How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn
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of the broader social context in which it is and has been used. Making sense of how we live inside these kinds of changing contexts that we both make and that make us has long been an important goal of anthropology. For anthropology the “human,” as a being and an object of knowledge, emerges only by attending to how we are embedded in these uniquely human contexts—these “complex wholes” as E.B. Tylor’s (1871) classic definition of culture terms them.
But if causanguichu is firmly in language, tsupu seems somehow outside it. Tsupu is a sort of paralinguistic parasite on the language that somewhat indifferently bears it. Tsupu is, in a way, as Peirce might say, “all that it is positively, in itself, regardless of anything else.” And this admittedly minor fact, that this strange little quasi-word is not quite made by its linguistic context, troubles the anthropological project of making sense of the human via context.
Take causanguichu’s root, the lexeme causa-, which is marked for person and inflected by a suffix that signals its status as a question:
causa-ngui-chu
live-2-INTER1
Are you still alive?
Through its grammatical inflections causanguichu is inextricably related to the other words that make up the Quichua language. Tsupu, by contrast, doesn’t really interact with other words and therefore can’t be modified to reflect any such possible relations. Being “all that it is positively in itself,” it can’t even be grammatically negated. What kind of thing, then, is tsupu? Is it even a word? What does its anomalous place in language reveal about language? And what can it tell us about the anthropological project of grasping the various ways in which linguistic as well as sociocultural and historical contexts form the conditions of possibility both for human life and for our ways of attending to it?
Although not exactly a word, tsupu certainly is a sign. That is, it certainly is, as the philosopher Charles Peirce put it, “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (CP 2.228). This is quite different from Saussure’s (1959) more humanist treatment of signs with which we anthropologists tend to be more familiar. For Saussure human language is the paragon and model for all sign systems (1959: 68). Peirce’s definition of a sign, by contrast, is much more agnostic about what signs are and what kinds of beings use them; for him not all signs have languagelike properties, and, as I discuss below, not all the beings who use them are human. This broader definition of the sign helps us become attuned to the life signs have beyond the human as we know it.
Tsupu captures to some extent and in some particular way something of a pig plunging into water, and it does so—weirdly—not just for Quichua speakers, but to some degree for those of us who may not have any familiarity with the language that carries it along.2 What might paying attention to this not-quite-wordlike-kind-of-sign reveal? Feeling tsupu, “in itself, regardless of anything else,” can tell us something important about the nature of language and its unexpected openings toward the world “itself.” And insofar as it can help us understand how signs are not just bounded by human contexts, but how they also reach beyond them. Insofar, that is, as it can help reveal how signs are also in, of, and about other sensuous worlds that we too can feel, it can also tell us something about how we can move beyond understanding the human in terms of the “complex wholes” that make us who we are. In sum, appreciating what it might mean “to live” (Quichua causa-ngapa) in worlds that are open to that which extends beyond the human might just allow us to become a little more “worldly.”3
IN AND OF THE WORLD
In uttering “tsupu,” Maxi brought home something that happened in the forest. Insofar as Luis, or I, or you, feel tsupu we come to grasp something of Maxi’s experience of being near a wounded pig plunging into a pool of water. And we can come to have this feeling even if we weren’t in the forest that day. All signs, and not just tsupu, are in some way or another about the world in this sense. They “re-present.” They are about something not immediately present.
But they are also all, in some way or another, in and of the world. When we think of situations in which we use signs to represent an event, such as the one I’ve just described, this quality may be hard to see. Sitting back in a dark corner of a thatched roof house listening to Maxi talk about the forest is not the same as having been present to that pig plunging into water. Isn’t this “radical discontinuity” with the world another important hallmark of signs?4 Insofar as signs do not provide any sort of immediate, absolute, or certain purchase on the entities they represent, it certainly is. But the fact that signs always mediate does not mean that they also necessarily exist in some separate domain inside (human) minds and cut off from the entities they stand for. As I will show, they are not just about the world. They are also in important ways in it.
Consider the following. Toward the end of a day spent walking in the forest, Hilario, his son Lucio, and I came upon a troop of woolly monkeys moving through the canopy. Lucio shot and killed one, and the rest of the troop dispersed. One young monkey, however, became separated from the troop. Finding herself alone she hid in the branches of an enormous red-trunked tree that poked out of the forest canopy high above.5
In the hope of startling the monkey into moving to a more visible perch so that his son could shoot it Hilario decided to fell a nearby palm tree:
look out!
ta ta
I’ll make it go pu oh
watch out!6
Ta ta and pu oh, like tsupu, are images that sound like what they mean. Ta ta is an image of chopping: tap tap. Pu oh captures the process by which a tree falls. The snap that initiates its toppling, the swish of the crown free-falling through layers of forest canopy, and the crash and its echoes as it hits the ground are all enfolded in this sonic image.
Hilario then went and did what he said. He walked off a little way and with his machete began chopping rhythmically at a palm tree. The tapping of steel against trunk is clearly audible on the recording I made in the forest that afternoon (ta ta ta ta . . . )—as was the palm crashing down (pu oh).
Lowland Quichua has hundreds of “words” like ta ta, pu oh, and tsupu that mean by virtue of the ways in which they sonically convey an image of how an action unfolds in the world. They are ubiquitous in speech, especially in forest talk. A testament to their importance to Runa ways of being in the world is that the linguistic anthropologist Janis Nuckolls (1996) has written an entire book—titled, appropriately, Sounds Like Life—about them.
A “word” such as tsupu is like the entity it represents thanks to the ways in which the differences between the “sign vehicle” (i.e., the entity that is taken as a sign, in this case the sonic quality of tsupu)7 and the object (in this case the plunging-into-water that this “word” simulates) are ignored.8 Peirce called these kinds of signs of likeness “icons.” They conform to the first of his three broad classes of signs.
As Hilario had anticipated, the sound of the palm tree crashing frightened the monkey from her perch. This event itself, and not just its before-the-fact imitation, can also be taken as a kind of sign. It is a sign in the sense that it too came to be “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.” In this case the “somebody” to whom this sign stands is not human. The palm crashing down stands for something to the monkey. Significance is not the exclusive province of humans because we are not the only ones who interpret signs. That other kinds of beings use signs is one example of the ways in which representation exists in the world beyond human minds and human systems of meaning.
The palm crashing down becomes significant in a way that differs from its imitation pu oh.9 Pu oh is iconic in the sense that it, in itself, is in some respect like its object. That is, it functions as an image when we fail to notice the differences between it and the event that it represents. It means due to a certain kind of absence of attention to difference. By ignoring the myriad characteristics that make any entity unique, a very restricted set of characteristics is amplified, here by virtue of the fact that the sound that simulates the action also happens to share these characteristics.