Page 209 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

192 Jeremy Stolow

By emphasizing how historically contingent is the modern, occidental
division between a mundane, knowable world of technical action and an
imperceptible, transcendent, numinous, or supernatural “other,” Szerszynski
reminds us that this is hardly a universal, let alone a self-evident, way of
understanding the cosmos. Consider, as a counter-example, the animist
cosmogony found throughout indigenous Amazonia, where humans,
animals, and other natural and supernatural beings are seen to exist in a
state of metaphysical continuity, based on a shared set of principles and
forces emanating from all bodily organs (Viveiros de Castro 1998). A basic
precept in the Christian tradition involves drawing a fundamental distinction
between human bodies, which are said to possess souls (and therefore
uniquely capable of salvation), and all the other living and inanimate bodies
that do not. However, such a divide makes little sense in Amazonian terms.
As Viveiros de Castro argues, rather than trying to distinguish between
spiritual essences (which are authentic and real) and bodily appearances
(which, as surfaces, only hide the truth), Amazonian indigenes confront an
undifferentiated cosmic order wherein efficacious meanings slip backward
and forward, between and among its various human and nonhuman
inhabitants, and in and through the “equipment” that is used to connect
such beings. Within this framework, a shaman engages with objects such as
animal skins as technologies,

endowed with the power metaphysically to transform the identities of
those who wear them, if used in the appropriate ritual context. To put
on mask-clothing is not so much to conceal a human essence beneath
an animal appearance, but rather to activate the powers of a different
body. The animal clothes that shamans use to travel the cosmos are not
fantasies but instruments: they are akin to diving equipment, or space
suits, and not to carnival masks. The intention when donning a wet suit
is to be able to function like a fish, to breathe underwater, not to conceal
oneself under a strange covering. In the same way, the “clothing” which,
amongst animals, covers an internal “essence” of a human type, is not a
mere disguise but their distinctive equipment, endowed with the affects
and capacities which define each animal.
(Viveiros de Castro 1998: 482)

Lest we be tempted here to indulge in the sort of romantic primitivism
that we have already seen used to relegate Kalahari Bushmen to the far
side of Western modernity, we might further note that Amazonian shamans
are not the only “technologists” who, in their efforts to gain such things
as power, knowledge, health, or release from suffering recognize no fixed
or impermeable boundaries between humans and nonhumans, the visible