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In Praise of the Everyday:Trust and the Art of Social Livingin an Amazonian Community

Joanna OveringUniversity of St Andrews,

A s an anthropologist (rather than, say, a philosopher) my aim is tounderstand and disclose other people’s visions of the world — parti-cularly those of the indigenous peoples of the Amazonian Rain Forest.

The local version that for many years I have been attempting to understandbelongs to the Piaroa, a forest people who dwell along tributaries of the Orinocoin Venezuela. For the most part they live through their practices of gardening,fishing, hunting and gathering. They are referred to by their neighbours as’the intellectuals of the Orinoco’, and indeed they do have a love for intellectualdebate, particularly over metaphysical aspects of everyday life. They are alsoone of the most peaceful of Amazonian peoples. To better understand theirtreasured peace,1 and as well their egalitarian and informal ways, my recentfocus has been upon the high evaluation that the Piaroa place upon mattersof daily existence, where the emphasis is upon everyday creativity. Indeed,most of their artistic production belongs to the domain of the everyday. Thebeauty and tidiness of the implements they make for daily use, the attentionthey pay to form and design, are striking. These beautiful artifacts and toolsserve to exemplify their work of beautifying as many aspects of everyday ex-istence as possible.2 Because their major concerns relate directly to the artfulskills of daily life, the Piaroa endow activities that we might see as merelyhumdrum (preparing a meal, weeding a garden, making a basket, feeding ababy) with significance far beyond any that we might consider. The artfuleveryday of the Piaroa is linked to a principle of trust, for it is only throughthe creation of trust that the artful everyday of this egalitarian people can beconstructed. To contextualise the significance of the topic of trust, I wish ini-tially to speak about certain writings in moral philosophy that have consider-able relevance to our anthropological studies in Amazonia.

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Feminist Moral Philosophy: The ‘Care/Trust’Perspective, and its Significance for Social Anthropology

‘Care’ is the new buzzword of feminist moral philosophy. It is from the‘care’ rather than the ‘justice perspective’ (the concern of much modern moralphilosophy), that the philosopher, Annette Baier, has been exploring the prin-ciple of ‘appropriate’ trust and distrust. In her book of essays, entitled MoralPrejudices (1995) she argues for the focus upon trust as one answer of aphilosophical counterculture3 to the overly coercive models of morality pre-valent in contemporary moral philosophy. It seems that in its theorising, moralphilosophy, as traditional anthropology, has more easily understood the rule-bound arena of jural behaviour, than the informal, non-proscriptive moralinstances in which most of us are normally engaged in our everyday activities.It ignores, for instance, the trust involved in the proper care of the young.Baier, in calling for a moral theory that also treats the complex ways in which‘appropriate trust’ structures our daily moral relations, provides us with a focusthat is particularly apt in the understanding of Sahlins’ (1987) category of‘performative structures’, or Ingold’s (1986:227) ‘communities of nurture’, andwhat I will label in this lecture as the ‘generative cultures’ of Amazonia. In allthese cases, the emphasis in social life is more upon the informal and theintimate, than upon the rule and its obedience. Here, the appropriate trustingrelationship belongs more or less to the domain of the intimate, rather thanto coercive law or contract, the areas which contemporary moral philosophytends to stress.

Baier notes (1995:4–5) that the influential (male) moral theorists of themodern era have understood obligation as the key moral concept. With thisfocus the central questions revolve around such problems as what justifiestreating a person as obliged or morally bound to do something, or who shoulddeprive whom of what freedom? In other words, what (in a ‘just society’) isthe justification of coercion? of forcing a person to act in a particular way?The concept of obligation becomes thereby linked to the idea of punishmentand the justified limitation of freedom, with little attention being paid to thenotion of trust and the virtues. 4 It assumes the necessity of people or institu-tions with extraordinarily coercive powers, an important paradox attachedto the modern notion of freedom. Baier argues that a large part of the problemis the type of case that moral theorists choose as example. For instance, they(if contractarians) use contractual obligation as the model of obligations, whichis the apt case for ‘civil society’. The contract also is premised upon a verycool relationship where only minimal trust is placed on the obliging person,

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and for whom considerable punitive power is required (1986:13, 116). As Baiernotes (1986:13), ‘in concentrating on obligations, rather than virtues, modernmoral theorists have chosen to look at the cases where more trust is placedin enforcers of obligations than is placed in ordinary moral agents, the bearersof the obligations’. Such a notion of (improper) trust, she argues, where theupholding of morality depends upon the trusting of others to coerce, distortsour moral vision to suppose that all obligations conform to what in fact is anabnormally coercive model. Her rhetoric is strong. She states that if this typeof coercive structure of morality is regarded as the backbone of our moralgaze, then ‘undoubtedly life will be nasty, emotionally poor, and worse thanbrutish’ (1986:14).

Baier, speaking from a western feminist’s perspective, understands the con-cern for care and trust to be largely a matter of gender, of interest to femalesbut not males. In other words, for her, the genders have different moral out-looks: while contemporary men tend to phrase morality in terms of obligation,contract, and justice (a reflection of their own concern with personal auto-nomy and independence), women are more communitarian in view, beingmost concerned with a morality relevant to the bringing up of children, en-gendering of love, care, trust, and co-operation.5

As anthropologists, we may well question the cross-cultural relevance ofthe western case, where males and females appear to be opposed in moraloutlook. I would argue that antagonism about matters of morality is not ne-cessarily typical of gender relations in Amazonia. This is because a primarymoral concern expressed by many Amazonian peoples pertains to the careof children, and to trust in relations of interdependency related to such care.6

For the Piaroa, the values of care and trust are relevant equally to the judgementof actions of both men and women (Overing 1989a; 1989b), for they relate ingeneral to notions about living an acceptable type of human life on earth. Atthe same time, the right to personal autonomy is likewise an ungendered value.In other words the western tendency to see communitarian values to be onthe side of the female, and the value of freedom to be basically a male per-spective, ill fits the Piaroa case. The basic point is that a dominant strand inwestern moral theory, from which anthropology is not totally exempt, ex-cludes domesticity and the everyday relations of the ordinary moral agent,which is what Amazonian sociality is often about.

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The Anthropological Lackof Regard for Domesticity and the Everyday

To understand other people, anthropologists must dwell as much upontheir own perspectives as those divergent to them. Our view is perspectival,and at the very minimum our own ways provide a valuable means for com-parative understanding. In the case of the Amazonia, we need to pay atten-tion to our own lack of regard for the ‘ordinary’ skills of life. We read in ourtexts that proper anthropological attention should be focused upon grandstructures: our task is to discover the underlying logic of the mind, of kinship,or even of artistic creations. With such an emphasis, the practices and expres-sions of everyday life are seen as relatively unimportant contingencies. Tomake things worse, the Western urbane academic tends to view everydaymatters as tedious: there are the dishes to be cleaned, the children to feed,the shelves to be dusted. We are disdainful of these matters, which should betended to as quickly as possible, or even better by others!

We regard the everyday as unremarkable, and long to know about theremarkable — the shamanic journey, the hunting with blowguns and curare.The allure of the exotic bewitches us. As a result we can be poor observers oflived daily life. The problem is all the more compelling when the setting forsuch a life is the jungle about which we also know little: we are clumsy movingaround in the forest, and we do not know how to see it.7 We do not have thepractical skills for making it intelligible. In Amazonia the everyday businessof feeding, tending and cleaning, by us so facilely assumed to be both boringand simple, is in fact not so very simple, nor is it boring.8 There are, indeed,ways in which indigenous peoples, philosophically speaking, can be inter-esting about matters of everyday concern.

The stress the Piaroa put upon the everyday and its activities is not trivial,but rather the product of a powerful and highly egalitarian social philosophy.These are a people, typically Amazonian, who overtly shun the idea of a socialrule, yet strongly value sociality, their own customs, and the mutuality of theties of community life — while at the same time demonstrating a staunch re-gard for personal autonomy. Such peoples can offend anthropological sensibi-lities on a number of fronts. The trick is to provide a translation that enablesus to engage with indigenous peoples’ ideas, and even to argue with them oncommon concerns, on freedom, for instance, or on the relation of customs torational decision making. However, our own perspectives can intrude uponour abilities to create such engagement. We ask, how can people link socialmutuality with an insistent individualism? How does a love for personal auto-

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nomy make a fit with an affection for customs? How does a paucity of socialelaboration of the structural sort fit with a richness of metaphysical talk? Theseare some of the questions we must explore.

The Cosmic and the EverydayI shall first speak of the cosmological embeddedness of the everyday. The

Piaroa say that their own position in the world is to dwell beneath their own‘sky of the domesticated’. An egalitarian people, they speak little of statusesand roles when talking about their social life. What they do talk of are theskills for social living, the many capabilities for living a harmonious, ‘domesti-cated’ life in concert with others — and the dangers of not using them. Thisemphasis upon skills is critical, for it is their perspective that they live as theylive because of what they do. They hunt, garden, make blowguns, weave cot-ton, and build houses. They transform animals and plants into edible food.They also marry, have children, and care for them within a community ofrelationships. For the Piaroa these are the capabilities that allow for a humanexistence on this earth (Overing 1993a) — they are what human life is about.

Does all this sound prosaic? It becomes less so when one realises that inPiaroa metaphysics there are no powers for human existence in their earthlyworld until they are brought in from outside their own ‘sky of the domesticated’.Most capabilities for living a human existence on earth were enclosed at theend of their mythic time within crystal boxes now owned by the celestialTianawa gods, who protect the world from the excessive use of the powerfulforces they guard, which were misused in mythic time. Thus with regard tothe source of human capacities, the Piaroa view is radically externalist: theforces for selfhood are in the most part dangerous, and have their origin ex-ternal to the self. As such they have significance within the wider cosmicorder. This is in contrast to the modern Western notion of self, which is radi-cally interiorised from the start, with consciousness and reason conceived inlarge part as autochthonous to the mind itself. There is no biological bedrockto Piaroa theory, and this would include their life of the senses and desire.9

Piaroa ideas about the everyday relate to a discourse that posits many otherworlds than that of human jungle existence: the myriad of significant otherswho have their homes in these other worlds (and times) provides a backdropagainst which all considerations and evaluations about living an earthly humanlife are made. Within this agency filled universe of many worlds, the personalskills for daily living which the Piaroa so value for their own existence havea very long history that tells of the traumas of original creation, and the dangers

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emerging from it. It is because of the violations of creation time history (suchas the practices of incest, murder, treachery) that living today within the safetyof their own ‘sky of the domesticated’ is considered so important to the achieve-ment of everyday life. In due course I shall provide more detail on this relationof the cosmological with the everyday.

The Community of SimilarsThere is an emphasis in Piaroa village life upon achieving what we might

translate as ‘a community of similars’. In contrast to the richness of cosmo-logical talk, there is a lexical paucity to their language of social structure. Theyhave very few means, aside from kinship terms, for marking sociological differ-ence. There are therefore few differentiations to become grist for the anthro-pological mill. As a result, power rarely carries with it the weight of what wemight call a ‘collectivity’. Instead power tends to be a personal matter, or asthe Piaroa explain it, human power refers to the potency of the individualbeing. Thus, ‘collectivity’ as envisioned in western theory as a coercive forceis not their understanding of community.10 To understand better this differencethe distinction must be made between ‘collectivity’ as it might be expressedthrough social structural imperatives (through roles, statuses and juridicalrules) and ’the collective’ as an attachment to a specific cultural and social wayof being. ‘The social’, in its more positive sense as expressed through shareddaily actions and interaction of a personal sort, is understood, probably bymany peoples of the Amazon, as a powerful means through which peoplecan actively work against the development of relations of coercion.

In accord with this more positive view of the social, as shared ways ofdoing things, indigenous peoples can be quite explicit in expressing the prin-ciple of community homogeneity.11 Certainly for the Piaroa, the idea is thatthose who in the first instance are dangerously — ‘different in kind’ (e.g. as in-laws) become ‘of a kind ’ through the process of living together. Thus, overtime a husband and wife become similar in kind. As we shall see, the reasonfor mem-bers of a community becoming increasingly similar to one anotheris that the mutuality of living together creates a certain sort of materialhomogeneity. This is the aim of community life, to achieve a safe, yet fertile,‘community of similars’ .

We still have the question of how the individual self in these stridently in-dividualistic cultures relates to a valued ‘community of similars’. To understandindigenous concerns, we must ask the more cosmological question of ‘Whatis that potency of the human self, its agency, that allows one to act in a speci-

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fically human way?’ As we shall see, from the Piaroa point of view, it is throughthe skills of its members for personal autonomy that the ‘community of similars’is created. Each person is ultimately responsible for mastering within the selfthe capabilities that allow for a human type of social and material existence.

The Practice of Generative CulturesIf a young unmarried man among the Piaroa should give his hunt to a young

unmarried woman (who is not his sister), and she then prepares and cooks it,and presents it to him to eat, they are thereby married. Through this informalprocess he has displayed to her his skills of the hunt, and she to him her skillsfor transforming food to edible form. No other ceremony marks the marriageevent. Blink, and you miss a ritual among the Piaroa, a people for whom mostritual activities are carried out casually as part of everyday activity. The mostnormal looking procedures in daily life could deeply signify.

It is significant that ritual among the Piaroa tends to be focused upon thepractice itself. Note that the young couple initiate their marriage relation bysharing their respective skills with one another, he with the hunt, she withtransforming his hunt to edible form. Through mutual choice and I presumedesire, they engage in the productive actions most stressed in the marital state,those attached to the art of feeding.12 It is through the sharing of their skillsfor the culinary arts, the young man and woman legitimise their relationship.In the ritual of marriage, it is not a status that is achieved that is important(that of marriage), but the practice of being married. Similarly, when a youngman through initiation receives his abilities to hunt, what is applauded is hispractice of hunting, and not that he has achieved the status of ‘hunter’, a statusfor which there is no category in Piaroa language that I am aware. Hunting,gardening, cooking do not adhere so much to statuses, as to activities carriedout by intentional, practiced agents.

It would be superfluous for an outside official to pronounce the legitimacyof their wedded state, for in the end, no matter the nagging and planning ofclose kinsmen to bring about the contrary, such decisions in the end remainhighly personal to the dyadic pair.13 As holds true for most Piaroa adult rela-tionships, marriage relations are premised upon a balancing of mutual inten-tion, and therefore created (and continued) through the respective, reflectedupon, practice of the participants. A strategy used by the Piaroa is how thecategories of their kinship terminology are applied to aid and abet their em-phasis upon the authority of personal choice. For instance, a young man mighttrace through his father his relationship to a young woman as marriageable,

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but if he has no interest in marrying her, he will reclassify her within the categoryof ‘sister’ by tracing his relation to her through his mother. It takes two, how-ever, to recreate a relationship, and the young man must wait to see if theyoung woman will return his ‘brotherly’ actions with ‘sisterly’ ones. Like allcreations, its object has the agency to be, or not to be, compliable.14

Marshall Sahlins (1987:xi–xiii), has distinguished between two very differ-ent sorts of social emphases, which he labels the ‘prescriptive’ and the ‘perform-ative’. Peoples who stress the prescriptive (well known to the social sciences)are attached to social form and institutional rule, while those appreciative ofthe performative place priority upon practice. With those attracted to theperformative, it is action that declares identity and enmity, the gift that makesthe friend, the sharing that creates the kinship. In other words, the appropriateact creates the relation, and not the other way around. There is also the matterof affect. With priority given to the performative, important aspects of socialrelationships are negotiable, to become constructed by choice, desire, andinterest (ibid.). For instance, a Piaroa man and his sister’s son enjoy each other’scompany, and often hunt together; the relationship is so affectionately closethat the man addresses his teenage nephew, not as ‘son-in-law’, but as ‘son’,who reciprocates by placing his potential father-in-law into the category of‘father’. Such social linkage is difficult to formulate in institutional terms: anillustration of the fact that the social life of a ‘community of similars’ is some-thing that is created daily through the specificity of the actions and affectivelife of each of its members.

However, in place of Sahlins’ rather dramaturgical notion of the ‘performa-tive’, I would prefer to use the phrase ‘generative’ to encapsulate the Ama-zonian stress upon modes of fecundity.15 The cosmological discourse of thePiaroa is in the main about fecundity, for it dwells upon the individual powersfor life creation and destruction of the mighty creator gods. Likewise, theirdiscourse about the everyday skills of people is about their own generativecapacities for acting in this world. It probably can be argued with cogencythat Amazonian sociality in general is more about the issues of fecundity thanthose of status, role, and property. Thus the concept of ‘generative’ capturesthe indigenous stress upon the fundamental relation of everyday skills andpractice to the social process (as opposed to the relation of the dramatic ritual,such as ‘I pronounce you man and wife’, to a social structure).

Certainly for the Piaroa, to be social is to be fertile in a specifically culturalway, and they understand the practices of living together to be generative ofmembers of a community ‘becoming of a kind’. Human power (or perhaps

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better said, Piaroa power) is distinctive in that it is comprised of those specificgenerative skills that allow the individual to act materially in the world in aparticular way.16 It is because of cosmological history that it is only humanbeings who can acquire these specific powers for creation that are engender-ing of a fertile communal life. We shall now look more closely at just whatthese capabilities are that humans alone can acquire.

Custom and the Fertility of the ‘Life of Thoughts’The Piaroa privilege their own existence in the universe because with re-

spect to earthly life it is unique to humans to be able to conjoin thought, andtheir particular skills for action, with a life of desires. It is because humanbeings can individually acquire from the Tianawa gods both a ‘life of thoughts’(ta’kwarü) and a ‘life of the senses’ (kaekwae) that a distinctively human creativityon earth is possible. Cosmologically speaking, these are the two availablemodes of being that exemplify distinct aspects of power upon which the Piaroaendlessly play. Their stress, in distinguishing types of life, is not so much uponform or appearance (it is we who talk about ‘life forms’), but upon activities,for example characteristic eating or killing skills. The emphasis is upon whatthe being does, and how it is done. For instance, the monstrous spirit Masterof the Jungle, who is the protector of all forest inhabitants, executes his dutiesas a pure ‘sensual force’: it is through physical force and the power of mightthat he is able to carry out his work of soldiering (Overing 1996b). The Piaroaare dependent upon both their ‘life of the senses’ and their ‘life of thoughts’ toachieve their own particular way of being. Humans, without their sensual ca-pabilities, could not act in an earthly human way, for they could not marry oract in concert. They could not eat in a human way. The human cognitiveagent of earthly space must also be an actor.17 Nonetheless, it is the life of theintellect that the Piaroa understand as most significant to the achievement ofthese practices; for it is through their ‘life of thoughts’ that they have theirparticular skills, and also the ability to reflect upon, and thus direct them.

Both the ‘life of the senses’ and ‘life of thoughts’ become interiorised toform a beautiful, and highly private, internally designed self. Together, theyprovide an encased beautification in the form of what the Piaroa call their‘beads of life’. The beads are literally called ‘the beads of the life of the senses’(kaekwaewa reu). Thus labelled, they designate those forces that allow a per-son to breathe, to eat and to drink, to have sex, and in general to live a physicallife of impulses and desires. This is somewhat surprising, given the Piaroastress upon the importance of their ‘life of thoughts’ for the achievement of

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their material existence. The explanation is that it is the casing of the beadsitself that endows the person with a ‘life of the senses’. The casing is said tobe made from a special granite formed by the outcroppings of the faeces ofthe subterranean supreme deity, who is the source of all power on earth. Eachchild at birth receives its first internal string of beads of life (their casings)from the crystal boxes of the Tianawa gods. In later ritual, the person receivesfrom these same gods the forces for his/her ‘life of thoughts’, which the officia-ting shaman carefully places within the casings already resident in the person.Thus, the fossilised faeces of the supreme deity, which endows the potencyfor the life of the senses, encapsulates and contains the ‘forces of thought’. Asone Piaroa phrased it, ‘intelligence resides within the beads’. The imagery of‘beads of life’ also states the attached relationship of the ‘life of the senses’and the ‘life of thoughts’. It is because they are endowed with their ‘beads oflife’ that the Piaroa can live their physical life of the senses in a distinctlyhuman way, which means that their (wild) life of desires can be mastered bytheir life of thoughts. For them, action, thought and affect must be constitutiveof each other.

The Piaroa did not always master their actions through their thoughts.Early on during the mighty period of creation, their desires were controlled,not by their life of thoughts, but disastrously by their life of the senses, centredwithin a peculiar set of bodily parts — their brilliant and shiny blue anusesand genitals. A mythic vignette relates how this process was reversed on theday these ‘naughty parts’ lost their colourful sheen. This happened when thePiaroa acquired the knowledge of the dangers of incest. As the story goes, aninstance of incest erupted into an eternal and disruptive quarrel between twocreator gods. With the onset of this quarrel, the Piaroa for the first time be-came aware of the social dangers of incest, and it was at that moment, uponattaining social consciousness, that they lost these colourful parts. Thereafterthey were able to master their sexuality through intellectual reflection. Theaspect of each person’s life of thoughts that allows for such personal reflectionis referred to as ta’kwakomenae (see below).

In contrast, the sexuality of the creator gods (not to be confused with thepresent day Tianawa gods) was always dominated by their life of desires. Themighty powers sufficiently great for mythic creation were too monstrous forthe gods to handle through reason, and thus there was both a perversity anda madness to most creation of a mythic sort. Mythic fertility was frequentlyassociated with defecation, or with the expelling of other products of wastefrom the various orifices of the body. Vomit, excrement, and blood all had

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fertilising powers akin to semen. However the issue from godly sexuality wasoften not normal, but ghastly (taking the form of types of disease, from whichthe Piaroa today suffer). The lesson of mythic events, repeated time and again,is that it is only through moderate fecundity that a person can be empoweredto marry and to create children, and to create enduring kinship relations. Humanfecundity must be mastered through reflective thought (ta’kwakomenae), acontrast with the potent but monstrous fertility of creator gods. However, itis more than the life of the desires that reflective thought must master.18

The socially reflective capabilities of ta’kwakomenae are but one aspect ofeach person’s ‘life of thoughts’. The second is ta’kwanya. Ta’kwanya is the closestword in Piaroa language approaching our notion of ‘tradition’ or ‘custom’.Thus a person’s ‘life of thoughts’ includes two distinct, but interlinked forces:the skills for reflective thought and the capabilities for cultural practice. Bothcome from the crystal boxes of the gods. It is through ta’kwanya that oneknows the forest, and the habits and the history of all its inhabitants, bothplants and animals. However, ta’kwanya most importantly refers to those active,powerful forces of the self forthcoming from the life of thoughts that allow apeople to have the skills to act upon the world, transforming it for use intheir own particular way. Custom (ta’kwanya) for the Piaroa specifically refersto particular ways of doing things, to activities and practices in the world.White people have the ta’kwanya to build airplanes and high rise apartmentbuildings. The Piaroa hunt, garden, and make blowguns.

To give ta’kwanya an indigenous reading, the concept can best be under-stood to cover those forces of the life of thoughts that empower a personwith fertility. When mastered through reflective thought, they are the powersthat enable a person to create, be productive, and in general have effect uponthe world in a Piaroa way. Ta’kwanya includes capabilities for language, themeans for acquiring and processing food; it includes the skills for giving birth,for gardening, hunting, for ritual, and the making of tools. Like babies, toolsand objects are created through the fecund forces of thought.19

All these practices are linguistically classed together as capabilities of the‘life of thoughts’. A man can say that ‘through the means of thought’ (cha’kwanae)I sing and thus can cure disease; or, ‘through the means of my thoughts’ I canmake a blowgun, or build a house or fishing trap. A woman can say that it is‘through the means of her thoughts’ (cha’kwahunae) that she makes her garden,or gives birth. The product of each creation is said to be ‘a thought’ (a’kwa)of its creator, a manifestation of that person’s ta’kwanya. Moreover, in Piaroavocabulary, to cure, to make, to transform, and to create all have the same root.20

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Expressions of SelfhoodAlthough the forces of ta’kwanya are distinct from reflective consciousness

(ta’kwakomenae), it is imperative that they go hand in hand: indeed reflectivethought (ta’kwakomenae) must be the master of not only the ‘life of the senses’,but also of the powerful forces of ta’kwanya, which become beautified by suchdomestication. It is of some significance that the Piaroa express ‘selfhood’through direct reference to their capacities for reflective thought, rather thanto their powers of ta’kwanya.

Piaroa individuals place high value on being able ‘to live one’s life in one’sown way’, but this is not to be confused with the egoism of a familiar brandof western individualism. The puzzle perhaps for us is that in the Piaroa viewpersonal autonomy is a social capacity, and also a cultural one: the (human) con-scious I is also the social and cultural I — else it would not be human! Whatis then the relation between the conscious, independent subject and his orher valued social relations? What is the relation of the conscious agent andvalued cultural ways of doing things? Such an associated set of values — thevolitional I, the social relation, the cultural artifice — is confusing for those ofus who tend firmly to separate the three in our own theories of mind (whetherformulated through common sense or more rigorous philosophical methods).Theirs how-ever is a particular theory of interdependency that posits personalautonomy as the starting point of the social and as such necessarily expres-sible through the cultural device.

In large part this is because the Piaroa do not tend to oppose, in the waywe do, thinking and acting. We cannot use our gloss of ‘mind’ and ‘body’ tocapture their way of understanding this distinction. They, in fact, have noterm for ‘body’. Rather, what we would call ‘body’ is complexly divided intoits functional elements, as clusters of muscles or generative parts. Basicallythe ‘body’ is regarded as a tool, or a cluster of tools to be used for reproductoryendeavours, for eating, for physical effort in creating. It is a condition of livingan earthly human life for these tools - of muscle, flesh, and bone — to be mas-tered by the individual’s ‘life of thoughts’, to be directed by both ta’kwakomenaeand ta’kwanya acting in concert. We can well wonder about the philosophicalimplications of having no concept of body or corporeality, at least in the waywe think of such things. What the Piaroa do sharply distinguish is thinkingand desiring. For personal autonomy to be social, raw desire must be subjectfirst and foremost to reflective thought, which for the Piaroa is also a culturalas well as personal capacity.

The Piaroa express ‘selfhood’ through the concept of ta’kwakomenae, which

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I have spoken of as ‘reflective thought’. However, depending upon context,the concept can be variously translated as such capacities as consciousness,comprehension, intentionality, volition, and responsibility. Ta’kwakomenae liter-ally means ‘my thoughts standing up’, the idea being that through personalwill a person is intentionally using his or her forces of thought. It expresses aswell the personal mastery of emotions, or ‘the life of the desires’, which areconsidered wild until so mastered. The expression cha’kwakomenae!,21 is oftenused in daily interchange as an emphatic statement of personal autonomy orpurpose, a proclamation of one’s individuality as human actor — a claim toone’s own consciousness, intentionality, or volition. Its meaning is contextual,though it usually declares that this or that is the person’s own way of doingthings, with the stress being upon the highly valued personal choice.

As well as to will, ta’kwakomenae can also specify comprehension, or respon-sibility, guilt, and fault. Again, only context can lead the listener to the properunderstanding. ‘Will’ is attributed to others as well as to self, and often enoughin such cases the connotation is a negative one, with fault or guilt assigned toa particular man or woman’s lack of thought. There is an important further am-biguity in the use of cha’kwakomenae. It was explained to me that the expressionmay have the meaning of either ‘myself ’ or ‘my customs’. Thus cha’kwakomenaecan be variously translated as ‘I do it because it is my will’, ‘because I want to’,because it is my manner — or equally, ‘I do it because it is the custom of mypeople’. The stress in the first is upon a person’s own particular way of doingsomething, while the second is upon using that person’s distinctive culturalways.

Such ambiguity takes us to the heart of ta’kwakomenae as a notion, and thusto what we might classify as the Piaroa’s specific version of self: while theemphasis is upon individual agency, there is always an interplay between anautonomous self and the use of a set of powerful and culturally specific skills.The expression of ta’kwakomenae could display the tension between the two,to express the notion that what is customary must be mastered by personal will.

It should be noted that the relation of a person to a community of relationscan also be very dangerous for either self or others.

The Creation of Life and the Transference of Powers,or the Fertility of Thoughts and its Dangerous Residues

The Piaroa explain that there are a number of factors, acts, events contribu-ting to the on-going creation or transformation of the life forces of a person.For instance, the act of endowing knowledge is a reproductory act: it is work

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that gives life. Thus the acquisition of life is not a mere physical process, estab-lished once and for all through the means of acts of sexual intercourse. Eachperson gradually receives over his or her lifetime additional aspects of self-hood which come to comprise their powerful ‘life of thoughts’. This is whythe old are considered to be stronger than the young: they have over timeaccumulated more interior forces of selfhood to combat danger. As the theorygoes, the ‘life of thoughts’ affects the ‘life of the senses’, and as already ob-served these two aspects of self are connected. Thus those in middle age,male and female alike, are thought to be physically healthier than those whoare younger because of their more powerful ‘life of thoughts’. They thereforecan often with impunity ignore food taboos, a lapse that would make an adol-escent ill. In sum, knowledge and capabilities can not be separated from whatit means to be human, alive, and healthy.

People who live together are also continuously involved in a process ofmutual creation through a principle relating to the transference of creativepowers. By definition, all the work that a person does contributes to the en-dowment of life of those who are members of the same community. Throughthe proximity of working and eating together, sharing and caring for one an-other in daily activities, members of a community become mutually involvedin each other’s creation. Better stated, all work has a reproductive effect uponthose in daily close contact with one another. The food one eats is usually asmuch a result of the efforts of others as of one self, and as such a product oftheir thoughts as well as one’s own. Thus when eating the food produced orprocessed or hunted by another, a person incorporates into his or her own selfthe personal powers of the producer’s life of thoughts. People are surroundedin daily life by the powerful products of thoughts created by others. This isthe process that leads in time to the creation of a ‘community of similars’.

There is, however, danger to such transference of powers, for generativepowers can be damaging. A potentially hazardous means of transference isthrough bodily excretions. All bodily excretions are understood to be particul-arly potent, and often unmastered manifestations of a person’s fertility. Theyhave the potency to impregnate others with disease, not life. It was throughbleeding, urinating, and defecating that perverse and dangerous creations oc-curred in mythic time. Excretions, such as sweat, are best thought of as residuesof ta’kwanya, or forces of thought that a person has not been able to domesti-cate, and which must be sloughed off for the person’s own safety and fertility.A woman by menstruating (who is understood to be shedding her own un-mastered forces) becomes powerfully cleansed, and therefore properly fertile.

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A shaman acquires his transformational powers through self-inflicted ritesof menstruation when he forces a stingray spine through his tongue, therebyridding himself of all the unmastered fertility that he has accumulated fromthose with whom he lives. Because of the greatness of the shaman’s ‘life ofthoughts’, his own sweat and urine can especially be harmful to those aroundhim.

Each person has the responsibility to protect kinsmen as much as possiblefrom the dangers of their own bodily excretions. When dealing with the veryyoung or the vulnerable, an adult has to be exceedingly careful of what he orshe eats. As a result, food taboos are as likely to be followed as much for theprotection of others, as for the benefit to self. With a very young child, parentsmust not eat the flesh of large animals, for it is likewise the case that largeanimals can pass on disease to humans, (impregnating them) through theirexcretions, which are the manifestations of their own perverse fertility, orundomesticated thoughts. The Piaroa will not consume the blood of animalsbecause of its disease giving powers for impregnation. One way the Piaroathink about the disease process is as a perverse, life damaging pregnancy.

We may well ask, why is ta’kwanya in its unmastered form, so dangerous?The Piaroa notion of human power entails a theory of materiality that placesthe capabilities for having effect in this world within the domain of thoughts.Idealistic as such an idea might sound, the beautiful forces of ta’kwanya thatcome from the crystal boxes of the gods — those creative and fertile skills forhunting, fishing, gardening, for curing and for ritual, and for the having ofchildren — are also in origin the powerful forces for predation and cannibal-ism, the Amazonian concern par excellence. To eat is to kill, and to kill is atonce both to impregnate and be impregnated. The process is circular, in thiskilling and regenerating.22 The Piaroa stress is upon how to enter into thiscycle with as much safety as possible, for instance without devouring (or be-ing devoured by) those you most need. How to attain an existence of civilisedpredation/fecundity is the question. Civilised predation requires first of allcivilised procreation (when a man does not perversely impregnate his sister),and secondly the everyday use of the culinary arts (when food is eaten cookedand not raw). A human sort of living is possible only when the violent andugly forces of creation taken from the crystal boxes of the Tianawa gods arebeautified and domesticated through the individual human will. This is whythe Piaroa place so much emphasis upon the artful everyday, for it is throughthe mastery of the daily practice of eating and preparing for eating within a‘community of similars’ that civilised life is made possible.

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A Matter of Trust: Reflective Thought and the Art of Social LivingIn conclusion I wish to talk again about the relation of the Piaroa version

of ‘the art of social living’ to a principle of trust.The Piaroa are one of many peoples of the Amazon Basin whose social

stress is upon the achievement of a certain quality of life that can be enjoyedthrough the everyday practices of community life. For them, the paramountsocial endeavour is the attainment of high morale in community relations.This is an end in itself. The political goal relates to the achievement of harmonyin the daily productive and commensal relations of community life. Here,the emphasis is not upon the grandeur of the institution, but upon sets ofinformal personal relationships through which intimate relations of trust canbe created. The health and the prosperity of a community, particularly as itpertains to the care and well being of its children, are understood to be con-tingent upon the success of its members in establishing such personal andinterdependent relations of trust.

Trust is crucially related to the sociality that the Piaroa so value, for theyare hardly naive about the capacities of human beings for doing damage toone another, and it is for this reason that they give sovereignty in social mattersto the intentional, choice making individual, and not the institution, nor thecollectivity. The person has power, and not the institution. Power ever person-alised makes self-aggrandisement of any significance very difficult to achieve(and the Piaroa are ever watchful for such signs): the would be tyrant has noinstitutionalised set of laws and regulations, or sets of enduring statuses androles, through which to grow and stabilise power.

The Piaroa notion of living under their own ’sky of the domesticated’ de-picts well the means through which they decentre social power: they ’domesti-cate’ power by personalising it and providing the individual actor, and notthe group, the responsibility for this domestication. As a result power alwaysbecomes a matter of personal trust — or distrust. And thus, community lifebecomes deeply dependent upon the creation of individual trusting relation-ships. As already discussed, the health of each member of the community isdependent upon the artful skills of other people performing the everyday tasksof providing food and further tasks. What is more, a good deal of social energyis directed toward creating new morally competent beings with the personalcapabilities for living harmoniously (artfully) with others: the young mustlearn how to trust, and how to become trustworthy. To be worthy of trust,they must learn the everyday skills for the culinary arts within the jungle set-ting, as well as those for living a tranquil social life. To become accomplished

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in any of these skills the child must learn to master his or her ‘life of thoughts’,and thereby domesticate personal power. Above all, children are taught touse reflective thought (ta’kwakomenae) to direct their actions. Both knowledgeand action are considered by others untrustworthy (not beautiful) if judgedto be enacted without the help of reflective thought.

It is at this point that we are able to disclose the significance of the distinctlyPiaroa version of the self for the creation of a particular sort of egalitarianprocess which contrasts with our own. For the sake of their egalitarian ethic,it is politically necessary for the Piaroa to conjoin the conscious, intentionalI with skills for both social and customary action. Their insistence upon per-sonal autonomy, their high evaluation of the social, and their affection forcustom are not conflicting values, or rather they only appear to be from thepoint of view of the dominant strand of our own individualism that states thesuperiority of the disengaged ego. The Piaroa individual by definition par-takes of the social and the cultural. It is partly because they do away with theweight of institutional solidity that they have no need to long for the freedomthat disengagement might endow. By refusing the imperatives of institutionallaw, they can properly socialise personal power, and link it to customary actionwithout neutralising the autonomous I. At the same time, by personalisingpower, they can further inhibit the development of the institution, and thehierarchical arrangements through which it flourishes. Given their highly real-istic view of the negative, coercive, and indeed absurd, side of power, thePiaroa have quite rightly decided that the weighty institution would be fartoo dangerous for them as a means through which dangerous power couldbe harnessed and channelled. As a result they are free to focus more uponthe productive and generative side of power, and not just its coercive face.

The anthropological problem is that we have equated this vision of collec-tivity as a coercive force with the notion of the social itself. Society becomesby definition the prescriptive order, and the institutions of hierarchy throughwhich the rules of this ordered whole are played out. There are, however,many peoples who view collectivity and the sociality it engenders in otherterms. The informal Piaroa have on purpose few mechanisms at hand for thebuilding of such hierarchy. Yet, as I have already remarked, the Piaroa highlyvalue their ability to be social. Such peoples become, as Marshall Sahlins phrasesthe problem, ‘monuments to the failure of the anthropological imagination —and beyond that to the limitations of Western social thought’ (1987:26).

The way out of the bind is to recognise that our theoretical constructs areto a certain extent local ones, and therefore certainly relevant to us. Derived

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from our own experience and history, they are therefore only more or lessapplicable to the histories and experiences of other peoples — and we cannotpredict the overlap. This does not mean, in my opinion, that we should denyindividualism or collectivity to the Piaroa — or to the Trio or the Arawaté. Todo so would imply that we have been culturally unique in expressing a con-cern over the issue of the relation of the individual to the social — that it isonly we who have thought about such complexities and who have thereforedeveloped the social theory to think about this relationship.

The stress in the Piaroa theory of selfhood is upon the self-conscious, choos-ing, interpreting moral agent. Consciousness precedes the acceptance (or re-jection) of the specific cultural and social way of doing things (ta’kwakomenaeis taught before ta’kwanya), but once accepted its use must be continuallymonitored by the acting, reflecting moral agent. The responsible, reflective‘I’ from the start is a social ‘I’: one’s own autonomy is dependent upon theautonomy of others — and vice versa. Personal power works in Piaroa societyonly because of the general practice of extending autonomy as a prerogativeof the other.23 Within these ‘non-contractual’ societies, the only contract is thisimperative, which in fact can only be backed by personal judgements of trust.

It now may be clear why the idea is rather widespread among Amazonianpeoples that ideal sociality is best achieved through ‘a community of similars’.The stress in this vision of ’a collectivity of singular similarities is upon achievingpersonal relations sufficiently engendering of intimacy and identity in pur-pose so that trust, not competition, becomes the hallmark of everyday rela-tions. Such identity does not impinge upon free will; but to the contrary, it isthrough the wilful, artful mastery of the skills for intimate living that a persongains the autonomy to live an adult life. In this particular Amazonian imageof the social, the more a people are able through free choice to come to agree-ment in their ways of doing things intimately, the more likely that they willbe able to rely upon a principle of trust in their generative practices of everydayliving. In other words, they can become free in everyday life from the necessityof having to rely upon the more coercive and personally destructive aspectsof power as might be expressed through avaricious and predatory competition,or the tyranny of rules and regulations of law.

AcknowledgmentThis text is based on my Inaugural lecture for the Chair in Social Anthropology,the style of the piece takes into account the fact that my audience was bothmulti-disciplinary and from the community. Although I have incorporated a few‘anthropological’ additions, the presentation remains for the most part as it was

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delivered. For their comments on an earlier draft of this piece I am grateful toDavid McKnight, Alan Passes, and Peter Rivière. A Portuguese version of thetext has appeared in the journal Mana 5/1, April 1999 under the title ‘Elogio docotidiano: a confiança e a arte da vida social em uma comunidade amazônia’.

Notes 1. According to Paul Oldham, who is involved in on-going fieldwork with the Piaroa

(See Oldham 1996), the treasured peace is now being disrupted in the form ofsorcery warfare between leaders, in the wake of their attempts to create organ-isational structures to deal with the nation state. Thus far, it appears that theirpeaceful ways, based upon the informal ‘structures’ about which I am concernedin this paper, will have difficulty surviving the introduction of more formallystructured organisation.

2. It is only in recent years that Amazonian specialists have recognised the crucialimportance of linking artful production to social organisation. As a splendidexample see David M. Guss (1989) To Weave and to Sing, who provides us with asatisfyingly full discussion of the relation of art, symbol, and narrative to theeveryday life of the Yekuana of Venezuela. It is also relevant to remark that mostPiaroa artistic production belongs to the domain of the everyday (See Overing1996a).

3. As belonging to a growing philosophical counterculture, she includes such peopleas Carol Gilligan (1982), Alasdair MacIntyre (1980), Michael Stocker (1976a,1976b), Lawrence Blum (1980), Michael Slote (1983), Claudia Card 1994, 1995,Alison Jagger (1983), Susan Wolf (1982). See Baier 1995:18–19.

4. Baier 1995:13–14. But see MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1980), where he expresseshis nostalgia for a virtues-centred ethics.

5. See Baier ibid:323, and also Gillisen 1992. 6. See Gow (1989, 1991) on the Piro of Peru; Belaunde (1992, 1994) on the Airo

Pai of Peru, McCallum (1989, 1994) on the Cashinahua of Brazil. 7. As the Norwegian philosopher, Jacob Meløe, notes 1988:95, ‘we are poor observers

of whatever activities we are not ourselves familiar with as agents’. A lot of anthro-pology (and not just philosophy, about which he speaks) is about ‘not seeingand not knowing that we are not seeing’ (Meløe 1988:89.).

8. Among the Achuar, garden plants are understood to be blood thirsty vampirecannibals (Descola, 1996: Chapt. 6). But here I am guilty of exoticising, and thatis not my point.

9. There is, however, a cultural relativism to indigenous theory that focuses uponvariation in capacities for action and asserts that each type or kind of being livesaccording to its own specific (and other-worldly acquired) set of activities andhabits.Viveiros de Castro has recently (1996:127ff ) classified this Amazonianstress upon distinctive action as a form of ‘multinaturalism’. On my part, I wouldsee it as an aspect of indigenous ‘multiculturalism’. I dare say this will continueto be an on-going debate among Amazonian specialists which has to do withthe controversy over the relevance of our own conceptual division between ‘na-ture’ and ‘culture’ to indigenous thought.

10. Also see, for example, Lévi-Strauss (1967) on the Nambikwara, Goldman (1963)on the Cubeo, Thomas (1982) on the Pemon, Viveiros de Castro (1992) on the

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Arawaté, Overing (1993b) on the Piaroa, Ellis (1996) on the Tsimane. Even amongthe more bellicose Achuar (see Descola 1994, 1996) and Yanomami (see Lizot1985), relations of coercion appear to be personal ones.

11. For example see Henley 1982 on the Panare. Also see Overing 1993a for additionalethnography on this topic.

12. There is increasing attention being paid to the ‘art of feeding’ in the ethnographiesof Amazonian peoples. See for instance Gow (1989) and Belaunde (1994).

13. See, however, Overing Kaplan (1975) on the political aspects of marriage arrange-ments among the Piaroa. The proper marriage is one where everyone agrees,the bride and groom, and also the parents of both of them. Nevertheless, theprinciple certainly normally asserted is that no bride and groom can be forcedto comply to parental desires, and often enough the decision remains with thebride and groom alone.

14. See Overing 1992 on the agency of tools.15. See, for example, the literature on the North West Amazon: S. Hugh-Jones (1979),

C. Hugh-Jones (1979), and the recent Ms. by Kaj Århem, ‘The cosmic food web’.Also see S-E Isacsson (1993) on the Emberá of the Colombian Chocó.

16. See Overing 1993a for a different sort of discussion on this matter.17. The Piaroa insisted that the Tianawa gods were also human beings. These gods,

who cannot act in the sensual sense, are not of earthly space.18. See Overing 1985 for an earlier, but fuller, discussion of the Piaroa theory of

‘mind’.19. The concluding ritual of each ceremony involved in the acquiring of ta’kwanya

confers fertility as well to both gardens and the jungle surrounds.20. One can say, I cure (tü aditusae) this woman; I make (tü aditusae) this blowgun

or loincloth.21. First person singular.22. As another splendid example, see the discussion of Isacsson (1993: Chapters 21

& 34) on the symbolism of the ‘sexual hunting’ and ‘the pregnant hunter’ amongthe Emberá of Colombia.

23. See D. Thomas (1982), who was the first to make this important observationabout an Amazonian people. In his case, it was about the Pemon, neighbours ofthe Piaroa.

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