Download Of words and fog

Anthropological Theory
Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi,
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http://ant.sagepub.com
Vol 10(3): 247–263
10.1177/1463499610372177
Of words and fog
Linguistic relativity and Amerindian
ontology
Magnus Course
University of Edinburgh, UK
Abstract
This article explores the role of analogies derived from language in the ethnographic
description and analysis of non-Western ontologies. Focusing in particular on the
rhetorical analogy of subject and object central to descriptions of Amerindian
perspectival ontologies, I suggest that such analogies may well obscure as much as they
reveal. Utilizing an account of ontological transformation drawn from my own
research among the Mapuche of southern Chile, I suggest that the analogy of subject
and object suggests to speakers of European languages a radical discontinuity and
therefore obscures the subtleties of the transformation at stake. Through the
presentation of alternative grammatical paradigms present in Amerindian languages
themselves, I suggest that grammars necessarily contain implicit ontologies which,
when used analogically to represent non-linguistic phenomena, may seriously distort
the ethnographic data they are intended to clarify.
Key Words
Amerindian • analogy • linguistic relativity • Mapuche • ontology • perspectivism •
Benjamin Whorf
In a recent paper on the influence of Gilles Deleuze on anthropology, Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro has written of ‘the three infernal dichotomies that contain the discipline
within an iron ring: nature and culture, individual and society, traditional and modern’
(2007: 97).1 The argument I wish to put forward in this article is constituted by the
simple description of a fourth infernal dichotomy, one in which contemporary
anthropological analyses frequently seem to remain imprisoned: that of subject and
object.
The critique implied by my description of this fourth dichotomy both emerges from
and is directed towards an approach to which I am highly sympathetic and indeed within
which I locate my own ethnographic efforts: the attempt to describe the ontologies of
non-Western peoples without recourse (or with as little recourse as possible) to our own
ontological assumptions about the world. More specifically, I seek to reveal how recent
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 10(3)
anthropological attempts to account for difference, without recourse to the set of
binaries mentioned by Viveiros de Castro above, frequently find themselves enmeshed
in yet another binary, that of ‘subject’ and ‘object’. Like the snake which bites its own
tail, these new ontologists come to devour the very position from which they speak, and
find themselves, having come full circle, back at the point from which they departed:
the ontological presuppositions of Western thought.
The attempt to understand others ‘on their own terms’ or ‘from their point of view’
has in many ways been the defining stance of anthropology vis-à-vis difference since at
least the time of Boas and Malinowski. However, in recent years an increasing number
of anthropologists have focused critical attention on the question of what exactly these
‘terms’ or ‘points of view’ of others might be. This focus has gone hand in hand with an
increasing awareness that even the foundational assumptions of Western epistemology
are neither as transparent nor as self-evident as was previously assumed, but rather
pertain to a highly specific naturalist ontology (Descola, 1996; Keane, 2007; Latour,
1993). This critical focus is not simply the questioning of the cross-cultural applicability of Western categories but a questioning of the very root assumptions of ‘cultural
difference’ itself.2 This dual movement towards, on the one hand, exploring the basis of
the Western social and intellectual project and, on the other, of exploring and describing the terms in which non-Western understandings of the world are grounded is
frequently unified by a shared commitment to ontology and has thus been described by
some commentators as ‘the ontological turn’.3 Perhaps not surprisingly, what people have
meant by ontology has been diverse and the field I am describing here is neither a ‘school’
nor even a ‘movement’, but rather a particular commitment to recalibrate the level at
which analysis takes place and, as Michael Scott puts it, to ‘explore the ways in which
human imagination and agency reference and reveal different configurations of the
essential nature of things’ (2007: 4). At first glance, this investigation of different
understandings of being may seem rather esoteric or, worse still, exoticizing, but as
writers such as Bruno Latour (1993) and Elizabeth Povinelli (1995, 2001, 2004) have
demonstrated, the incommensurability of ontological frameworks and the ensuing
attempts to commensurate them are key sites of political struggle. My intention in this
article is neither to offer a review of this increasingly prominent body of literature nor,
in any direct way, to contribute to it. Rather, I wish simply to suggest that a prerequisite to engaging in the already substantial and intimidating task of describing
ontologies ethnographically is to think a little bit more critically about the analogies we
employ in carrying out that task.
The focus of this critique, then, is neither the concept of ontology nor its utility for
anthropology, but rather on the slightly more mundane topic of the practice of ethnographic writing. Since the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986),
critiques of ethnographic writing have rained down hard and fast to the point at which
even the most open-minded and ‘reflexive’ of readers must feel on the verge of saturation. However, the critique of ethnographic writing I present here is not at the level of
literary composition but at the slightly less glamorous level of grammar and the
pervasive analogies to which grammar gives rise.
Put simply, I want to suggest that analogies drawn from certain grammatical features
of European languages have had a profound yet largely unrecognized effect on the ethnographic representation of transformative social practices in Native South American
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societies. Through the presentation of hypothetical counter-examples, I suggest that the
Western configuration of the subject-object paradigm, which has arguably stood as one
of the key analogies of Western thought, is but one possible representation of relational
roles, a representation premised on its analogical resemblance to the grammatical
subjects and objects of European languages. This suggestion, that the roots of the
abstract categories of philosophy and social theory are to be sought not in ‘reality’ but
in the very forms of the language in which they are expressed, is not novel. To take but
one among many possible examples: Emile Benveniste made a very similar point a long
time ago, revealing that ontological categories of Aristotle were, not coincidentally,
isomorphic with the grammatical categories of ancient Greek (1966).4 My purpose in
restating this old, even ancient, argument here is to draw attention once more to the need
to excise the continual slippage between representation and its forms so characteristic of
‘habitual’ thought from our ethnographic efforts.
I start the article by describing one specific approach within the ontological turn
described above, the attempt to understand the ontologies of indigenous peoples in South
America in terms of what has come to be known as Amerindian ‘perspectivism’. Using an
account of ontological transformation drawn from my own ethnographic research among
rural Mapuche people in southern Chile, I aim to illustrate the limitations, not of a perspectival approach itself, but of the analogy of subject and object in which it is frequently
framed. Utilizing alternative grammatical configurations of subjects and objects present in
Amerindian languages themselves, I execute an admittedly speculative anthropological
‘thought experiment’ to suggest that the configuration of subjects and objects solely as
radically opposed yet reversible identities characteristic of European languages is but one
possible configuration. The paper ends with a broader reflection on the relation between
grammar, analogy, and the world, and consequently on the continuing importance of a
‘Whorfian’ sensitivity to our analogical use of language in ethnographic theorizing.
PERSPECTIVE AND TRANSFORMATION IN NATIVE SOUTH
AMERICA
The particular manifestation of the ‘ontological turn’ I focus on in this paper is the
identification and description of what has been called the ‘perspectival’ basis of
Amerindian ontologies (Århem, 1993). This approach has represented a genuine
paradigm shift in socio-cultural anthropological approaches to indigenous peoples in the
Americas, and in lowland South America in particular. Perspectivism, as it has become
known, is perhaps most closely associated with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and his
colleagues at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, but has now become the dominant
paradigm (some might even say orthodoxy) within which most Brazilian, European, and
an increasing number of North American anthropologists concerned with the region are
working.5 Perspectivism is a ‘beautiful’ theory in the sense used by physicists to describe
those theories that explain the maximum number of phenomena with the minimum
number of words. Its influence thus lies in its ability to make sense of a wide variety of
ethnographic facts that had previously appeared somewhat arbitrary or unconnected.
Phenomena as diverse as shamanic transformation, the wearing of Western clothing,
endo-cannibalism, exo-cannibalism, the keeping of pets, food restrictions, understandings of white people – all seem to ‘make sense’ within a perspectival ontological
framework in ways that they did not before.
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 10(3)
So what is this perspectivism? Put simply, it is the observation that in many indigenous American ontologies different kinds of beings see different worlds in the same way.
A couple of examples will make this clearer: in an Amazonian context, it is common to
hear that peccaries see each other as human and that they see humans as jaguars. Jaguars,
on the other hand, see each other as human but see humans as peccaries. These perspectival ideas are not confined to South America but are widespread throughout the
Americas as a whole. Thus, for example, among many indigenous peoples of the northwest coast of North America it is said that salmon see each other as humans, they see
humans as bears, and they see the leaves on the bottom of the river as salmon (Guédon,
1984). Viveiros de Castro has described this phenomenon of Amerindian perspectivism
in terms of deixis (1998). In a conventional use of the term, deixis refers to the referential meaning of an utterance being dependent on the spatial, temporal, or personal
position from which it is emitted. Yet in the deixis characteristic of perspectivism it is
the world itself which is dependent on the position from which its perception emanates,
hence Viveiros de Castro’s label of ‘cosmological deixis’. A key point is that in perspectival ontologies not only do all beings appear human to themselves, but they act towards
one another as humans would – in other words they all possess human ‘culture’. For
example, peccaries see themselves as living in villages, having shamans, and frequently
holding manioc beer parties (although what constitutes manioc beer for peccaries
appears to humans as mud, while what constitutes manioc beer for jaguars appears to
humans as human blood). The crucial point is that ‘Amerindian ontological perspectivism proceeds along the lines that the point of view creates the subject; whatever is
activated or “agented” by the point of view will be a subject’ (Viveiros de Castro, 1998:
476, emphasis in original). And it is the occupation of this subject position, rather than
any ‘natural’ essence, which defines one as ‘culturally’ human.
It would be a mistake to think of these perspectives as fixed and systematic. What is
in fact the driving force behind much Amerindian social practice is the essentially
predatory struggle to impose one’s perspective on others, to make others conform to
one’s own vision of the world rather than conforming to that of others. In other words,
to be the subject of perception rather than its object, and thus to be ‘human’ rather than
non-human. This is especially salient given that the primary indigenous idiom which
Viveiros de Castro focuses on in his description of this conflict of perspectives is that of
predator and prey. To be a perceiving subject is to be a predator, whereas to be the object
of perception is to be prey.
Let us take as an example Tania Lima’s account of peccary hunting among the Juruna,
a Tupi-speaking people of central Brazil (1999). Juruna people say that peccaries see each
other as human, that they have chiefs and shamans, and that what peccaries like to do
best is to go to parties with their brothers-in-law. It is for this reason that when hunting
peccaries, human hunters should never joke. For joking is the primary social activity
between brothers-in-law. Thus to act as a brother-in-law is to act in accordance with the
peccaries’ perspective on the world and ultimately to submit to the reality of this vision.
Those who break the joking taboo therefore end up as peccaries – they wander off in
the forest to join their peccary kin never to be seen in human form again. They have, in
perspectival terms, ceased to be the subjects of their own perspective and have become
instead the objects of the perspective of another. Let us now turn to an example of the
danger of uncontrolled transformation in the opposite direction along this predatory
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chain of perspectives. Among the Parakanã, a Tupi-speaking group from the Brazilian
state of Parà, shamans diagnose illness through acquiring the perspective of other beings,
namely jaguars (Fausto, 2004). They must take great care, however, in not succumbing
entirely to the reality of the jaguar they have become, as in this jaguar state achieved
through trance, their own kin appear to them as peccaries, as prey animals, and several
tales tell of such shaman-jaguars devouring their own kin.
The implications of a perspectival ontology are radical, far reaching, and as a consequence, far beyond the modest scope of the argument presented here. Put briefly,
Viveiros de Castro opposes an Amerindian ‘multinaturalism’ to a Western ‘multiculturalism’: the former sees ‘culture’ as what is shared by all species, while it is a plurality of ‘natures’ which differentiate.6 Multiculturalism, on the other hand, posits a
diversity of ‘cultures’ against the backdrop of a unifying ‘nature’. It is in this exploration
of incommensurable understandings of the configuration of the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’
that the perspectives of Viveiros de Castro and those of Latour (1993) described above
come into close alignment.
There is clearly an awful lot more to be said about perspectival ontologies, and much
contemporary work with indigenous peoples in lowland South America and elsewhere
is concerned with thinking through its implications in a variety of historical, cultural,
and political contexts.7 The key point which I ask the reader to hold in mind with regards
to the argument I wish to present here is that the usual anthropological exegesis of
perspectival cosmologies is always based on two analogies drawn from language: firstly,
that of deixis, and secondly, that of a particular configuration of subject and object.8 It
is the latter of these two linguistic analogies which I wish to explore in more depth
through an ethnographic account of what is referred to by Mapuche people of southern
Chile as the experience of kolüm.
Kolüm
Manuel arrived at our house just as the sun rose over Huapi’s wooded skyline to the east.
He looked scared, dishevelled, and dirty, rather than happy and drunk as we had seen
him the previous afternoon. He wanted a drink, and once the glass in his shaking hands
had been emptied he told us the cause of his alarm:
I went over to Agustin’s place to drink with the money I got for harvesting potatoes.
We stayed there drinking and I spent all my money. Agustin’s wife wouldn’t sell me
anymore, so I headed off towards Sergio’s house; his wife will sell me wine on credit.
I made my way down into the gully between Agustin and Mario’s when all of a
sudden a heavy fog came down. This wasn’t like a morning fog [trukur] or a sea fog
[madkan]; it was early evening on a sunny day. The fog was so heavy I couldn’t see
anything. I wandered around and around in the woods, trying to get out of the
gully, but I kept coming back to the same place. I began to shout and scream, but
no one heard. All the time I felt something watching me and surrounding me. I
was all alone, wandering and shouting all night. Eventually I fell asleep, the fog
lifted, and here I am.
‘That was kolüm,’ said Papi. ‘There’s a ngen in that place that’s always misbehaving. The
same thing happened to me. If you really annoy them you’ll never get out.’
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 10(3)
The experience of what is known as kolüm is a great source of fear for the rural
Mapuche people with whom I lived.9 Old men found dead out of doors in winter are
often thought to have been the victims of kolüm from which they could not escape. I
have heard numerous accounts of experiences similar to that described by Manuel above,
all of which share certain features. Firstly, kolüm only ever occurs to people who are on
their own, kisu in the Mapuche language, Mapudungun. Secondly, experiences of kolüm
tend to be situated in specific places renowned for being governed by mischievous
ngen, usually described in the literature as a kind of ‘nature spirit’ responsible for the
continuing abundance of animals and plants, places which are almost always situated by
water of some kind.10 Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, the person suffering kolüm
can neither see nor hear anything through the thick fog, but at the same time has the
distinct feeling of being observed. In other words, they start to lose sense of being the
locus of their own perspective and instead start to become solely the focus of another’s
perspective. In some cases the experience of kolüm may be put down to the person’s lack
of respect to the natural environment of which the ngen is master. In others, it is put
down simply to the capricious vindictiveness of the ngen responsible.
Within such accounts of kolüm are some of the classic themes of Amerindian ethnography: the ubiquitous presence of what are frequently called ‘masters of the animals’; the
dangerous transformative process triggered by encounters with such beings; the mediating role of fog. My intention here, however, is not to provide any analysis or exegesis of
the meaning of kolüm and its place within Mapuche ontology, but rather to think
critically about the vocabulary we use to describe the process of transformation at its
core.
‘SUBJECTS’ AND ‘OBJECTS’
The experience of kolüm described above corresponds to what Viveiros de Castro has
described as the ‘canonical form’ of Amerindian supernatural encounters: ‘An abnormal
context wherein a subject is captured by another cosmologically dominant point of view’
(1998: 483). He goes on to suggest that such an encounter ‘consists in suddenly finding
out that the other is “human”, that is, that it is the human, which automatically dehumanizes and alienates the interlocutor and transforms him into a prey object’ (1998:
483). It is this opposition of subject and object which constitutes the key analogical device
in which the ontological transformation at the heart of such encounters is represented.
The writings of Viveiros de Castro (1992, 1998, 2004, 2007) are permeated with this
dichotomy, a dichotomy which is premised on understanding ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ as
referring to opposed yet reversible identities. I should make it clear that Viveiros de Castro
makes explicit his use of a subject-object dichotomy as a strategy to reveal its very
inadequacy, as a means of critiquing our ‘conceptually dichotomous heritage’ (1998:
270). He writes that the rhetorical use of such dichotomies has ‘the advantage of showing
how unstable and problematic those polarities can be made to appear, once they have
been forced to bear “unnatural” interpretations and unexpected rearrangements’ (2004:
464).11 My argument here constitutes a demonstration of Viveiros de Castro’s insight into
just how problematic and unstable these ‘polarities’ can be, but perhaps from a slightly
different perspective to that envisaged by Viveiros de Castro himself.
Before going on to explore the problems with applying this analogical device to the
experience of kolüm described above, I would like to pause briefly to highlight how the
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pervasiveness of the subject-object dichotomy goes far beyond the work of Viveiros de
Castro and, indeed, far beyond the boundaries of Amerindian ethnography: it is an
opposition which could well be said to lie at the heart of Western philosophy and social
theory. As Webb Keane has argued recently, the separation of subjects from objects, of
those entities properly endowed with agency from those for which agency is denied, has
been central to what he calls the ‘moral narrative of modernity’ (2007). This modernist
narrative is concerned with the ‘purification’ of social practice, a term Keane derives from
Latour (1993). Such purification was initially rooted in Christian practice, most evident
perhaps in missionaries’ concern with the extirpation of idolatry, but has eventually
become so entrenched in Western thought as to penetrate even the most secular realms
of science. Keane comments in passing how this alignment of subjects and objects has
carried over from Christian practice into philosophy. He thus locates Marx and
Heidegger as two strands of a wider project concerned with drawing the correct lines
between what entities can stand as objects and which as subjects. Given the historical
and cultural breadth of Keane’s claim, it is probably not too difficult to think of counterarguments and counter-examples. However, all I want to take from Keane in this
instance is simply the idea that in the Western intellectual tradition subjects and objects
appear as radically opposed and ontologically distinct entities. Much academic, theological, and political debate has revolved around the allotting of entities into one or the
other of these two ways of being. I want to suggest that the heuristic value of much
‘perspectival’ ethnography lies in the very insufficiency of the structuring subject-object
dichotomy in which it is framed. For despite its attempt to free itself from such intellectual baggage in the description of a radically different Amerindian ontology, it remains
at least partially imprisoned within this infernal dichotomy and its accompanying
ontological assumptions.
We all know that the ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of grammar are not the same as the
‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of philosophical and anthropological theorizing. Linguists distinguish between ‘agents’ and ‘patients’ when talking about the semantic roles anthropologists frequently gloss as ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’, while they reserve the terms ‘subject’
and ‘object’ to refer to grammatical functions of language. We only need to think of
any passive construction to realize the difference. The distinction between these two
uses of the opposing pair ‘subject’ and ‘object’ is at once immediately obvious yet, and
this is the crux of my argument, very easily forgotten. In the cool light of academic
reflection, we can see the two uses as distinct, yet in the habitual practice of representing relations and structures through analogies, analogies emerging from the habitual
practice of everyday speech, the subjects and objects of grammar and the subjects and
objects of ontology become as one. If we take analogy to be the juxtaposition of two
distinct phenomena which resemble one another in a certain form, a problem arises
when the analogical quality of the relationship is forgotten, and the two forms are
confused as one.12 My contention in this article is thus that the analogical opposition
of subjects and objects in attempts to describe Amerindian ontology is not necessarily
a reflection of the data present, but rather a reflection of the grammatical structure of
European languages, an analogy at right angles to what it seeks to represent. More
importantly, I suggest that this slippage has real consequences for our understanding
of the more subtle aspects of ontological transformations like those experienced in
kolüm.
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 10(3)
I now turn to explore alternative configurations of the subject-object paradigm
present in Amerindian languages themselves. My intention in doing so is absolutely not
to suggest that there is any relation whatsoever between these grammatical forms and
perspectival ontologies. Such an argument would immediately flounder given the fact
that perspectival ontologies occur across a wide variety of languages and language
families. The purpose is rather to demonstrate that, when used analogically, grammatical
forms impose certain ontological structures on what they seek to represent. Put simply,
I am not suggesting that the grammatical forms of language affect ‘culture’ unless these
forms are stripped from their discursive context and utilized analogically to stand for
something other than language. By presenting the following thought experiment, I hope
to reveal that grammatical configurations are themselves not ontologically neutral and
that this opacity is exacerbated when they are taken to stand analogically.
ALTERNATIVE ONTOLOGIES OF GRAMMAR
The analogical use of a particular grammatical configuration of subject and object to
represent an ontological transformation such as that occurring in kolüm might go
unnoticed were it the only such configuration to occur in natural language. This,
however, is not the case. My intention in this section is to illustrate, through the presentation of alternative configurations of subject and object present in Amerindian
languages, that the reversible opposition of subject and object characteristic of European
grammars is but one particular configuration. Put simply, whereas the grammars of
European languages tend towards presenting entities as either subjects or objects, some
Amerindian grammars additionally allow for the configuration of an entity as simultaneously subject and object, while still others present certain entities exclusively and
irreversibly as subjects.13 The grammatical configurations I present here, those of
inversion and ergativity, are intended to serve the purpose of ‘a mirror held up to our
own’ implicit assumptions and reveal the particular opposition of subjects and objects
in the ethnographic representation of Amerindian ontologies for the grammatical
analogy which it is (Whorf, 1956: 138).
I should once again stress that I am most certainly not suggesting that any ontology
can be accessed or understood through the grammar of its speakers, nor am I suggesting that specific grammars lead people to think in specific ways, but rather that when
used analogically grammars carry their own ontological structures. As Silverstein, following Whorf, notes: ‘Languages each seem to contain an implicit ontology as a function
of structural factors of mapping from/projecting onto the universe of “reality,” the
uniqueness and nonlinguistic manifestation of which become critical issues’ (2000: 91).
The danger then arises that these implicit ontologies within the form of a particular
language can, when used as supposedly neutral analogies for non-linguistic phenomena,
deflect us from the true nature of what we are seeking to describe ethnographically. I
should add here that my argument is not against the use of analogies per se, but rather
to suggest that the linguistic roots of many analogies and the ontological structures they
imply are far from transparent.
Before turning to explore alternative configurations in the form of inversion and
ergativity, it is necessary to clarify the situation as it occurs in European languages.14 The
radical opposition between subject and object central to the grammar of most European
languages is an aspect of what is referred to as a nominative-accusative system. Within
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such a system the subject of an intransitive verb is necessarily distinct from the object
of a transitive verb.15 The subject/object distinction in English pronouns is thus marked
as he-him, she-her, and I-me.16 The marking of a pronoun as subject in a transitive clause
implies its agency in the realization of the verb, and the reverse is true of its marking as
an object. This association of the role of subject with agency in transitive clauses is, I
would suggest, heavily influential on a habitual speaker’s understanding of the subject
of an intransitive clause to the extent that subjects in general are taken to be agentive.17
When extracted from discourse and used analogically, the reversible opposition of
subjects and objects in European languages slips all too easily into a superficially similar
reversible opposition of the semantic roles of agents and patients. But what difference
would it make if the analogies utilized ethnographically were drawn from other
languages? In the counter-examples which follow, my goal is certainly not to propose an
alternative set of analogies for use in the description of Mapuche transformation, but
rather to simply highlight the linguistic specificity of the subject-object paradigm as it
stands.
Ergativity
Let us turn now to an alternative to a nominative-accusative formulation, that of
ergativity. The term ergativity or, more properly, ‘ergative-absolutive’, refers to a
grammatical principle which represents the relation between subjects and objects in a
rather different way to that occurring in nominative-accusative configurations.18 For in
ergative-absolutive configuration, the subject of an intransitive verb is frequently
equivalent to the object of a transitive verb. As English does not possess an ergative
principle, the only example I can provide would be something erroneous like ‘Him slept’,
a construction which would be acceptable in many ergative systems.19 Thus what is
usually treated as a object of a transitive clause is now equivalent to the subject of a
intransitive clause. This example refers to ergativity as it occurs in pronouns, but like
the subject/object configuration in nominative-accusative systems, it is a principle which
may be expressed in a wide variety of linguistic features: word order, verbal marking,
discourse ordering, and so on.
Ergativity as a principle is widespread throughout the languages of South America,
Australia, and Asia, yet in all known cases it co-occurs with a nominative-accusative
principle. In other words, it is a particular configuration of subject and object which
occurs in addition to, rather than instead of, the configuration familiar to speakers of
European languages. In this sense, all ergative languages are actually ‘split’ ergative
languages, offering both ergative-absolutive and nominative-accusative configurations.20
The nature and relevance of ergativity is a subject of no little controversy and debate
within linguistics, and to enter fully into this debate is beyond both the bounds of this
article and the limits of my expertise.21 My goal here is far simpler: it is certainly not to
propose any ‘ergative’ model of transformation, nor to suggest that anyone thinks or acts
in an ‘ergative’ way; rather it is simply to follow Roy Wagner’s idea of anthropology as
a process of ‘relativizing’, in this case relativizing the implicit ontological framework of
subjects and objects drawn by analogy from the nominative-accusative languages like the
one you are currently reading (Wagner, 1975). You can hopefully see that ergativity can
work in one of two ways: it can have the effect of decreasing the agency of the subject
of an intransitive verb or increasing the agency of the object of a transitive clause. Waud
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 10(3)
Kracke has suggested that the possibility of ergativity ‘decentres’ the subject while ‘recentring’ the object (2007: 5). The point I wish to make is simply that if we were to use
them analogically, ergative constructions allow for a representation of a relation in which
the distance between an intransitive subject and transitive object is drastically reduced
and the two are no longer presented as opposing categories. We could say in fact that
ergativity represents subject and object as points on a continuum. Significantly, Payne
notes that ergativity seems to pay more attention to change of state whereas nominativeaccusative formulations place the emphasis on agentivity (1997: 142).
Inversion
I now turn to explore briefly a second alternative configuration of subject and object,
that of inversion, of which the Mapuche language, Mapudungun, is an example (Arnold,
1997; Smeets, 2008; Zúñiga, 2000). In an inverse system, or more properly a directinverse system, the question of which entity stands as subject and which as object
depends upon a hierarchy rooted in the intrinsic saliency of the entities involved rather
than in the action taking place. If the subject is considered to be intrinsically more salient
than the object, the clause will be direct: ‘The man bit the dog.’ Men, at least in Mapuche
society, are intrinsically more salient than dogs. However, if the subject is intrinsically
less salient than the object, the clause will be inverse ‘The man was bitten by the dog.’
Within the inverse paradigm of Mapuche, you could not say: ‘The dog bit the man’.
Thus, in terms of pronouns, first persons are nearly always more salient than second
persons in Mapudungun.22
In some ways direct-inverse systems point in a different direction to ergative systems.
Whereas some versions of ergativity ‘decentre’ the subject, in inverse systems the subject
is ‘hyper-centred’. On the one hand, inverse-direct systems fit in well with the perspectival quality of Amerindian ontology described by Viveiros de Castro – in that they are
‘hyper-deictic’, the self is necessarily subject – yet on the other hand their implicit ontological foundations seem less apt to present relations as transformative than ergative
systems. The key point I wish to make with these counter-examples is not that any
particular grammatical paradigm is any more appropriate to describe perspectival transformation than any other, but rather that each of the paradigms we have explored –
nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, and direct-inverse – contains its own implicit
ontology. While I would not argue that these grammatical ontologies make a great deal
of difference when used in natural language, problems arise when they are stripped from
discourse and utilized to stand analogically for non-linguistic phenomena.
Kolüm refigured
Let me now try to put this critique into action as we turn to the Mapuche experience
of kolüm once again. We are seeking to describe a situation in which someone goes from
being an agent within a world defined by their very act of perceiving it to becoming a
patient defined by the perspective of another. In the conventionalized nominativeaccusative terms of academic discourse, the analogy is that of a ‘subject’ becoming an
‘object’, of a transition between two radically opposed ways of being. But this radical
distinction does not quite fit with the way people describe and envisage kolüm – after
all, the victims can still see and hear, yet what they can see and hear has been drastically
reduced. In other words, their agency has been dramatically curtailed.23 The correlation
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of grammatical relations with semantic roles typical of nominative-accusative languages
does not adequately convey the liminality and marginality of the ontological transformation people find themselves undergoing.24 In short, they find themselves in a position
in which they are simultaneously acted upon yet undergoing a transformation from
within. I think this experience could be well described by any language, indeed, I have
heard Manuel describe his encounter on several occasions, sometimes in Mapudungun,
an inverse language, and sometimes in Spanish, a nominative-accusative language.25 The
problem emerges when a feature of language is used analogically for non-linguistic
phenomena.
As a little experiment, let us approach the experience of kolüm once more and try to
envisage the relation between the victim and the ngen spirit, but this time let us approach
it with our master analogy of subject and object recast in ergative-absolutive terms. The
victim finds himself undergoing a transformation which has been affected by falling into
the perspective of another more powerful agent. At the same time, the more powerful
agent has not actually acted upon the victim other than to perceive him and thus make
him correspond to its own perceived reality. To rephrase this linguistically we can say
that the victim is simultaneously the object of a transitive clause and the subject of an
intransitive clause, a statement which from an ergative-absolutive standpoint is unproblematic, but from a nominative-accusative perspective cannot be confined within a
single clause. The point is certainly not that an ergative analogy would be any better,
but rather that it is the specific linguistic features of the analogy itself rather than what
it is representing which are the point at which contradiction or reconciliation can occur.
I certainly do not think that we should utilize ergative or inverse analogies, or that we
should give up writing in European languages! Rather, we need to be aware that our
rhetorical oppositions are in many cases ultimately constituted as analogies derived from
the forms of language, and that these forms, far from being neutral, carry with them
certain ontological assumptions. By putting such analogies to one side, what we lose in
style and rhetorical power we gain in symmetry.
WHORFIAN ONTOLOGIES
‘Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different
types of observations and different evaluations of extremely similar acts of observation’
(1956: 221). These words are of course not my own but belong to Benjamin Lee Whorf,
a writer whose influence on the approach taken in this article may already be apparent.
While in North America Whorf ’s reputation seems to be in the ascendant, in Europe
he remains consistently misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misrepresented. He
frequently stands as a figure of ridicule, tragically stereotyped as the academic amateur
and part-time insurance investigator who claimed that language determines thought, a
claim which he of course never made.26
Whorf ’s methodology was distinctly dialogical: his claims about the ontological
assumptions implied in Hopi grammar served as a counterpoint to those assumptions
implicit in European – or in Whorf ’s terms, Standard Average European – languages.
There is a distinct political and moral imperative in Whorf ’s writings. His mission is to
relativize and thereby deconstruct the hegemony of modernist positivistic representation
and its claim to universality. Note here for example his famous statement that:
‘Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are recepts from culture and
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 10(3)
language. That is where Newton got them’ (1956: 153). Note also that Whorf is writing
at a time when the Native peoples of North America seemed to be on the brink of extinction, frequently portrayed as living anachronisms disappearing in the face of industrial
and intellectual modernity. It is necessary to make clear in this regard that, despite my
critique, I understand Viveiros de Castro’s intellectual project as being very much in line
with that of Whorf: the holding up of Amerindian thought as a mirror with which to
reflect upon the particularities of the Western intellectual tradition. Whorf ’s oeuvre can
thus be read as a profoundly reflexive critique of positivist writing, a reflexivity not
confined to the social positioning of the observer, but including the very means of
representation itself: language.
I want to now rein in the Whorfian imagination and utilize it in a return to the
problem at hand: the inappropriateness of the subject-object paradigm for the representation of the transformative quality of Amerindian ontologies, of my friend Manuel’s
getting lost in the fog. Taking the general point of Whorf ’s body of work to be that
representation, knowledge, and language are inextricably tied together through habitual
practice, I want to focus on two of his insights. First, that language is not a transparent
representation of the world but nevertheless does tend to appear to its users as such.
Second, that the habitual use of particular linguistic forms leads to habitual representations, that these habitual representations lead to habitual dispositions, and that these
habitual dispositions ultimately lead to particular linguistic forms. In other words, that
language and representation are dialectically linked.
As I mentioned earlier, Whorf claims that languages tend to appear to speakers as
transparent representations of the world. How does this illusion come about? Whorf
argues that the form of language stands initially as a conscious analogy for the form of
the world. Through habitual use, however, the fact that the relation between world and
word is one of analogy is forgotten, and words come to appear as direct unmediated
representations of the world. The central analogy of subject-object in writing on
‘perspectivism’ and in anthropological writing more generally is a perfect example; one
sometimes gets the impression that the world is actually composed of such things as
subjects and objects. Until we start to consider more carefully, first, the fact that we are
dealing with analogies and not realities and, second, that these analogies drawn from
language are themselves linguistically specific, we may, like my friend Manuel, find
ourselves forever wandering in an ontological fog.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was carried out under a British Academy post-doctoral
fellowship. Earlier versions were presented at the Department of Anthropology, University College London; the Department of Linguistics, School of Oriental and African
Studies; and the Social Anthropology Seminar, University of Edinburgh. I am especially
grateful to Casey High, Martin Holbraad, Michael Silverstein, Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro, and two anonymous reviewers for their generous and detailed comments on an
earlier version of this piece.
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Notes
1 The term ‘infernal dichotomies’ is drawn by Viveiros de Castro from Pignarre and
Stengers (2005).
2 As Martin Holbraad, following Viveiros de Castro, has made explicit, the default
anthropological position of weak cultural relativism is already grounded in a specific
dualistic ontology that posits a single, uniform world and then a multiplicity of
representations of that world which we call ‘cultures’. He states that: ‘I for one know
of no theoretical position in anthropology that departs from the basic assumption
that the differences in which anthropologists are interested (“alterity”) are differences
in the way people “see the world”’ (2008: 4).
3 This dual goal of the new ontological approaches is perhaps best summarized in
Latour’s call for a ‘symmetrical anthropology’, one that makes no distinction in its
analytical stance between ‘them’ and ‘us’, between ‘modern’ and ‘nonmodern’
(1993: 92).
4 But see also Derrida’s critique of Benveniste, namely that central aspects of
Benveniste’s critical framework – the notion of ‘category’ and the separation of
language from thought – are themselves inherited from the Aristotelian tradition.
My intention here is not to sail on what Derrida refers to as ‘the high seas’ of this
very complex debate, but rather to stay closer to shore and explore its effects on
ethnographic practice (1982: 179).
5 A full review of the expanding body of ethnographic literature on indigenous
societies from a perspectival approach is beyond the scope of this essay. However,
Viveiros de Castro (1992), Vilaça (1992) and Lima (2005) constitute key examples.
Even those works critical of Viveiros de Castro’s interpretations of perspectivism such
as Rival (2005), Overing and Passes (2000) and Londoño Sulkin (2005) do not
dispute the relevance of a perspectival approach for understanding indigenous sociality in lowland South America.
6 The universality of the human perspective has its roots in a mythic past which, as
Lévi-Strauss famously demonstrated, posits an original shared humanity fractured
by transformation into a diversity of different natural species (Lévi-Strauss, 1988).
Or as Viveiros de Castro puts it, ‘animals are ex-humans, not humans ex-animals’
(1998: 472).
7 For attempts to think about the relevance of perspectivism beyond the Americas, see
Holbraad and Willerslev (2007) and Pedersen (2001).
8 Although this article focuses on the subject-object opposition, the components of
the other key analogy of pronominal deixis are also linguistically particular. See, for
example, Hanks’ (1990) work on forms of deixis among Yucatec Maya.
9 The Mapuche are an indigenous people of southern Chile and Argentina with a
population of approximately one million. Twenty-eight months of fieldwork was
carried out between 2001 and 2003 in the communities of Piedra Alta and Isla
Huapi located between Lago Budi and the Pacific Ocean in Chile’s Ninth Region.
For recent ethnography on the Mapuche see Bacigalupo (2007), Course (2007,
2009) and Dillehay (2007).
10 See Grebe (1993) for further accounts of ngen.
11 Similarly, Carlos Fausto starts his essay on Amerindian cannibalism by stating that
the opposition between subject and object is inappropriate to Amerindian
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 10(3)
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
ontologies, yet despite this warning he quickly falls back into the analogical
opposition of subject and object just a few pages later (2007: 503).
Take for example Frazer’s (1922) famous critique of ‘sympathetic magic’, the confusion
which arises from an erroneous connection between two superficially similar entities.
Many linguists from Fillmore (1968) onwards have gone as far as to argue that the
very terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are themselves not valid universal categories of
language.
All European languages, with the sole exception of Basque, represent grammatical
relations in this nominative-accusative way.
The terms ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ are themselves far from ontologically ‘neutral’
but are retained here in accordance with the conventions of linguistic description. I
thank Eduardo Viveiros de Castro for bringing this point to my attention.
As well as pronominal marking, the subject/object paradigm is also marked syntactically. For example, the meaning of ‘The dog bit the cat’ is not the same as ‘The cat
bit the dog’. In this case word order distinguishes between the agential subject and
non-agential object.
Of course, technically, our ‘habitual’ speaker is incorrect in attributing agency to the
subject of an intransitive verb. However, as functional linguists have pointed out,
grammatical relations are not as autonomous from semantic roles as once assumed.
We can say that the subject is ‘prototypically’ an agent (Payne, 1997: 132).
See Dixon (1979) and Planck (1979) for accounts of ergativity across a variety of
languages.
In some ways pronouns are a misleading example of how ergative systems work in
that many ergative languages treat certain pronouns in a nominative rather than
ergative way and reserve ergativity for other noun classes (Silverstein, 1976).
The location of this split between ergative-absolutive and nominative-accusative
systems within any one language is a complex matter but frequently relates to the
relative saliency of the entities involved. Whereas entities at the top such as the first
person pronoun are never treated ergatively, those towards the bottom are.
See Duranti (1997) and Payne (1997) for discussions of some of the debates
surrounding the concept of ‘ergativity’ within linguistics.
In some American languages there is a stative-active configuration in which it is the
saliency of the verb rather than the entity carrying it out which defines the coding
of agency (see Mithun, 1991).
Some recent studies of ‘perspectival’ societies have questioned the value of dichotomous analogies on the grounds of morality (Londoño Sulkin, 2005), gender (Rival,
2005) and material agency (Walker, n.d.).
Although in this article I do not offer an analysis of the specific meanings of fog in
a Mapuche context, it is worth noting Lévi-Strauss’s observation that throughout
the Americas fog appears in myth ‘as a mediating term conjoining extremes and
rendering them indistinguishable’ (1981: 393).
The majority of people in my fieldsite of Piedra Alta are bilingual in Mapudungun
and Spanish, although some older people speak only the former, and some younger
people only the latter.
See Gumperz and Levinson (1996), Lucy (1992), Schultz (1990) and Silverstein
(2000) for further discussion of what constitutes a ‘Whorfian’ approach.
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MAGNUS COURSE is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His research
explores issues of language, personhood, and ritual among the Mapuche and elsewhere. Address: Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8
7DW, UK. [email: [email protected]]
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