuration walk the Emberá. Assuming the ascription of indian, they represent that which is requiered to elicit whatever is obtainable in each arrangement, knowing each figural variant presupposes a particular set of imginary associations that fill the space between selves and others so necessary to human being...But they never forget...that these outsiders, especially the white ones, tend to have a quite erratic interest in local matters. Since Ancient times, the terms and rules in the game of desire and deceit have been elaborated and confused. In the context of contemporary development, the game must be played adroitly. at the same time that the emberá may reap benefits from anew market economy, they must sustain ecological survival st the level of the autonomous household. PP31-32
1.2.19.10 Most perplexing to the person who explores far and wide in search of different forms of apprehension is the encounter with images that come from home, images that were given away, spread around, stolen, and transformed. Governed by a particular distortion, images may retain a name and a trope, but the familiar exists in a changed media, its elements conjoin with new ones according to a different code. The new combination of elements conveys structures of feeling from opposing sources, sends conflicting qualities to the brain, and stimulates awareness of the cultural production of difference. PP32
1.2.19.10.1 Me: As in the concept of the devil, or in white man’s figurines for curing.
1.2.19.11 The homogeneous merging of cultures that hypothetically takes place after prolonged contact and has been called acculturation seems to occur only superficially. The presence of borrowed terms may seem to support the notion of an unproblematic and inevitable assimilation of indigenous cultures only if the deep suspiciosness installed with the conquest’s treacheries are erased. Indeed, the traces of borrowed traits is just as often a deceit that defeats the desire of a conquering order. PP32
1.2.19.12 ...for the Waunan and Emberá there are lots of devils- in fact, the shaman’s song was as much about calling ones to aid in curing as about getting rid of others. These little devils...aren’t particularly good or bad. They are governed by intent, by the heart of the shaman that employs them...acceptance of Christian dogma is limited because the term devil is put in a different context and is invested with Emberea meanings and functions that are consistent with shamanic practice. PP33
1.2.19.13 The myths of Ancient Times echo through the atmosphere of the living. in the language of rivers, each flood, each small war, each deceit contains within it the potential for complete revision, an unconscious devastation of that which is known in all its diversity as a human being. As the emberá struggle to survive in their way, they know that complete restoration after every cataclism cannot be expected. people move on, others preserve and restore what is left. When movements and labour investemnts overlap, conflict may result. PP37
1.2.19.14 In the time frame of the living -about three or four generations- things get sorted out one way or another. Everyone over twenty five has experienced at least one flood, the meaning of which gets interpreted in the frame of Ancient Times. Mythical meaning confronts historical conditions that have changed in many ways since Noah/Nue built his boat/canoe. The regional presence of a cash economy is more than just an alternative to traditionalsubsistence practices...as the cash economy ramifies and gets institutionalized in the region, it intrudes into the most isolated human sanctuaries of the upriver forest. Money brings its own terms and its own codes, which, spoken through the imaginary figure of the (male) Indian, begin’s to weigh on people’s minds. the outside world is now inside the borders of even a small family garden. PP37
1.2.19.15 Holding tightly to traditional values, Inez wants her family to own the orchard because it produces fruit, not capital, for people to eat, not to sel. She struggles here not only for an orchard but, in the context of adjustment to changing historical codes and conditions, to keep Emberá values of kinship and care, to keep some orientation to the qualities of social life that have nurtured her sense of herself, now shifting too with the contending discourses of the landscape. The availabilty of alternative codes creates contradictions and ambiguities that are locci of struggle and creativity. thus with intelligence and caution, capitalism can be put at the service of indigenous values. PP43
1.2.19.16 For now, the Emberea...must struggle with the contradictions of capitalism, which following Chantl Mouffe (1988), is best understood in its most pervasive sense as the commodification of social life. at the same time, they must sustain the piece of forest that gives them food and shelter and must adjust their sense of human being to the currents and currencies of global import. PP44
1.2.19.17 Of all the aspects of life in the upriver forest that is the most authentic, it is the discontinuities that present themselves....this ethnography is just a symptom of the much broader process of worldsystem intrusion into all indigenous enclaves, an economic and symbolic process that creates discontinuities, inexorably forcing distinctive cultures to come to terms with the hierarchies and homogeneities that result from market-driven abstractions of humanvalue. PP44-45
1.2.19.18 ...we need not worry that desire may be tricked by deceit once again. For the wisdom of Ancient Times has prepared us with the knowledge that it is deceit after all, and in the beginning, that motivates creation. PP45
1.2.20 Cphtr 3. Transformation and taboo. (burning forests)
1.2.20.1 In chaos , the cosmos seizes two lovers engaged in annal sex...A form of human interpenetration that is nonreproductive may be thought of as excessive; its intimate excess attracts co-ocurring cosmic transformations. Cosmic and human excess resonate. ‘In this day it was sticky,’ tells Simone in her tale. ‘Because it was the time of creation, the world was still in the works,’ my translator explains. In this mythical case, excess is a kind of similarity that sets up a sympathetic vibration between couple and cosmos. But the power of the cosmos is too much: IT LEAVES THECOUPLE PETRIFIED. THIS COMBINATION OF SIMILARITY AND INDEXALITY, OR CONTACT, MAY BE RELATED TO THE TWO PRINCIPLES OF SYMPATHETIC MAGIC THAT Frazer identifies in the Golden Bough (1911:52) as underlying the magical efficacy of fetishes- namely the Law of Similarity, in which likeness can affect or draw power from the original, and the law of Contact or Contagion, in which things that have been in contact can continue to act upon one another even after contact has been severed. As Taussig (1993:55) points out in his study of mimesis, Frazer’s principles are usually combined in magical practice. The Emberá mythical conception of how human action connects to the cosmos points to the utter naturalness of the combination of these laws in practice, as everything in the osmos may be perceived as always already in potential contact. According to this mythical conception, magical transformation is not necessaruly a matter of fetishes but a matter of timing. PP47
1.2.20.1.1 Me: Yes, my notion that space is not empty, but is a web of connectedness with all and everything. The immanet world woven togethe...shakti.
1.2.20.2 The moral, spoken in the voice of an old woman, passed down through time and many tellers, is that it is safer to avoid excessive conduct altogether, for moments of chaotic creation are so unpredictable. PP47
1.2.20.3 This mythical knowledge teaches people to avoid setting up situations in which excess activates untoward cosmic contact. Taboos are set in place to guard hman behavior, especially behavior that is transformative in nature. because it is the epitome of human transformation, sex is particularly subject to such taboo. Incorporative, like eating, and also reciprocal, like talking, sex engulfs other concept of exchange. Sex is the purest embodiment of myth, a model of potential. its images of abuse and resurrection cue unpredictable effects; its images of intimacy offer grounds for social control. the discourse of sexuality circulates, substituting for other modes of signification. PP47
1.2.20.3.1 Me: Yes, but what about Taussigs insight that taboo and transgression are one and the same, complementary, reinforcing one another? necesitating ano another?. What about bataille’s journey into excessive nonreproductive ecstasy as failed transcendance? Transformative activities, like cooking also; shamanism, internal alchemy, etc. Obviously, there are times when, under ‘controlled’ circumstances, transgression is necessary to keep the social order, as in initiation rituals, etc. Though, at those times aldo, taboos are at their strongest, eating and sexual prescriptions most enforced. Expenditure, same as excess? What about excess in accumulation, in gula, etc? Important topic to be covered in the thesis. Notion of purity probably important here. To achieve conjunction with the sacred, one needs to be ‘pure’. The spirits will not like us otherwise (nor will the game we want to hunt).
1.2.20.4 Enforcement of taboos becomes intensified during recognized cycles of celestial disruption such as Easter week. You are not supposed to have sexual intercourse on Easter Week. PP47
1.2.20.5 A chain of taboos concerning the body are observed more strictly as easter Thursday and friday approach. In addition to prohibitions against sex, there are prohibitions against sleep, (long) baths in the river, going to the forest or orchard (all food and firewood is gathered, hunted, fished, and processed before the holiday), cutting or cooking food too briskly, handling money, and letting dogs sleep in the house at night. Because exchanges sets up the possibility for transformation, sites and actions that entail exchange are to be avoided. After the hectic period of preparation when everything is readied, there is a slowing down of everyday life, a suspension, a unification of the people. if these taboos are broken, some fear the world will end. In the same breath, however, people may note that of course everybody disrispects Easter these days.
1.2.20.5.1 Me: at least for the book, important to point out that in order to create and invite the sacred in(to) our lives, we have to make the space and the time for it, as well as to make it special by ‘purifying’ for it. You get out as much as you put into it. Effort, care, mindfulness, reverence, etc...
1.2.20.6 Where the cosmos has order, take advantage and prepare. Where its tempos can be discerned and qualities balanced, attend and act. When the heavens are about to change from dry season to rain, prepare for destruction and rebirth: make black smoke billow from crackling hot fire. With a blaze of synchronicity, bring on the hard rains and tender green shoots. Out of the fire, the people bring bright life [Time to burn the forest clearings to plant chacras]. Every year at easter time, public life turns towards creation. PP48
1.2.20.6.1 Me: remember when first americans came to jungle camp only to find the destruction there? They are not used to the rythms of destruction, and to its fertilizing powers. Now its all green and beautiful.
1.2.20.7 Easter is a tie to restore vibrancy to the body, earth, and magic formulas. it is a good time to buy and learn secretos, verbal...formulas for the treatment of specific ills...if your secreto has gotten stale,write it down on a piece of paper andand bring it to the forest on noon on Good friday,..and put it in a crotch of a tree. When you pic it up at 1:p.m. say a prayer to jesus or Ankore (E.God) to ‘please restore this secreto.’...Easter is the best time to make a pact with the devil and to discover buried pots or chests of spanish gold...’the devil comes:’what do you want? do you want plata, or gold, or in bils?’ If your heart is strong, you answer: ‘I want gold" then the devil leaves. the man stays waiting...And then he gets it-a big, heavy sack full of gold. for this, in ten years, or twenty years, the devil will eat him. PP54
1.2.20.8 It hardly seems worth it, i say, unless you already are very old. Dzoshua says, ‘well, yes, but we can enjoy [the money]. in Ancient times we were brutes, but now we know plants to put on us that protect us from the Devil. You apply the plant..., and the body is like kindling...like when you set this forest afire, you can’t get close, right? So is the body of a man when he is like kindling, the devil can’t come close.’ ‘Ah, so Saturday of Glory is a good day because the Devil can’t come close-it’s the big fire.’ He said yes. PP54
1.2.20.8.1 Me: Like doctor Fausts, pack with devils, ambivalent treatment Should be in the thesis, encouraging people not to get into magic out of self interest, for there is a price to be payed for everything you get. on the other hand, we need to take care of ourselves, or rather, by living right we are taken care of? Natives obviously have to hunt/take, and pay a price for it when the owner of the game extracts a price in human lives. Yet the Kumu does not engage in those activities. But does not condemn them either. Death is a part of live, the problem lies in excess. Having enough to live is O.K. but more, to amss power, is not. Extras are payed dearly.
1.2.20.9 His tales use this imported figures of good and evil, God and the devil, with humor and irony. basically. i think they reflect the social fact that many Emberá don’t take this christian ideas very sriously; they have a more expansive, fluid notion of spiritual embodiedment and codification. hence, the comdedy of the indiAN PLAYING THE FOOL, WHOSE CASH ALWAYS SEEMS TO LOOSE ITSelf from his fingers and whose source always seem to be some Spanish or gringo devil. And the light way Dzoshua sloughs off the consequences of devil pacts, which have been considered as a means of capitalist critique (Taussig 1980) and overcoming alienation (Nash 1979) in the context of the proletarianization of indigenous peoples, suggests that perhaps not everyone takes the Devil’s terms as seriously. PP55
1.2.20.10 The holiday [semana santa] attests to the fluidity of cultural motifs and suggests that cultural identity is not bound to content or place but, rather, to process and perspective. PP55
1.2.21 Subtitle: Afterlife: Accounts and visions
1.2.21.1 Sensing Grandfather’s spirit, Ako defends himself fromits dreadful pursuit. He refers to his visit back home as proof of continuing his obligation to kin. he has not contributed an improper lack of attention to kindred that might cause a rent in the boundary of the real, an opening between worlds through which a boy might be drawn away from life. He claims his right to move through familiar places without fear of unsolicited communications. the act of asserting his claim of being kin in good standing and his sense of grandfather’s acceptance releases him from fear. PP67
1.2.21.2 Grandfather is dead, but his projected desires motivate the living. his absence is apparent only to those who do not sense his presence. for those who do, he is one of the more or less identifiable sentient beings living in the screen at the edge of the world. ghosts, along with devils, animals, maybe even some kampunia (E. non-Indians), edge along culture’s seams where, through desire and deceit, action can be taken on the real. they are free to assume or enter or possess nature and humanity in unpredictable ways and times. Grandfather’s ghost is a rift in the heart of kindred’s domain...The family tries to discover and mend the cause of the rift through empirical investigation matched with the visions of dream, song, and the datura vine’s hallucination. PP67
1.2.21.2.1 Me: important topic, death, ancestors, mourning, etc. Also though, notions of mending rifts, paying karma (burning off), purification, through suffering, or changing, righting the wrong.
1.2.21.3 Sculptures of dead spirits are fabrications posed in counterpoint to life. they are tactile messages from Ancient Times. I think that humans make them to mark the boundary between living and dead...I have seen them not only as batons in shamanic ritual and household art ...but as heads on a variety of tools such as a tume (ladder and boundary marker of the home), pestle (machucador), and laundry beater...Given the repetition of their form in everyday as well as ritual contexts, my hunch is that sculpted spirits may serve to protect the living by warning the dead away from areas of human settlement and to remind the living of the immanence of their own death. PP69
1.2.21.3.1 What a dull explanation. i don’t buy it. Trying to really explain spirits away? What about providing an abode for them? CHAOS UNLEASHED WHEN GRANPA’S FIGURINES OF GRINGO CREW WERE DESTROYED?
1.2.22 CHPTR 4. Techno-magic CANOE CONSTRUCTION
1.2.22.1 The process of canoe construction involves a crucial step of transformation- in this case from tree as natural object to canoe as cultural object. in the moment of transformation the object is neither tree nor canoe, neither nature nor culture, a dangerous conceptual anomaly. According to the Emberea cosmology, danger is intensifies by the tendency of transformation to attract other concurrent transformations, a combinatory event that is powerfully creative and unprdictable. Construction is coded linguistically and magically as asequence of stagesthat inform the builder when to enact symbolic controls. The moment preceding the completion oftransformation fromtree to canoe...is recognized by feeding the tree. in magical terms, recognition of the dying tree spirit allows the builders to pass safely through the moment of transformation. if the danger of this moment goes unrecognized, builders (and users) may be subject to negative effects of coocurring transformation, here conceived as a dynamic of natural disease (wood rot) going awry in the sexually assigned seats of culture. Furthermore, according to emberea cosmology, transformation is also dangerous because it attracts otherworldly intruders (devils), contact with whom brings death. The entire period in which innards are being removed...is therefore ritually marked. as Dzoshua explains, before going home each day after work, a cross of sticks is left on top of the tree/canoe to preventthe devil from shitting in it, poisoning one of the spouses whose identity is connected to it. PP81
1.2.22.2 Deceit is normal. But the combination of deceit and technology gives man terrible power, allowing him to destroy the Jaguar, natural contender and shaman’s ally. With the shotgun is heard the spanish name: hombre: the officiallanguage of state places masculinity in the doman of technology; wereas Wera, Embera name for woman, registers no challange. PP85
1.2.22.3 The dugout canoe is a ticket to survival, taking one in serach of food and materials to build shelter, in search of adventureupriver and money markes downriver. The archetypal example of what every Emberea man should know, a form of knowledge pased down from elder to younger, canoe construction is part of a tradition that continues in the context of changing historical conditions, persisting and transforming according to varying deinitions of competence, function, and value...Canoe construction is an accomplishment that demands qualities of workmanship and an awareness of and respect for the magical plane of experience that is invisible yet intereffective with the one we see. If there is ever a history of Emberá life written, it would have to include descriptions of special events such as these. The history of a people who tend toward egalitarian andpeaceful ways, numbering only in the thousands, simple in thechnology and rich in material design, should be written on a human scale. it would be a history interwoven with myth, wherein rulers and superpowers would find their place only in the margins. PP89
1.2.23 Cptr 6 Misfortune’s hat
1.2.23.1 Hai (E.spirit[s]/devil[s]) is the elemental principle that binds cause and effect in shamanic discourse. The presence of hai is implicit in all interpretations of inexplicable misfortune. Moving among humans and animals, whose bodies are transparent to their vision and permeable totheir passage, hai effect reversals of life and death, cure and curse. hai borrow biological forms for appearances sake, but they ignore biological limits. Immeasurable and lacking in intention, hai may not even feel the need to survive. Neutral, they can be swayed through song, dance and perfume and can be captured and controlled by shamans. Empty, they are the essential vehicles of unnatural transformation, the means by which human anddemonic intentions are enacted. PP90-91
1.2.23.2 Antumiá is the demonic messenger of the shaman. When shamans battle, they send Antumia to kill. Like the snake, Antumia has its own hai PP91
1.2.23.3 Antumia can appear as hai in different forms, or it can kill with an invisible hand. PP92
1.2.23.4 ..[in the] Emberá shamanic code,...someone with malicious intention can (with training) make use of invisible otherworldly forces, extending the bounds of human agency beyond the empirical through the use of haiPP97
1.2.23.5 The experience shifts the ground of my realist sense. Caught in the paranoid strands of shamanic retribution, my unconscious pulls out scenes from old movies, composing bits of memory to send me a personalized message. It was only a dream. I do for myself what the cacique does for Union: I pull out a fragment of mirror (rationality) and fix my sense of the real, reasserting the illusion of stability and easing the fear of misfortune. PP102
1.2.23.5.1 Me: Freud, unheimlich. Uncanny. check it out.
1.2.23.6 The scenes in this chapter show how nonspecialist Embera use shamanic discourse to locate misfortune in terms of their broader experience.they experiment with interpretation to find the one that fits an unnatural or uncanny occurrence, one that can patch a break in the continuity of everyday life. Extending discernment into that which cannot be senced directly, Emberá compose narratives using Hai, the capricious spirit-mediators of history. The method avoids direct blame,lest misfortune be perpetuated in a cycle of retribution. The aim is to discover the path of peaceful restoration, the right reversal. The process of interpretation may not always work, but it always does give the Embera the means to respond- and that in itself can be a cure. At times, shamanic interpretation tends to run away with itself or is too tentative to be reliable. It is then that interpreters can take advantages of coexisting systems of interpretation; then that Euroamerican rationality can be pulled, like a white rabbit, out of the conceptual bag, diverting discussion. I fmisfortune does not recur, things usually correct themselves one way or another. PP104
1.2.23.7 A hat shakes loose from the mundane, pointing only to lack, posing questions of the imagination. And from the imagination, the people’s questions return, cured, mysterious and magical as ever. Renewed, the questions keep wait with hope, ready to seek sense in death’s unpredictable desire-the next time. PP104
1.2.23.7.1 Me: Important, instead of trying to be moralistic and trying to answer things for people, do as here, and depart from an empty point, whereby all you’r doing is providing different conceptual armors (weapons, tools, cures, etc), for people to fit the shoe when the need arises. That is, to allow for the interpretive act on the part of the reader, to fit and borrow from the assortment of ideas, concepts, etc, when the need arises. The act of a reader actively interpreting his situation and choosing his cure(conceptualperspective) for the particular illness/rift/misfortune, is in itself a cure that provides them with a sense of agency. Moreover, this is in keeping with my approach to the question of the One and the Many, namely, that all the beings, the many are there to be dealt with, enjoyed, etc, just so long as we don’t get caught/entangled in any one of them; and the only way to do that is having faith in a God who is Outside; that is, one who is none of the above, negatively defined yet all powerful. so that no identification with images, definitions, etc can ever stick, perennially in the outside. provides a blackhole to slip out from under the grasp of any being we might encounter and be attacked/seduced by. Quite a faith. Should the faith itself be articulated in the book? Am I then not actually teling peole what to believe in? Even if only negatively? Don’tbow down to any image, false gods/false consciousness. error. let people fit their own shoes.
1.2.23.8 Chptr 7. Scale of sentient Beings (political Economy of race and gender)
1.2.23.8.1 Cultural identity is reproduced in a landscape of diference; for its part, difference defines the edges of the real. Consider the hearth the center of the universe; home, the place most familiar and safe. moving outward from one’s personal center, one finds others with whom one identifies: Embera, the most fully human of all sentient beings. but Embera fill only a small part of the world; they mark off that partas theirs, unifying it by repeating the particular patterns of the Embera Way. Where there is juxtaposition with those who are diffrent, boundaries are constructed. Using salient features of race, wildness, and tangibility, the landscape of experience is coded.PP105
1.2.23.8.2 Upriver is where the stories of Ancient Times figure the unknown, the territory of animals...who had speech and technical skill before the world changed...there the devils (hai), those beings whose spirits are not anchored to form, slip into reality most readily. tricky, they appear as the image of one’s sensual passion. excitement and pleasure make one forget one’s sense; reaching out, one is overcome with whirling dizziness. in the conceptual space between humans and animals/devils, the cimarrones can be located. those Embera forced by the conquest to resume a state of wildness, the cimarrones shun contact with the outside world. They have even given up obtaining salt to cure their game, a key feature that distinguishes human from animal...their tracks are seen still. PP106
1.2.23.8.3 Conquest fractured the upriver forest location of the unknown. Word of Spanish kings and queens and New York City skyscrapers provokes a radical departure from Ancient Time geography. Yet devils may also slip in from these new unknowns. Entering through market towns like Yaviza, post-conquest devils may take the form of kampunia (non-indians) in order to disguise the sensation of strangeness they bear from the realm of death. in the moment before deadly embrace, devils may assume the figure of another race, combining the ambiguity of strangeness with the energy of taboo. In the brief instant between the time a human acquiesces to pleasure’s attraction and the time the mistake is realized, death is touched, and in the devil slips. (There’s little margin for error in desire. Suspicion must be both intense and constant.) PP106-107
1.2.23.8.4 Sentience is feeling or sensation, as distinguished from perception and thought. Humans share sentience with animals, cimarrones, kampuina, and devils. By lending human order to difference, the scale of sentient beings interposes distance between familiarity and the unknown, life and death. I’m not sure whether ghosts are sentient...Ghosts confound the scale; seraching for what coexistence denied them, ghosts track theliving right through quotidan experience. They haunt the center of the real, the key to their sensation’s memory. So even as you and your kindred construct difference among the sentient so that you can live in similarity’s safe heaven (difference’s reverse), the deaths of kin create dread paradox in the most intimate part of the real. PP107
1.2.23.8.5 With devils and animals, the ghosts of the ancestors animate the conceptual space that borders on death and the otherworld. as Embera distance themselves from home, the loss of familiarity is a loss of the capacity for discernment. it becomes increasingly difficult to discern real world beings and otherworld beings. the symbolic significance of black-kampunia is best understood in this context...As symbolic mediators between Embera and the otherworld (outside as unknown), black-kampunia are located between Embera and the devils/animals/hai, who may take on kampunia guise. The duality of their roles is conflated in practice, making much social interaction with black-kampunia a paradoxical combination of appreciation and fear for Embera. PP107
1.2.23.8.6 ...the production and resolution of fear...it is the dynamic of fear that is most easily exploited in the alienation of ethnic identities, one from another, in the creation of interst groups by a (militarized) democracy. PP107
1.2.23.8.7 ...there are some odd consistencies between early Coquest and colonization and contemporary development startegies. These include the differential application of the idea of equality, the concentration of populations within racially homogeneous but distinct areas, and the cultivation of antagonism between groups divided by race and territory. In this context, the system of signification that underlies the geography of race-the one i call the scale of sentient beings- maintains its relevance. Drawing on this mythico-geographic set of boundary markers, the Embera renegotiate current events. As the prefixes post and neo- before colonialism are inserted with the times, changes and repetitions are registered in their narratives of everyday and official life. PP113
1.2.23.8.8 [regarding cockfights]: The equation of money, masculinity, and bloodthat seems to motivate it does not jibe with their cultural dispositions and habits...if an Embera man has a lot of money, the last thing he will do is publicize the fact...An egalitarian ethic, a pervasive lack of money and material goods, fear of shamanic retribution, and nervousness about entering and aggressive arena with racial others are factors that dampenthe gambling spirit of the Embera in this context. PP116.
1.2.23.8.9 In contrast to kampunai border zones, it is ot dramatic events that lend character to the home but the repetition of the uneventful. the mundane pattern of the everyday life is reality’s center, the Emberá Way. PP128
1.2.23.8.9.1 Me: Yes, talk about how we weave sense into our lives through the repetitiveness of habit (habitus). With the movements of our bodies, the interactions with people, etc, we soon develop a sence of familiarity and interiority and safety through repetition. Going to same restaurants, repeating one’s walk pattern, inscribing ourselves into the streets, deriving recognition from others we repeatedly see, and recognizing places we repeatedly encounter...traces, we leave them through where we have passed, we recognize something of us when we go back, the smell of our own, a presence that is familiar, similar, because it is us.
1.2.23.8.10 As reliance on subsistenceproducts declines and reliance on bought food increases, women depend more on their male kin. buying alternative food products may reduce women’s work load, especially in regard to processing products like oil and sugarcane. but these alternative products must be bought with money earned from increased agricultural labor, making it unclear whether woman’s lives are actually made easier. The politics of changing gender roles should be taken into account as well. because men are the ones traditionally responsible for dealing with the outside money economy, the replacement of wild and locally cultivated products with products of foreign manufacture may diminish women’s power and authority within the home. PP137
1.2.23.8.11 Through repetition of materials and routines, heterosexual partners manifest the core concept of the embera as fully human...Symbolically, this identification with embera reality as distinct from animal and kampuina realities weighs more heavily on women...they take the back seat in the canoe...and play the silent partner in transactions with kampuina. money, the quintessential sign of kampuina exchange, fall into the domain of masculine adventure and responsibility. PP138
1.2.23.8.12 Mysteries of coexistence invoke attraction and horror on a sliding scale of sentient beings. Culture’s sliding scale (interpolated by warlike states who fight to claim the names on the maps) cue your powers of discernment, align the features of chaos according to some phenomenological order, guide you back from the other world to the center of the real, enchanted and safe. PP139
1.2.23.8.13 Humans share existence with all sentient beings. Embera principles of causality derive from this encompassing, interpenetrating view of spirit and matter. training this awareness to the repetitions of history, Embera create images of difference in relation to which they (provisionally) orient theirselves. Into this, walk the foreign colonizers and developers with all the mixed intentions of their business. observing which human differences are meaningful locally, outsiders use them to build a new order, disrupting that which came before. in their hubris, they turn a blind eye to the wider scope of being and cause, never imagining the folly of their ways. in their guilt, they try to cerrect the follies of the past (e.g., with indigenous reserves and wildlife parks), only to work their way deeper into the contradictions between legal proposal and praxis. PP139
1.2.23.9 Chpt 8. Shaman’s song
1.2.23.9.1 ...shamans call cosmology into the quotidian, engaging the phenomenal beauty of life for healing-whatever the nature of current illnesses and misfortunes, the conditions of nations and histories, or the manners of pleasure. Some say the most powerful shamans are those withdrawn most deeply into what’s left of the dense forests. But no matter how far shamans withdraw, they cannot heal effectively if they isolate their vision. The pain and suffering the people bring with them in these times must be read against the grain of a world system rationality that stakes its truth on objectivity, splitting religion from medicine, spirit from matter, factor from factor. in the paradoxical progress of colonoalism and development, the practice of shamanism has become a thing of magic empowered by scorn (Taussig 1987). Indigenous exchange, white-kampunia Conquest, slavery, missionization, democratization, zonation-it all gets played out again and again in the insistent repetition of ritual healing. PP141
1.2.23.9.1.1 Beginning of this quote could go in the front page.
1.2.23.9.2 The possibility of acquiring shamanic power is open to all Embera...Any man or woman willing to pay may learn to cure/sing. Becoming a shaman requires meeting the shaman-teacher...in an encounter removed from everyday experience.PP141
1.2.23.9.3 ...a student is challanged by animal spirits, which must be conquered in the learning process. if this is achieved, rather than getting sick from the contact...you become their owners, turning them into helpers whose extraordinary abilities of sight and movement are bent to tasks motivated by your intent...building up a repertoire of song -or, better said, investing the song with more and more power-is the condition for gaining control over spirits. If you want to become a powerful shaman, you experience such encounters with several differnt shamans. The more you experience, the more knowledge, power, and vision you acquire, and the more precise becomes your discernment of good and evil intentions in each shaman’s heart. You have greater control of the learning process as itproceeds...Even after a master’s death, you may call upon those who have taught you in order to assist in a cure. PP141-142
1.2.23.9.4 Each shaman builds his or her storehouse of power by capturing spirits who have the power to see into bodies. But just as animals can be let out of the corral, spirits can be let loose and trapped again by someone else, or they may be trapped while on a mission. A shaman who cures may capture the spirits causing the sickness that were sent by another shaman. Thus curing, while requiring spirits, also provides a means to gain control over more spirits. as you acquire more spirits, you assume greater responsibility. In order to maintain control, the shaman must keep ‘feeding’ the spirits by holding a song event periodically. in this sense shamans are dependent on their patients to provide financial means to stage songs that are their cure. Without patients, shamans either have to sustain the considerable cost of making chicha or buying liquor for ‘feedings’ themselves or find that the power that is the basis of their practice recedes dangerously. PP142
1.2.23.9.5 Knowledge and power circulate among shamans and are sustained by a population of patients. Together, all practicing shamans constitute a net-like organization that extends throughout the demographic range of Embera and Waunan populations. Any person hooking into the net of shamanic encounters becomes a vehicle of power. Ny maintaining a personal store of this circulating power and by manipulating it in song, the shaman can either heal or kill. The former effect of power is sought by people with sickness, the latter form is what they seek to reverse. PP142
1.2.23.9.6 While shamans are strongly linked in service to their own family groups, the reputations of great shamans are spread by word of mouth, attracting people from great distances. discourse about shamanism is a discourse of journeys. long journeys to meet shamans of powerful repute are undertaken by those who want to tap their power, either because they want to learn how to become shamns themselves or because they search for a cure- endeavors that are often one and the same. Journeys give narrative form to a patient-student’s search and to the actual curing event itself. Journeys bring a patient-student to the homes of shamns, and from the ritually marked spaces in the central plataforms, the shamans use their songs to call spirits and lend vision. PP143
1.2.23.9.7 As is expected with a code that is secret and dangerous, and a professional doctor-patient relationship that is confidential, he [a shaman]sets clear limits to the knowledge he is willing to share. his discourse does not flow directly from his knowledge to mine; instead, it is his knowledge filtered through and reflected off the ideas that he the shaman thinks thAT I THE LISTENER HAVE OF HIM THE SHAMAN. THE FULL LOGIC THAT UNDERLIES THE POWER OF SHAMANISM, IF IT IS AT ALL POSSIBLE TO CONCEIVE OF ONE, CANNOT BE COMMUNICATED. INSTEAD, a glimpse of ritual healing is presented with an interpretation that focuses on the vulnerability and power of shamanism in history. PP143
1.2.23.9.8 Someone told me latter that Joaquin’s father was also a brujo and that Joaquin had inherited all the batons from him-and he had quite a bunch, maybe ten. batons, called barra in Embera, are pieces of carved wood in which human and animal figures are sculpted, often one on top of the other. Some take the form of lances or arrows...They say that the little animals (S. animalitos) stay in the batons as if it were their house and that the shaman who is the owner..of the batons is the owner of the animalitos thAT LIVE INSIDE. PP147
1.2.23.9.9 ...THE ROLE THAT MONEY PLAYS IN THE RITUAL...IN THE CONTEXT OF THE SONG THE PATIENT PAYS THE SHAMAN’S SPIRIT HELPERS. ..monetary payment pressures the spirits to come to human aid; it is this same payment that eventually goes to the shaman (although outside the ritual context there may be another fee paid directly to the shaman...). Thus money, operating simultaneously on both symbolic and material planes, is an essential element in the production of magical effects. PP148
1.2.23.9.9.1 Me: remember the bolivian diviners who ask for money on the table as a ‘seat’ for the spirits.
1.2.23.9.10 A little bench, a manifestation of the transformative power of the mythical serpent called Hei..., the shaman’s otherwordly connection, is placed at one end of the table. According to my interpretation of the Embera model of ritual curing, the shaman places himself or herself at the boundary between everyday and otherworld by sitting on the bech in the ritual space. The patient’s illness is conceptualized either as an invasion of invisible beings or qualities from the other world into the patient’s body or as a loss of the patient’s spirit. In position, the shaman uses the song to call his or her spirit helpers, the devil or animalitos who see. In this, the shaman opens up his or her own body not only to spirit allies but to the illness-causing spirits as well and, through them, to another shaman who may be directing the spirits causing illness. The interjection of the shaman into the circuit of power in which the patient is caught and the act of seeing the causeof sickness are two basic components of the mechanism of cure. According to this model, then, the aim of the cure is to break harmful contact between patient and otherworld, placing him or her firmly and safely back in everyday life. As such, the song event is a ritual enactment of myth for practical ends. It is also a personal instantiation of a particular set of social and symbolic relationships that converge in one moment of the patient’s life history. PP150
1.2.23.9.11 The song is a waterfall flowing into the night air of fullpossibility. calling the spirits, froglets, bird, cicada, and all the hai to come and drink together, it’s a party. As we drink, that which is false falls away, and the truth is revealed. To reveal the truth is to cure. Send all evil away on the insistent beat of the many-fingered leaves of the drum tapping faster, oh much faster, than the heart beats. PP151
1.2.23.9.12 ...Joaqui is never possesed,; he is the chief. PP151
1.2.23.9.13 ...Joaquin then moves into a song that combines the words and melody of a popular Spanish folk song with the vocable healing song of the Embera: ai chinangito, aison colores, mi barquito va navegando, madrugada que bonito...perhaps Joaquin’s improvisation withtraditional melodic form has a magical aim that is not so inconsistent with the rest of his performance after all. he may be attracting hai with the pretty musical and linguistic image of a boat of many colors riding on the sea...Indeed, when Joaquin picks up the musical dialogue again...he says that the Kampuina hai are here [non-indian spirits]. PP160-161
1.2.23.9.14 Gabriel seeks aid to fight that which grabs at his breath and undermines his days making him feel less than fully human. he can only imagine the cause; this imagining eneters into ritually magnetized social space to be reshaped and returned. his emotions and his breath are gathered together and set forward on a path to well-being...PP162
1.2.23.9.15 Joaquin extracts labor from his nephew, a fair exchange of time and energy,agricultural labor for magical labor-not an imposition of power. Like Embera and Waunan shamans generally, Joaquin’s shamanic power does not extend into everyday life. He does agricultural work to support his family like everyone else does...his magicalpower ends when the ritual song end. His power is not over people but over spirits. And although he owns his spirit familiars as if they were pets, he must nevertheless entice them into helping him see. The shaman learns the art of seduction, rather than the rule of law. PP162
1.2.23.9.16 When misfortune or illness occurs, the Embera and Waunan produce an array of interpretations to explain the event and to identify a remedy. These interpretations draw from the set of images, categories, and models of processual relations that constitute the semantic field of shamanism. Some interpretations point directly to the need of shamanic curing ritual, as in specific forms of illness. IF NO ADEQUATE INTERPRETATION can be agreed upon, as in many cases of misfortune, or if remedies fail, as in chronic or repeated illness, a shaman may also be called upon. The shamn’s task is to listen to the multilayered, open-ended contradictions and ambiguities in the discourse of illness and misfortune and enact a ritually focused movement toward closure and resolution: a timely spinning of the torn strips of experience into personal myth...Drawing from the shamanic field of meaning a set of images and relationships applicable tothe specific set of symptoms and personal history of the trobled person, the shaman funnels anxieties and questions into the circuit of ritual power and returns them transformed. through the agancy of the shaman, the shamanic field acts on the patient’s desire and pain, restructuring these in language and in the unconscious, altering the sence of self and reality, and, one by one, transforming the relation between Embera and Waunan culture and the world. PP164
1.2.23.9.16.1 Me: sounds a little too much of a structuralist interpretation, or a psychoanalytic one. It is, I think, much less about the said, about interpretation than she imagines. its more about the unsaid but done, the transformations that happen through inarticulated (and unarticulable) energetic interactions.
1.2.23.9.17 In the search for cause and remedy, the interpretation of illness and misfortune may identify a misdeed...or it may invoke the figure of the shaman of evil heart/intent. In practice however, the evil shaman’s figure seems to play no more than a shadow role in the discourse of tragedy. people are afraid of the power that shamans wield, but if particular evildoers are ever identified, they are usally outside the normal range of social intercourse. PP164
1.2.23.9.17.1 This is not the case in mestizo villages like Tamshiyacu, where accusations among peole in the village are rampant.
1.2.23.9.18 [Exceptions are usually shamns who are also patriarchs, started the settlement]...As first settlers, they enjoyed a certain dominion over the land surrounding the settlement site. the authority of first settlers, however, is limited by the egalitarian orientation of Embera culture and, in prior times or in small villages, by the abundance of unused forest. For those seeking aid from men who are first settlers and shamans, respect for dominion may be mixed with fear of magical power. PP164
1.2.23.9.19 As Taussig’s (1987:159) work with the healers and sorceres of Colombia shows, good and evil shamans, like the christian God and the Devil, "can stand not merely in opposition, but as a mutually empowering synergism." Even as the healer does good, he or she is empowered by the struggle with evil. The ambivalence of this fact...informs the debate over the roles of shamans in the villages. The favored grandson [of a powerful shaman and first settler] focused on the curing skills of the shamans. along with Embera representatives in national government, he was all for holding a shaman’s convention. He had hopes, in the long run, of incorporating shamans into the village and comarcal bourocracies and for using their powers in the managment ofcrime. The ill-favored grandson thought that power itself corrupts. He focused on how evil shamans must be punished and destroyed. PP170
1.2.23.9.20 [in tha case of the grandfather who had the phantom gringo boat hais in his batons, his grandchild placed responsibility for the loose spirits causing havoc in the village]on Evangelical missionaries from the neighboring village upriver. For they, with their threats of eternal damnation, convinced grandfather to let them pour kerosene on his batons and burn them, scattering all the spirits corralled within. PP169
1.2.23.9.21 {another shaman] ...The ritual power of the murdered shaman was perceived to be safely stored in the batons. the social mechanism for passing on the batons to the next generation, much like orchards, was in place...’the father of Onofre, that one sung too. He passed the batons on to onofre. He also died.Now Eva has the batons.’ So perhaps someday Eva will activate her inheriance and secure the shamanic field for the healing of the people in her settlement.PP171
1.2.23.9.22 Each settlement has a shamaic field that corresponds to it [check Whittens description in sacha Runa of settlements}; that is, the social field and shamanic field are in dynamic relation. Incidents of illness and misfortune are interpreted in terms of that dynamic relation. The synergistic opposition between good and evil is worked through in everyday and ritual discourse within the village. Although the struggle to achieve some balance focuses on the local context, problems solved and solutions created are simultaneously part of an expanded political economic field. By means of the social-shamanic dynamic, local culture struggles to impress meaning on changes wrought by transnationalforces so that they can be molded to local purpose. PP172
1.2.23.9.22.1 Note in text: Following jameson 1981:17-102, the texts ofshamanic interpretation are considered here as collective texts of a political unconscious that should be read in a seriesof interpretative horizons. PP211
1.2.23.9.23 In this expanded context, the particular forms that good and evil assume change with history...these roles might be phases in political careers, wherein successful curers who gained power by protecting clients and defeting antagonists came to preeminence with a ready base of support. later, if their decisions proved harmful to some members of the community, they would come to be seen as killer shamans whose presence demanded a cure...a community might not achieve consensus about where to assign antithetical aspects of curing and killing, and one shaman may be spoken of as either curer or killer depending on the speaker’s experience. PP172.
1.2.23.9.24 [In the case of patriarchs] Respect for their dominion could lead to resentment if they or their well-positioned descendents are ungenerous with resources. These feelings could intensify with village formation as land becomes more limited. PP172
1.2.23.9.25 however, I would argue that there is no necessary link between shamanic power and political and economic power. it is the inequalities generated by patriarchy and linear descent that lead to the identification of specific local shamans as evil, whether evil shamans ‘use another man’s wife’ or claim more than their fair share of lAND FOR THEMSELVES AND their descendants. The assignement of evil to particular shamans in the local context is not inherent in shamanic practiceitself. PP172
1.2.23.9.25.1 Me This is a bit naive though, for surely a shaman uses his power to seduce women and to get his way in business, and much is made of shamanic attributions in that regard. Surely people attribute evilness out of envy and resentment, but also a shaman will use his powers to gain advantagesfor himself and his people.
1.2.23.9.26 Although we cannotseparate shamans from the social and political context in which they live and work, egalitarian modes of social relationship are nevertheless conducive to the perception of ritual power as curing. Killing, curing’s antithetical aspect-however necessary to the logic of cure- may be displaced onto a nonspecifiable person or being outside the realm of everyday social interaction...Blame for causing illness tends to be assigned with vague or unknown referents- people met on journeys afar, an invasion by an otherworld spirit that slipped in through a breach in the boundary. In effect, at this point in history, most real-world encounters thatthe Embera have with shamans are for the poerposes of healing not harming, and the process of healing engenders positive, peaceful relations among family members. PP173
1.2.23.9.27 Although they do not cause it, in their struggle against it, curing shamans are nevertheless empowered (and endangered0 BY ILLNESS AND MISFORTUNE (TAUSSIG 1987:159). The state too, in its best-intentioned offers of development, could also be said to be empowered by illness and misfortune-for example in fulfilling society’s ‘needs’ (coming to aid in natural disasters, punishing crime, etc.). Certainly shamanic and state power are very different, and yet they may share some structurel characteristics. Foucault’s (1980:98) analyses of state power are also useful in thinking about shamanic power: ‘Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as something which always functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in a position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert and consenting target; they are always also the elemments of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application.’ PP173
1.2.23.9.27.1 from Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books.
1.2.23.9.28 Shamanic power lacks the imposing dominance of state power. ithas no military might to back its words with force, no organization to command and channel resources, no modern communication or transport system, no capital to speak of. instead of relying on the state’s imposing dominance, shamans rely on symbolism that is embedded in everyday life. the field of meaning that encodes ritual healing power is produced in conjunction with social relations more generally-shamanism is where the world system seeks to be; Embera think and act in its terms; it precedes world system dominance. as a mode of interpretation, shamanism exceeds the practice of specialists; it is an integral part of common survival strategies, as fundamental to daily life as ecology. PP174
1.2.23.9.29 As a kind of cultural transformation, the effects of shamanic healing may act i critical counterpoint to state power...the discourse of shamanism, in and out ofritual, may function to resist the power of capitalist efforts at organizing labor, creating consumers, and concentrating settlement...while its effects can give form to resistance, like witchcraft and psychoanalysis, shamanism is also a remedial institution that helps people adjust to the range of opportunities and constraints in the transforming social structures of our planet. PP174
1.2.23.9.30 Where there is an asymmetric distribution of resources due to a nonegalitarian organization of social relations..the attribution of evil may be brought closer to home...In non-egalitarian situations, for example, the charge of sorcery may be applied to male or female actors who benefit from patriarchy butwho are not shamans and who might feel that they themselves are victims of the ‘envious’ And these indeed seek out sorceres to enact either retributory or protective magic for them. In this way, sorcery, the negative cast ofshamanism, may become a generalized mode of discourse in certain social and historical contexts. if things get worse in the Darien shamanism could sink further into the discourse of sorcery. But if it is true that the more evil things get, the greater the power of healing, we may take faith in the forces of creative transformation. PP175
1.2.23.9.30.1 This last point sounds like the millenarianists who just want destruction to wreck havoc so that redemption might come.
1.2.23.9.31 In their ritual work, shamans contine to prepare precise points in time and space to link up the everyday worldwith a circuit of healing power. With song, drink, smoke, and perfume, shamans seduce spirits into the circuit of power and then borrow their otherworld vision. their seductive lure is made more compelling by the language of capture. The once worthy traditional metaphor of shamans as hunters winning animals/spirits in battle [?] has nearly been eclipsed by metaphors derived from the Conquest. The better to compel spirit seduction, the lowland tropical forest shamanic bricolage is now accented with signs of colonial power: batons given to indigenous intermediaries by colonial administrators as icons of their apportioned power; the ame patron [of the spirits] for the foreigner who stole what he wanted and called himself master; coins and printed paper, icons of the abstract power of universal exchange. but it is not for the purpose of multiplying the effects of oppressors that the trappings of power are appropriated as symbolic resources in shamanic ritual. Ritual draws the gestures of oppression out from signs of domination and replaces them with gestures of healing. In this way, the shamans continue to tie theirancient song to the dynamic of history for the good of humankind. PP176
1.2.23.9.31.1 Important dynamic here, Mimesis. Imitate so as to draw power from them, yet use it otherwise? or get caught by imitating what youdespise so that you become like them?(as in horkenheimer and Adorno)Double-edged sword. Much is at stake. People everywhere imitate, usually seeking prestige they imitate ready-made models put forth by the status quo. Can one imitate otherwise? can one subvert state symbols and not get caught?
1.2.23.10 Chptr 9. Cosmo Snake and the nation-State
1.2.23.10.1 The paradoxical dimension of human experience is addressed in the myth of Hieropoto, a culture hero/antihero whose strange birth and disgusting habits imbue him with the power to battle the cosmo-snake Hei. Hei is the serpent of paradox who twists fertility and mortality in its coils; heis the river dragon of whirlpools who generates the waters of life only to devour the humans who drink from them. heropoto succeeds in chalalnging hei because he is made of the same paradoxical stock. PP177
1.2.23.10.2 The myth of heiropoto has become central to my understanding of how gender is used in the managment of paradox...As I interpret is, the myth encodes a series of principles concerning paradox that are fundamental to the organization of Embera culture and its articulation with the nation-state.: Human existence is founded on paradox: death in life...The imageric linkage of mythical elements to natural elements mythologizes the natural world, such that ‘Nature’ itself becomes a cultural construction/ paradox can be managed by separating contradictory aspects (e.g, defining sacred and profane, home and otherworld) or by removing signs of paradox from view (absenting moon-blood). but in order for this managment strategy to be effective, the work involved must be hidden; for reality to appear, the details of its construction must not be announced/ although paradox is a source of anxiety that requires management, confrontation with paradox (transgression) is also a potential source of creation and restoration/ Desire to confront paradox can be displaced and fragmented but not destroyed (myth turns nature’s parasites into proof of its own eternal cycles). PP179
1.2.23.10.3 Moon-blood is the substance of paradox arising from the femalebody in the center of the Embera everyday. The managment of moon-blood (and giving birth, the positive sign of this paradixical sign) anchors the analogous tasks of separation, withdrawal, and repetition that culture assigns to the femaledomain (e.g., growing and gathering food, bringing food and fresh water into the home...,caring for the dead...). together the performance of these tasks creates a space for life (everyday, home) and pushes back the boundaries of death (illness, otherness, misfortune). This is the symbolic dimmnesion of housework. Training girls to dedicate their bodies to the managment of paradox (i.e., the reproduction of life) is fundamental to their constitution as gendered subjects. Women uphold their cosmological role, even though the significance of their actions is hidden by the supreme ordinarinness of the tasks involved; even though they have the natural ability to carry out tasks assigned to the masculine role. Unproclaimed, women thus perform the primary acts of culture. In contrast to contemporary theory in psychoanalysis and anthropology, this analysis suggests that culture originates in gesture, not language. What is spoken is contingent on myriad and overlapping motions. The repetition of daily movement creates cultural space. PP180
1.2.23.10.3.1 Yes, patterning energy; even sound, as opposed to meaningful expression, as movement, pattrens energy and precedes speech. From Bourdieu;s Habitus
1.2.23.10.4 While both men and women find their center in the home, the cosmological division of labor orients their responsibilities in complementary directions. The male body lacks the capacity to carry out tasks involving the substance of paradox. in contrast to girls, boys are trained to seek new sources of creation by crossing out of the Embera everyday into the unknown, posting the other pole of paradox in the outside world. this is fundamental to the constitution of male subjectivity. though centered at home, men’s responsibilities are oriented outward toward other races and species. Men have primary responsibility for building the larger structures upon which the everyday depends (the house, canoe, larger wooden processing and cookig tools). In their shared agricultural labor with women, men are responsible for axing down the large trees. men are trained to travel between home and the outside world to engage in hunting, fishing, adventure and trade. Male transgressions of cultural boundaries are found acceptable within a range that is negotiated with women. The limits of this range are marked by Heiropoto, the one who tears the veil between the sense of reality and its manufacture. PP181
1.2.23.10.5 Upon this fundamental gendered split in cosmological work, an organization of labor is elaborated that overdetermines the roles ofmen and women in history. The fairness of this division depends on the continuing presence of the Embera home as a valued symbol, a source of stability, identity, and shamanic power. if history changes the conditions under which the cosmological underpinnings of the everyday are reproduced-pushingegalitarian relations towards patriarchy and taking authority and control out of the household-it could make dedication to cosmological tasks a burden. because the mechanism linking housework to the construction of reality is most secret, the guardians of paradox least acknowledged, women (and men who are oriented outward to the upriver forests but not to the kampunia towns and comarca politics) are most likely to be negatively affected by recent changes accompanying development. PP181
1.2.23.10.5.1 D ME: important topic, role of Woman in the creation of the sacred, The dimmension of Home and Housework, etc).
1.2.23.10.6 In the multiethnic field of Panamanian politics, Embera culture=nature; being ‘natural’ is the trademark of indigenous status, and indigenous status is the basis for rights to a comarca. A few chosen, bare-breasted women miming the gestures of wild animals enact the emblem of Embera ethnic identity after the men are finished negotiating the details of state. The bare-breasted woman and the suited man is a composite image that encodes indigenous relations to the kampuina world. They index the way in which men take on the trappings, and may eventually assume the power of the state, within the Embera household [?]. PP183
1.2.23.10.7 The association of womenwith the home and men with outsideadventure is repeated through the larger corpus of Embera myth...As the twenty-first century closes in, upriver forest diminishes, and evenmyth points downriver to a postnuckear otherworld where animals are few, races of kampuina multiply, and devils roam multinational banks and munition dumps. Embera are met moreoften byhumans with different modes of reality construction and their own versions of the fantastic. but even as encounters with alternate realities increase, the cosmological dynamic of guardianship -deflection of transgression, otherworldlyadventure, and gift-bearing return- continues to be played out according to gender. The mythical assignements of the sexes, with its implicit priviledge of male freedom of movement over femalebonds to home, encodes an unequal structural relation that can be appropriated and emphasized by foreign/nationalized forms of dominance. PP185
1.2.23.10.7.1 Who is she kidding? all this words to say that women stay home? Probably its more to do with aternity and similar biological constraints than with structures of domination, etc. For that matter, the forms of dominance seem to have benefitted more from the disintegration of the household autonomy whereby woman enters the labor market.
1.2.23.10.8 Women’s guardianship of Embera ways is a responsibility that has been accompanied by rights. Cosmology has ordained them, but egalitarian principles of social organization make their acceptance worthwhile...If power and authority are to be drawn out of the household and into markets and official meetings, gender assignements also need to be restructures...Women are being excluded from positions of power made available with integration into the national political economicstructure. their rights are increasingly ingnored, yet their obligation to uphold tradition is called upon more and more. PP185
1.2.23.10.8.1 Just what is she backing this with? What notion of ‘rights’ does she have in mind? land rights.
1.2.23.10.9 There is a split between egalitarian ideals and patriarchical actualities. Why is it growing wider?Naming a tradition of internal patriarchy does not seem an apt answer unless we refer to the ‘tradition’ that results from the accomodation to conquest and Colonization. The incorporation of gender asymmetries may have begun between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, when Spanish warriors, bourocrats and missionaries...began assigning Embera ‘caciques’ and ‘household heads’ to carry work orders to and collect taxes from dispersed settlement sites. PP188
1.2.23.10.10 held back from full participation in the otherworld and foreign, yet responsible for and affected by it, women stand poised at the contradictory site that articulates the Embera with the nation. their value as identity constructor is unspoken, allowing cultural construction to seem real. poised at the contradictory site of articulation, women monitor and selectively resist foreign interventions that might weaken their control over household’s economies. the monitoring and selection of foreign forms functions politically, not only in the construction of a revised tradition, but, outside the official arena, as a form of active political resistance to foreign intervention. The traditional forms that we see are not remnants ofa precapitalist past; they are symbolic constructions designed to work against the pressures that are specifically foreign. ..Despite the official silence in which it is submerged, the vitality of women’s politics can be discerned if analysis proceeds on this basis and includes the local level. PP188-189.
1.2.23.10.11 Tradition, despite its association with the conservative perspective, includes the possibility of its own transformation (Williams 1977:115-20). Indeed, to continue resembling itself in changing conditions, traditon has to be transformed (Hall 1981). people...are not just conforming to habits that are tried and true. their stance critically assesses current conditions of possibility.PP190
1.2.23.10.12 While interhousehold capitalist endeavors can work, it is a process that leads families to become dependent onthe national economic system at the village level. The Embera don’t like to lose control over their family’s labor and resources to state bourocracies- even when they’re supposed to get something good out of it. Some who live in dispersed sites do not willingly deal with the state at all. PP192
1.2.23.10.13 People don’t have to move into villages, but they are constantly pressured to do so. parents who live too far to send their children to school are threatened by the guard. PP193
1.2.23.10.13.1 So illiteracy campaigns are not such a loft cause after all. For some it is, for others it isn’t. its about damn time we fucking realize that what is good for us isn’t necessarily so for everybody else. live and let live. Stop trying to make the whole world like yourselves. Your no’ hot model yourself, to pretend we ought to imitate you. Stop feeding us democracy, literacy, conversion, salvation, nutrition, vaccinations, development, your T.V, your refrigerator, your hysteria, your histerectomie, no thanks.
1.2.23.10.14 Devil-making Bush and Noriega
1.2.23.10.14.1 The democratic cloak over the Spanish general’s violent rule was falling off. The scam was getting out of hand. The gringo president had no choice: The Spanish general had to go. The gringo president used the television, print, and radio to remake the Spanish general into the gringo image of evil: he turned theonce-militaristic but benign force of political economic stability into the devil-dictator, the recently budding democracy into an entrenched ‘narcocracy’ (U.S. government 1989).PP195
1.2.23.10.14.2 Humans give devils the lead in scripts of sudden disruption. They call on images of devils when they cannot cope with the thought of their own lying and destructiveness. The clashing of cultures and the fires of war produce leaders whose humanity is ambiguous enogh to fit the devil’s images, while their subjects play the fools, soldiers and victims. PP197
1.2.23.10.14.3 I know that to veronica and her father this gringa-in-the-flesh is more real than a duende, but how much more, i cannot tell for sure. To me, her personal-experience narrative is like a collective dream in which i grope for memories of surreal encounters in other times and places, memories of impossible things that make their way into history. And I brood upon the points at which cultural confrontation trains our emotions to fix and hide. becoming a listener and then a teller in the chain of interpretation through which we all negotiate our diffrences and desires, our distinctiveness and common humanity is confirmed. multiplying the possibilities for discourse and imagination may help us come to grips with the politics of war and waste that govern our planet. PP200
1.2.23.10.14.4