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Anthropological Theory Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) 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 247 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 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 248 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 COURSE Of words and fog 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. 249 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 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 250 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 COURSE Of words and fog 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.’ 251 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 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 252 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 COURSE Of words and fog 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. 253 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 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 254 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 COURSE Of words and fog 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 255 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 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 256 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 COURSE Of words and fog 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 257 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 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. 258 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 COURSE Of words and fog 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 259 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 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. 260 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016 COURSE Of words and fog References Århem, Kaj (1993) ‘Ecosofia Makuna’, in F. 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[email: [email protected]] 263 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 12, 2016