How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn
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things. If jaguars also represent us—in ways that can matter vitally to us—then anthropology cannot limit itself just to exploring how people from different societies might happen to represent them as doing so. Such encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize the fact that seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs.
How would coming to terms with this realization change our understandings of society, culture, and indeed the sort of world that we inhabit? How does it change the methods, scope, practice, and stakes of anthropology? And, more important, how does it change our understanding of anthropology’s object—the “human”—given that in that world beyond the human we sometimes find things we feel more comfortable attributing only to ourselves?
That jaguars represent the world does not mean that they necessarily do so as we do. And this too changes our understanding of the human. In that realm beyond the human, processes, such as representation, that we once thought we understood so well, that once seemed so familiar, suddenly begin to appear strange.
So as not to become meat we must return the jaguar’s gaze. But in this encounter we do not remain unchanged. We become something new, a new kind of “we” perhaps, aligned somehow with that predator who regards us as a predator and not, fortunately, as dead meat. The forests around Juanicu’s Quichua-speaking Runa village, Ávila, in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon (a village that is a long day’s hike from that makeshift shelter under which we, that night, were diligently sleeping faceup) are haunted by such encounters.2 They are full of runa puma, shape-shifting human-jaguars, or were-jaguars as I will call them.
Runa in Quichua means “person”; puma means “predator” or “jaguar.” These runa puma—beings who can see themselves being seen by jaguars as fellow predators, and who also sometimes see other humans the way jaguars do, namely, as prey—have been known to wander all the way down to the distant Napo River. The shamans in Río Blanco, a Runa settlement on the banks of the Upper Napo where I worked in the late 1980s, would see these were-jaguars in their aya huasca-induced visions.3 “The runa puma that walk the forests around here,” one shaman told me, “they’re from Ávila.” They described these massive runa puma as having white hides. The Ávila Runa, they insisted, become jaguars, white were-jaguars, yura runa puma.
Ávila enjoys a certain reputation in the Runa communities of the Upper Napo. “Be careful going up to Ávila,” I was cautioned. “Be especially wary of their drinking parties. When you go out to pee you might come back to find that your hosts have become jaguars.” In the early 1990s, in Tena, the capital of Napo Province, a friend and I went out drinking one night at a cantina, a makeshift tavern, with some of the leaders of FOIN, the provincial indigenous federation. Amid boasts of their own prowess—Who could command the most support from the base communities? Who could best bring in the big NGO checks?—talk turned more specifically to shamanic power and where the seat of such power, the font of FOIN’s strength, really lay. Was it, as some that night held, Arajuno, south of the Napo? This is an area of Runa settlement that borders on the east and south with the Huaorani, a group that many Runa view with a mixture of fear, awe, and disdain as “savage” (auca in Quichua, hence their pejorative ethnonym Auca). Or was it Ávila, home to so many runa puma?
That night around the cantina table Ávila edged out Arajuno as a center of power. This village at first might seem an unlikely choice to signify shamanic power in the figure of a jaguar. Its inhabitants, as they would be the first to insist, are anything but “wild.” They are, and, as they invariably make clear, have always been Runa—literally, “human persons”—which for them means that they have always been Christian and “civilized.” One might even say that they are, in important but complicated ways (ways explored in the final chapter), “white.” But they are, some of them, also equally—and really—puma.4
Ávila’s position as a seat of shamanic power derives not just from its relation to some sort of sylvan savagery but also from its particular position in a long colonial history (see figure 1). Ávila was one of the earliest sites of Catholic indoctrination and Spanish colonization in the Upper Amazon. It was also the epicenter of a late-sixteenth-century regionally coordinated uprising against the Spaniards.
That rebellion against the Spaniards, a response in part to the increasingly onerous burden of tribute payment, was, according to colonial sources, sparked by the visions of two shamans. Beto, from the Archidona region, saw a cow who “spoke with him . . . and told him that the God of the Christians was very angry with the Spaniards who were in that land.” Guami, from the Ávila region, was “transported out of this life for five days during which he saw magnificent things, and the God of the Christians sent him to kill everyone and burn their houses and crops” (de Ortiguera 1989 [1581–85]: 361).5 In the uprising that ensued the Indians around Ávila did, according to these sources, kill all the Spaniards (save one, about whom more in chapter 3), destroy their houses, and eradicate the orange and fig trees and all the other foreign crops from the land.
These contradictions—that Runa shamans receive messages from Christian gods and that the were-jaguars that wander the forests around Ávila are white—are part of what drew me to Ávila. The Ávila Runa are far removed from any image of a pristine or wild Amazon. Their world—their very being—is thoroughly informed by a long and layered colonial history. And today their village is just a few kilometers from the growing, bustling colonist town of Loreto and the expanding network of roads that connects this town with increasing efficiency to the rest of Ecuador. And yet they also live intimately with all kinds of real jaguars that walk the forests around Ávila; these include those that are white, those that are Runa, and those that are decidedly spotted.
This intimacy in large part involves eating and also the real risk of being eaten. A jaguar killed a child when I was in Ávila. (He was the son of the woman posing with her daughter in the photograph that serves as the frontispiece for this chapter, a photograph the mother asked me to take so that she might have some memory of her daughter if she too were taken away.) And jaguars, as I discuss later in this book, also killed several dogs during my time in Ávila. They also shared their food with us. On several occasions we found half-eaten carcasses of agoutis and pacas that were-jaguars had left for us in the forest as gifts and that subsequently became our meals. Felines of all kinds, including these generous meat-bearing runa puma, are sometimes hunted.
FIGURE 1. As visible from the detail of the eighteenth-century map reproduced here (which corresponds very roughly to modern Ecuador’s Andean and Amazonian regions), Ávila (upper center) was considered a missionary center (represented by a cross). It was connected by foot trails (dotted line) to other such centers, such as Archidona, as well as to the navigable Napo River (a tributary of the Amazon), and to Quito (upper left). The linear distance between Quito and Ávila is approximately 130 kilometers. The map indicates some of the historical legacies of colonial networks in which Ávila is immersed; the landscape of course has not remained unchanged. Loreto, the major colonist town, approximately 25 kilometers east of Ávila, is wholly absent from the map, though it figures prominently in the lives of the Ávila Runa and in this book. From Requena 1779 [1903]. Collection of the author.
Eating also brings people in intimate relation to the many other kinds of nonhuman beings that make the forest their home. During the four years that I worked in Ávila villagers bought many things in Loreto. They bought things such as shotguns, ammunition, clothing, salt, many of the household items that would have been made by hand a couple of generations ago, and lots of the contraband cane liquor that they call cachihua. What they didn’t buy was food. Almost all the food they shared with each other and with me came from their gardens, the nearby rivers and streams, and the forest. Getting food through hunting, fishing, gathering, gardening, and the management of a variety of ecological assemblages involves people intimately with one of the most complex ecosystems in the world—one that is chock-full of an astounding array of different kinds of interacting and mutually constituting beings. And it brings them into very close contact with the