THE AESTHETICS OF PRODUCTION: THE SENSE OF COMMUNITY AMONG THE CUBEO AND PIAROA Joanna Overing

Aesthetics in the modern West has been disentangled from most other realms of activity; it has been separated out from religion, from the moral and the political, and from the domain of knowledge and truth. We tend to place art on the side of genius: it is an asocial activity, not of the everyday nor pa.rtaking of the practice of it. As Gadamer notes,1 we are influenced by Kant's refashioning of moral philosophy, a task that purified ethics from all aesthetics and desire. Kant also limited the idea of k n o w l e d g e to the theoretical and practical use of reason, thereby excluding aesthetics from both. In so doing, he also removed the activity of aesthetic judgment in the area of law and morality from the center of philosophy, and he thus excluded the notion of sensus communis, or "sense of community" (a concern once general to Western philosophy and an inheritance from Roman philosophy) from his formulation of the domain of aesthetics. In this paper I shall use Vico's use of the concept "sense of community "2 as the sense of the right and the general good that is acquired through living in community and which is related to its specific structures and aims. As such, it has both a political and moral meaning, and embraces an aesthetics, and indeed a metaphysics, of action as well. The contrasting view of aesthetics as an autonomous realm (yet another alongside religion, science, economics, politics) tends to be our inheritance in the social sciences; although in anthropology we do have a weak "anthropology of art" which says, weakly, that other peoples, in contrast to us, do not separate art, its activity and its judgment, from its use. Despite such an obvious insight, we have barely begun the process of f o l l o w i n g t h r o u g h the implications, both theoretical and practical, of such an entanglement
Joanna Overing is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, London. Dialectical Anthropology, 14:159-175, 1989. 9 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in ~e Netherlands.

of the everyday with aesthetic judgment and activity. It is my argument in this essay that for us to understand what "the social" is for the amerindians of the South American rain forest, we must return to our former understanding where aesthetics was not the autonomous category it is today, but a political and moral one. It is only when we reintegrate aesthetic judgment with the morally good and the morally bad, and both judgment and morality with productive knowledge and activity, that we can begin to say sensible things about the economy, the polity, and the social philosophy of these peoples. For instance, for the Piaroa, a people of the Orinoco Basin, production itself was viewed as a creative activity that was either beautiful or ugly, and as such social or asocial, domesticated or dangerous. Behavior that was beautifully controlled was understood to be conducive to the creation of community, while ugly excess was not. Beauty for the Piaroa was then a moral notion, having to do with both the morality of personal relationships and the use of productive forces. Aesthetics, in the broader sense of its meaning, where beauty is seen as an expression of moral and political value, becomes critical to an understanding of their everyday social life and of their own everyday judgments of it. Although we do not have a particularly good record in our ethnography for expressing the amerindian view of the social, or their sense of community, the work by Goldman on the Cubeo is an obvious exception to such a judgment. In all of his writings, Goldman insists that we take seriously the understandings of the people we study, 3 and with The Cubeo he gave us an ethnography that captures well a particular Amazonian sense of community. I shall say more on his success shortly. In general, however, it can be said that the amerindian sense of community is difficult for us to understand: it is alien not only to many trends in Western social and political thought, but also to

160 our own well e n t r e n c h e d c a t e g o r i e s in anthropology. The most relevant bias for the purpose of this paper is that of hierarchy: anthropologists tend to understand structures of h i e r a r c h y or i n s t i t u t i o n s of coercion and subordination much more easily than they do structures of equality or institutions of cooperation and peace. Peter Riviere describes well 4 our difficulties in understanding egalitarian aspects of the social and political organization of amerindian societies of lowland South America, and particularly those of the Guianas. In the Guianas there are no warrior societies, no formal council of mature men, no moiety organizations for the playing out of community life, no age sets, no descent groups. In other words, there exist few mechanisms for corporate group decision-making, whatever the topic at hand. Thus ethnographers have frequently described these peoples, and lowland amerindians in general, in terms of what they lack, and not of what they have and what they say. When one attempts to describe their informality through ordinary anthropological vocabulary, they appear to have no community organization whatsoever. Informality can, however, be a political creed, a social and aesthetic value. As Clastres noted with respect to the commonly found amerindian refusal of institutions of coercion and subordination, "it is imperative to accept the idea that negation does not signify nothingness; that when the mirror does not reflect our own likeness, it does not prove there is nothing to perceive. ''5 Clastres was speaking of the disassociation in the amerindian societies of the lowlands of leadership and institutions of coercion. It is my suggestion that the so-called "looseness of structure" that often results not o n l y has its p o l i t i c a l i n t e n t , but a moral/aesthetic one as well. To understand this point, it is necessary for us to comprehend the social sense of the amerindians, their sense of community. But as I have noted, to do so is a difficult task. In contrast to the trend in Western political and sociological thought that equates "the social" with the constraint of a collectivity and with relations of domination, 6 lowland amerindians, in their political theory, tend to insist upon the opposite, where 'the social" (at least in its positive sense as expressed through the relationship of community life) is viewed as the means through which people can actively prevent the establishment of relations of dominance. However, the assumptions of the discipline, especially those on "the collective other," can disorient the unwary ethnographer. It is therefore my suggestion that the egalitarianism of many lowland amerindians -- their aversion to coercion and to relationships of subordination, their disdain of both "social rule" and collective decision processes, their attitudes toward property and work, and their insistence upon personal autonomy, yet attachment to community -- can be understood and translated by us only if we first explore their particular sense of the social. Their institutions of equality, their sense of community, and creation of it are, after all, constitutive of one another; thus the argument seems an obvious one to make. It is also the a r g u m e n t that Goldman reiterated time and again in his ethnography of the Cubeo. in The Cubeo, Goldman unfolds for us the reality of amerindian village life for those who experience it and form it -- the inhabitants of the c o m m u n i t y . As my own understanding of amerindian values and metaphysics advances, a slow process over the years, I am increasingly impressed with the ethnographic sensitivity of Goldman, who over two decades ago told us in very straightforward manner what the basic principles of Cubeo social life were. Although highly unfortunate, it is also i n t e r e s t i n g that the extent of G o l d m a n ' s accomplishment has been somewhat overlooked in lowland amerindian studies. Perhaps it was necessary for structuralism to play itself out before we could understand the import of Goldman's work. Also, it is once again fashionable to speak of the social construction of emotions, and the relation between values and social action. Thus we can only now realize the courage of Goldman, and appreciate it, for taking the Boasian stance that he did in the midst of the age of isms, evolutionism, functionalism, structuralism, etc. For Goldman to understand the Cubeo as well as he did back in 1963, and their understanding of the proper relationship between the individual and the

161 community, it was necessary for him to shed a good deal of intellectual baggage from both anthropology and the Western scientific tradition in general. I shall refer again to some of this baggage below. For now, I shall quote his concluding remark in The Cubeo, where he explained their egalitarian values and their related lack of interest in economic expansion as in large part products of their own decision and choice, rather than the result of external forces:
Much of the form of a culture represents a style of life that need not, indeed cannot, be explained simply in terms of function, equilibrium, or adaptation. A style of life then must be studied in its own terms since it too is part of the diversity of nature. 7

Goldman's argument was that the Cubeo values of and rhetoric on emotional spontaneity and personal autonomy (the expression of their "sense of community") were constitutive of their economic actions, and as such played a participatory part in their explanation. For instance, the Cubeo economy was not a matter of an "inhospitable environment," but of values solidly held. They were a people who preferred emotional comfort over material advantage. I shall first summarize Goldman's description of the Cubeo sense of community (what he summarizes as their "style of life"), which was a political and moral understanding of the founding of community that pertains to the sphere of what I shall refer to as "productive (or aesthetic) knowledge." I think it is probably the case in general that amerindians have such a category of knowledge that relates to a theory of work and creativity: in their understanding it is productive or a e s t h e t i c k n o w l e d g e that a l l o w s for the maintenance of community and provides the creative force for its continuity. The Cubeo category of productive knowledge has its obvious political side: for them it refers not only to the capabilities that allow for the use of resources of this earth, but also to those that allow for tact, or the capabilities for getting along peacefully or s o c i a b l y w i t h o t h e r p e o p l e in e v e r y d a y relationships. It would be my argument that the particularistic description of Goldman of the Cubeo

"style of life" can be extended to many other amerindian peoples. 8 Since I cannot in this essay unfold the full ethnographic support for such a contention, I shall concentrate on the Piaroa case to show that their sense of community and structures of equality are in many ways similar to those of the Cubeo. At first glance, if the analysis is through normal anthropological categories of social organization, the Cubeo and Piaroa may look very different from one another. Typical of the North West Amazon groups, the Cubeo have phratries, sibs, virilocality, and a "hierarchy" of statuses played out in ritual; while typical of the extreme informality of the Guianese groups, the Piaroa keep to the minimum the ways in which expression can be given socially to group differences and distinctions. 9 Even the Piaroa moieties pertain to an afterworld asocial existence, and to a thisworldly social life. However, my point is that these more obvious (to the anthropological eye) features of social organization which reflect difference are s u p e r f i c i a l c o m p a r e d to t h e i r r e s p e c t i v e understandings of the social, which show a clear similarity. Goldman himself makes the same judgment when he states the priority for the Cubeo of both personal and community autonomy (the political values of informality) over the principles of sib and phratry organization. As an aside, the obverse case can be made in a comparison between the Piaroas and their neighbors, the "fierce" Yanomami: while the social organizational features of the two groups are very alike, they contrast considerably in their respective "sense of community." In t a l k i n g a b o u t the Piaroa sense of community, my concern will be to explore further the strong and initial insights of Goldman on Amazonian production and community life by focusing directly on the area of the "aesthetics of production," an important aspect of Piaroa productive knowledge and therefore of their metaphysics of community and its egalitarian structures. It is important to note at this point that there are hierarchical aspects to the social organization of all amerindian groups, and my emphasis here on equality is rooted in the argument that, for the Amazonian groups,

162 hierarchy must be understood through the more encompassing institutions of equality, and not vice versa. widespread among tropical forest groups of the Amazon, and as Clastres has expressed it, 14 "if there is something completely alien to an Indian, it is the idea of giving an order or having to obey..." One area over which each Cubeo individual had sovereignty was over his/her own labor. No Cubeo could be coerced to work, and while headmen could direct certain collective work by men, no one had jurisdiction over the work of women. 15 Nor could one demand the products of another's work: each crop belonged to the one responsible for its growth. 16 Although the Cubeo stressed their autonomy with respect to work and the products of work, labor was not disassociated from the ties of c o m m u n i t y . They p r i v i l e g e d s h a r i n g and generosity as personal characteristics which bestowed status. Generosity and sharing, both values of community, were linked to the assertion of individual rights; for one acquired respect by giving away what one owned, especially of economic utility. 17 Goldman remarks that the Cubeo had almost a total lack of anxiety about the loss of property. 18 What this particular mixture of the valuation of community and the valuation of the individual entailed for the Cubeo was a disassociation of political and economic advantage. For them, food and production symbolized "the amity of the highly knit sib community. ''19 According to Goldman, the corollary was that the total economic product was divorced from the consideration of status and power. In his words,
The Cubeo cannot think of economic advantage as a political advantage over others, and, conversely, they cannot regard the economic advantage of others as a threat to their own autonomy. Economic equalization through the various formal channels of distribution is taken for granted.20

T h e S e n s e of C o m m u n i t y of the Cubeo: Collectivity, the Management of Mood and the Pleasure of Work
In daily living, according to Goldman, the Cubeo expressed the apparent opposites, a high valuation of both individualism and collectivism; but when collectivism loomed too largne, the Cubeo were quick to assert autonomy.'~' Goldman clearly understood that in the Cubeo sense of community there was an equal valuation of community (the desire for "linkage" with people) and personal autonomy. His stress upon the complementarity of community and personal autonomy in Cubeo social thought is evidence of one area where Goldman was able to shed the baggage of Western social thought: the antipathy between the principles of community and personal autonomy is salient to a major strand of Western individualism. In this Western argument, all other ages and places give high valuation to the c o l l e c t i v i t y , and t h e r e f o r e to relations of subordination. With this logic and the rhetoric supporting it, individualism, with its emphasis upon freedom and equality, could only therefore be a modern Western phenomenon. 11 The amerindian views the social as the means of keeping relationships of subordination at bay, understand the relationship between freedom and the community in a different and more positive light, where it is only through personal autonomy that the social can be achieved. In this view, the social is not given priority over the individual, nor vice versa. In contrast, a modern Western understanding of morality carries with it the notion of the moral individual outside of society. 12 Such a stress on disengagement would be totally alien to amerindian individualism. The ways in which the Cubeo expressed personal autonomy were many, but the most obvious was their distaste for orders and commands. As Goldman reports, 13 "in Cubeo social life.., one neither commands nor submits." This is a political desire that is p r o b a b l y

The critical difference between the poor and the wealthy community was not, therefore, a matter of productive accumulation, but one of morals. 21 Nevertheless, the Cubeo view that the community with high morale was the wealthy one was based on a firm sense of reality; for it was only through the construction of high morale that

163 collective activities, and indeed all work, could be smoothly carried out or carried out at all. Probably the most innovative insight of Goldman on a m e r i n d i a n s o c i a l life, and the key to understanding it, was his sensitivity to the strong insistence by the Cubeo upon psychic comfort, or tact, in their social relationships, and especially in those entailing cooperation in work. Goldman observes 22 that "all collective enterprises of the sib, such as hunting, fishing, foraging, and housebuilding, require a mood of geniality." Without it, the sense of collectivity weakens. On the level of individual realtionships, the dissatisfied wife produced less to eat. 23 It probably can be said in general about the lowland amerindian sense of community that in it work is a matter that must cater to individual desires, talents, and dispositions. In the Cubeo understanding of the social, then, production was dependent upon the creation of high public morale,24 which makes good sense if culturally the members of the community refused to enter into c o m m a n d and o b e d i e n c e relationships and worked (in accordance with a value on personal autonomy) with only the minimum of direction. The most important role of leadership became the establishment of high morale among the members of the community, which carried with it the creation of comfort on the material level. Such a value on material comfort must, at the same time, be placed within the context of the Cubeo assessment of materiality and their lack of interest in material abundance for its own sake.25 A c c o r d i n g to G o l d m a n , each social relationship for the Cubeo demanded a specific atmosphere of feelings, sentiments, and emotions, the implication of which was that in the successful creation of a Cubeo community, its members had achieved a "spontaneity of cor,,respondence between emotion and action. 26 Again in Goldman's words, 27 "to the Cubeo nothing of consequence can result from an act divorced from its proper mood." For instance, men worked on housebuilding only when they felt cheerful and dedicated: 28 the most productive work was that which brought pleasure, work that carried with it an air of the spontaneous. From a political point of view, collectivity -- and the work demanded for its existence -- became a matter of the politics of mood m a n a g e m e n t , and not one of the establishment of institutions of hierarchy and relationships of domination and subordination. For the Cubeo, the latter solution would have been asocial, and therefore contrary to their sense of community. We are speaking here of an ethics of sociality. The Cubeo understanding of high morale was attached to a particular sense of morality that places high value upon relationships of harmony and cooperation. The personal autonomy that they desired was not a free-for-all individualism where anything could go. Goldman stressed the great tact of Cubeo adults about criticizing, intruding, or imposing upon others, and the acute sensitivity they had for one another's moods, their tolerance for the bad moods of others. Privacy for self and others was important to their sense of community, which included the moral dogma that one must not intrude upon the feelings and moods of others. 29 This sense of privacy was not that of the modern West, for the Cubeo value on privacy was one that pertained to the domain of emotions and personal dignity, and not to the world of property and personal possessions. I have described elsewhere 30 the first lessons of Piaroa children when the community leader taught them the art of living, the wisdom of leading a tranquil life and how to go about achieving it. Basically, the children were taught what in our own moral philosophy are called "the other-regarding virtues," those that enable one to take responsibility for one's actions towards others, rather than the "self-reqarding virtues" such as ambition, talent, courage. 31 From Goldman's descriptions, the Cubeo's understanding of a person's autonomy and his/her obligations to respect the autonomy of others sounds very similar to the Piaroa case. The Piaroa leader also taught the children about social deficiencies, especially those of ill-nature, arrogance, envy and malice. The Cubeo stressed greed, for the excessive behaviors that they most loathed were gluttony, which they viewed as unfriendly, and non-sharing, which they saw as pathological. 32 For both the Cubeo and the Piaroa, personal

164 autonomy was at base a highly social notion, a point that is central to their understanding of work and the productive process in their respective sense of community. Work, for the Cubeo (and for the Piaroa), was not, as it is in the West, alienated from the personal relationships of community and their morality. In summary, there was a connection in the Cubeo sense of c o m m u n i t y between the personal relationships of which community is comprised, production and wealth, the pleasures of work, an ethics of tact, and their high evaluation of personal autonomy. It was necessary for the political leader to take all this into account in his role as the creator of high morale. Tact, respect for the feelings of others and others for self, was clearly considered to be an aspect of productive knowledge for the Cubeo. Work was to be pleasurable, and a product of desire; it was not a realm set apart from either the personal or the social. Rather, both intensely personal and social, work was both a product of pleasurable social relationships and a creator of them. It was action that fulfilled the desire to provide for self and the desires and lives of others -- of children, spouse, and other members of the village. 33 Through such work a proper community and linkage with others could be created and maintained. The two, work and social linkage, were seen to be constitutive of one another. Without the tranquil relationships of good community life, one could not work; and without work, one had no community. In other words, work, including or especially the daily maintenance of life, was not understood as drudgery: that is a Western notion, or a product of relationships of domination and subordination. In principle, the Cubeo worked when cheerful; for them, all effort was to be i n h e r e n t l y s a t i s f y i n g , 34 as a p r o d u c t of pleasurable social relationships. The important point that Goldman understood about amerindian social and political organization, and the philosophy of sociality that supported it, was that the very fact of people living together in community was dependent upon the daily creation of high morale among its members, and not upon the establishment of laws, rules, and corporations. This is one good reason for the Piaroa and the Cubeo to look so much alike once the "exterior" form of social organizational features is removed. Since linkage to others for both the Cubeo and the Piaroa remained (insistently) on a more informal plane and was to a large extent considered to be subject to personal preference, the group stayed together only so long as its members and its leaders achieved and retained geniality of relationships. 35 In contrast to peoples who believe that their communities have temporal existence through such mechanisms as the corporate ownership of property and the jural rules of such corporation, neither the Cubeo nor the Piaroa u n d e r s t o o d " c o m m u n i t y " and the relationships of which it was comprised as a political given that allowed for continuity through time, but as a process of existence that had to be daily achieved by individuals through tact and work. The political choice was one that opted for daily physical and emotional comfort rather than for the more abstract stability that past and future inheritance, with its rules and regulations, entails. 36 For many amerindians, work is also a creative c a p a b i l i t y , a m a n i f e s t a t i o n of productive knowledge, that confers human status, and through it one can create possessions, 37 such as ornaments, the material means for transforming the e a r t h ' s r e s o u r c e s f o r use, and the transformations themselves (e.g., garden produce, cooked food). As I shall indicate below when speaking about the Piaroa, ornamentation and the capabilities for work were not disassociated. Beauty on a person spoke of the beauty of his/her creative capabilities and skills for work lodged within the person which allow for personal autonomy. The use, however, of such beautiful creative skills for work was only possible within the context of the social: they were an aspect of social action, and their p u r p o s e was in fact the production and reproduction of the community -made explicit in enjoyable personal relationships. The tact necessary both for productive knowledge and for the creativity of production carried with it an aesthetics that related both to production (its p l e a s u r e s ) and to the m o r a l i t y of social relationships (their pleasure). In brief, we can refer to it as a "social aesthetics," a critical element of an

165 amerindian sense of community, or the domain of productive knowledge that in the amerindian understanding allows for the building and maintenance of community. Goldman, in his ethnography on the Cubeo and his emphasis in it on the Cubeo values of extreme tact in personal relationships and the pleasure of work, lead us to this area of social aesthetics, which I now wish to develop. choice was proclaimed c o n s t a n t l y in daily conversation -- and to the anthropologist asking about their "rules." It was up to the individual to choose or not to choose to follow the proper ways of doing things, and it was very bad manners to comment directly in a negative manner upon a decision of another, whether with respect to food, work, residence or sexual habits. Even correct marriage (about which I have written 39 as the one social-organizational institution of community life among the Piaroa that the anthropologist might easily categorize) was a matter for extremely loose interpretation; and no marriage was considered to be proper if all parties involved -- parents, parentsin-law, bride and groom -- did not agree to it. Again, there was no "residence rule," but relatives with whom it was good and also correct to live: the final choice was left to the individual or marital couple. The same can be said for the reckoning of specific kinship ties, often a tortuous decision for an individual to make. 40 Daily work was loosely organized and as such usually reflected the personal moods and preferences of the individuals involved. The work of another was never taken for granted. The right to preference referred both to the personal choice of co-residents with whom one found it most congenial to spend time and to the type of task itself. It was usually several years after marriage before a young married couple cooperated together in the clearing of garden: it was time and desire for caring for their children that led them to this task. If one did not find congenial the kinsmen with whom it was normal to cooperate at least partially, for instance a father or mother, one lived elsewhere in another community. Men especially tended to "specialize" in work that they enjoyed most; some men hated hunting, thus made artifacts instead, or fished. Other men hunted daily. As for the Cubeo, respect for the moods and preference of others was for the Piaroa an essential aspect of their sense of community. If a person misbehaved in an uncontrolled way so as to be a continual nuisance to others, s/he was advised by a kinsman or community leader (its ruwang) to undergo a cure with the leader, who had shamanic powers, to discover the external cause of the person's lack of control. The cure was

T h e A e s t h e t i c s of W o r k a m o n g the Piaroa, or Productive Knowledge The values of personal autonomy and community
Since I have written at considerable length elsewhere on the informality of Piaroa social life and upon their extreme value on tranquilityQ in personal relationships within the community, ~'U I shall here summarize only a few obvious points to make the comparison clear, I shall then speak at greater length below on their aesthetics of work. The values of community that I shall discuss held specifically for the Piaroa village, the physically isolated and large communal house, which was a semi-endogamous, residential group that was fairly a u t o n o m o u s as an economic, kinship, and ceremonial unit. The same values of amity held only partially for the political territory, the largest social unit in Piaroaland, which was normally comprised of six to seven of the highly dispersed multiple-family communities. The territorial population, however, resided together in the house of its leader for three months of the year during the great Piaroa increase ceremony, the Sari. During this festival, the aesthetics of community life and its related work that I describe also applied to the u n i t e d m e m b e r s of the t e r r i t o r y , w h i c h approximated 350 people. What is more, the festival could only be presented by the territorial leader if such values of community could be achieved for the whole. Typical of Guianese amerindians, the Piaroa played out community life in a highly informal manner, and, as with the Cubeo, they insisted on personal autonomy while at the same time placing high value upon the social. The right of personal

166 then a private matter between the ill one and the community, while garden products and artifacts were privately owned by the individuals whose work produced them. There were no mechanisms, such as groups of elders or adult men, for corporate decision-making over disputes or economic matters; thus sovereignty with regard to most daily action was largely in the hands of individuals. A woman not only owned the garden produce that she herself produced, but neither the community nor a husband had legal rights to her progeny in the case of divorce. As part of her individual productive capabilities, she was responsible for her own fertility. As important as it was for any Piaroa to dwell in a large community, no Piaroa recognized the legitimacy of the power of the "collectivity." The notion that a "whole community" might have rights over one or that one must submit to a decision forthcoming from a "general will," or that one's morality would be imposed from above by the community, would have been abhorrent ideas to the Piaroa. 41 The use of such powers of coercion would be judged as asocial and politically illegitimate. As with the Cubeo, the Piaroa insisted on the rights of the individual and at the same time placed high value upon the social relationships of community. To be social was considered by the Piaroa to be the most valued characteristic of humans living on this earth; but such sociality was not a s s o c i a t e d by them with a notion of "collectivity" and the political powers with which it might be endowed. Rather, the creation of the community and its sociality could only be done through the skills and the personal autonomy of individuals. This daily work of the creation of community action was made possible through what I have referred to above as "aesthetic knowledge," an area of knowledge for the Piaroa which entailed both 1) the creative skills of production (or those powers that enabled one to transform the earth's resources for use) and 2) those skills that led to the creation of tranquil relationships with those whom one lived and worked. In their theory of agency, the use of these two sets of skills separated humanity of today (and perhaps the Piaroa alone) from all other agency in the universe, past or present. The ornaments work by the Piaroa and the designs painted on them that

ruwang.
The affluent community for the Piaroa was the one that could take into account on a daily level both flexibility in schedules of work and individual preferences for the specific tasks themselves; as for the Cubeo, affluence was a matter of achieving personal comfort in work, and not of productive accumulation. Such affluence demanded the creation of community that had both the high morale and the size to allow for such flexibility and cooperation. When I was with the Piaroa for my first fieldwork with them in 1968, individuals remembered with horror how hard they had to work when they were not members of larger communities; the older people dreamed of the time in the past, before the disease epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s, when Piaroa communities were larger. A very small community of 15-20 people simply did not have the membership resources to allow for personal choice and mood in the carrying out of all the duties required for daily survival -- the fishing, the hunting, the collecting of food and firewood, the gardening, the preparation of game and garden produce, and the ritual necessary for daily protection. The successful leader was the one that managed to attract sufficient people into his community who could amiably cooperate on a daily basis, and who then was able to maintain such high morale within it. It was only through high morale that comfort in work (the definition of affluence for the Piaroa) could be achieved. Although he had extraordinary powers through his powers of wizardry vis-a-vis worlds outside the social, the leader of a community (its ruwang) had very little power of coercion over the acting out of social matters. It was he, in fact, as the knowledgeable teacher of the ethical values of personal autonomy, equality, and tranquility, who taught formally against such coercion. For the Piaroa, coercion had no place within the context of the everyday work of community members; they were as allergic to the idea of "the right of command" as to the notion of "social rule." No person could order the work of another; and on a daily basis all products from the jungle were shared equally among members of the

167 made them beautiful spoke of these related skills of sociality and productivity. powers, so too are the forces for chanting; for it was through them that the Piaroa leader, the ruwang, brought into the community from the abode of the gods all powers for life and productivity. Because they came from the gods, all such productive powers, including a woman's fertility, were therefore labelled by the Piaroa as wizardry (maeripa).43 Individuals received these capabilities gradually through their lives, and often at their own request, as they felt they personally could achieve mastery over them. A person's productive powers were stored within his/her internal "beads of life," which also came from the crystal boxes of the gods. The ruwang, through his chants and travels to the abode of the gods, brought the forces for productivity enclosed within "beads of life" into this world and placed them within the individuals of his community. These beads were called "the beads of life" (kaekwaewa reu) because they designated the force for the "life of the senses" (kaekwae) within one which enabled one to have desires. Productive and other knowledge contained within them was in contrast called one's "life of thoughts" (ta'kwaru). The quantity of necklace beads worn by a person indicated the quantity of internal beads of life s/he had thus far acquired. Thus, the amount of beads worn in d e c o r a t i o n told of the degree of capabilities owned by the person wearing them: the great ruwang/eader and the woman with several children were ladened with them. The Piaroa associated beauty with creative abundance and fertility: to wear many beads conferred beauty; the gods who were the source of productive powers had many names, and were therefore beautiful; the house of the gods, filled with each type of edible food, had many names, speaking of their beauty, the good visions of wizardry that a ruwang had when under the influence of hallucinogens were beautiful ones, and they were also highly productive -- they were visions of increase that replenished the jungle of plants and animals. All of the forces for production within the crystal boxes of the gods were beautiful and concretized as such: inside the box of curing, chants of the fertility goddess, Cheheru, was the beautiful light of her songs, along with a long cord of beads that had all the colors of the rainbow,

Beauty and C r e a t i v i t y : Beads of Knowledge and the Crystal Boxes of the Gods
Outward beauty in Piaroa aesthetics is a manifestation of the beauty of the productive skills and moral capabilities that are lodged within the person. Elsewhere I have described Piaroa ornamentation, but toward a different end;42 thus some of the ethnography is worth repeating here. For ornament the Piaroa wore necklaces, leg and arm bands made of beads or cotton, depending on gender, and various face and body paints. All such ornamentation illustrated on the surface of the body the protective skills contained within the person. The Piaroa used a deep red dye (k'eraeu) for body and face painting, the designs of which they applied with carved wooden stamps. The women also applied black leg and arm designs made of a resin dye. These face and body markings of men and women were specific pictorial representations of the transformational forces or creative capabilities held within their bodies, serving as its inner clothing. The stamped body markings of w o m e n r e p r e s e n t e d t h e i r k n o w l e d g e of reproduction, and were called "the designs of menstruation"; while the markings of men spoke of their productive knowledge of hunting, fishing, chanting, curing and protecting. Men's face designs were also called "the paths of beads" or "the path of the words of the chant," indicating the specific knowledge of chanting; the design was the path, or the order, of the words and chants. Some of these designs were seen by Piaroa men when under hallucinogenic trance, particularly during an increase ritual. They were also the designs of their twilled basketry. The beautiful baskets made by Piaroa men which carried these designs of "the path of words" were used by them for the storage of items of ritual value, such as their drug kits, drugs and combs. It was through use of combs that the forces of their productive thoughts were "kept in order." Just as the forces for gardening, hunting, fishing were understood as productive

168 while another fringe of beads hung down from her hammock; her crown of toucan feathers lay on a rafter. Within her crystal box of hunting prowess were her beautiful amulets and her necklace of medallions, and within all of her boxes of power were many beautiful waterfalls. Abundance alone, however, did not lead to beauty: beauty was always tied to the notion of moderation in the use of creative capabilities. Piaroa ethical standards conjoined the social and the morally good with the clean, the beautiful, and the restrained; while asocial behavior and wickedness were tied to dirt, ugliness, madness and excess. 44 In Piaroa cosmogony, productive f o r c e s w e r e in t h e i r o r i g i n both wild and poisonous; and today, if one did not achieve mastery over these dangerous productive forces taken inside one, one would be led to excessive (ugly) behavior and madness. Thus, the Piaroa notion of productive knowledge carried with it a theory of beauty and ugliness that had its moral and political side. In other words, within the context of moral and social action, productive knowledge became broadened to aesthetic knowledge. when freshly bathed, thus cleansed, and wearing ornamentation, their body designs and beads of life. It is important to note that the products of one's labor -- a child, a comb, a garden, a blowgun -- w e r e l a b e l l e d as o n e ' s a'kwa. B e a u t y (a'kwakwa), thoughts (ta'kwaru) and the products of work (a'kwa) were linguistically linked. Powers that were especially evil came from the immoderate heat and light of the sun, and circles or rains of rust stained by the sun's force and filled with madness fell from the sky to poison one. An unscrupulous hunter could take powerful hunting poisons or charms from vulture down, sky rust, center-of-the-sky down, all of which were filled with the fierce force of sun down. Such a hunter, one who took such powers, would be poisoned by the bright force of the sun into a state of paranoia and ugly behavior. But all productive forces were potentially evil in use. The creator god of these productive forces during mythic time was physically ugly, mad, evil and foolish in action. The source of his capabilities to use and transform resources of the earth -- to garden, to hunt, to cook -- were the poisonous hallucinogens given to him by the supreme deity beneath the earth. He also used the poisonous powers of the sun to increase the force of his capabilities. The tremendous powers he created constantly poisoned his desires (his "life of senses"), and thus he was the archetypical asocial being of mythic time, a predator and cannibal. He never married, but rather gleefully committed incest and ate his potential affines. The poison of his powers eventually affect all other gods of creation time history. Mythic time was a time of rapid technological development, when the means for using the earth's resources were created, and because of the poison of the forces that allowed for this creation, it was also a period that increasingly became characterized by the violent competition over the ownership of new technology and the resources which it made use of. While at first the gods were more or less peacefully able to acquire such resources and the forces for productive activity through marriage and exchange, these forces became too multiple and strong for the gods to master their potency, and slowly they poisoned the

The Beautiful and the Ugly: a Theory of the Social and the Asocial
The P i a r o a d e s c r i b e d the g o o d and p r o d u c t i v e p o w e r s of w i z a r d r y as not only "beautiful," but also as "clean," and "fresh": it was the clear yet moderate light of the moon, in contrast to the strong light of the sun, that was designated as "the precious light of wizardry." The light of the moon, its clear, fresh light without color, was the light of the words of the ruwang's lifegiving and life-protective powers, or his productive capabilities. The moon-lit water within the crystal boxes of song and wizardry owned by the gods was clean, clear and fresh, and it was with this water that the ruwang each night cleansed and beautified the words of his chants. All of the contents of the crystal boxes of the gods remained beautiful because these ethereal beings, through a pure "life of thoughts" (ta'kwaru), continually cleansed their powers. A woman was beautiful (a'kwakwahu), and a man handsome (a'kwakwa),

169 wills and desires of those who received them. As time went on, the characteristics of greed, arrogance, anger and lust made impossible the m a i n t e n a n c e of peaceful c o m m u n i t y and intercommunity relationships. All of the creator gods began to steal and then murder for access and ownership of ever more powerful forces for transforming the resources of the earth; and then they began to murder and cannibalize for the ownership and the control of the domains themselves. All relationships developed into those of predator and prey, and the creation of a peaceful community life became impossible. This creative period of history ended when all transformational forces for production were thrown out of this world into a new and stable home in celestial space: these powers are those that are housed today in the safety of the crystal boxes of the present-day gods discussed above. It is highly significant that the ethereal, celestial gods who today own all these productive forces have no "life of the senses" to be so poisoned. They cannot therefore use the powers they own, but rather with all the force of their "life of thoughts" they cleanse and beautify them. A Piaroa who took an excess of productive forces from these gods beyond his/her capability to master, would not be able to cleanse them of their poison; and therefore, like the creator god of these powers and later all creator gods, the person's "life of senses" would become poisoned, and s/he would suffer madness and act unsocially. 45 It was for this reason that the Piaroa insisted on the gradual and the limited acquisition of productive powers from the gods. And it was because access to these creative powers were limited to them that the Piaroa could in present day time create and maintain the social community, an accomplishment impossible for creation time beings. In the Piaroa aesthetics of sociality, the social side of cleanliness, beauty, and the restrained -- all signs of the mastery of the productive forces within one -- was manifested through the individual's capability of maintaining harmony in one's relations with others. This is a people who respected tranquility in a man more than his prowess in hunting. The asocial sides of dirt, ugliness, and excess -- signs of productive forces within one still poisoned by monstrous and fierce sunlight -- were the negative qualities of madness, greed, quarrelsomeness and arrogance, aspects of character the Piaroa most abhorred. Unless one kept the productive forces within one in control, one could not live socially in community. The Piaroa explicitly associated excess in the use of resources of this earth with illegitimate social and political power: the boxes of power owned by the made and evil creator god of forces for using resources were called "the boxes of domination and tyranny." In the Piaroa theory of sociality, the asocial person tried to dominate his neighbors, compete with them, thieve from them, and even to eat them. The uncomfortable ontological dilemma with which the Piaroa were faced was that of how to prevent this from occurring in everyday life; for the Piaroa conceived of their very means of living and fulfilling their material needs as basically predatory capabilities (the ability to hunt, to garden, to transform food for civilized eating and, indeed, reproduction). There was, then, a strong sense of violence (and for them ugliness) attached to their understanding of the category of productive capability. The "spirit of songs" within the ruwang was also the "spirit of hunger" and the "spirit of j a g u a r ' s b r e a t h " ; w h i l e the spirit of the hallucinogen, yopo, within him was the "spirit of battle." In short, p r o d u c t i v e powers were poisonous transformational forces of predation, and, as such, forces for the conquest and domination of others. The second dilemma for the Piaroa was that the beads of life that contained the poisonous knowledge and capabilities were also dangerous. They were the source that endowed the individual with the wild forces for the "life of the senses" which enabled one to breathe, to want sleep and water, to desire food and sex. Traditionally, the beads of ornamentation worn by the Piaroa were made from a special granite that the Piaroa said was the outcropping of faeces of the most powerful and dangerous deity of the universe, the tapir/anaconda whose dwelling was beneath the earth. For safe and therefore social usage, both the life of the senses and productive capabilities had to

170 be cleansed of their danger, and it was for this reason that the gods gave the Piaroa the cleansing power of the moon. It enabled one to rid both the beads and the forces of productive capability within one of their respective wildness and poison. This is why the ruwang cleansed and thereby beautified each night his beads of knowledge and the words of his chants: he rid them of their wildness and their poisonous, predatory madness. The process of cleansing the beads of the dirt of the t a p i r / a n a c o n d a ' s feces and productive knowledge of its creator god's poison made them beautiful. Aesthetic knowledge is, then, productive knowledge beautified, and therefore civilized. The beauty of Piaroa ornamentation referred not so much to the beauty of productive forces per se w i t h i n o n e , b u t to o n e ' s m a s t e r y of transformational capabilities were not considered beautiful unless cleansed of their venom and their predatory violence. The amount of knowledge was for naught without its careful mastery, and the person who took productive skills beyond his/her capability for mastering them became ugly, at least morally speaking. The social side of cleansing (and beautifying) was the mastery the individual achieved over both his/her "life of senses" and productive capabilities through the other aspect of one's "life of thoughts," one's ta'kwakomenae. One's "life of thoughts" (ta'kwaru) is made up of two components, both of which come from the crystal boxes of the gods. 46 The productive forces for material existence (one's ta'kwanya), formed one part of the "life of thought," while one's social capabilities and moral aptitude formed the other (one's ta'kwakomenae). The totality of one's ta'kwaru (both ta'kwanya and ta'kwakomenae) would form a person's aesthetic knowledge. Ta'kwakomenae gave one the capability for making personal decisions, and it was therefore one's personal choice how one developed it: one's virtuous action toward others was a matter of personal decision. A rough gloss of the category would cover will, responsibility, consciousness, intentionality, rationality; and it was lessons in ta'kwakomenae that a leader first gave children, long before they began to incorporate within themselves the dangerous forces for production and reproduction. Once a mastery of sociality was achieved, one could then gradually, through ta'kwakomenae, begin to master the strong forces for work. B e a u t y f o r the P i a r o a w a s a s o c i a l accomplishment, tied to reason and the control of emotions. Through ta'kwakomenae one achieved mastery over both social and productive behavior, a process that beautified both behavior and the self. Productivity and moral action, then, belonged for the Piaroa to the same aesthetics; in their aesthetics of morality, an aesthetics of the body spoke of an aesthetics of work and sociality. It was an aesthetics that also entailed a particular sense of community, which explains why the social could only be achieved through the personal autonomy of individuals. Ta'kwakomenae, one's mastery of sociality, was, then, in inimitable amerindian logic, also one's personal autonomy. In other words, as a transcendental fact, the weight of acting socially was placed in the hands of the individual, and not with the corporate group or collectivity, or with a political leadership. This was why the assertion of personal autonomy, "cha'kwakomenae" ("it is my way, my decision"), was the most frequently expressed phrase in the everyday life of the Piaroa. The Piaroa social principles of personal autonomy and egalitarianism were religious facts w h i c h , as such, stated the m e t a p h y s i c a l prerequisites for sociality. The creation of political hierarchy, that situation where stable relationships of domination become institutionalized, has as its minimal prerequisite the possibility of endowing the collectivity with power -- with power overt resources and their use, over labor and the products of labor. In Piaroa ontology, productive forces, their ownership, mastery and use, could be a matter of individual ownership, mastery and use. The dark side of such a social philosophy, with the particular ontology that supported it, was that any notion of "the social," at least in the strong sense of its meaning, was limited to relatively small social units, where a milieu of social intimacy could be c r e a t e d . One c o u l d not t o t a l l y trust relationships outside the boundaries of such intimacy not to become the predatory and

171 cannibalistic ones of jaguar and anaconda. The idiom of cannibalism was all-pervasive in Piaroa thinking about relationships, whether about the relationship between gods of the past, between them and humans, between humans and animals, and finally between humans, and especially between affines (not living with one another) and between Piaroa and all other people. 47 Outside the safety of the moral, n o n - c o m p e t i t i v e relationships of community life, there was at least the potentiality, even among fellow members of the political territory, of "the other" becoming one's predator and enemy. Only the social relationships created within the community were not potentially savage ones, and it was for this reason, for instance, that a young person longed for the endogamous marriage, for a partner from within his/her own community. Such a choice was aesthetically based. These characteristics, with which neither I nor Goldman would disagree, lead him, however, to classify such economies as "structures of underexploitation" and, as such, asocial and, at their base, on the side of nature. The primitive DMP, he says, 50 supports the philosophers' "man in isolation," their "man in nature." Unity (the social) can be created only to the extent that kinship and political mechanisms are able to overcome the anarchic and dispersal force of the DMP, where the greatest challenge becomes that of getting people to work more, and more people to work. The anarchy about which Sahlins is speaking is not social or political anarchy, but the anarchy of nature. He argues that "economically. primitive society is founded on an anti-society, "51 and in order for society or a social state to be achieved, the "economic defects" of the Domestic Mode of Production must be overcome. 52 Kinship morality and the political power of the chief, for instance, through institutions of hierarchy and alliance could overcome the anarchy of the DMP. The economic values of a u t o n o m y and equality must be undermined before the social can be created. 53 Basically, Sahlins is equating structures of egalitarianism with a state of nature, asociality, and underproduction; in contrast, he places structures of hierarchy through which surplus can be produced on the side of the social. In the end, this is an ethnocentric stance, a common one in a n t h r o p o l o g y , that goes against the very ethnocentrism that he attacks -- the equation of progress with degree of productivity. 54 More important, in his delineation of a DMP he misses the possible complexity of the category of productive knowledge that is often associated with such economies, where work is part and parcel of social r e l a t i o n s h i p s and an aesthetics of community. Other's ideas and judgments about "the social," "their sense of community" and work as a category within it, can be very different from Sahlins' essentially Western (and anthropological) view and judgment. What Sahlins views as the anarchy of nature, the Piaroa and the Cubeo understood as the highly desirable social state to be achieved. The primary political goal of these amerindian communities was the achievement of the social, but such sociality --

The Piaroa "sense of community:" aesthetic knowledge and the creativity of maintenance
Goldman, as I noted above, said of the Cubeo that collectivity was dependent on the daily creation of high morale, and it was good mood management that led to high productivity within the community. In their understanding of the social, work was properly a highly social and pleasurable matter. Productive accumulation was not the goal of the community, but rather the daily creation of high morale which allowed for productive and social comfort. Sahlins, in Stone Age Economics, categorizes such "economies" as "domestic modes of production" which, although affluent, are anarchic in organization. And so they may be. He says that "the DMP has all the organization of so many potatoes in a certain famous sack of potatoes, ''48 and he notes that the p r i n c i p a l r e l a t i o n s of p r o d u c t i o n in such economies take on "a modality of the intimate. "49 Thus, the unity of society is sacrificed for the a u t o n o m y of the d o m e s t i c group and the producing individual. He then argues that the DMP is, therefore, refractory to the exercise of political power and the enlargement of production.

172 in accordance with their "sense of community" -was d e p e n d e n t u p o n both the e c o n o m i c a u t o n o m y of the individual members of the community and the creation of high morale among them. The economic goal of such achievement was indeed that of "Chayanov's rule: ''55 as the community grew with respect to its working capacity, the less the individuals in it had to work. This is in contrast to Sahlins' vision of the productive (and social) community, where through relations of hierarchy resources, labor, and their products would be exploited to their fullest. For the Piaroa, they alone of all agents in the h i s t o r y of the universe c o u l d a c q u i r e the capabilities of sociality. The gods of the mythic past, w h o o w n e d t o o m a n y p o w e r s f o r transforming the earth's resources for use and wealth, became maddened by their powers and thus they could never maintain the social relationships of community life. The creation time history of the creator gods was a period of rapid technological development, characterized by violent competition over the ownership of new technology resources. While this use of power by the Piaroa creator gods are those that we might judge as conducive to progress and liberation in our human, social realm, it was the Piaroa judgment that it was misuse, conducive of tyranny and c a n n i b a l i s t i c behavior, and t h e r e f o r e destructive of the social. What we would see "as natural" in human history, the Piaroa saw as "barbaric." The Piaroa recognized two types of history, and therefore two types of creative processes: 1) the cumulative history of creation time, when demonic creative forces of progress were let loose on the earth, free for the taking; and 2) the noncumulative history of present-day time, where creativity was seen as a daily battle against the return of cumulative history enacted by the mad and greedy creator gods. The creation of this noncumulative history (and the social work which was its aim) was dependent upon the skills and the personal autonomy of individuals. Because this earthly world was depleted at the end of mythic time of all its poisonous creative powers, in p r e s e n t - d a y time p r o d u c t i o n and its social relations could only be achieved and continuously recreated by individuals carefully taking limited amounts of power to do so from the gods. Piaroa leaders, the ruwatu, took more productive skills within themselves from the gods than normal people, and they therefore had greater responsibilities than laymen for the work of building the community. Without the work of the ruwang, the community could not be created, and because of his greater creative powers, 56 he was also the m o s t p r o d u c t i v e m e m b e r of the community. And because his productive capacities within the community were often dependent upon his destructive skills outside it, it is not surprising that in Piaroa political theory the great weight was placed upon constraint over the ruwatu, rather than over ordinary people. The daily achievement of community was due not only to the endless creation of the ruwang leader, but also to that of all adult Piaroas, as they used and m a s t e r e d their t r a n s f o r m a t i o n a l abilities. 57 This mastery gave them the capacity to reproduce and to transform the earth's resources for use. It was the obligation of the individual to achieve the proper balance of forces within the self that would allow him/her to live a tranquil life within the community, and thereby help to create it. The social and productive world could neither maintain nor regenerate itself without human beings constantly recreating it through will and cultural capability. As with the Cubeo, the social was considered to be a daily achievement. The creativity involved was a creativity of maintenance, a value that fit their aesthetics of community life, and the egalitarian structures that could build it. As with the Cubeo, the creation of emotional comfort was valued over the creation of material advantage. It was not a creativity that values the creation of new forms or an expanding economy to which new technology could lead. The violent and competitive creativity of the creation period was too wanton and dangerous for the p o s s i b i l i t y of an e s t a b l i s h m e n t of a moral community; thus the social for the Piaroa was an endless act of resistance to a return to the particular type of creativity and cumulative historical process that was embodied in the mythic time of creator gods. The creativity of "today" time, which is manifested in the achievement of the

173 community, of individuals living, reproducing, and working peacefully together, was therefore and antidote to past wantonness, a prevention of the return of a past and wild historical process prohibitive to the achievement of a tranquil and productive sociality. We are the people who conjoin history and evolutionary process, and who go on to identify the latter with "progress," "the good," and "the creative." Because we value progress, we tend to see those who do not condone our sense of "historicity" as belonging to static and therefore uncreative societies: they do not change; they do not "progress" to ever "higher" technologies. They have "developed" only "subsistence techniques" and therefore have not achieved our state of progress where yesterday's rarity is today's cliche. We would find it difficult to comprehend an a e s t h e t i c s t h a t v a l u e s the c r e a t i v i t y of maintenance. We tend to define creativity in terms of past shackles, and thus the creative act is seen as an act of liberation which frees the artist from the constraints of old style. Such a notion of creativity is part and parcel of our own social philosophy of revolt against the past, and against community. The Piaroa valuation of creativity had nothing to do with a social philosophy of rebellion, but instead it was about the achievement of past possibilities given to them. We would find it difficult to comprehend the aesthetics that values such a creativity of maintenance, and within our own f r a m e w o r k of a e s t h e t i c s would find more understandable the creativity of the Piaroa mythic past, which would be conducive of progress and liberation in our human, social realm. This is the creativity that the Piaroa judged as conducive of cannibalism and therefore as destructive of the social. They would be strongly opposed to participating in the development of what Sahlins sees as "the social." The sociality of both the Cubeo and the Piaroa did demand more or less the type of economy that Sahlins describes as his DMP, but the anarchy with which it was associated was a highly moral and political vision that carried with it a particular aesthetics of acting in the world.

NOTES
1,

2. 3.

4.

5,

6.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), pp. 35-39. See especially the discussion by Gadamer, ibid., pp. 19-24. See, for example, Irving Goldman, The Cubeo (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), p. 294; Irving Goldman, The Mouth of Heaven (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1985), pp. 14, 209. Peter Riviere, Individual and Society in Guiana (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1984), p. 4. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), p. 12. As a clear example of this trend in Western thought, see Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Louis Dumont, "The economic mode of thought in an anthropological perspective," in P. Koslowske (ed),

Economics and Philosophy (Tubingen: J. C. B.

7,

8.

Mohr, 1985), p. 252. Goldman, 1963, op cit, p. 294. See, for example, the following works: Jonathan Renshaw, The Economy and Economic Morality of the Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco (Ph.D. thesis submitted, University of London, 1986); Peter Gow,
The Social Organization of the Native Communities of the Bajo Urubamba River, Eastern Peru (Ph.D.

thesis submitted, University of London, 1987); Cecilia McCallum, Gender, Personhood and Social
Organization amongst the Cashinahua of Western Amazonia (Ph.D. thesis submitted, University of

9.

London, 1989). See Joanna Overing, "Styles of manhood: an Amazonian contrast in tranquility and violence," in Signe Howell and Roy Wills (eds), Societies at Peace (London: Routledge), pp. 79-99.

174
10. 11. Goldman, 1963, op cit, pp. 274-275. For example, see Dumont, 1977, op cit; Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, Bryan Turner, Sovereign Individuals of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 2. See Dumont, op cit, p. 8; and Charles Taylor, Human A g e n c y and Language: Philosophical Papers, 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 33. It was Gow's contribution (op cit) to understand the relationship of work and desire in Amazonian thought and the importance of this relationship to the creation of community. Goldman, op cit, pp. 67, 87. Goldman, op cit, pp. 279-283; also, on the Piaroa, see Joanna Overing Kaplan, The Piaroa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). Given such a social philosophy, the communities were not so fragile as might be assumed. Piaroa communities had a normal time span of 20-40 years. Goldman, op cit, p. 75. See Overing Kaplan, 1975, op cit; Joanna Overing, "Personal autonomy and the domestication of the self in Piaroa society," in G. Jahoda and Joan Lewis (eds), Acquiring Culture: Cross-Cultural Studies in Child Development (London: Croom Helm, 1988); and Overing, 1989, op c/t. E.g., see Overing Kaplan, 1975, op cit. See Overing Kaplan, 1975, op cit; and Joanna Overing, "Today I shall call him "Mummy": multiple worlds and classificatory confusion," in Joanna Overing (ed), Reason and Morality (London: Tavistock, 1985), op cit. See Overing, 1989, op cir. Compare John Renshaw on the groups of the Paraguayan Chaco, 1986, op cit; 1988, op cit. Joanna Overing, "There is no end to evil..." (1985), op c/t; 1988, op cit; and Joanna Overing and Myron Kaplan, "Los Wothuha," in Jacques Lizot (ed), Los Aborigenes de Venezuela, vol. 111, (Caracas: Fundacion La Salle de Ciencias Naturales, Monte Avila Editores, 1988). I am using the term "wizardry," rather than "sorcery," because the powers of the wizard are considered to be generally used for benevolent rather than malevolent purposes. See Overing 1988, op cit. See Overing, 1985, op cit. See Overing, 1985, op cir. For a fuller discussion on aspects of "ta'kwaru," see Overing, 1985, op cit; Overing, 1988, op cit. See especially Joanna Overing, "Images of cannibalism, death and domination in a non-violent society," Journal de la Societe des Americanistes, /..XX/I(1986), pp. 133-156. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 95.

12.

34. 35.

1985).
13. 14. 15. Goldman, op c#, p. 253. Clastres, 1977, op cit, p. 5. Irving Goldman, op cit, pp. 53, 86. I suspect, however, that female owners of gardens could direct the work of young women working with them. Goldman, op cit, p. 74. Goldman, op cit, pp. 74, 75. Goldman, op cit, p. 76. Also, on the Paraguayan Chaco, see John Renshaw, "Property resources and equality among the Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco," Man, vol. 23, No. 2 (1988). Goldman, op cff, p. 89. Goldman, Ioc cff. Goldman, op cff, ~. 88. Goldman, op cff, ~. 283. Goldman, op cit, ~. 87. Goldman, op cit, ~. 53. Goldman, op cit, ~. 52. Goldman, op cff, ~. 285. Goldman, op cff, ~. 253. Goldman, op cff, ~. 67. See Goldman, op cit, pp. 22, 39-40. Contrast the Yanomami, who obviously do not share such a value on privacy. See the fine ethnography by Jacques Lizot, Tales of the Yanomami (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Joanna Overing, "There is no end to evil: the guilty innocents and their fallible god," in David Parkin (ed), The Anthropology of Evil (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 252-253. Goldman notes (1963, op cit, pp. 55-56) that "expertness" in fishing, etc., is casually shared among the Cubeo. Contrast the attitudes of Shavante men who, as warriors, obviously value the self-regarding virtues, (David Maybury-Lewis, AkweShavante Society [Oxford: Clarendon, 1967]); also see Overing 1989, op cff. Goldman, op cit, pp. 82-83.

36.

37. 38.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

30.

31.

44. 45. 46. 47.

32.

48.

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49, 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. Sahlins, op cit, p. 77. Sahlins, of> cit, p. 97. Sahlins, op cit, pp. 86, 97. Sahlins, op cit, p. 101. Sahlins, op cit, pp. 132, 134. Sahlins, op cit, Chapter One. Contrast the discussion by Sahlins, op cit, pp. 8991. 56. It is important to point out that when I speak of "creative powers" I am speaking from the Piaroa point of view. The Piaroa exegesis on the creativity of the ruwang is especially rich, and another topic that lain presently writing about. For more detail on gendered transformational capabilities, see Joanna Overing, "Men control women? the 'Catch 22' in the analysis of gender," /ntemationa/ Journal of Moral and Social Studies, vol. 1, No. 2 (1986), pp. 135-156.

57.