The Fabricated Body: Objects and Ancestors in NW Amazonia.

Stephen Hugh-Jones, Contemporary Amazonian ethnography has given relatively little attention to the world of objects. One reason for this might be that material culture was the focus of an earlier, no longer fashionable approach to the region. There is also the salience of animals and plants in Amerindians everyday experience and cosmological thinking, one that has its analogue in the prominence of nature in European constructions of Amazonia and Amazonians. Against either version of this animated backdrop, inanimate objects seem to pale into insignificance. In the three main theoretical styles of recent ethnography on the region (see Viveiros de Castro 1996), there is also an inbuilt tendency to downplay the significance of objects. This is evident in Rivires (1984) characterisation of the Amazonian political economy as one more of people than of goods, in McCallums (1988) denial of the relevance of notions of wealth or political economy, and in claims (see Overing and Passes 2000) that Amazonian societies are inherently egalitarian. The diminished sociological weight of objects is also implicit in the view, shared by all three styles, that Amazonians fall under the rubric of Collier and Rosaldos (1981) bride-service societies where, in contrast to bridewealth societies, substitutions between people and things do not occur. Implicitly or explicitly, in this ethnography, Amazonians are also being compared to the peoples of other regions - the Andes, Melanesia, or the West. Such comparisons often take present conditions as representative of all times and neglect both the archaeological and historical reality of the region and the extensive material and intellectual exchanges between highlands and lowlands. 1 The analogue of this temporal flattening is the spatial homogenisation that occurs when particular manifestations of Amerindian society and culture are taken as typical of the whole.2 In a paper that extends his arguments concerning perspectivism to the world of artefacts, Viveiros de Castro writes the idea of creation ex nihilo is virtually absent from indigenous cosmologies. Things and beings normally originate as a transformation of something else. Where we find notions of creation at all, what is stressed is the imperfection of the end product. Amerindian demiurges always fail to deliver the goods. And just as nature is the result not of creation but of transformation, so culture is a product not of invention but of transference. In Amerindian mythology, the origin of cultural implements or institutions is canonically

explained as a borrowing a transfer (violent or friendly, by stealing or by learning, as a trophy or as a gift) of prototypes already possessed by animals, spirits or enemies. He goes on to oppose the Amerindian emphasis on transformation and exchange to a Western emphasis on creation and production and speculates that this may be connected with an Amerindian emphasis on affinity over consanguinity. This difference is reflected in myth: if old world mythology is haunted by parenthood and especially fatherhood, the protagonists of the major Amerindian myths are related agonistically as in-laws (2004: 477-8). In this chapter I want to discuss a set of Tukanoan myths from the Uaups region of NW Amazonia that are indeed about creation ex nihilo and squarely in the idioms of parenthood, myths about divinities who, in the end, do indeed deliver the goods - and do so by means of goods. My aim is not to prove Viveiros de Castro wrong he is already well aware that the Tukanoans fit uneasily into the general Amazonian pattern.3 Instead I want to suggest that, in effect, he is right, for the Tukanoans patriliny and exogamy produce a transformation in mythic structure that can be predicted from his suggestions above. This transformation, which plays lineal inheritance and transmission off against themes of affinity, violence and theft, is also reflected in a shift away from the violent appropriation of body-parts and trophies, characteristic of the Tupians and others, towards the elaboration of sets of highlycrafted artefacts that become personified heirlooms transmitted across the generations. These heirlooms are both the spirit manifestations of ancestral powers and objectifications of body parts that point to human capacities, intentions and responsibilities. All this suggests that we should avoid over-hasty generalisations about Amazonia and Amazonians. As they have varied patterns kinship, shamanism, architecture, etc, so they may have different theories and ideologies of materiality (see Miller ed. 2005) and live in different object worlds. Despite the universal theme of ensoulment (Santos Granero, this vol.: X.) of objects by those in their proximity and the frequent associations of bodily ornaments with spirit or soul (Hill, Miller, Turner this vol.), one thing that emerges clearly in this volume is diversity and variation. There are not only multiple ways of being a thing in particular Amerindian societies (Santos Granero this vol., p. X) but also significant differences between the overall object regimes of different groups. The collectively owned valuables and heirlooms of northwest Amazonia and central Brazil (see Turner, this vol.) are a far cry from the shamanic stones of the Yanesha and

Urarina (see Santos-Granero, White this vol.). Likewise, the intense circulation of ritual objects and ordinary possessions in Northwest Amazonia and the upper Xing (see Barcellos Neto, this vol.) contrasts with the Matis insistence on the moral imperatives of self-sufficiency (Erickson, this vol.: 1). One aim of this chapter is to suggest that there is a certain fit between different object regimes, different social structures and different cosmologies. The Myths The creation myths I have in mind can be found in a remarkable series of publications, the Coleao Narradores Indigenas do Rio Negro, each authored by an elderly Tukano or Desana kumu (priest-shamans see Hugh-Jones 1994), paired with a younger, literate amanuensis.4 As Andrello (2004: 258-9) points out, these books are themselves a recent addition to the set of heirlooms just mentioned. The myths are close variants of those discussed by Hill (this vol.); his chapter should be read as a performative, musical accompaniment and complementary vision to this one5. Starting from an initial, dark, formless and invisible state, the myths run through several attempts at creation that culminate in the emergence of the fullyhuman ancestors of the peoples of today. This process involves a progressive materialization and embodiment from an initially immaterial, disembodied state and a transition from a pre-human, artefactual mode of reproduction to a fully human, genital mode. Briefly summarised and keeping objects to the fore, a Desana version, complemented where appropriate by other varaints6, runs as follows: [19-26] The Grandfather of the Universe (GFU), who is both Thunder and the Primal Sun, appears spontaneously in a state of total darkness. He lives alone {TG 27: lives with his daughter and the Master of Food - see below} in a house in the sky. He had with him the following items, the Instruments of Life and Transformation (ILTs): rattle lance7, shield8, stool, cigar, forked cigar-holder9, gourds of coca and other substances, gourd stands10, adze11, split-palm screen12, and maraca, each made of white crystal {NK 21, 27 and each a part of his body}. On a support made from two crossed rattle-lances, one of female bone, the other male, he places 5 sieves, spinning them round to make a layered world compared to a spherical gourd on a stand. He spreads palm-splint screens on the earth

to bring Yepa Bko, Old Woman of the Earth13, mari niko, the Grandmother of the Universe (GMU) into being. Blowing spells, GFU conjures up a stool on which he then sits, eating coca. To create people, he smokes a cigar held in a cigar holder blowing smoke and blessings over a gourd of sweet kana berries14 covered with another gourd and placed on a stand. These gourds are GMU, the earth itself. Seeing that, as a man, GFU has failed to create life, GMU takes over, blowing smoke and spells on the gourd (illustration I). Five male and two female beings, the Universe People, mari Masa {NK 22: Yep Masa, Earth People; UT 52: Thunders) come to life and emerge from the gourds: 1. Sun (Abe15); 2. Deyubari Gam16, Master of hunting and fishing; 3. Baaribo, Master of cultivated food17; 4. Buhsari18 Gam, Master of time, seasons, nature, and living beings; 5. Wanani19 Gam, Master of poison; 6. Amo; 7. Yugup.20 [35-41] Wanani creates a woman for Deyubari Gm, vomiting her up after drinking water mixed with sap from forest vines21. Like all women at that time, she has no vagina; they make her one using the cigar holders pointed end as a knife. {TG 49-51: Getting up near dawn, Abes son Kisibi vomits up two women, Pui/Diakapiro and Wisu/Yuhusio. Had he obeyed his father and got up earlier, these women would have been men, beings capable of reproducing themselves by vomiting - without the need for women, for transformation and for birth}. [143-155] The Universe People needed yag to enable the future humanity to have visions and improve their knowledge. Realising yag was in their own bones, they decide to kill and eat their younger brother Wanani Gm now under the name Mirupu. They turn him into a caimo fruit which they offer to their sisters Wisu/Amo (see below) and Yugup to eat. Yugup refuses but Wisu eats and becomes pregnant. Lacking a vagina, she is delirious with pain, her delirium being also the effects of yag. Abe cuts a vulva with his gold earring using the arms of the cigar holder as a template. As the house fills with blood, the visions of yag, Mirupu is born as Yag, his body made up of all varieties of the plant. The Universe People eat Yags head, arms and legs, leaving his denuded trunk as a penis/flute. He now assumes the name Yurupar, Master of forest fruits; his body parts are flutes, forest fruits, birds, animals and fishes.22 Yurupar later avenges his brothers shameful act by eating their sons. They, in turn, burn him on a fire. From his ashes springs a paxiuba palm which is cut up and distributed to all Tukanoans as their yurupar flutes, Yurupars bones.

Wisu and Yugup steal the yurupar flutes from the men causing the musician wren (Cyphorhinus aradus), the flutes soul and voice, to abandon its home; henceforth the flutes voice will be the breath of men. {NK 141: Urged on by Opossum who tells them that they do not need women and can emulate his own extrauterine, marsupial mode of reproduction} the men recapture the flutes from their enemies, the women. As they seize the flutes, the women also hide them in their vaginas. Wisu flees to the West and Yugup to the East. {MM 33-9; TG 70-71, Wisu becomes Amo, Mistress of feather oranments and ceremonial goods, in a house made from the moulted plumage of migrating birds. The younger sisters go to the East where they become Clothes Women who transform ceremonial ornaments into guns, motors, aeroplanes, hammocks and other manufactured objects that they send to their brothers upstream}. [163-177] GFU and Buhsari Gm decide to transform the Universe People into true human beings. GFU has two transformation gourds, one in the sky and one on earth. The Universe People fly up to the upper gourd and from there, travel via a kana vine down to the lower gourd, the Milk Lake in the East where they become fishes. They make the Anaconda-Canoe of Transformation (Pamri pino, p. gasiro)23. {MM 40-43: Sky/Sun and Earth/Moon seek help from GMU and GFU in the sky. GFU vomits up paired ceremonial ornaments onto a split-palm screen, each set corresponding to a future Tukanoan group. Sky sends two avatars down to the Milk Lake in the East. In the underworld, Earth acquires a maraca and a stool with three different designs, gaining strength and becoming Yepa Oak or Yepa diro mas, (earth flesh man). One of Skys avatars becomes Transformation Anaconda, a female snake who swallows her children, the future humanity in the form of fish}. Inside this anaconda-canoe, the Universe People travel westwards towards the centre of the world {MM 44: guided by Yepa Oak using his rattle-lance as a compass, gnomon and instrument to create rivers and paths}, accompanied by animals and fish. Made by the anacondas tongue, the river up which they travel is also a kana vine umbilical cord that nourishes them with milk and sweet juice. As they travel, the Universe People undergo a gestation, leaving animals and fish behind them and becoming diversified Transformation People, each speaking a different language and now related as cousins. After nine months of travel, they arrive at Ipanor24, the centre of the world, emerging through a hole in the rapids as fully human ancestors.

As they emerge, GFU gives them ritual goods according to their status: a ball of feather down, rattle-lances, a shield, necklaces, flutes and dance ornaments; the ancestors of White People and Mak receive nothing. GFU offers the ancestors five gourds (for future generations, blood, milk, pure air, and health), a hat and a gun (the sources of technical intelligence and manufacturing industry) and two more gourds: for white skin and for skin changing and eternal life. The Indians ancestors ate from the first five gourds but showed no interest in the rest. The White peoples ancestor eats from the five gourds, then bathes in the gourd for white skin but does not dare confront the snakes, spiders and other poisonous creatures around the rim of the gourd for skin changing. Instead he puts the hat on his head and fires the gun into the air. Angered by his pushy behaviour, GFU sends the White peoples ancestor to live in the East and the ancestor of the Mak to live in the forest, armed with a bow and arrow. The Indian ancestors now bathe in what is left of the water only enough to whiten the palms of their hands and soles of their feet. {MM 46-51: The Transformation People acquire the ILTs, now as their own bones, Wa-ari, fish bones}. [177-188] The myth ends with the dispersal of the different Tukanoan groups, an account of the internal composition and hierarchical ranking of the Desana, the distribution of ritual goods amongst them, their post-mythical history and the genealogy of the narrators own group. The sexual life of things The Italian artist Archimboldo made paintings of human heads composed of natural objects - vegetables, fruits and fishes; in their creation myths, the Tukanoans not only envisage the human body as made up of cultural artefacts but also present creation as human reproduction carried out in the modes of fabrication and assemblage. The following correspondences between objects and body parts are all evident in complete versions of the myths summarised above: stool: placenta, pelvis, buttocks; rattle lance: bone, vertebral column, penis, body; shield: placenta, skin cigar holder: penis, legs, labia25; cigar/tobacco: penis, part of vertebra; bone marrow, semen tobacco smoke: semen;

gourd: vagina, womb, stomach, heart/soul, head; gourd stand: human body, especially thighs, waist and thorax caimo & kana fruits/juice: semen, milk; coca: bone from vertebral column, semen, milk gourd & kana vines: umbilical cord; women with fruits as children yurupar flute: bone, penis, vagina feather ornaments: skin adze: tongue all ILTs: fish bones Beyond such term-by-term correspondences, some cross-references should also be noted. In the myths, the world (a gourd or pile of sieves) is supported on crossed rattle-lances that form a stand - Bs. saniro, also holder, enclosure - a term that also applies to the cigar-holder - Bs muno [tobacco] saniro. The cigar-holder has stool shaped hips (Bs isi-kumuro, buttock stool) that are often carved as paired stools separated by a gourd stand (illustration II a). Functionally stools are also stands or supports. The cigar-holder and rattle lance are both made of dense, red Tabebua wood and both have sharp points that are stuck in the ground - and used as a penis. The upper prongs of the cigar holder are also reproduced in miniature in the bone or tooth prongs on the top of the rattle lance (illustration II.b.). When seen from the side, the two roundels below that represent the Sun and Moon can also be read as either stools or gourd stands. Inverted, the cigar holder resembles a man with cigar as an erect penis. Finally, the spiral-wound cigar appears as a miniature Yurupar trumpet (see Koch-Grnberg 1909/10 I: 282 abb. 160), an object that is also bone and penis. The ILTs fall into three classes: 1). tubes: flute, cigar, rattle lance; 2). Containers: cigar-holder, gourd, shield, canoe, beer-trough, screen enclosure, feather box, feather ornaments26, house; 3) supports: stool, gourd stand. These also correspond to the major skeletal features and organs of the body; in the myth, the total human form is imagined as a cigar in a holder stuck inside a gourd supported a gourdstand and standing on a stool (see illustration III and DG: 261). In the myths, the ILTs appear in male-female pairs and some of the objects themselves form natural pairs: cigar + holder, rattle-lance + shield, flute + gourd (see Hugh-Jones 1979). If these pairings have to do with sexual reproduction, they

also displace and substitute for it for the myths present normal bodily sex as a sterile diversion from the urgent task of creation, a sign of laziness and a cause of disharmony. Instead of sex we have insemination and gestation in artefactual modes. Divine bodies made up of tubes: cigars, flutes, rattle lances - spew forth seminal breath and vitality in the equivalent registers of colour and sound: tobacco smoke, fruit juice, flute music and feather ornaments, a fertile, dangerous synaesthesia encapsulated in the figure of Yag - at once blood of parturition, coloured vision, throbbing ears, Yurupar, coloured, singing birds and coloured, biting snakes. Like manioc mash mixed with saliva, the stuff that fertilises beer (see Butt 1957), these seminal substances then fill gourds and beer troughs where fermentation culminates in new life, the Tukanoans or Fermentation/Transformation people (Pamri masa). Consistent with myths concerning creation and parenthood, it is clear then that tubes and containers stand (in) for the normal reproductive organs that the divinities lack. This substitution between artefact and reproductive organ is underscored in the spells that accompany the the divinities acts of creation. Recapitulating these acts as they sit on stool and blow smoke over gourds of coca and kana fruits, human kumus now use these same spells to manage pregnancy, birth and naming. It is only when the ancestors become fully human that they fully internalise and embody their reproductive and other organs, only then that cultural artefacts are externalised and disembodied as objects and possessions, and only then that men and women become fully distinct. This brings us to the issue of gender. From Sex to Gender If, in the myths, there is no separation between persons and things, there is also no separation between genders. Rather, a set of androgynous demiurges with overlapping identities and ambiguous kinship statuses inseminate, and are inseminated by, each other. This androgyny, latent in the fuzzy boundary between tube and container (or anaconda and canoe), is encapsulated in the cigar holder, an object that inseminates gourds and women and, by implication, the smoker as well. At once a man with an erect penis and a penis thrust between female legs or labia, the holder encompasses gourd-stand, stool and rattle lance within its own form. This androgyny also applies to normal human beings. In most respects the bodies and body parts of men and women are quite similar and the penis and vulva/vagina that we treat as diacritics are here imagined as transformations of one

another, androgynous object-organs that are simultaneously given up (flute-penis) and retained (as flute-vagina) following the womens theft of yurupar flutes.27 This same androgyny appears in the Makuna idea that women have a right-male and left-female side and that menstruation is the yurupar of the left side (rhem et al 2004: 184, 207). All this suggests that, with respect to Amerindian mythology, we should avoid reducing gender to sex and should recognise that gender, as one kind of relation, serves a device to imagine many others. Rather than seeing myths as a discourse about human sexuality in the code of material culture, a flaw in Reichel-Dolmatoffs work on the Tukanoans, it would be more appropriate to see artefacts as expressions of more abstract capacities and dispositions shared in common by men and women, albeit in different gendered modes. If womens ability to create life is primarily bodily and only secondarily artefactual in the analogous culinary processes of cooking and fermentation, the story of the theft and recuperation of yurupar suggests that for men, the terms are inverted in getting back as artefacts what women retain in their bodies, mens role in sexual reproduction plays second fiddle to their rituals of reproduction and dominance of ceremonial goods. This is the message Opossums who link flutes to their own extra-uterine, marsupial mode of reproduction (see p X above), of men who sleep too long and thus forgo the ability to reproduce solely by vomiting (see p. X above), and of women who, in stealing the ability to become pregnant, diminish the potency of the mens Gourd of Life (see note 22). As androgyny is transmuted to the ambiguities of ethnicity, the play between male and female, body and artefact, reappears in the pairing of bows with guns and of feather ornaments with merchandise. Today, men dominate all such objects but, in the myths, if bows/guns are male chosen by the male ancestors of Indians and Whites ornaments/merchandise are unequivocally female controlled by two sisters who stand for Indians and Whites. All theseobjects are ultimately forms of clothing, things made from transformed body ornaments by Clothes Women. They are signs for gendered capacities and dispositions, destruction in the case of weapons and creation in the case of ornaments and manufactured goods. Clothes are also changeable skins, things that can be taken on and off to produce transformations in being and appearance equivalent to the ecdysis and pupation of insects or the sloughing of skins by snakes. Clothing, the Clothes Women and Amo (Bs gamo), whose name means moulting, sloughing the skin, ecdysis, pupation and menstruation

(itself understood as an internal change of skin - see Hugh-Jones 1979) and whose house is made from moulted feathers, all encapsulate reproduction, transformation and periodicity. Like the feathered wings of birds, the paws and claws of jaguars, or the spiked shoes of an athlete, clothes are affects (see Viveiros de Castro 2004: 474), at once sign and substance of capacities and dispositions. From Objects to Affects In myth, divinities, prototypical kumus existing as pure spirit, act through a set of artefacts that stand (in) for absent bodies. As their blessings make clear, these artefacts are the outcomes and indices of their thoughts and intentions and signs of the capacities of the human bodies they will eventually create, a creation that moves from thought through artefact to body. Likewise, in ritual contexts, invisible ancestors are made present by assembling the ceremonial items that correspond to their body parts (see Hugh-Jones 1979: 153-4). At birth, naming, puebrty and initiation, the kumu controls bodily transitions and transformations by manipulating artefacts identified with body parts. This identity is affirmed in blessings first uttered by divinities but here the process moves in the opposite, direction away from concrete bodies and towards more abstract artefacts that serve as signs for the spiritual components of those bodies, a device that allows the socialisation of thoughts and behaviour (compare Mamaind ornaments as souls- Miller this vol.). This move from body through artefacts to thoughts, intentions and responsibilities is clear in the following extracts from a Makuna text (rhem et al 2004, my trans.) During the first stage of the life cycle, the kumus blessings relate to the maintenance of the babys stools of birth. These stools, that contain the life and thoughts of the newborn child, relate to its mothers arms and legs because it is these that give it comfort and support in its first months. The baby is not given other stools as it does not yet think about its own future; so the kumu gives it a stool of infancy, the legs of its mother. At this stage it will also have the stool of crying and tears. At the second stage of the life cycle, at puberty, the kumu changes the stools of birth for stools of thoughts; for boys these relate to yurupar and for girls to menstruation. At this time, the stool of the mother becomes prohibited; the child is isolated from the mother and takes on another life, the stool of forgetting the mother (200). Through the blessings she receives when she begins to menstruate, the young girl changes her skin and changes her childhood stools for those of thoughts, the stools of

cultivated plants, of coca, of tobacco, of manioc, of menstruation and of red paint. From this time on much of the life of the young girl will depend on looking after these stools (205). Because women are the only ones who can give life, they are considered to be the birth stools of the universe (184). When boys see yurupar for the first time, the stools of thought that are blessed are those of coca, tobacco, redpaint, yag and yurupar (215) If containers and tubes relate to more immediate capacities and processes of reproduction, these extracts suggest that stools or supports relate not just to different capacities but also to the different behaviours, competencies and responsibilities involved in human life as a whole. For the Tukanoans, as for their Witoto neighbours to the south (Pineda 1994), a stool is not just an object or part of the anatomy (see above) but also an abstract notion of support, base, foundation, location and comportment, When a newborn child is named, the kumu gives it a stool to fix its name-soul in its body; at puberty this stool is changed for a new set of stools, the gendered thoughts, concerns and responsibilities of adult life. Similarly sitting, an activity described as cooling, relaxing, and peaceful, is synonymous with learning, thought, contemplation and meditation and has connotations of stability, rootedness, and fixity. A wise person has a cool seat, an irritable person a hot seat and a thoughtless or flighty person does not know how to sit. A persons stool is thus an aspect of their character. Stools are also an index of rank and authority, things reserved for men of higher status, the dancer and the kumu. The kumu sitting on a stool (Bs. kumu-ro, kumus thing) is a gourd filled with knowledge and wisdom who travels between the layers of the cosmos with smoke as mediating breath and stool as clouds and sky resting on mountain-legs (see Beksta 1988). Sitting in a canoe (Bs. kumu-a), the kumu also travels in horizontal space in a vessel whose counterparts is the beer trough (kumu-a hulia, canoe section), the Anaconda/Fermentation-Canoe. In short, and as the myths suggest, stools and gourds are not only objective forms of shamanic knowledge but also objectifications of human life and capacities, not just buttocks and wombs but also hearts, souls, heads and minds. The myths also suggest a theory of mind and agency in which thoughts, designs and intensions are given material form in the objects that such intensions produce. A theory in which a diversity of artefacts connotes not only different body parts but also different bodily

capacities and dispositions controlled, regulated and inspired by different areas of self-discipline and responsibility. Making and self-making In Tukanoan society, technical and symbolic competence go hand-in-hand. The ability to make objects is a mark of adult status, leaders and ritual experts are typically expert craftsmen, and the objects they make are the hallmarks of a particular civilisation. If people are progressively built up and socialised as assemblages of objects, so objects may socialise people. Girls undergoing puberty seclusion spend their days making things pottery whilst initiate boys are trained to make basketry. This training is as much moral, intellectual and spiritual as it is technical for sitting still and making things are forms of meditation. Post-initiation is also the favoured time for more knowledgeable adults to make feather ornaments and other ritual objects, a dangerous activity whose female counterpart is the production of red paint: both involve the seclusion and dietary restrictions that mark bedise, a bodily state akin to that of menstruation. The seclusion, fasting, and other bodily regimes that follow first menstruation and initiation are processes of transformation in which the body is trained to make objects of beauty and is itself made into an object of beauty. Beauty is a social not natural quality: natural materials such as feathers only become beautiful when they have been transformed, a socialisation of nature that parallels the way that the making of things and the wearing of ornaments socialise the body. The recursive relation between bodies and objects is manifest in the decoration of ritual objects in the manner of bodies: the same designs are applied to baskets, to the skin of dancers and to the stools they sit upon. The same relation is also underlined in spells and other shamanic discourse concerning training, discipline and socialisation where the subject is portrayed as an artefact - a solid, contemplative stool or a basket that is progressively filled with knowledge, wisdom and responsibility 28. Making things is thus self-making and the mastery of technique a mastery of the self. Possessions - Gaheuni Human artefacts are referred to as Bs. gaheuni29 and distinguished from living creatures and plants but, above all, gaheuni are the ILTs. In mythological terms, the ILTs are not human productions at all but divine bodies existing as bone and crystal,

substances, whose qualities of hardness, durability, scarcity, whiteness, purity, brilliance and luminescence all emphasise their otherworldly nature. In more human terms, gaheuni are quintessentially highly crafted objects made from fine hardwoods and decorated with intricate painting, engraved designs and delicate featherwork. The few who know how to make such things are deemed to possess special gifts. Gaheuni are thus items of wealth and objectified forms of shamanic knowledge whose value condenses labour, know-how and controlled power. Many of these valuables are heirlooms that connect their owners to the known past of previous generations; all of them connect to otherworld of ancestors and divinities. They, their names and the names of their owners are collective group property that signal group identity and embody its vitality, spiritual powers and potency, items quite similar to the Kayap nkrtch (see Turner this vol.). They are accumulated and displayed as inalienable possessions but were once the prime object of inter-group raiding and occasionally enter into prestigious exchanges. They thus have connotations of alterity, primarily that of divinities and dead ancestors and secondarily that of other peoples and affines. As animals have degrees of animality,with jaguars occupying pride of place, so objects have relative degrees of materiality. These hierarchies of subjectivity and value also correspond to the social hierarchies of rank and prestige that are a characteristic feature of Tukanoan society. Members of the higher-ranking clans typically control sacred ritual paraphernalia. Like their possessions, such people are big, beautiful and heavy, more material than the less substantial commoners (compare Turner ibid). As immaterial possessions that define Tukanoan clans or house (Hugh-Jones 1995) language and names are also gaheuni. Likewise, material valuables come attached to mythological pedigrees that are recited when the objects are displayed and that serve to differentiate apparently similar objects as the body parts of different group ancestors. We have already met this verbalisation of things and materialisation of language in the synaesthesia of colour and sound, the identity between tobacco smoke, flute music, and feather ornaments mentioned above. As I have shown elsewhere (Hugh-Jones 2006), names and ornaments are like two versions of the same thing, both of them manifestations of soul. Thus feather ornaments and the name-soul are both described as a second body, and naming at birth also confers a protective covering or barrier (Bs kni oka) made up of invisible artefacts, split-palm screens

and shields. Artefacts are the material traces of thoughts and intentions as name and spirit point to artefacts. In Andrellos words, in the Tukanoan case objectification is the same as personification(2004: 240). Clothing and Merchandise Manufactured goods are also gaheuni but here again some are more so than others. In historical times, at the top of the hierarchy were guns, swords, machetes and axes, potent tools and weapons also used as items of dress and adornment alongside glass beads, clothes, silver coins and mirrors. There were also bibles, images of saints, calendars and letters patent, paper items treasured more as potent objects in their own right than as materials to be read. Coming from far away peoples and places and possessed with extraordinary qualities and efficacy, White peoples objects were also considered as things not made but which simply existed - and to some extent they still are. Today, this hierarchy is giving way to one of electrical and electronic goods and the land titles and other bureaucratic documents involved in dealings with the state. In addition to their control of ritual goods, it was typically high-ranking individuals who controlled trade with White people, who were appointed as chiefs by the colonial authorities, and who received the hats, swords, epaulettes, medals and letters patent that went with such appointments (see also Andrello 2004; ch. 4). Today too, there is still a strong correlation between traditional rank and status and occupancy of positions of leadership in indigenous organisations and local government. As gaheuni, ancestral heirlooms and White peoples goods are alternative versions of the same thing, objectifications of capacities, powers and knowledge that come in two different but complementary forms. This is suggested by the notion that the world of the dead is like a White peoples city, a place with street lights and abundant wealth and by the fact that Stradelli, an C19 Italian explorer of the Vaups region, was believed to have obtained money and wealth from the regions mountains and rapids, the transformation houses of the Tukanoans ancestors (Andrello 2004: 233-4). The point is also clear in a series of mythic choices and permutations. In the case of yurupar, women had to give up flutes to men but retained them in another bodily form - flutes are thus the objective material correlates of womens reproductive capacities. This incident then results in a differentiation between two sisters, one becoming Amo, the Mistress of Dance Ornaments who lives at the headwaters where Indians live, the other becoming the Mistress of Clothing who lives downstream

where White people live. Clothing, a metonym for all merchandise, is an exotic version of moulted feathers and the shed skins of insects and snakes, the objective, material correlates of menstruation and reproduction, capacities encapsulated in the name Amo, chrysalis/menstruating woman. Finally there is a fatal choice that determines the difference between White people and Indians. This choice is presented in three different registers: a bath that determines skin colour, a choice between the weapons, and a choice between items of clothing. These registers suggest that the difference should be understood as simultaneously physical, technological, behavioural and moral. One reading of all this would thus be that women and White people stand together as thieves who stole goods, powers and capacities that rightfully belong to men. The other would be that, in their use of ancestral heirlooms and White peoples merchandise, men are appropriating, in object form, the powers and capacities of those in the position of potent Others: women, enemies or potential affines. Separations and continuities In Amazonian mythology there is typically no separation between humans and animals. After the appearance of sex, death and time, humans and animals become separated in this world but remain united at the level of spirit or soul in a parallel world of myth where human culture is the norm. If this is also true in the rest of their mythology, what is striking in Tukanoan creation myths is that objects appear to take up the space normally occupied by animals. People and thing are not separated, we see a profusion of different artefact-body parts, and instead of an elaborate external differentiation of animal species, animals are reduced to the single term fish, a generic category of which aquatic fish are the prototype, the anaconda is the Master or hyper form, and land animals (Bs wai bkra, mature fish) are a sub-species. In this scheme of things, objects also play a key role in the differentiation between men and women (flutes), Indians and White people (weapons, clothes), humans and fish (ornaments). We have discussed men / women and Indians / Whites above. Following Andrello (2004: 367 ff.), let us now turn to humans and fish. After a journey, at once a gestation, childhood and socialisation, the ancestors emerge from a hole, a birth and initiation. As they emerge, they abandon their fish skins and put on ornaments. Appearing towards the end of the story, ornaments are the final additions that allow the ancestors to achieve a fully human status, external

skins added to internal organs that figure as stools, gourds, flutes, etc. It is precisely these ornaments that serve to demarcate the ancestors from fish and to underline their new, definitively human status. They underline this transformation because, from the perspective of the divinities, ornaments are themselves people. Humans are thus doubly human: they clothe their bodies with goods that are not just aspects of persons, their skins, but also persons in their own right. This means that Tukanoans are different from both animals and other peoples not only in their own eyes but also in the eyes of the divinities that have tried so hard to create them. They are Real People (Bs. masa-goro). This foregrounding of objects ahas knock-on effects on the relations between humans and fish. If people see themselves as human and fish as fish, fish too see people as humans and not only as predatory animals. Because fish are jealous of humans and resentful at having failed to make the grade, they seek to drag humans back down to their own level by making them ill and dragging their souls down to their own aquatic houses. Thus Tukanoans hold Fish-People (Bs wai masa) responsible for the most of their illnesses and afflictions (see also Lasmar 2006, Cabalzar 2006). From the human side, to see fish as human would be to go along with these plans, an invitation to sickness or death. So rather than a transitive or affinal relation between people and fish where each sees the other through human eyes we have a linear, non-reciprocal relation between fishes, humans and divinities which appears to correspond both to an emphasis on hierarchy and to creation in the idioms of fabrication and parenthood. But affinity is not entirely absent from the picture. Tukanoan creation myths move from the universal to the particular, from alterity to identity, and from potential affinity though real affinity to consanguinity. More concretely, they move from major generic divisions between (1) men and women, (2) humans and fish, and (3) Whites and Indians, then deal with the differentiation of the Tukanoans into affinally related groups end with the genealogy and ranked internal divisions of each. In the earlier stages of the myths, women, fish, and White people all figure as hostile enemies. From these virtual affines humans appropriate spiritual powers and capacities objectified in flutes, feather ornaments, exotic names and White peoples clothing. In the middle stages, these generic powers and their material correlates are divided between different Tukanoan groups, as their ancestral inheritance and inalienable heirlooms. These Real People, related as real affines of the same general

kind, order their lives by exchanges of sisters and ritualised exchanges of goods. Some of the items we have met above yag and beer, coca and tobacco, stools and gourds figure prominently in these exchanges. Flutes and feather ornaments, inalienable objectifications of group spirit and potency, are more typically displayed than exchanged, their display being an affirmation of both power and rank. But when they are exchanged, the groups involved enter into a special kind of ritual or spirit alliance (Bs. hee teny ancestral affine) as if they had exchanged sisters - or as if goods and people were equivalent and substitutable. If this is not quite bridewealth there can be little doubt that, for the Tukanoans, objects can also be subjects and persons. At the end of the myth, these same goods underwrite internal differences in rank and status. At the level of groups, such goods are the prerogatives of highranking clans and part of a politico-ritual system that allows them to dominate lower ranking groups. At the level of individuals, power and influence go hand in hand with control of sacred property - and of White peoples merchandise, technology and learning. Tukanoan culture and society thus displays two complementary tendencies. At the level of shamanism, these two tendencies are those of the kumu or priest and the yai or jaguar-shaman (see Hugh-Jones 1994). The former is concerned with vertical, hierarchical relations of divine creation, lineal transmission and ancestry and controls relations between the living and their ancestors by processes of personification and objectification. The prototypes of the kumu are the Grandparents of the Universe sitting on their stools blowing out tobacco smoke, the creator divinities that figure throughout this discussion. The latter tendency is more concerned with horizontal relations, a more typically Amazonian domain that is the focus of a different, complementary body of mythology where humans and animals intermarry and exchange perspectives on equal terms. And here, as for the Sanuma and Mamaind (Guimaraes, Miller, this vol.), objects figure not as divinities whose human creations were once fish but rather as of the body parts of birds and animals who were once people In these other myths and as Viveiros de Castro would predict (2004: 477-8), the origins of cultural institutions are indeed explained as borrowings of prototypes possessed by animals, spirits and enemies - i.e. taking. Virtual affinity and transfers from enemies also figure in Tukanoan creation myths (see above) but here they are set

alongside themes of creation in the bodily and artefactual idioms of parenthood and fabrication i.e. making. I suggest then that, as in the case of the physical and symbolic elaboration of their architecture (Hugh-Jones 1995), the physical and symbolic elaboration of the Tukanoans Instruments of Life and Transformation and the parental idioms of creation that these artefacts imply, are part and parcel of the Tukanoans hierarchical, lineal character. References Andrello, G (2004) Iauaret: transformaes sociais e cotidiando no rio Uaups (alto rio Negro, Amazonas). PhD thesis, University of Campinas. rhem, K et al (2004) Etnografa Makuna, Gothenburg/ Bogot. Barbosa, M et al (2000) Upperi Kalsi. So Gabriel da Cachoeira. Beksta, C (1988) A maloca Tukano-Dessana e seu simbolismo, Manaus. Butt, A (1957) The Mazaruni scorpion, Timehri 36: 40-54. Cabalzar, A (2006) Peixe e gente no alto rio Tiqui, So Paulo. Candre, H & Echeverri, J-A (1996) Sweet Tobacco Cool Coca, Dartington. Collier, & Rosaldo, R (1981) Politics and gender in simple societies in S. Ortner & H. Whitehead orgs. Sexual Meanings. Cambridge. Cornelio, J.M (1999) Waferinaipe Ianheke. So Gabriel da Cachoeira. Diakuru & Kisibi (1996) A mitologia sagrada dos Desana-Wari Dihputiro Pr. So Gabriel da Cachoeira. Fulop, M (1954) Aspectos de la cultura Tukana: cosmogona, Revista Colombiana de Antropologa 4: 123-64. Hartman, (1975) Sitzbank und zigarrenhalter, Tribus 24: 137-56. Hugh-Jones, S (1979) The Palm and the Pleiades. Cambridge (1988) The gun and the bow: myths of white men and Indians. L'Homme 106-7: 138-156 (1994) Shamans, prophets, priests and pastors, in N. Thomas & C. Humphrey (eds.). Shamanism, History and the State Ann Arbor. (1995) 'Back to front and inside out: the androgynous house in NW Amazonia, in J. Carsten & S. Hugh-Jones eds. About the House. Cambridge.

(2001) The gender of some Amazonian gifts: an experiment with and experiment in T. Gregor & D. Tuzin eds. Gender in Melanesia and Amazonia. Berkeley. (2006) The substance of Northwest Amazonian names in G. vom Bruch & B. Bodenhorn eds. The Anthropology of Names and Naming. Cambridge. (Ms) Brideservice and the absent gift. Koch-Grnberg, T (1909/10) Zwei Jahre unter den Indianer, 2 vols. Berlin Lasmar, C (2005) De volta ao lago de leite. So Paulo. Maia, M & Maia T (2004) s yksmia maske. So Gabriel da Cachoeira. McCallum, C (1988) The ventriloquists dummy? Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23, 3: 560-1 McEwan, C, et al (2001) Unknown Amazon. London. Miller, D ed. (2005) Materiality. London, Routledge. ahuri (Miguel Azevedo) & Kmar (Antenor Nascimento Azevedo) (2003) Dahsea Hausir Pora uksehe wiophesase merbueri turi, So Gabriel da Cachoeira. Overing, J & Passes, A (2000) The Anthropology of Love and Anger. London. Pineda, R (1994) Los bancos taumaturgos, Boletin del Museo de Oro 36 :3-41. Rivire, P (1984) Individual and Society in Guiana Cambridge. Tram Bayar & Guahari Ye i (2004) Livro dos antigos Desana-Guahari Diputiro Por. So Gabriel da Cachoeira. Umsin Panln Kumu & Tolamn Kenhri (1980) Antes on mundo no existia. So Gabriel da Cachoeira Vincent, M (1987) Mascaras. Objetos rituais do alto Rio Negro, in B. Ribeiro coord. Suma etnolgica brasileira. Petropolis Viveiros de Castro (1993) La puissance et lacte: la parent dans les basses terres de lAmrique du Sud. LHomme, 126-128 XXXIII (2-4): 141-70. (1996) Images of nature in Amazonian ethnology, Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 179-200 (2004) Exchanging perspectives, Common Knowledge 10, 3: 463-85. 7561 words.

1 2

For a very different picture, see McEwen et al 2001. On this see Hugh-Jones forthcoming. 3 See Viveiros de Castro 1993. 4 See Umsin Panln Kumu & Tolamn Kenhri 1980 (UT), Diakuru & Kisibi 1996 (DK), ahuri & Kmar 2003 (NK), Maia & Maia 2004 (MM), Tram Bayar & Guahari Ye i 2004 (TG). 5 See also Cornelio et al (1999), Barbosa et al (2000) in the same collection. 6 Based on the text in DK with relevant page numbers in []. Variants and additions, in {}, are from the sources in note 5 above and use the shorthand references therein. Orthography for indigenous languages has been standardised and simplified. Tuk, Des and Bs refer, respectively, to the Tukano, Desana and Barasana languages. 7 An approx. 2m. long staff decorated, at one end, with feather mosaic, engraved designs of the sun and moon and two bone or teeth prongs. Above the other, pointed, end is a bulbous maraca-like swelling that contains small crystal pebbles. Used as a musical instrument to mark divisions of time in major rituals (see Koch-Grnberg 1909/10, I: 345-6, abb. 219-221). 8 Accompanies the rattle lance (see Koch-Grnberg idem: 344, abb. 218; 346, abb.221). 9 See Koch-Grnberg idem: 281-2, abb. 159-60 10 Hour glass in shape; made from a bundle of split palm splints (see note 12 below) bound in the middle and twisted, with the splayed ends then woven in position with Heteropsis vine (see Koch-Grnberg idem: 266, abb. 145). 11 See Koch-Grnberg idem: 350. abb. 225. 12 Made from the split trunk of the Iriartella setigera palm - also used to make blowpipes (see Koch-Grnberg 1909/10, II: abb. 18, 19) Used to construct fish-traps and temporary compartments for the seclusion of young men at initiation and young women at menarche, to isolate officiating shaman-priests during major rituals and as a mat on which to lay objects to protect them from dirt. Called par in Lingua Geral. Yurupar, the name of the NW Amazonia mythological hero, decomposes into iuru-, mouth and par, enclosure, trap. 13 Also Yepa Maso, Earth Woman, the Grandmother of Transformation (MM 21); also Romi Kumu, Woman Shaman (Hugh-Jones 1979). 14 Fruits of Sabicea amazonensis and related species of vine that grow in abandoned clearings; a key ritual item (see C. Hugh-Jones 1979: 126) 15 Muhihu (Tuk) or abe (Des) is a composite sun/moon. In Tukanoan mythology, Sun and Moon sometimes change roles (see Hugh-Jones 1979: 272-3). Sun and Moon are also ancestors of the Desana (Sky/Day People) and Tukano (Earth/Night People). This, and the affiliation (Tuk/Des) of the narrator, will affect who is specified and in what order (as EB vs. YB). 16 Deyubari from (Tuk.) deyu-, to limp? (Des) Gam, (Tuk) ak, glossed as God by Tukanoans, could also be glossed as man of bone (compare the Wakunai Ipirrkuli, he inside of bone see Hill, this vol.). (Tuk) Yepa Oak is (Bs). Yeba Hak; hak, father is phonetically and semantically close to oak. 17 His body is made up of all varieties of manioc and cultivated plants (NK 19) as Yurupars body is made up of forest fruits (NK 42) and ancestors of White people are sometimes described as having bodies made up items of Western merchandise. 18 (Des, Tuk) buhsari = ornaments. 19 (Bs) wanari is the aquatic darter bird (Anhinga anhinga). 20 Variants: A. NK 34-5: GFU creates 1. Moon, Yepa Oak/Muhihu; 2. Deyubari Oak, 3 Wanani Oak; 4. Yupuri Basebo (i.e. Baaribo); 5. Buhtuiari Oak, Master of nature; 6 Amo; 7 Yupak (probably Yugupo see above in text) and three other women. B. MM 22-23: 1. GMU creates mkoho-mas, Sky Man (Desana ancestor i.e. Sun) and Yepa-mas, Earth man (Tukano ancestor i.e. Moon). C. TG 29-30: Thunders daughter, impregnated by Baaribo (see footnote 22 below), gives birth to 1. Yurupar; 2. Sun; 3. Moon; 4. Kri; 5. Buyar; 6. Wehetero; 7. Kri Pino Maku; 8. the EB of the Diroa; 9. Goamgoro (true god); 10. Butari Goam, Master of laziness; 11. Deyubari Goam; 12. Suribo Goam, ancestor of White people and Master of merchandise; 13. birds with coloured feathers used to make ornaments. D. UT 54-6: GMU creates five thunders followed by Yeba Goam. She decorates his rattle lance with feather ornaments to create the Sun. He then creates the layered universe. 21 Tukanoans use the pulverised cortex of various vines (Bs somo misi, soap vines) as cleansing vomifacients. 22 Variants: A. TG 241-2; 261-3: To create yag, Kisibi, S of Sun and Deyubari goam give their Zs coca impregnated with yag. The yag impregnates the EZ via the egret-bone tube used to ingest coca. She gives birth to Yag but this proves unsatisfactory. Later, they give her caimo-fruit juice impregnated with Yag that dribbles to her vagina. She gives birth to Yag. His umbilical cord becomes a coral snake, he becomes various other snakes and his placenta becomes a ceremonial shield. B. MM 57-61: Sun and Moon have a Gourd of Life containing coca and guarded by creatures with special reproductive powers: they can change their skins (poisonous insects) and carry their abundant young in bags on their stomachs (spiders). Using the gourd, a cigar and cigar holder, the brothers try in vain to emulate the creatures reproductive powers. Their two Zs, created when the men vomit water mixed with vine sap (see above in text), smoke the cigar and eat from the gourd. This

gives them the power to reproduce through pregnancy but diminishes the powers of the cigar and gourd. The women become pregnant but lack vaginas. The men give them blessed caimo juice to drink; a falling drop indicates where their vaginas should be. Using the cigar holders legs as a template and its point as a knife, the men make their vaginas. The EZ gives birth to Yurupar; the YZ gives birth to birds with coloured feathers, to snakes and to Yag. C. UT 65; 115-6: The EZ, pregnant from a cigar, gives birth to Yag who is Yurupar; the YZ, pregnant from coca, gives birth to birds with coloured feathers. D. TG 29-30: Making a vagina (also referred to as a gourd) for Thunders D with his cigar holder (bone for multiplying made from his right rib) and his metal earring, Baaribo inseminates her with coca and tobacco smoke. She gives birth to the Universe People - see note 20 above. 23 (Tuk) Pam- to emerge, to surface, to ferment. Thus the anaconda-canoe is also the canoe-like trough (Bs kumua-hulia, canoe section) in which beer is brewed. 24 On the Uaups river close to Brazils frontier with Colombia. 25 For the elders, the arms of the cigar holder represent the labia of the vulva. (with) the cigar as penis held in the labia to give rise to the Universe People. The sperm is like the juice of the Caimo fruit DK 23, fn, 18. 26 Note that Amos house (= container) is made from feathers and that (Bs) hoa, feather, fur, hair is also bag. 27 See also Hugh-Jones 2001 28 For comparable Witoto ideas see Candre and Echeverri 1996: 49. 29 Gahe-, other, -uni, thing(s)