How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn
Читать онлайн книгу.
interpretive dilemma that this dream poses, and the existential and psychic conflict that it thus lays bare, concerns how to continue as a self and what such continuity might mean in the ecology of selves in which the Runa live—an ecology that is firmly rooted in a forest realm that reaches well beyond the human but which also catches up in its tendrils the detritus of so many all-too-human pasts. This chapter, more broadly, is about survival. That is, it is about the relation of continuity and growth to absence. Ethnographic attention to the problem of survival in the particular colonially inflected ecology of selves in which the Runa live tells us something more general about how we might become new kinds of we, in relation to such absences, and how, in this process, “we” might, to use Haraway’s (2008) term, “flourish.”
Understanding this dream and what it can tell us about survival calls for a shift, not only regarding anthropology’s object—the human—but also regarding its temporal focus. It asks us to recognize more generally how life—human and nonhuman—is not just the product of the weight of the past on the present but how it is also the product of the curious and convoluted ways in which the future comes to bear upon a present.
That is, all semiotic processes are organized around the fact that signs represent a future possible state of affairs. The future matters to living thoughts. It is a constitutive feature of any kind of self. The life of signs is not, then, just in the present but also in a vague and possible future. Signs are oriented toward the ways in which future signs will likely represent their relationship to a likely state of affairs. Selves, then, are characterized by what Peirce calls a “being in futuro” (CP 2.86), or a “living future” (CP 8.194).11 This particular kind of causality, whereby a future comes to affect the present via the mediation of signs, is unique to life.
In the life of signs future is also closely related to absence. All kinds of signs in some way or other re-present what is not present. And every successful representation has another absence at its foundation; it is the product of the history of all the other sign processes that less accurately represented what would be. What one is as a semiotic self, then, is constitutively related to what one is not. One’s future emerges from and in relation to a specific geometry of absent histories. Living futures are always “indebted” to the dead that surround them.
At some level this way in which life creates future in negative but constitutive relation to all its pasts is characteristic of all semiotic processes. But it is a dynamic that is amplified in the tropical forest, with its unprecedented layers of mutually constitutive representational relationships. Runa engagements with this complex ecology of selves create even more future.
Chapter 6, then, is primarily concerned with one particular manifestation of this future: the realm of the afterlife located deep in the forest and inhabited by the dead and the spirit masters that control the forest’s animals. This realm is the product of the relationship that invisible futures have to the painful histories of the dead that make life possible. Around Ávila these dead take the form of were-jaguars, masters, demons, and the specters of so many pre-Hispanic, colonial, and republican pasts; all these continue, in their own ways, to haunt the living forest.
This chapter traces how this ethereal future realm relates to the concrete one of everyday Runa existence. The Runa, living in relation to the forest’s vast ecology of selves, also live their lives with one foot in futuro. That is, they live their lives with one foot in the spirit realm that is the emergent product of the ways in which they engage with the futures and the pasts that the forest comes to harbor in its relational webs. This other kind of “beyond,” this after-life, this super-nature, is not exactly natural (or cultural), but it is nonetheless real. It is its own kind of irreducible real, with its own distinctive properties and its own tangible effects in a future present.
The fractured and yet necessary relationship between the mundane present and the vague future plays out in specific and painful ways in what Lisa Stevenson (2012; see also Butler 1997) might call the psychic life of the Runa self, immersed and informed as it is by the ecology of selves in which it lives. The Runa are both of and alienated from the spirit world, and survival requires cultivating ways to allow something of one’s future self—living tenuously in the spirit realm of the forest masters—to look back on and call out to that more mundane part of oneself that might then hopefully respond. This ethereal realm of continuity and possibility is the emergent product of a whole host of trans-species and transhistorical relations. It is the product of the imponderable weight of the many dead that make a living future possible.
That hunter’s challenge of surviving as an I, as it was revealed in his dream and as it plays out in this ecology of selves, depends on how he is hailed by others—others that may be human or nonhuman, fleshly or virtual. It also depends on how he responds. Is he the white policeman who might turn on his Runa neighbors with a blood thirst that terrifies him? Is he helpless prey? Or might he not be a runa puma, a were-jaguar, capable, even, of returning a jaguar’s gaze?
Let this runa puma, this one who both is and is not us, be, like Dante’s Virgil, our guide as we wander this “dense and difficult” forest—this “selva selvaggia” where words so often fail us. Let this runa puma guide us with the hope that we too may learn another way to attend and respond to the many lives of those selves that people this sylvatic realm.
ONE
The Open Whole
By a feeling I mean an instance of that sort of element of consciousness which is all that it is positively, in itself, regardless of anything else. . . . [A] feeling is absolutely simple and without parts—as it evidently is, since it is whatever it is regardless of anything else, and therefore regardless of any part, which would be something other than the whole.
—Charles Peirce, The Collected Papers 1.306–10
One evening while the grown-ups gathered around the hearth drinking manioc beer, Maxi, settling back to a quieter corner of the house, began to tell his teenage neighbor Luis and me about some of his recent adventures and mishaps. Fifteen or so and just beginning to hunt on his own, he told us of the day he stood out in the forest for what seemed an eternity, waiting for something to happen, and how, all of a sudden, he found himself close to a herd of collared peccaries moving through the underbrush. Frightened, he hoisted himself into the safety of a little tree and from there fired on and hit one of the pigs. The wounded animal ran off toward a little river and . . . “tsupu.”
Tsupu. I’ve deliberately left Maxi’s utterance untranslated. What might it mean? What does it sound like?
Tsupu, or tsupuuuh, as it is sometimes pronounced, with the final vowel dragged out and aspirated, refers to an entity as it makes contact with and then penetrates a body of water; think of a big stone heaved into a pond or the compact mass of a wounded peccary plunging into a river’s pool. Tsupu probably did not immediately conjure such an image (unless you speak lowland Ecuadorian Quichua). But what did you feel upon learning what it describes? Once I tell people what tsupu means, they often experience a sudden feel for its meaning: “Oh, of course, tsupu!”
By contrast, I would venture that even after learning that the greeting “causanguichu,” used when encountering someone who hasn’t been seen in a long time, means “Are you still alive?” you don’t have such a feeling. Causanguichu certainly feels like what it means to native speakers of Quichua, and over the years I too have come to develop a feel for its meaning. But what is it about tsupu that causes its meaning to feel so evident even for many people who don’t speak Quichua? Tsupu somehow feels like a pig plunging into water.
How is it that tsupu means? We know that a word like causanguichu means by virtue of the ways in which it is inextricably embedded, through a dense historically contingent tangle of grammatical and syntactic relations, with other such words in that uniquely human system of communication we call language. And we know that what it means also depends on the ways in which language is itself caught up in broader social, cultural, and political contexts, which share similar historically contingent systemic properties. In order to develop a feel for causanguichu we have to grasp