Death and the Loss of Civilized Prédation among the Piaroa of the Orinoco Basin - article ; n°126 ; vol.33, pg 191-211

Joanna Overing

Description

L'Homme - Année 1993 - Volume 33 - Numéro 126 - Pages 191-211
21 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: L-HOMME0
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1993
• Nombre de lectures: 10
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Joanna Overing
Death and the Loss of Civilized Prédation among the Piaroa of
the Orinoco Basin
In: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33 n°126-128. pp. 191-211.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Overing Joanna. Death and the Loss of Civilized Prédation among the Piaroa of the Orinoco Basin. In: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33
n°126-128. pp. 191-211.
doi : 10.3406/hom.1993.369636
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/hom_0439-4216_1993_num_33_126_369636Joanna Overing
Death and the Loss of Civilized Prédation
among the Piaroa of the Orinoco Basin1
opposition Joanna analogical of Orinoco the dead. Overing, Basin. ordering, permeates Though — The Death not the Piaroa to alterity and domain social of the is the living, that Loss the Orinoco is hallmark of most but Civilized to basin notably the of classification apply Prédation this deficient wordly their among in most of sociality, alterity, the elaborate the non-social for Piaroa the skills logic Piaroa homes of for the of
strip the dying of all capabilities for civilized prédation, and thus for civilized relations
of alterity: save for gender, the dead lose all aspects of personal singularity. The
impoverished afterlife of the dead is in sharp contrast to the communities of the living,
where a principle of homogeneity is conjoined with a stress on personal difference. The
egalitarian social philosophy of the Piaroa allows for the understanding of the apparent
perversity of their classificatory logic.
The Piaroa explanation of the process of death, along with their descrip
tions of the asocial spirit world of the dead, combine to form an ele
gant sketch of what they understand to be the possibilities and dif
ficulties of the human condition on earth. Since death, as they describe it,
brings with it the loss of most aspects of what is necessary for the person to
be alive and well in society, the land of the dead is not so much the converse
of life but a highly deficient one. Only earthly human beings can acquire the
particular predator forces upon which civilized productivity and therefore sociality
are dependent. This is a process of being that is at once both the condition
for human existence and its predicament. The process of death makes sense
only within the context of their reflection upon the process of life, and to a
certain extent vice versa. It is the relationship between life and death that
is the topic of this paper.
The Piaroa understanding of the processes of living and dying fits into their
much broader cosmological scheme of agency for beings within the universe
as a whole. It is an ontology of being that has historical foundation, and
in the Piaroa formulation of their creation time history it was through this
history that potentialities for agency changed. It is highly significant that the
historical focus becomes increasingly centred upon the agency of this-wordly
L'Homme 126-128, avr.-déc. 1993, XXXIII (2-4), pp. 191-211. 192 JOANNA OVERING
and present-day Piaroa — and their distinctly eness from gods past and present,
and from the plants, the animals, and the dead. This is not to say that Piaroa
cosmology is but a reflection through converse logic of their social life, for
it is far from being so. Nor is it about social order or social control, and
it would also be an extreme distortion of the facts to see Piaroa myth and
cosmology as solely charters for social action. Nevertheless, being centred upon
the possibilities and dangers for present-day humans living a social and productive
existence, Piaroa cosmology (and their discourse about it) provides for them
a theory of the social. As such it is a cosmology that incorporates a complex
conversation about the process of being that is uniquely lived and achievable
by human beings.2
It would be wrong to see Piaroa cosmology and their highly elaborated
discourse about it as one part of a system commenting on another, as for example
upon social action or political legitimacy. Cosmology, discourse, power and
social practice — they all participate in the same process, not separate ones, and
they are therefore constitutive of one another. All occupy daily public space,
and as such define it. Talk and action must not be treated as different orders
of reality.
The "problem" of minimalist, fluid societies
The Piaroa, a forest dwelling horticulturalist, fishing, hunting and gathering
people of the Venezuelan Guianas, belong to that category of lowland peoples
who Viveiros de Castro (1992) has recently described as "minimalist societies"
which as a class provide us ostensibly with a specific anthropological puzzle:
they appear to be top heavy in the area of cosmological discourse in relation
to the casualness, and indeed apparent paucity, of their social organization.
In the Guianas, we do have a prescriptive marriage rule and the Dravidian-
type of therminology through which it is expressed. The relationship termino
logy is the primary and almost sole means through which social relationships
are expressed, considered, changed. At the same time it is a classification
that in its use adheres insistently, not upon the principles of social solidarity
and continuity, but upon the freedom of personal free choice (Overing Kaplan
1975). There is also the local group, or village, the physical structure of which
was traditionally the large communal house. Socially it was envisioned as an
endogamous cognatic kinship group, comprised (despite the marriages which
gave it form) of "those of a kind" with one another (also see Rivière n.d.).
Thus, a strong stress in community living is upon a social principle of homog
eneity. Equally powerful, and linked, is the principle of personal autonomy.
The structure, if one can so label the results of such principles that insist upon
social homogeneity and the autonomy of the person, is at once enabling of
equality and résistent to the stabilization of hierarchy (see, for example, Thomas
1982). The Piaroa were particularly offended by, and adamantly so in talk, The Asocial World of the Dead 193
the legitimacy of any notion of social rule. The idea of "the right to com
mand" was equally offensive. In short, their high valuation of personal aut
onomy — especially a person's "right to choose" — was by far too strong to allow
for any appreciation of the benefit of the social control-like mechanisms that
are coterminous with the anthropological understanding of the order and social
structure of non-state societies.3
Perhaps it is best to say that the peoples of the Guianas have little or
no social structure. This is not such a preposterous statement, for in anthro
pology the notion of social structure — and indeed of the Social — is usually
defined by 1) structures of separation and opposition, and 2) structures of
inequality, or the institutional elaboration of relations of dominance and subor
dination.4 Both run contrary to Guianese daily social life where the playing
out of difference and opposition relate most saliently not to the interior of
community life but to its exterior. Otherness in Piaroa social philosophy
pertains most forcefully to all those people, animals, spirits, and gods who
dwell outside the village boundary, and even beyond the community's own
experiencing of time.
This is not to say that the peoples of the Guianas do not value highly an
idea of sociality, and even more the practice of it. In order to discover the
path to this indigenous sense of the social, it is better to speak of their aesthetics
of the social (see Overing 1989), rather than their institutionalization of it. Their
concern is focused upon the attainment of a particular quality of material
existence, and not its structure — at least not as anthropologists tend to
use the term. Sociality is a process of being that the Piaroa privilege over
any other way of being, and certainly over any structure that might give a
guarantee of control and be based upon relations of domination/subordination.
Viveiros de Castro (1992) takes another route in explaining the casual social
organization of the Araweté, a Tupi-Guarani group of Brazil. He understands
the Araweté "other-worldly style of thought" as embodying the high valuation
of these other worlds, which leads in the end to their focus being upon feritas
and divinitas instead of humanitas. Thus, the world of the social for the
Araweté — a people for whom truth and desire always lies with the Other and
in their future afterworld life with and as cannibal gods — is marginalized, and
society becomes but a precarious space, a "time of transition, encompassed
by that which is exterior to it" {ibid., chap. 1). In contrast, the desires of
the Piaroa are directed firmly toward this world which they view as the privileged
space within the cosmos, and when in it, unlike the Araweté, they want no
contact whatsoever with their dangerous and non-social dead.5 Their concern
is always for acquiring the capabilities for earthly living and sociality, for in
their view all other ways of being, whether of the dead, the gods, or the animals,
are by contrast barren and deficient. Thus we do not have the option (as appears
to b