This outstanding book provides a provocative way to look at material culture, presented in a brilliant introduction and ten essays drawing on ideas from ten Amazonian Amerindian groups representing seven different linguistic families. The authors include established scholars and younger researchers from three continents. They have obviously carefully read each other’s contributions and cite one another (as well as the very rich recent bibliography on Lowland South American ethnography) throughout. This kind of tight integration is all too rare in edited volumes, and the reader is the beneficiary of the extra time and care this entailed.
This is not your grandfather’s material culture study—largely because it takes as its point of departure the Amazonian Amerindian perspectives on objects, not the European ones. In one of the best-written collected-essay introductions I remember reading, Santos-Granero defines the object as follows: “This book does not intend…to revive the topic of ‘material culture.’ Rather it strives to explore how native Amazonian peoples envision the lives of material objects. In other words, its purpose is to examine the ‘occult life of things’—occult because their lives are extraordinary, and occult because their personas are normally not visible to lay people” (2).
The book grows out of a concern that the “perspectivist” approaches to Amazonian societies, identified especially with the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and several of his students, have focused too exclusively on the relations of humans, animals, and spirits. This book proposes to show how objects are part of the construction of people and experiences, and how these are part of the objects. This review can only hint at the richness of the material presented.
Santos-Granero’s extensive introduction provides an excellent overview of the issues the authors address from their diverse ethnographic research. Part One, chapters 1-3, is titled “Artifactual Anatomies,” and many complex issues of body and gender appear in it. Chapter 1, “The Fabricated Body: Objects and Ancestors in Northwest Amazonia” by Stephen Hugh-Jones, focuses on the importance of the elaborate material objects that appear in the mythology of the Tukanoan peoples. He observes that, in Tukanoan myths, objects take up the space normally occupied (in other Amazonian cosmologies) by animals. Drawing on his own research and his reading of the other authors’ works, he argues that different peoples may have different “object regimes” (55). This anticipates the experience of the reader, who encounters some very different relations of objects, history, and persons in future chapters. Chapter 2, “Things as Persons: Body Ornaments and Alterity among the Mamaindê (Nambikwara)” by Joana Miller, looks at body ornaments among the Mamaindê and argues that “the ownership of body ornaments defines the subject, conferring upon her consciousness, direction, intentionality, and memory” (61). The Mamaindê have both external and internal body ornaments, the latter only visible to shamans—thus raising interesting issues of the “materiality” of objects. Chapter 3, “Baby Hammocks and Stone Bowls: Urarina Technologies of Companionship and Subjection” by Harry Walker, argues that in spite of the relatively modest inventory of their material possessions, the Urarina find things “good to socialize.” The gendered agency of the two central objects of the title highlight "the intimate connection between autonomy and dependency, or between the power that acts on a subject and brings it into being and that which the subject in turn enacts” (99).
Part II, Subjectivized Materialities, includes chapters 4-6. Chapter 4, “From Baby Slings to Feather Bibles and From Star Utensils to Jaguar Stones: The Multiple Ways of Being a Thing in the Yanesha Lived World” by Fernando Santos-Granero, explores the notion of materiality among the Yanesha of eastern Peru. He argues that the only way of attaining a more comprehensive portrayal of Amerindian perspectivism is by taking into consideration other beings such as plants, meteorological phenomena, and artifacts in addition to humans, animals, and spirits (124). Chapter 5, “The (De)animalization of Objects: Food Offerings and Subjectivization of Masks and Flutes among the Wauja of Southern Amazonia” by Aristóteles Barcelos Neto, addresses the production of “artifactual subjectivities” in the illness-shamanism-ritual system of the Wauja in the Upper Xingu region—which, like the Northwest Amazon, is a region rich in the production of material culture. His description of contemporary Wauja concerns about changing values with respect to material objects and their relations adds an important temporal perspective to his presentation. Chapter 6, “Valuables, Value, and Commodities among the Kayapo of Central Brazil” by Terence Turner, discusses the distinction between two types of objects, “beautiful” and “common,” and suggests that “the cosmos consists of a praxis of objectification, in Karl Marx’s sense of productive activity as objective” (165). He also describes how recently introduced industrially-produced material culture items (especially guns, electronic devices, and airplanes) remain somewhat apart from the ideas and actions related to more “traditional” Kayapo objects and relations.
Part III, Materialized Subjectivities, includes chapters 7-10. Chapter 7, “Obedient Things: Reflections on the Matis Theory of Materiality” by Philippe Erikson, argues that among the Matis “making one’s own personal possessions is a basic part of life and probably even a moral imperative” (173). Thus each person makes the same objects in pretty much the same way as everyone else, rather than relying on specialists to produce different objects and exchanging them. The act of making something is tantamount to turning it into a partial extension of one’s body. For them, too, industrial goods produced by unknown people do not fit into this scheme, and have been treated differently from those they produce themselves. Chapter 8, “The Crystallized Memory of Artifacts: A Reflection on Agency and Alterity in Cashinahua Image-Making” by Els Lagrou, focuses on the making of images, rather than objects. The definition of image is here as broadly construed as “material” culture is in the volume: “I include those images made in the mind and often expressed by very indirect means, as well as images hinted at in songs but never represented or depicted elsewhere” (193). Lagrou analyzes the use and agency of body paint designs in rites of passage. She argues that in contrast to the Melanesian context, in Amerindian Amazonia objects are beings of their own, with their own agency. Chapter 9, “Identity Cards, Abducted Footprints, and the Book of San Gonzalo” by María A. Guzmán-Gallegos, presents a fascinating story that highlights the importance of textual objects in indigenous life—in this case, identity cards and Xaman’s Association identification cards. The author argues that anthropologists have too often overlooked the importance of textual objects as active agents in native cosmologies. She also introduces issues of hierarchy and exploitation of indigenous peoples by non-indigenous neighbors that add an additional level of complexity to materiality. Finally, Chapter 10, “Materializing the Occult: An Approach to Understanding the Nature of Materiality in Wakuénai Ontology” by Jonathan D. Hill, returns us to the Northwest Amazon, nicely bookended with the first chapter. Hill argues that “musicalized speech genres, such as shamanic singing and chanting, provide ways of making subjectivities into ‘thing-like’ materials” (236). Interestingly, he focuses on nominal classifiers to develop his ideas, and ends with a discussion of “ownership”—a topic that reappears (coordinated with “mastery”) throughout the volume.
While this is a volume about material culture, many of the authors have already written extensively about other aspects of the societies whose ideas on things they discuss here. They bring to the subject of “things” many years of reflection on relations and cosmology. The volume as a whole is part of a larger discussion about the construction and reproduction of society and person that has transformed our understanding of Lowland South American Indian societies generally in the past twenty years. By adding “things” to humans, animals, and spirits, the book provides an important balance to earlier works without repudiating them. For those not particularly interested in the Amerindian Amazon, I believe the indigenous ideas about things that are so carefully presented here could have a profound effect on studies of material culture in general. After all, if we study others to learn from their perspectives on the world, then we should take their perspectives seriously enough to use them as a lens through which to examine the world. And this lens on “material culture” is a revolutionary one indeed.
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[Review length: 1360 words • Review posted on October 20, 2010]