He was working in his garden,
and had picked up a large rock,
to roll down the hill,
to get it out of the way.
The rock spoke up,
saying that he shouldn't remove him from his bed,
why was he tearing apart his house?
When the rock first spoke, it looked like the same rock,
but then it appeared just like a person.
—Wãñ&etilde;kï (August 22, 1975)
Poor empiricism! You are under attack and perhaps even on the wane within some neighborhoods of our intellectual community. In casual speech you are used, in parts of the humanities and social sciences, as a mark of derision—a "rank empiricist." The foundations of your house, once so regally splendid, have steadily eroded in the late twentieth century, the cracks and fissures and crumbling mortar becoming apparent upon inspection through the lens of cultural meanings. Why is this so? In the first place, people find that they cannot derive meanings from experience in any simple way. There seems to be no obvious one-to-one mapping. And, in the second place, the meanings attributed to experiences vary from one culture to the next. What are we to make of this, if not your unsustainability, your decrepitude?
Anti-empiricism has reached such a feverish pitch in some quarters that ethnography itself is open to question. Originally an endeavor to investigate the nonempirical or variable foundations of meaning in culture—one thinks here of Boas's observations about the color of sea water and of his formulation of "the seeing eye as organ of tradition," or of Durkheim's argument that social classifications formed the basis for the Aristotelian categories of knowledge—ethnography has now become suspect for its own empirical pretentions. Do the meanings ethnographers infer from their field experiences derive from the object of those experiences, that is, from another culture? Or are they superimposed from the ethnographer's own culture? Is the Other a construct of our cultural imagination, having little or nothing to do with the people who are Othered? Or does the Other have some substance?
One despairs here at the recognition of irreconcilable dualisms. Either experience is determinate of knowledge or it is neutral, its significance a result of cultural superimpositions. But between these two positions lies a third, which has to do with the empirical foundations of cultural meaning, not in extracultural experiences but in experiences of the very sign vehicles by which cultural meanings are circulated and shared; that is, by which they become properly cultural in the first place. And the most important of those vehicles is discourse.
The textual artifact in Plate 1 is such an empirical object. It is a photograph of field notes typed by Patricia Kent in 1975, while she and I resided in a tiny, bat-infested wooden house at P. I. [Indigenous Post] Ibirama, a government-run indigenous reserve in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. The original notes were part of an ethnographic encounter, situated within space and time. As I examine them today, nearly two decades later and more than four thousand miles removed, I recognize them as part of a present empirical world, and also as my link by an invisible thread to a remote and forgotten corner of the planet, to a world gone by, the notes' still faintly musty and smoky smell rekindling old sensory experiences.
I give below a different representation of Plate 1, as well as of the two cards that follow it in the file:
9-15-75 (W. T.)
He was hunting with Kañãïi and Wãñpõ.
Wãñpõ said that it was a tapir that the dogs were chasing.
They stayed waiting on a trail,
and soon the tapir came running down the trail.
They hit it with an ax,
and it fell over, still a little bit alive.
So Wãñpõ got a vine,
and said that they should tie it up.
Then they started to pull it along by the vine.
They stopped and the tapir was lying belly-up,
waving his legs in the air.
Wãñ&etilde;kï was feeling sorry for the animal,
because he was still alive.
Kañã'ï said for him to help pull,
but Wãñ&etilde;kï said that he wouldn't help.
So Kañã'ï said that he would pull it by himself.
So they went on for a ways.
They decided to take off the skin.
They started taking off the skin,
but the tapir was still alive,
and waving its legs.
Wãñ&etilde;kï was saying that they should leave it there and go on,
because it could harm them.
But Wãñpõ said that he wanted to get a piece of meat to bring home.
Then they decided to take out the guts and cut open the belly.
They took out all of the innards except for the heart,
which was still beating.
At each beat of the heart,
the tapir's head would move to one side
and then back again at the next beat. Wãñekï again said that they should leave this animal and go on,
because it was going to harm them.
But Kañã'ï said that his wife was waiting for him
and would want some meat.
Wãñpõ said that tapir meat was even better than pork.
Then Wãñekï was looking at the tapir's heart,
which was the only organ left inside the body,
when it all of a sudden appeared as though the heart had looked up at him
and then down again.
Wãñekï became afraid,
and told the others.
Wãñpõ said that he didn't even want to hear about that stuff,
and cut himself a piece of meat to take home,
as did Kaña' ï
Wãñ&etilde;kï didn't want any, though.
They all started walking away,
and Wãñekï turned around to look at the tapir,
which was standing up,
and shaking its head at him.
The others also turned to look,
but didn't say anything.
I cannot doubt that Plate 1 is a photograph of a physical object of experience that is here before me—a tangible, visible entity providing the public a access through the senses that empiricism regards as fundamental to knowledge. And you will probably agree that my representation of this physical object in the lines above resulted in a different object, but one that is a more or less regular physical transformation of the first. What you will regard as crucial, however, is that this physical object is not only sensible—dark shapes leaping out at the eye against a light background. It is also intelligible. That is, you know that those shapes are the bearers of meanings, and you recognize in the meanings something resembling a story, a narrative of an occurrence.
As soon as one steps into the realm of intelligibility, the problem of the specific language (English) by which these meanings are carried becomes crucial. Language is brought to bear on and presupposed in the ability to experience an object as meaningful. It is that quintessential pre-empirical backdrop of a present sensory encounter from whose vantage point one can criticize the empiricist project. But, if you accept that criticism, there is another issue. Speaking English is by itself not sufficient to allow you to recover the specific meanings associated with this physical object of experience. You must have a sensory encounter with the object. There is, in other words, an empirical condition for access to these meanings, even if there is also a pre-empirical one in the language you speak.
I have argued in an earlier work that the cultural specificities of grammar must have some basis in experiences analogous to our encounter with the physical object, the text artifact, depicted above. The Saussurean system we call language only appears to be pre-empirical. In fact, it is built up out of repeated encounters with discourse as a physical object, discourse such as is reflected in the text artifacts above, or in instances of actual speech. This long history of encounters—beginning with earliest childhood and continuing up to the present—provides the empirical, experiential basis for a culturally specific, as opposed to a universal, grammar. But the historical empirical foundations of the culturally specific grammar do not detract from the important insight that one does bring to bear in momentaneous encounters with specific text artifacts or bits of discourse, insight that existed prior to the artifacts. That insight is pre-empirical or pre-experiential in this special sense. One superimposes it on the text artifact that is the elect of immediate scrutiny. You can think of meaning in this way as half subjective, deriving in part from something that is not there for you to hold at the moment.
But if meaning is half subjective, it is also, importantly, half objective. You know this because the specific text artifact might have been different. Depending upon the nature and degree of difference, the meanings would have been different as well. The objective characteristics of the sign vehicle matter; they fight back against solipsistic tendencies; they are the reason for doing ethnography in the first place-an endeavor that might otherwise degenerate into pure projection, as some critics have charged. Discourse, as a socially circulating empirical phenomenon, keeps the ethnographer honest. It ensures that he or she is retrieving something from the realm of the senses.
If grammar is a pre-experiential foundation for experience of the text artifact—at least in the limited sense discussed above—you might wonder whether it is the only such pre-experiential foundation. Is knowledge of grammar alone sufficient to furnish an understanding of the text artifact? Or, put differently, how much do you understand about the meaning associated with this text artifact as it currently stands? What more would you need in order to grasp the significance of it for the particular social encounter out of which it grew, and, perhaps also, for related social encounters?
One issue here is what has been termed in the literature "metadiscursive framing"—how this discourse itself is represented through other signs. I have already framed it, in some measure, by referring to it as "resembling a story, a narrative of an occurrence." That framing places the instance of discourse, and the meanings associated with it, relative to others, but I could get more specific, as did the participants in the encounter that produced the artifact, by framing it as a dream narrative, and you would have been cued in by an encounter with the remainder of the text artifact:
[Then he woke up.
he told his wife about this dream;
she said that it was a bad dream,
and it was a good thing that he had told her about it.
It was a bad dream, because the animal never died,
it must not have been a tapir,
but something else, maybe a gàyun (spirit).
He is also going to tell this dream to Wãñpõ.]
The story takes on a different meaning, framed metadiscursively as a dream. From discourse-internal properties, an educated Westerner might otherwise read this as a type of fiction, because, in part, the metadiscursive interpretation of narratives of realistic events does not permit statements of the sort: "Then Wãñ&etilde;kï was looking at the tapir's heart, which was the only organ left inside the body, when it all of a sudden appeared as though the heart had looked up at him and then down again."
Of course, you probably already guessed that we were out of the realm of documentary narrative with the statement: "They took out all the innards except for the heart, which was still beating," and, if not at this point, then when the animal's head moved back and forth in time with the heart. The narrative simply does not make sense to us—and the "us" I am referring to here is educated Westerners—as an account of what empiricism regards as ordinary experience, since it is out of accord with other discourse describing biological functioning. We cannot imagine that a heart would continue beating once the other organs were removed, let alone that the animal's head would be moving in time to the beats, unless, of course, this were a description of a scientific experiment involving electrical stimulation—a possibility ruled out by earlier portions of the narrative. But until this point, the narrative might have passed as documentary, a recounting of personal experience told secondhand.
Whatever the specific text-internal cues—and there may be, in some stretches of discourse, none—the principal determinant of metadiscursive framing is discourse external to the stretch in question, which is nevertheless "about" that stretch. Such is the case with "he told his wife about this dream" and "he is also going to tell this dream to Wãñpõ." The word "this" points to the stretch of discourse physically preceding it. It creates a relationship between that stretch of discourse and the word "dream." The word "dream" in turn tells the listener or reader how to interpret the relationship between that preceding stretch of discourse and the experienceable, phenomenal world. The tapir narrative is a narrativization of dream experience.
So here you have one fragment of discourse ("this dream") which is about another, longer fragment of discourse ("He was hunting with Kañã'ï..."). Both fragments are half subjective, requiring the preexperiential or pre-empirical cultural foundations we have been discussing, and yet also half objective, that is, not derivable from the earlier discourse alone but dependent upon an empirical encounter with the sign vehicles in question—the tangible, publicly accessible objects of experience that carry them along. At the same time, the two bits of discourse are related because the one (the metadiscourse) is about the other (the narrative). The problem here, consequently, is analogous to that of the relationship between an instance of discourse and some nondiscursive object of experience to which it might pertain.
What are we to make of this? Let's pursue the question of what it might mean to frame the narrative as a dream. For an educated Westerner, this framing will relate to how you are to understand the connection between the narrative and the rest of reality. And it will mean that you are able to dismiss it with respect to the broader empirical project: the delineation of a public world of common experience, reality, and truth.
Metadiscursive framing accomplishes this by separating the dream narrative from genres of documentary discourse, asserting a boundary between them, and denying the significance of the former for the latter, while asserting the explanatory power of the documentary genres with respect to the dream narrative. But is the label "dream" sufficient to accomplish this? You must conclude that no, the label merely summarizes broader patterns of interpreting or talking about the discourse. It is those broader patterns that are crucial to the epistemological position of the dream narrative with respect to the empirical project.
In modern Europe and America, the dream is of little or no public interest. It is not thought to pertain to anything outside the individual. It is inconceivable, for example, that a dream narrative from an American president should become the focus of national interest. The interpretive or metadiscursive patterns associated with dream narratives define them as irrelevant to the empirical project. Although dreams are experiences, they are not the kind of experiences capable of revealing anything fundamental about the universe or about the inner workings of things.
In contrast, the interpretive patterns in the P. I. Ibirama community from which the above-recounted dream narrative emerged define the experiences to which that discourse pertains as of definite public interest. Correspondingly, the dream narratives are actively circulated, providing evidence about an external reality to which the community as a whole is attuned and in which they have an abiding interest. Dreams are not defined as simply individual fantasy material without import for the collective endeavor. Rather, they provide entry into a realm beyond or behind surface appearance, the waking, visual shapes being only one manifestation of essences or, to borrow Kant's terminology, noumena as opposed to phenomena, but not the only manifestation and perhaps not even the most important one.
This is apparent from the brief snippet of interpretation reported above: The dreamer's wife tells him, after he has awakened, that the animal "must not have been a tapir, but something else, maybe an gèyun (spirit)." In her reported interpretation, she claims that a part of reality has been revealed to the dreamer—spirits or forces that animate the world but that are not apparent to the waking eye in everyday circumstances. Yet because they animate the world, they are of public interest, relevant to the commonweal.
This does not mean that metadiscourses in this community always encourage people to make their dreams public—"it was a good thing he had told her about it." Examination of other instances of interpretation that are part of the same discursive field show that the dreamer is sometimes coached to withhold dream experiences from the public: "His wife says that he shouldn't tell anybody about his dreams, because perhaps he would become a shaman as a result..." But here the motivation for withholding the dream narrative is not its irrelevance to the broader public. On the contrary, the withholding may allow the dreamer to achieve special knowledge or understanding or experience that puts him in a privileged position relative to the public.
Almost the opposite situation obtains in the case of Western interpretive patterns, including psychoanalysis. Here, dreams are considered irrelevant to the public; they do not provide access to a realm of common interest, for which, on the contrary, everyday waking experience—and especially visually confirmable experience—is paramount. This is why we want to hear a leader's waking thoughts about the world, but we never discuss his or her dreams. For psychoanalysis, dreams are important for what they reveal about individuals, but not for what they reveal about reality. Like fiction, they do not reflect a different facet of a complex reality, but rather fantasy or imagination or unreality.
What accomplishes this is the metadiscursive framing or interpretation of the discourse in question. Such framing determines how a given instance of discourse is to be understood, and, in interpreting an instance, it also shapes and builds up an understanding of the world, of reality. As a provisional definition, we might say that reality is that which is of public interest, of concern to the commonweal, where we understand interest to be reflected in socially circulating discourse construed metadiscursively as descriptive and nonmetaphorical.
This is by no means a denial of empiricism, since the community is interested in things that affect it, and the peculiar focus of Western empiricism—waking experience of things—does in part take into account what affects the community. But you can imagine communities differing as to whether the Western understanding takes into account all of what is of public interest. The above example, of course, suggests that it does not, that at least in that one instance metadiscursive patterns construct a public external world that includes, but is not limited to, what is accessible through Western empiricism.
Of course, this does not mean that every discourse that publicly circulates is a discourse of reality. Metadiscourses can define public functions for discourse other than the disclosure of reality. In the educated West, for example, we have entertainment and aesthetics separated from the disclosure of reality. This may be part of the continuing attempt to restrict the valid empirical encounter, which in other metadiscursive traditions is opened up, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that there are, everywhere, some exclusions of this sort.
From the proposition that reality is constructed by the community, however, it does not follow that anything goes, that the floodgates are left open, that the we-are-only-superimposing critique of ethnography obtains. You find instead an empirical constraint on the metadiscourse that defines the relationship between discourse and reality; it itself must socially circulate; it must be encoded in publicly accessible, sensible sign vehicles. And not just anything will circulate. The discourse that does achieve a wider currency does so because of its effectiveness in helping a community to exist in the world. The discourse is like a membrane or thin film that is simultaneously in the world and yet a filter through which the perceptible world is passed and its underlying realities understood.
Because a key feature of publicly occurring sign vehicles is not just that they are sensible but also that they are intelligible—and intelligibility requires the superimposition of a whole history of encounters with discourse onto a present instance—metadiscourses may vary in how they structure what is of public concern. But not just anything will convince a public about what it is that affects it. Indeed, you have to leave open the possibility that some metadiscursive formulations may be universally more convincing than others. The ethnographic experience makes one aware that the Western framing of empirical knowledge is one among alternatives, but you cannot deny that that alternative may have, ultimately, a broader public appeal than others, as the international public sphere widens its scope of operation. Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, this is a matter for empirical investigation.
***
Our journey to Brazil began in Chicago. It was the summer of 1973—and in those days there seemed to be perpetual summer. We were glued to our television sets as the drama of Watergate unfolded before our eyes—obsessed with names like Haldeman, Erlichman, and John Dean, that now only vaguely recall the sentiments in which they were then steeped.
The University of Chicago had been the site of student protests in the late 1960s, and protests continued into the 1970s, but we were dazzled as well by the acorporeal intellectuality that flourished there, like a garden of ideas overdosed on fertilizer; the incomprehensible lectures of the famous philosopher Paul Ricouer, whose almost comical French accent enabled us to pick out only fragmentary, but no less epiphanic, utterances (the four questions of Immanuel Kant—What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? What is man?—were barely discernible), contrasting (somewhat later) with the logical lucidity of Donald Davidson, the final effect of which was no more, for all its apparent rigor, comprehensible. Nevertheless, the proximity to ultimate understandings seemed palpable, although it vanished like some vaporous apparition when we tried to reassemble it in smoke-filled rooms and coffee shops with odd names like The Bandersnatch.
In the anthropology department itself, Clifford Geertz had come and gone, but traces of his presence were everywhere, the culture concept mingling with structural functionalism, brought to life by visits from Meyer Fortes and Raymond Firth—giving the department a British club atmosphere the density of pipe smoke—and by senior students returning with stories from the mysterious "field" (a narrative space kept alive in this little discourse community by informal encounters, in our case, those wonderful evenings with Anthony and Judy Seeger, then just back from Brazil). And structuralism was the rage, though it flowed into Marxism, culturalism, and the rest more like a lava lamp bubble, the whole configuration constantly oozing and shifting, and managing thereby to hold us transfixed.
My wife and I had already been to Rio for the summer of 1972. Flying in again in May of 1974 was no less magical. We were aware that impeachment proceedings against President Nixon were set to begin back in the United States, but the aerial view of Copacabana Beach nestled into the Serra Geral mountains; the tropical vegetation; the heavy, bus-fumed air; the breakfasts of carefully cut oranges, papayas, and assorted fruits with toast, jams, and ludicrously rich Brazilian coffee served up on thick white tablecloths by waiters in crisp white dinner jackets; and the turtles and macaws in the lushly vegetated courtyard of the National Museum, where the anthropology department was housed—all marked this time and place as special, different from what we had left behind, like stepping into a Carmen Miranda movie, and we did indeed see Carmen Miranda look-alikes at tourist spots, especially at the Pão de Açucar, or Sugar Loaf, with stacks of fruit perched atop their heads, re-creating the movie images for those who came there to find them, in that global circulation that was coming to be culture.
But it was also the heyday of military repression in Brazil, and truckloads of young men—some mere boys—in army fatigues, carrying tommy guns, were stationed at street corners. The Brazilian Navy reportedly held target practice off Copacabana Beach. And the United States had not yet pulled out of Vietnam, so that the era of post-World War II supremacy was still manifest in our dealings; the open, breezy American style was not yet so openly identified with imperial aspirations the way it would be, and the way British accents and demeanors had been around the globe a generation or two earlier.
For us, however, there was the exoticism of Brazil, and it would only deepen, change its hue, but never again be so noteworthy, as we bid farewell to civilization, whose amenities seemed already significantly curtailed in Rio. From no hot water to no running water was a mere matter of degree. And only a few steps down from the omnipresent "Fusquinhas," or Volkswagen Beetles, scurrying about in tightly packed, but always improvised, clusters on Rio streets was the í950 banana yellow army Jeep, originally part of the U.S. Geological Survey, which haltingly carried us into the hinterland, its gears held in place, we later found, by tin cans hammered in as bushings. (You may want to know, incidentally, that dried corn cobs make excellent battery caps, and Brazilian rot-gut rum, known as cachaça, has the viscosity of brake fluid.)
As you drive inland from the coast at Florianópolis, you ascend a lovely and ancient mountain range known as the Serra Geral, whose peaks rise above 3,000 feet. The range is a continuation of the mountains that stretch along the entire east coast of Brazil. About one hundred or one hundred and fifty miles inland, you reach their peaks, and the rivers flow in the opposite direction, moving westerly toward the great drainages of the Amazon, farther north, and the Paraguay-Paraná to the south. The enormous plateau of central and southern Brazil is homeland to peoples who were among the last to be disturbed by Western civilization in the twentieth century. In the vast, and then still considerably uncharted, area from just south of the Amazon to the far south of Brazil were to be found seminomadic peoples and part-time agriculturalists speaking related languages grouped under the names Jê or Gê in the anthropological literature. The best guess of scientists is that peoples speaking these languages have probably occupied this remote upland region for several thousand years.
As the first drops of rain began falling that gray, overcast afternoon—which my field notes indicate was the 21st day of July in 1974—I had to remind myself why I was there. We had passed the last town before Indian country. It was known as Ibirama, a quaint German settlement with cobbled streets on which roamed horses and Volkswagen Beetles alike. From there the dirt road turned to mud with the first drops of rain. The gears on our jeep began failing one after the next, as we slipped and slid, the drizzle turning into a downpour. Fewer and fewer settler dwellings could be seen as afternoon turned into dusk. The only other traffic was going in the opposite direction—frighteningly huge, fully loaded lumber trucks descending at improbable speeds, causing us to swerve and nearly careen off the road into the Itajaí River some fifty or a hundred feet below. Lumber trucks? We knew that the great Araucaria forests of southern Brazil were rapidly vanishing, but where was this lumber coming from? Much of it was from outside the indigenous reserve that had been established at P.I. Ibirama. We would later confirm, however, that some of it was being sold by the Indians themselves to lumber companies that today have shifted their locus of activities farther north into the Amazon basin.
Was the trip going to be worth it? The road narrowed, with a steep slope on the left, a sharp drop-off to the river below on the right. At its narrowest point stood a lovely German-style cottage, with lush tropical gardens surrounding it. This was the home of Eduardo de Lima e Silva Hoerhan, legendary frontiersman, who as a young man had established the first peaceful contact with the indigenous group known variously as Bugres, Shokleng (or Xokleng), Botocudo of Santa Catarina, Aweikoma, and Kaingang of Santa Catarina. That year was 1914, and "Seu Eduardo"—as he was known to locals—was still alive and lucid in 1974, though it would be months before we actually met him.
Thinking back on it today, the stories told by settlers and Indians alike seem fantastic. Seu Eduardo had a trained horse, which he rode into saloons, having it dance about on its hind legs as he shot off his revolvers. Seu Eduardo had killed the government Indian agent originally in charge of the "pacification" project. Seu Eduardo had murdered an Indian. Yet here was a cultured, intelligent man who spoke and wrote several languages, and was eager to converse about Freud and physics. He had grown up in Rio, in an upper-class world. He told us that he had been attracted to the frontier by the romantic image of the Indian popular in earlier twentieth-century Brazil. He announced one day to his mother that he was going off to pacify wild Indians in the wilderness of Santa Catarina. His mother said, as Seu Eduardo reported, and as I will never forget: "You will repent; you will cry tears of blood; you will eat bread that the devil has kneaded." On a lazy afternoon in 1975 he told us that it was all true, but that he had never repented. I did not appreciate then that I would never see that great friend and colleague again. By the time I returned to Brazil in 1981, he had already died. His house, once so vibrant with frontier life, had been abandoned and partially destroyed in a flood. The Santa Catarina frontier had come to a definite end.
As I write this, I know that the memory flashes by because of an association with his house, which marked the entrance to the indigenous reserve. We unwittingly drove past it for several kilometers until we rattled to a halt in front of a few wooden structures marking the outskirts of the Indian post—P. I. Ibirama. At that time, the government Indian agency was headquartered across the river, about a half mile up a steep hill. We crossed over the river on a suspension foot bridge. That night it was gloomily dark and raining steadily and hard. Fortunately, as the bridge swayed and we stumbled along, we could not see the innumerable broken and missing and severely rotted planks. An army colonel and his aide, there to hunt, would later fall through, plunging sixty or so feet into the waters below. That night we crossed safely, and were greeted by the acting post chief, Isaac Bavaresco. We would become close friends with Seu Isaac and his wife Dona Tina, close enough to be shown Isaac's silver pistol and the scar from a bullet that had traversed his abdomen. That night we were thankful to be dry and safe and to have hot rice soup to eat.
The rains menaced us for two weeks, cracks of thunder and lightning breaking open the thick dark gray mist, that musty smell caused by mildew beginning to permeate our possessions. We were largely confined to the Indian post. The clay mud was so thick that we could not walk in our Brazilian sandals, known locally as "Hawaiians." Even our bare feet sank to the calves in mud. It seemed that we would never meet the Indians. As Lévi-Strauss had said: "Anthropology is a profession in which adventure plays no part; merely one of its bondages, it represents no more than a dead weight of weeks or months wasted en route; hours spent in idleness when one's informant has given one the slip" (1968 [1955]: 17). We spent our time in idleness, waiting for the rains to stop.
Why were we there? Presumably, to continue the investigation of Jê social institutions begun by David Maybury-Lewis (1979) in the 1960s, under the auspices of the Harvard Central Brazil Project. Maybury-Lewis (1965, 1967) himself had lived with the Xavante, a group belonging to what is thought of as the central branch of the Jê family. Among his students, Jean Carter Lave and Delores Newton had gone to live with the Krikatí, Julio Cezar Melatti with the Krahó, Roberto da Matta with the Apinayé, and Joan Bamberger and Terence Turner with the Northern Kayapó, all groups that were part of the northern branch of the Jê family.
My wife and I had studied Jê ethnology at the University of Chicago under Terence Turner, and so considered ourselves grandstudents of David Maybury-Lewis, whose book Akwe-Shavante Society formed the basis for Turner's year-long course. It was the 1970-1971 academic year, and I recall Turner's deep, barrel-chested voice resonating throughout that drafty Classics classroom, light filtering through leaded gothic windows as we squirmed to find comfortable positions in ancient, straight-backed wooden chairs with attached writing arms. Despite our physical discomfort, Turner kept us rapt as we pored over genealogies, inspected residence charts, pondered the symbolic meanings of rituals, and examined photographs for a you-are-there sense of central Brazil.
Despite the immense contribution of the Harvard Central Brazil Project, it became apparent that little was known about the southern branch of the Jê family, in the then-modern social organizational sense, although Jules Henry (1941) had spent time between 1932 and 1934 at P. I. Ibirama, and Herbert Baldus (1952, 1955) had worked with the Kaingang. The group settled at P. I. Ibirama was one of three that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eduardo Hoerhan established contact with the group in 1914. The remnants of a second group—largely decimated by raids from the P. I. Ibirama community as well as Brazilian "Indian hunters," known locally as bugreiros—was settled several years later near São Jodo dos Pobres farther to the north and west. The third group was never successfully contacted. They continued to make news, raiding settlers in the area, until the 1950s, when they abruptly disappeared. In the early 1970s, the Brazilian anthropologist Silvio Coelho dos Santos mounted an expedition to contact the survivors, then thought to be wandering in the Serra do Taboleiro south of Florianópolis. This is what had attracted our attention to the area in the first place. The group was never contacted, however, and if any Indians were still occupying the area, there could not have been more than a family or two. The area was simply too small to support a community of several hundred. So, we ended up at P. I. Ibirama.
The rains finally did subside. We went to visit some of the indigenous households, and were profoundly disappointed, for reasons that now seem worth recalling. If Rio was a self-consciously exotic city—constructing itself at least in part after the movie images tourists wanted to see firsthand—the community at P. I. Ibirama was outwardly unexotic, maybe even anti-exotic. The indigenous population wished not to attract attention to itself as a distinctive cultural entity, but to blend in, to become invisible. Men had given up using the lip-plugs that had so marked them in earlier generations, though the holes in the lower lips of many older men were still plainly visible. Most members of the community dressed not much differently from the local Brazilian settlers, and their houses resembled settler dwellings, stretched out over about ten kilometers on either side of a road that traversed the reserve. In addition, many younger people were already fluent in Portuguese. When we first met Wãñekï, whose dream narrative opens this chapter, he was wearing a Columbia University sweatshirt and a baseball cap. We despaired of finding a distinctive and actively flourishing Amerindian culture.
All that would change over the course of the year. When we finally did observe the widow's seclusion ceremony, and the subsequent festival for reintegrating the widow, there was before us a plainly palpable indigenous culture. Men doffed their Brazilian clothes and donned their traditional costumes, painted their bodies, danced and sang in unmistakably indigenous ways. But none of this was for public consumption outside the reserve. No Brazilians were invited and only a handful of Kaingang showed up. The outward display of indigenousness had not yet become popular—as it has in the 1980s and 1990s among the Kayapó, Eastern Timbira, Xavante, and other groups. The latter have recognized their media image as a resource in political struggles. This was not true at P. I. Ibirama in the mid 1970s.
There the contrast between what I call the sensible and the intelligible slowly clarified, like shapes at dawn solidifying out of the darkness. While by outward, perceptible signs the indigenous population blended into its Brazilian settler surroundings, there was an inward, actively circulating discourse imbuing the world with a wholly different significance. There were stories of a land above the sky, through which men entered by means of a hole in the sky vault. There were reports of a land of the dead, where ants appeared as jaguars, and people nourished themselves on dirt. And there was the world of dreams, in which individuals encountered spirits behind the surface of everyday waking reality, like walking through a mirror in Jean Cocteau's Orphée. This was not the world of Brazilian settler culture.
During our stay, relations between the community and the Brazilian government via the government Indian agent, the official representative of FUNAI—the National Indian Foundation—were continuously turbulent, sometimes exploding. There were countless reasons for this, not least of which was the lack of funds to carry out promised projects. But the principal source of friction concerned lumber. Many members of the community wanted to sell off wood in exchange for various goods, including, in some cases, electric refrigerators, though there was at that time no electricity in indigenous houses. I was opposed to this, regarding the forest as a key component of the patrimony, though my arguments were invariably brushed aside, like an annoying fly.
In any case, the turbulence at the FUNAI post provided us with an incentive, after a few months, to take up residence in an unoccupied indigenous house, conveniently situated between the homes of two men whose voices emerge prominently in this book—Wãñ&etilde;kï and Wã&ntiolde;põ. We were accorded some privacy, as a married couple, a situation that would change completely when I returned alone in 1981-1982. Nevertheless, our house, along with those of Wãñekï and Wãñpõ—and, I imagine, every other house on the reserve as well—was the locus of continual comings and goings, innumerable conversations and storytelling sessions, as our competence in the indigenous language improved. I cannot claim to have achieved fluency during this first year and a half, but I could get by well enough to obtain numerous tape recordings, which I studied in earnest upon our return to the United States in March of 1976, after spending several additional months among the Kaingang of Ivaí at P. I. Manoel Ribas in central Paraná, and returning to the United States via the Andes.
With a few dramatic exceptions, our life there was tranquil, even bucolic. We made weekly trips to town for supplies. The bottled gas we brought in enabled us to type and read in the evenings, and to operate a two-burner cooking stove, which greatly facilitated our lives, since I was hopeless at picking out good firewood. We spent our days conversing with visitors, asking questions, tape-recording, visiting other households, or just observing the general goings-on. We had a massive invasion of native rats after the ripening of the bamboo, events said by local Brazilians to happen once every twenty years. The rats would leap all about, jumping over our shoulders onto the table, scrambling for whatever food was available. Bats lived in our roof and would awaken us each morning as they returned from their night's labors, scrambling for position. Flocks of prattling parrots descended upon neighboring fruit trees—the resultant cacophony sometimes making it impossible to converse. Once an enormous spider—said to eat fledgling birds!—leaped out of a tree onto my shoulder as I walked through the forest. Another time a huge lizard, at least six feet long, appeared on the road before us as we rounded a bend while returning from town. It was all part of a normal state of affairs. The serene existence was belied only by the circulating discourse, which was filled with magical occurrences of an animated world, with endless historical narratives of times gone by, and with dark rumors of political intrigue and mounting tensions.
Every three or four months, we traveled to São Paulo or Rio to meet with anthropologists, stock up on supplies, and see movies. One sunny afternoon, we were approaching the reserve, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when out of the bush popped a camouflaged figure wielding a tommy gun, motioning for us to stop. In Brazil you are required by law to carry in your car a reflecting triangle and fire extinguisher. He asked whether we had ours—we did not. Then he asked stone-facedly for identification and told us to wait, which we did, and he disappeared into the bush. In a few minutes, he returned with a friendly-looking commanding officer, who informed us that the area had been cordoned off as a means of preventing the further extraction of lumber. However, he knew that we were American anthropologists, and he allowed us to proceed. Later at a bar outside the reserve, federal police officers clashed with some members of the community. Shots were fired, but no one was seriously hurt. Some rumors would circulate that we had summoned the army. By the time of our departure, however, the situation had calmed.
As our departure neared, Wãñpõ proposed that we adopt one of his own young daughters, one whom he himself had adopted. By that time, we had already been given indigenous name sets—my names were Mõgñã (Sucks Honey), Kañã'ï, and Lugmũ, names that had once belonged to one of Wañpõ's two fathers, who had been captured from a different group. Now the adoption would solidify our ties to him. After considerable soul-searching, we decided against it. The lovely Mu (pronounced [mbu]) was a constant delight, but how would she have adapted to life in a small Chicago apartment, separated from everyone she knew? Clearly, the idea was crazy, and yet it seemed so natural at the time. And then there was our constant companion, a black-and-white spotted dog named bolinha (little ball). Wã&ntiolde;põ wanted him, and we wanted to take him. In the end, Wã&ntiolde;põ won out. I learned later that bolinha had died within a year—though, as Wã&ntiolde;põ told me in 1981, his was a valiant death, resulting from a fight with another dog twice his size over a female.
Five years later I returned, this time alone. So much had outwardly changed. The government had constructed a dam, which was to flood a considerable portion of the reserve. Its purpose: to prevent flooding in the downstream city of Blumenau. Ironically, when the rains came, and the dam broke, it resulted in the worst flooding in their history. Nevertheless, many people had moved. The community had fissioned, one group moving off into a remote corner of the reserve known as the "Bugio" (Howler Monkey), where they were unattended by FUNAI. Wã&ntiolde;põ had remained, but had moved his house to the other side of the road, further up the hill. And to my dismay I learned that our great friend and companion Wãñekï had died. When I listen to tapes of him today, and read the transcripts, I marvel at his intellect, at his ability to cast the traditional mythology into a philosophical understanding of his existence. His was a great loss.
In retrospect, my life during that year there seems hectic. I was never alone, even while wretchedly ill and desiring privacy. I befriended a young man named Nãnmla, whom I taught to write the indigenous language, and who helped me transcribe the numerous tapes I was amassing. This freed up my own time to wander around with my tape recorder and lavalier microphone, recording whatever interesting discourse or sounds I happened upon. A considerable portion of my time was spent with the oldest man in the community, Nil (pronounced [ndíli]). We wandered the forests, he teaching me about the plants and animals, the stories, the meaning of the world around me.
You might be asking, What did Nil think of all this? Like Wãñpõ and Wãñ&etilde;kï but unlike younger members of the community, Nil, I believe, thought that it was self-explanatory, that it was about time someone appeared from the outside who genuinely wanted to learn the traditional culture. The Indian agents were not there to learn, but to tell everyone what to do. The lumbermen had eyes only for those vast stands of virgin forest, and they would disappear without a trace once those were gone. The school teachers wanted to fill the heads of children with Portuguese and knowledge of Brazilian culture. But Nil, like Wãñpõ Wãñ&etilde;kï and many other members of the community, knew that there was something valuable in what he had learned, and he wished in turn to pass it on.
Laura Graham has eloquently documented, in her recent book Performing Dreams: The Discourse of Immortality among the Xavante of Central Brazil, the relationship she had with the old chief Warodi. Through the years of her field research, she grew to understand that Warodi not only tolerated her tape-recording of public performances, including oratory in the men's council; he actually wanted her to record all of this. He would instruct her to turn on the tape recorder or bring the video equipment. Shrewdly, he grasped her pragmatic role. Through her recordings and publications, his discourse would live on. And through that discourse, he would live on, and with him the Xavante culture in which he had been raised.
Perhaps not so media savvy, Nil nevertheless similarly grasped the significance of my presence there, and he was determined to pass on his own knowledge. Re-examining a tape recording I made of a ceremony in 1975, I found that the tape recorder had inadvertently eavesdropped on Nil. I was trying to record some singing, but there was his voice in the background. He was talking to some young boys, trying to teach them the origin myth, just as the elders had done to him some seventy years earlier. At this phase in his life, he never ever missed an opportunity to pass on his culture. My arrival had been fortuitous, but for him it seemed preordained, the opportunity he had been waiting for. Day after day I immersed myself in his world, and I began to see my own life in terms of it. "I descend dancing, confronting my destiny" is a refrain from the origin myth. By the time I left P. I. Ibirama in 1982, and left Nil for good—he would die soon thereafter, reportedly amidst visions of the jaguar spirit—I knew precisely what that line meant.
Now a decade has passed, and those mundane aspects of my life have given way to a deeper sense of the profoundly philosophical dimensions of the discourse I had recorded. The book you have before you represents my attempt to probe those philosophical dimensions, to inquire into the nature of social life and its discursively encoded meanings in this tiny and largely forgotten backwater of our planet, and to project that inquiry onto the large intellectual questions of our time.
Yet, I still remember the small incidents, as if they had just happened. There was old Patè, who talked me out of my new, sleek Adidas running shoes I had brought from the United States and saved for special occasions. Normally, I wore a pair of cheap, ill-fitting sneakers, keeping the Adidas up in the rafters, dry and safe, but unfortunately visible to visitors:
"You have two pairs of shoes," Paté had said.
"Yes," I replied.
"And I have none," he said.
"Yes," I agreed, beholding his hardened feet, toes splayed.
"Perhaps I could try these on?"
"Oh, they would not fit you," I tried.
"Let us see."
And, sure enough, they fit, and it was obvious that two pairs of shoes for one person was too many when the other person had none. The logic was impeccable, and I grasped it immediately.
And there was another indelibly etched incident. Miguel, who had been raised on the Paraguayan border, was hired by FUNAI to survey the remaining forest. To the dismay of many members of the community, he boasted openly of men he had killed. Like many other Brazilians, he carried a revolver with him. One day I entered the house of Yòko, a woman who usually cooked for me. It was dark, and my eyes were slow to adjust. Beneath my feet I felt a splot, and then gradually made out the shape of a fledgling bird, flapping and gasping its last breath. "Oh," Yòko said, "that is Miguel's bird. For sure he will be angry."
So I immediately went to the FUNAI post, relocated because of the dam, and found Miguel seated behind a table. I confessed that I had inadvertently stepped on his fledgling bird, and indicated that I was sorry. He said that if the bird died, he would kill me. I said: "But, Miguel, your bird is dead." In a rage, he stood up, knocking over the table, making a gesture I interpret in retrospect as reaching for his gun. He went across the room, located the weapon, then stared at me with laser eyes, scoring the veneer of my reality. For one brief moment, I thought he would shoot, and I wondered again, as I had in those days of my first arrival in 1974, what on earth I was doing there. I wanted my body to be returned to the United States. I wanted to be buried in Illinois. But to my relief he lurched forward, bumping me with his shoulder as he passed, like a boy trying to start a fight. He disappeared out the door and into the forest, not to return for several days.
My troubles were only beginning. Yòko had followed me and observed the incident. Later I overheard her angrily recount the story to the Brazilian Indian agent, the gentle and thoughtful Seu Dival, remarking in Portuguese: "He who threatens Lugmu [i.e., me], threatens my people." I had never heard any member of the P. I. Ibirama community say a positive word about me publicly until that moment. Of course, looking back on it today, I recognize that I was only the seed around which a sudden political crystallization had taken place in an already saturated solution, but it was a novel experience to be that kind of seed. By evening, word of the incident had spread like a Southern California brush fire across the entire reserve. A number of men gathered to make plans. I listened. They were talking about killing Miguel. They made reference to his own repeated boasting of killing others—a definite mistake on his part. And they considered his threats to me an affront to themselves. They would make clubs. Each man would hit Miguel once, so that no one would know who had inflicted the death blow. I spoke up, trying to talk them out of it, imagining the headlines—ANTHROPOLOGIST LINKED TO MURDER OF INDIAN AGENT. As in the lumber incidents, however, my arguments were swatted aside.
Miguel did not return that night, nor the next. Several men reported seeing him circling my house, trying to kill me while I slept. I was sure this was fantasy, but worried about what might ensue. Wisely, Miguel slipped back to the post one night and was taken out in FUNAI's Toyota Land-Rover. The incident blew over, and life returned to normal. I would see Miguel again some months later, this time in the city of Curitiba in Paraná. He was contrite, saying that he had been distraught, under pressure, the bird had meant so much to him. He did not mean to threaten me. Please accept his apologies. I did.
And there was the time I was up on the mountain ridge with old Nil. We were walking along, discussing various plants and animals. Nil was teaching me a song. Suddenly, I lost my footing and went careening some twenty or thirty yards down the slope. Nil came up behind me, a look of terror on his face. He thought I had died or seriously injured myself. I was scraped up, and considerably embarrassed, but otherwise fine. When he saw this, he chuckled. Looking at my field notes, I see that at the time I hardly remarked the incident. Yet it stands out so lucidly in my memory.
As I think about it now, I am led to relisten to the tape. Nil and I are chatting away about each of the plants we see, their usages, the mythology surrounding them—a good example of the transmission of culture at work, and it is occurring through discourse. As he teaches me a name, he insists: "Say it again." I too ask him always to repeat the names, especially for the tape recorder. In the background, we hear insects, rustling brush as we walk, air rushing across the microphone. Later Nil is singing, and I encourage him. So he continues:
ku nu là kònã yòke.... .... .... ....
nã kònã yòke
kàn kàlà...
kàn kà_là
wèn wala
wèn walã ....m
There is a rustling and scraping as I fall, and later Nil's chuckle, but otherwise no evidence on the tape of its significance for my memory. Someone who had not experienced this directly would be unable to recover it from the tape. Bishop Berkeley wondered about the tree falling in the wood. Here was the anthropologist falling in the wood, and though the event was barely salient at the time, yet it has grown in my mind and gone on to live in my own discourse, in my storytelling. I wonder if Nil subsequently told this tale. Did it live on for him? Did it entertain and regale those around him, as other stories about me had? How curious it is what gets encoded from the fleeting experiences making up these lives of ours.
***
No doubt you have observed already, from the structure of this chapter, the main theme of my book: the relationship between intelligibility and sensibility, between understanding and experience, between what I will call, following the philosophical tradition, noumena and phenomena. So the first part of this chapter examines the intelligibility of the world as disclosed through an ethnographic fragment, a bit of discourse that, like a time capsule, carried meanings into a future. The second part records ethnographic experiences from the time when this and other ethnographic fragments were collected. One is a kind of hermeneutic of texts; the other a narrativization of my memory, based upon sensible encounters with the world. The first retrieves meanings that were not within the purview of my experience at the time; the second records recollections of my experiences themselves. I propose here that it is the relationship between these two—a discourse about meaningful discourse and a discourse about experience-that forms the proper object of ethnographic inquiry.
You will notice that we are at one remove from sensibility, since the ethnographer's personal experiences are already here encoded in words. In sensibility itself, there is a primacy to perceptions and feelings. These fall outside discourse, or, rather, they precede their formulation in publicly accessible words, and hence they cannot be studied directly but only indirectly through the words in which they are encoded. I recall today with great vividness the visible shape of Miguel's corpulence, the expression on his face that day in 1982. I can summon the smell—smoke-permeated beeswax—so characteristic of the P. I. Ibirama houses, including that in which I saw the vague outlines of a fledgling bird flap and gasp its last breath as my eyes adjusted to the dark. In fact, I have here in my desk beside me a piece of beeswax, carefully wrapped in plastic, a physical object transported from its original context into this one. I take it out and unwrap it and hold it near my nose, and its smell reproduces those original sensations. Yet, as soon as I try to describe the sensations to you, I must put them into words. It thus seems that we are already in the realm of intelligibility. The method of juxtaposing the ethnographer's narrative of sense experience with the interpretation of ethnographically collected discourse provides us no out from the poststructural conundrums of our time, with which we are already too familiar.
And yet my argument here is that this juxtaposition is our best hope. Precisely because we can examine the intelligibility of ethnographically occurring discourse, and compare its intelligibility with that coming from a narrativization of what our own eyes see, what our own noses smell, what our own ears hear, we have a check on the solipsistic tendencies latent in so much poststructural writing. Our own narrativization of sense experience is challenged through a double-leveled ethnographic encounter, in a way that it was not, for example, for Foucault, who dealt with entirely historical discourse. The narrativization of a dream experience as an encounter with the spirit world that lurks behind or beneath the sensible veneer of the waking one is shocking for Western patterns of intelligibility. Precisely for that reason, it challenges those patterns of intelligibility, leading us toward, rather than away from, the sensible world. It asks us to see for ourselves.
I will argue that this same push toward the empirical world is operative at P. I. Ibirama as well. It is really a kind of skepticism. It results from the conflict between the intelligibility of the world as encoded in the discourse of another and the way the world is intelligibly formulated by one's self. Because of this skepticism, the recourse is always to a go-and-see-foryourself attitude. I will try to argue that at P. I. Ibirama the desire is for a relatively unmediated experience with the sensible world. This is an epistemological desire, and it accounts for, among other things, the peculiar form that group ceremonies assume in this community. If individuals experience this tension between intelligibility and sensibility, if they organize at least some of their social activity around it—as I will try to show they do—then surely that tension must be incorporated into the core of any theory of culture.
In fact, however, I believe that it has not been so incorporated into recent cultural theory—at least not in its poststructural and postmodern wing. Perhaps this is due to the hard struggle in that area to establish discourse as a proper object of investigation in the first place, as Foucault endeavored to do in The Archaeology of Knowledge. In trying to distinguish "the statement"—the central unit, in his view, of discourse—from the proposition, the sentence, and the speech act, he ends up making it into a single thing, an interesting thing to be sure-which "circulates, is used, disappears, allows or prevents the realization of a desire, serves or resists various interests, participates in challenge and struggle, and becomes a theme of appropriation or rivalry" (1972 [1969]:105)—but a unitary thing, nonetheless. For this reason, he failed to see the inherently "duplex" character of discourse, as Jakobson (1957) and Silverstein (1976) dubbed it. Discourse leads a double life. It is something that is half sensible and half intelligible, and the two halves sit uncomfortably together, as do experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena, more generally.
Furthermore, this duplex nature of discourse is what allows us to distinguish between, on the one hand, the internal intelligibility of the world to the self, constructed through inner speech, toward which one cannot be normally skeptical, and, on the other hand, the speech of others about the world, about which we are naturally skeptical. For we recognize the external discourse as external by virtue of its sensible character. This is why I began this chapter with ethnographically collected dream narratives. Because of the sensible character of the discourse in which these narratives are carried, we recognize the narratives themselves as external. Consequently, we can maintain a skeptical attitude with respect to them. It was not really a spirit of the tapir that Wãñ&etilde;kï encountered in his dream. Though the tapir stood up and shook its head, its innards having been extracted, this was only a dream. It was based on encounters with real tapirs (Plate 2).
We can see a sharp contrast by comparing my own descriptions of the ethnographic context in which these dreams were recorded with Wáñéki's narratives themselves. Mine is a world devoid of magic, emptied of mystery. What we have here is a waking reality—a man wearing a Columbia University sweatshirt and baseball cap, a pair of Adidas running shoes, dark gray mist cracked open by lightning, a flapping and gasping fledgling bird. This is a sensibility with which Western readers will be comfortable. No spirits are to be found there, lurking behind the surface appearance of an ordinary tapir. No rock I kicked would ever speak back. Indeed, no dream of my own would seem noteworthy in this context, except as an illumination of my inner state at the time. It would not illuminate that external world of hard things we call reality.
So discourse here is not a single thing, a unitary entity. It is both sensible and intelligible, and this enables us to distinguish between our own inner discourse and that of others, and it enables us in some measure to distinguish discourse that is about the nondiscursive world from discourse that is about discourse, hard as this may be on some occasions. But because discourse is complex and heterogeneous, it does not follow that it is hopelessly fragmented, that its pieces do not and cannot maintain relations with one another, or, at least, that we cannot attempt to define pathways of linkage between them. On the contrary, it is my goal to show that two of the fundamental principles of culture concern the interconversion between the two sides of discourse, its sensibility and its intelligibility. The principles are a product of a simple fact: People want to put the two sides of discourse together. They want a discourse that leads them into the world, that produces some benefit for them in their lives.
From the point of view of culture as an adaptive mechanism, we can see why this would be. If people did not want a discourse that would accurately disclose the world to them, their task of living in that world would be made more difficult. Culture must be adapted to the real world, and the analogues of the long-stranded deoxyribonucleic acid that encode information about the real world are the long-stranded discourses, which similarly can be replicated and passed down across the generations. Consequently, these discourses must in some measure, and in certain ways, aid in the maintenance of relations with that world. This is not a novel claim. But what is novel is the further claim that individuals are actively trying to fit the discourse they circulate with the sensible world they encounter, and this struggle to produce a fit leads to some fundamental principles of culture, namely, those involving the interconversion between the sensible and intelligible sides of discourse.
What are these principles of culture? One principle maintains that there is a tendency for people to enact what is otherwise only intelligible through discourse. That is, they try to make the intelligible sensible. We shall see this throughout the following chapters, but it is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the case of shamanism. By contacting the spirit world, much as Wãñ&etilde;kï did in his dream of the tapir, shamans are said to be able to harness that spiritual power for mundane concerns, such as healing. In fact, shamans harness the power by imitating the physical, sensible characteristics of the spirit being—in the case I will discuss subsequently, the actual body posture and call of the howler monkey. To nonshamans, the howler monkey spirit is only intelligible, accessible through discourse. The shaman makes that intelligible spirit palpable, available for anyone to see or hear, by his physical behavior. We may think of this as the principle of enactment. What otherwise exists only in the realm of meaning is made tangible by enactment. Nike—goddess of victory in Greek mythology—originally owed her existence to the mythological discourse in which she circulated. A pure object of the intellect, she assumed sensible form in the fourth century B.C. marble sculpture, known as the Nike of Samothrace, which can be seen today in the Louvre, even as the original discursive memory of her has faded. Who now remembers that she escorted Heracles to Olympus?
The other main principle is this: As discourse meanings expand their social circulation, especially through transmission across the generations, the form of their expression tends to become fixed. In other words, meanings are made sensible here not by enactment, but by holding constant the physical form of their expression. This process of fixation can take many forms. One need only think of the significance attributed to writing in the West. In the P. I. Ibirama community, fixation takes the form of verbatim repetition, and is most highly developed in connection with performances of the origin myth. As in the case of enactment, people seem to be striving here for the conversion of an object of the intellect—an intelligible meaning, or noumenon—into a sensible thing of the world, a phenomenally real entity. But the phenomenally accessible entity in this case is the material form of the discourse. In holding it constant, people seem to feel that they can hold constant as well the mercurial meanings, which otherwise slip constantly from their grasp, disappearing into the shadows of the mind.
You will no doubt be surprised to learn, having spent so much time on this journey into epistemology and culture theory, that this book is concerned with social organization, as classically conceived—its lineage can be traced back to Lewis Henry Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family and through Emile Durkheim, Edward B. Tylor, and the British social anthropologists, among them Meyer Fortes; it includes the research on marriage systems undertaken by Claude Lévi-Strauss and others, who founded anthropological structuralism. But the study of social organization has fallen into some disrepute in the 1990s, or at least it has languished as concern with the world system, globalization, media, and reflexivity has increased. I hope to breathe some new life into this earlier research, with discourse as my smelling salts.
I want to show that a focus on discourse opens up the older concept of social organization, exposing it as having two interestingly distinct sides. On the one hand, social organization is the objective field in which, through which, and by which discourse circulates. It is the medium—dare I say ether!—for the physical movement of discourse across space and time by means of replication. On the other hand, social organization is the interpretation of the social world through discourse. It is the meaningful apprehension of individuals as members of groups—such as lineages, clans, and moieties—and as partners in relationships, especially kinship relationships. It is part of the broader intelligibility by which sense perceptions are interpreted and the phenomenal world is made real.
My proposal in this book is to look at the relationship between these two sides, seeing social organization through the lens of the two great interconversion principles discussed earlier. Unfortunately, the endeavor to investigate this relationship runs against historical trends. The evolution of academic culture opened a chasm between the two that has not yet been bridged. The fault lines of this chasm could be detected already at the turn of the century—in the famous debate between A. L. Kroeber (1909) and W. H. R. Rivers (1914) over the nature of kinship terminologies. Kroeber argued that kinship terms were to be understood at the plane of intelligibility, as reflecting, in his words, "psychology, not sociology." Rivers reaffirmed sensibility, declaring that systems of kinship—and, in particular, the "classificatory" system originally posited by Lewis Henry Morgan—were to be understood with reference to what he called "social conditions." If Rivers's position was a denial of the intelligible side of social organization, Kroeber's was a denial of its sensible side.
Regrettably, the chasm between the two points of view was never construed as reflecting a problem intrinsic to social organization itself, and hence as in the utmost need of exploration. Instead, it was celebrated by warring camps not only as a difference in theoretical point of view, but as a natural divide between analytic approaches or disciplinary methods, two distinct continents on which researchers could scurry about, conducting their investigations without the need for intellectual commerce with their neighbors. Indeed, Talcott Parsons proposed a fourfold disciplinary division in the study of human beings, which, he thought, could be construed in terms of distinct "systems": the biological, personality, social, and cultural systems. The division was actually implemented, during the 1960s, at the University of Chicago. As you will have guessed (if you did not already know), the cultural system dealt with meaning, intelligibility, or what Kroeber called "psychology." The social system, in contrast, focused on what Rivers called "social conditions," which were apart from or prior to their meaningful construal.
Some will wonder at the wisdom of exploring this chasm today. Perhaps it is best to let the dead lie undisturbed. Even if the classical conception of social organization could be resuscitated, why do so? What significance can it have for us now? I want to argue that not only is discourse a means of illuminating social organization, but that social organization also illuminates discourse. We have stripped the tapir's innards, but its heart is still beating, and we recognize here, as did Wãñ&etilde;kï that the beast is not what it at first appeared to be. It is something far more mysterious, vastly more powerful, than the flesh-and-blood creature of our senses. The discourse of social organization not only creates social life. More important for our understanding of discourse, the social life that it creates is important for discourse. The discourse of social organization is a discourse that produces its own conditions of circulation as well as the conditions of circulation for all other discourse—a matrix of interactions in which culture is nourished and grows. Without it, there could be no circulation. With it, discourse flows, and the universe comes to life, not only as something the eye sees, but also as something the mind comprehends.
