Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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phase of development and expansion is the mainstay of all postcolonialist writings today. The stress time and again is that Western creations of difference and images of otherness are products of a process of exclusion (e.g. see Todorov 1987; Pagden 1982; Hulme 1986; Mason 1990; Lindqvist 1996 [1992]; Bauman 1995; Corbey 1991; Karstens 1991; de Certeau 1997; Duerr 1985; Fardon 1995a; Hiller 1991a; Thomas 1994; Said 1978; Bhabha 1994). The exclusivist ideology, which assumes the superiority of self vis-à-vis all others, is a very good strategy through which to disempower others. In the writings of Todorov, Pagden and Hulme, we have been presented with highly interesting discussions of the development during the conquest of the Americas of the European imagery of, and discourse on, the ‘radical otherness’ of the New Worlds indigenous peoples, especially those of the Caribbean and Amazonia. In colonial discourse the populations of the Americas appeared for the most part as the exotic and pathological antithesis of what the conquerors thought themselves to be.Through a principle of inversion, the difference between self and other was understood to be absolute. The most virulent argument for the inferiority of the American Indian was given by the lawyer, Sepúlveda, in his debate conducted in Valladolid in 1550–51 with the priest, Bartolomé de Las Casas, on the question of whether the indigenous peoples were human (see Hanke 1959; Pagden 1982:117–18; Mason 1990:52–3). Sepúlveda’s characterization of the Indian was of a creature who was child-like, irrational, savage and incontinent as an animal, to be contrasted with the adult, rational, cultured, tame (gentle) European. Through the principle of inversion, the cultures of America became defined as an ensemble of negations to be contrasted with the civilized and cultured society of the developing ruling classes of Europe.

An insightful observation of Mason (1990: Ch. 2) in his discussions of Eurocentrism is that the imagery of the exotic that was used for the American Indian was but a projection of the imagery signifying both lack and excess already in use by the European upper classes for their own internal other. In other words, the Europeans, in conquering the Americas, in particular Amazonia, fixed the status of Native Americans at the level of the lower echelons of their own society, placing them alongside the Jew, the mad, the wild, the child, the peasant, the Gypsy and the witch. Incorporated into this language of alterity used to characterize both domestic and foreign European others was the rich imagery of the non-European monstrous and fabulous races depicted in Greek and Roman travel lore and described in Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, a text that had great appeal throughout the Middle Ages and that also

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enjoyed considerable popularity during the sixteenth century (Mason 1990: Ch. 3). The imagery of the brutish giant—the naked, bestial, and cannibalistic wild man—along with his cohort, the sexually profligate, cannibalistic wild woman especially caught the imagination of medieval Europe.These images, applied to Europe’s internal subaltern classes, were transported to the New World and utilized for its inhabitants, as evidenced, for instance, by Sir Walter Raleigh’s giant and headless Ewaipanoma, a people of the Guianas, who Raleigh says had ‘eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts’ (in Mason 1990:108). The image of the sexually deviant and monstrous cannibal heathen (with his or her culinary, religious and sexual perversions) covered both Europe’s internal and external others (Mason 1990:44).

Such ‘inferiorization’ of excluded others became a constant throughout the development of European thought. It developed by the nineteenth century into a unifying discourse upon alterity that was structured further by the increasingly popular language of evolutionism. With its stress upon the progressive move of humankind from the primitive to the civilized, such imagery had clear and powerful implications for the colonial enterprise (Corbey and Leerssen 1991; Lindqvist 1996 [1992]:104). If it can be argued, as Edward Said has done, that the Orient is a product of a Western hegemonic exoticism, the same can certainly be said for Native America as it too became the primitive other to Europe’s civilized self (see Said 1978; Overing 1996a). Anthropology, as evidenced by its technical vocabulary on the primitive, has hardly been exempt from the encroachment of the prevalent European language of exoticism, and certainly not from the rhetoric which signifies and stresses lack. Peter Riviere (1984), commenting on the state of Amazonian ethnography, notes that through it Amazonian peoples are best known, not for what they are, but for what they are not—stateless, with no government, no lineages, no descent groups, no structure, no….

Two solutions to alterity: anthropophagia and anthropoemia

Lévi-Strauss, in the chapter entitled ‘A Little Glass of Rum’ in Tristes Tropiques (1961), discusses the contrast between two solutions for neutralizing the dangers of the other, the anthropophagic versus the anthropoemic strategy (cf. Bauman 1995:179–80). He notes that the first, the strategy of cannibalism, is repellent to Western sensibilities as the most barbaric of all customs. It is, however, a widely spread notion of

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native Amazonia that the powers of the self acquire their human potency only by assimilating the powers of dangerous others (Overing Kaplan 1981). For some Amazonian peoples the process must be literal, through the ingestion of the ground-up bones of a relative (otherness itself is a highly ambiguous state in Amazonia), as among the Yanomami, or the eating of a fragment of an enemy corpse as occurred among the Tupinamba. For others, it is the idea of ‘cannibalism’ (at least from our point of view) that frames their understanding of human life (see Overing 1996a). Thus to marry fits within this structure (one marries a stranger who becomes absorbed physically and socially as kin), as too does the eating of meat and vegetables (they both were human at the beginning of time). The ideal is to assimilate the other, and in order to achieve a life that is human this process of incorporation must be constant.There is the widespread Amazonian message that alterity is the hallmark of this-worldly social living: the achievement of the social state itself, and hence of the world of the interior, requires the force and creative powers of those different from self. Without consuming the powers of others, there can be no fertility and no productive capacity. Such an anthropophagic strategy of dealing with alterity follows the inclusivist route: we incorporate the powers of the other into our own body—and body social.

Lévi-Strauss comments (1961:386) on our own ethnocentrism in being appalled on moral grounds by either actual or ritual cannibalism. To condemn cannibalist practices implies for instance a belief in bodily resurrection, which would be compromised with the material destruction of the corpse. This would be a religious belief of the same order as those in which ritualized cannibalism is practised. He suggests that there is no good reason why one belief should be preferred over the next. Lévi-Strauss also proposes that our own strategies would in turn appear highly uncivilized, repugnant and barbaric to the native Amazonian. He gives as example our own judicial and penitentiary customs which neutralize the powers of dangerous others through a process of anthropoemia (from the Greek emein, to vomit). As Lévi-Strauss says (ibid.), our judicial procedures ‘expel these formidable beings from the body public by isolating them for a time, or forever, denying them all contact with humanity, in establishments devised for that express purpose’. This is the exclusivist strategy, which severs all social links with the other. For the Amazonian this solution is an outrageous denial of humanity.

As a postscript to Lévi-Strauss’s observations, we might add that the West has a history of its own anthropophagic practices, the reasoning for which being very similar to those of indigenous peoples of the Americas,

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i.e. that they revitalize and give health! Medicinal cannibalism in Western medicine has a long history, and was especially popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Paracelsian medical philosophy was followed. According to Beth Conklin (1998; cf Gordon-Grube 1988), Europeans consumed human blood, fingers, hands, fat and liver, bones and bone marrow as treatments for arthritis, sciatica, reproductive difficulties, skin problems. The public executions of criminals were a main source of blood and other body parts—blood drunk from people who died violently was considered especially potent. According to Peacock (1896:270–1, and see in Conklin 1998), epileptics were reported to ‘stand around the scaffold in crowds, cup in hand, ready to quaff the red blood as it flows from the still quavering body’. It is probable that the indigenous peoples of America would have found some of such practices exotically fascinating.Whether they would regard the anthropophagic practice in the West today of transplanting hearts, kidneys, lungs and livers as exotically monstrous is another question.

Inclusivity and exclusivity as political solutions

Overing argues (1996a) that the contrast of an emphasis on either inclusive or exclusive solutions for dealing with otherness can relate respectively to egalitarian and hierarchical political strategies, and to a difference between social philosophies that stress social symmetry and those that are attached to social asymmetry.As mentioned, native peoples of Amazonia were identified with Europe’s subaltern classes. The signifying quality of otherness in Eurocentrism, certainly as it was elaborated as political and colonial discourse, was first and foremost that of inferiority.The gaze was that of the conqueror who took for granted a natural order premised upon conquest and the relations of superordination and subordination that might emerge from it. So extreme was the strength of this notion of the inferiority of the other that the divide between the self and other easily slipped into the opposition of the human and the non-human. The Eurocentric discourse, born within a hegemonic and totalizing rhetoric of hierarchy, is deeply exclusive in its view of humanity. It allows might to the conquerors alone. In contrast, the ethnocentrism of indigenous Amazonian discourse can best be understood as being based upon a rhetoric of equality, and its expressions of alterity are much more inclusive in its categorization of humanity. Here power does not accrue to self alone.

The indigenous peoples of Amazonia have no ‘lower echelon’ classes, and for most of its indigenous social groupings, certainly those of the Guianas, where the persistent destabilization of hierarchy in personal

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relations is the norm, it would be a misconstrual to identify specific social divisions or whole categories of people within them as inferior or subordinate to others (cf. Overing 1993a; Thomas 1982). Since the right to domination is alien to the understanding most native people have of proper social relationships (cf. Clastres 1977), they would not judge external others, even if monstrous, as inferior beings who were therefore rightfully subject to their domination. Instead we find a certain tolerance of difference (as well as a fascination, fear and strong desire for it). Moreover, the boundary between self and other tends to slip and slide; it is difficult to draw, as too is the distinction between human and nonhuman. Among the Piaroa of the Venezuelan Guiana, the root metaphor for alterity in their rhetoric was the lascivious and monstrous cannibal other—a character ironically very similar to the Spanish conquerors’ imaginary other (Overing 1996a; cf. Mason 1990). However, for the Piaroa such an image did not preclude in any complete sense themselves. The ‘cannibal other’ devours people; the Piaroa cook and eat animals and plants which are transformed humans. There is always an ambiguity to the Piaroa language of alterity, for their stress is upon the plight of human existence as might generally be the case (for both self and other), and therefore upon the potential for the irrational and the villainous, as well as the positive strengths in human power; whereas in the European vision evil and danger are usually assumed to come from without, not from within.

It is true that in the nineteenth century, many European authors, influenced by the Romantics’ rebellion against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, also stressed in a positive way the non-rational, emotional and wild aspects of a creative interior self. However, by contrast, psychoanalytic theory was to be put to the service of taming the neurotic, the uncontrolled, aggressive and lascivious beast within. As Raymond Corbey has so convincingly argued in his essay on the role of alterity in the architecture of psychoanalytical theory, Freud’s understanding of the monstrous primal man within civilized man was in accordance with a nineteenth-century discourse on savagery and civilization and its pervasive association of prehistoric or contemporary ‘primitives’ with the wild, the impulsive, the childish and the excessive (Corbey 1991:49). It was a discourse that operated with the same polar opposites used by Sepúlveda in the sixteenth century: the opposition between contemporary and primitive society, culture and nature, man and beast, men and women, white and black, adult and child.These were distinctions used in a privative way (cf. Karstens 1991:78–81). All of the second pole of opposites lack essentially what is of quality in self: women, beasts, primitives and children lack reason, civilization and

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