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Is everybody human? The relationship between humanity and animality in Western and Amerindian myth narratives

Culture & Psychology 0(0) 1–22 ! The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1354067X18779058 journals.sagepub.com/home/cap

Douglas Kawaguchi and Danilo S Guimar~ aes University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Abstract The general problem this research approaches is the observation that, in Western cultures, Human occupies a central place and is identified with the cosmological wholeness—a worldview which is in tune with the paradigm of massive abuses that are practiced against animals who1 are exploited by industry worldwide and with the environmental catastrophe we witness nowadays. Departing from that problem, this paper presents and discusses the Western notion indicated above, comparing it with the notion of Yanomami indigenous people about human’s place in the universe. We use a dialogical methodology pertinent to semiotic-cultural constructivism in psychology, focusing on the relationship between “human” and non-human animal in the two mentioned cultures, through the analysis of two creation myths: The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew-Christian Bible; and The Falling Sky: Words from a Yanomami Shaman, a set of narratives from indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa. Results show that Western and Amerindian narratives present mostly opposite conceptions concerning the relationships between “humanity” and animality and that meanings for “human” and “animal” differ essentially in both. From the tension with Amerindian cosmology and its relationship with nonhuman animal, we call into question the ethno-anthropocentrism that is present in Western psychology since its birth. Given that psychology lays its foundations on a worldview that presupposes a strict split between nature and

Corresponding author: Douglas Kawaguchi, Rua Oneyda Alvarenga, 35, Apto. 91-B, Saude, S~ao Paulo 04146-020, Brazil. Email: [email protected]

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Culture & Psychology 0(0)

Humanity (assuming, e.g. an insurmountable incompatibility between the impulse of our “natural” desires and the regulation and prohibitions imposed by “culture”), this research intends to draw attention to the fact that the naturalist ontology is not an a priori nor a necessary condition for the construction of self-identity in the world. Whereas this presupposed Human “alienation” from nature remains taken for granted in the hegemonic theoretical–methodological reflections in psychology, we discuss the limits of Eurocentered psychology research and its implications in a dialogical epistemology. Keywords Narrative, myth, identity, human, nonhuman, indigenous peoples

Then God said: let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.—Genesis, 1:26

In Western2 cultures, the notion of Human3 as the center of the world exists at least since classical Greek humanism and it crossed the Middle Ages, as it can be seen in the Bible narrative quoted above. When Modernity arrives, Human expands his domain beyond the world, becoming now the Lord of the Universe: as if he were taking the throne hitherto occupied by the Father, an anthropomorphic God. However, the seizure of power does not imply a change of regime: it is based on the same paradigm of unicity and unilaterality of the biblical discourse that the newborn science will lay down a single God and impose a single truth and discourse, the Science ones, in his place. Gadamer (1954/2010) proposes that, when Christianity supposes the ideas in pagan cultures as false, it paves the way to the development of modern sciences, by fomenting the advent of a cultural basis where the multiple mythical conceptions of world were no longer accepted (cf. Jahoda, 1999). By the end of the Medieval Period, the dissolution of feudal borders will lead to a growing sociocultural rupture in Europe. After a millennium of isolation, the encounter with the other will provoke the emergence of “new ethnic mixtures, linguistic hybridism, transformations in the religiosity” (Guimar~aes, 2017, p. 6), which will definitely trouble the unicity of reality hitherto perceived. Thus, with the weakening of the absolute truth professed by the Bible, a new safe basis will find the propitious context to set ground. L’Uomo Vitruviano will pave the way to make Descartes’s (1596–1650) “thinking self,” Human, the cosmological reference of Western culture. Later, John Locke (1632–1704) will create a theory of property, assuming that there is “a deity that makes a world populated by subjects (humans) and useful things (animals, plants, earth . . .),” as Fausto (2008, p. 337) observes.

Kawaguchi and Guimar~aes

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Note the split between the one who acts—the Human—and things that are used— the rest. When Enlightenment ideals culminate in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), which advocates the existence of “natural rights for every man,” with no mention to other beings in the world, what we have is a strong indication of the supposedly innate status (“natural”) of supremacy and primacy of agentive power of Human over nonhumans in the cosmos. This ontological split continues in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which, in its very name, admits the possibility of a universality restricted to Human.4 In remarkable consonance, science of the 19th and 20th centuries will engage in an unprecedented crusade to attest this exceptional condition of the Human (cf. Catton & Dunlap, 1980). The attempts are innumerable: the idea that Human would have exclusivity in the capacity for reasoning, language or conscience, to cultivate empathy, to produce culture, among many other anthropocentric ideas present in science and popular imaginary. Note the expression “everybody,” meaning “every people”: if every “body” is a “people’s body,” then where are the bodies of those beings who are not “people”? From Antiquity to the present day, in Western culture, we see a clear narrative line, which constructs a Human who is radically cleaved from other beings in the cosmos—a notion that approaches the concept of “master narrative” proposed by Hammack (2010) and discussed by Guimar~aes (2010). This master narrative that constructs and reconstructs such idea about Human finds impulse in a text that has resisted to centuries and is spread over Western homes: the Bible. Considering the anthropocentric vocation of the biblical myth and its deep influence on the different constructions of meaning in Western societies, we shall ask: do non-Western cosmologies reserve the same place for “human”?

Amerindian cosmologies In the first time, there were only the people we called yarori. These ancestors were human with animal names and kept metamorphosing all the time. Thus, little by little, they became the hunting animals that today we shoot and eat.5 (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 80)

Descola (2005) compared ethnographic data from different societies around the world and concluded that all can be framed into at least one of four possible ontologies, according to how they classify existing beings and their forms of relationship.6 Each ontology brings a different combination of two oppositions: interiority versus exteriority and similarity versus difference. The former refers to what, in Western terms, we would call soul, spirit or mind (interiority), on the one hand; and body, appearance or physical attributes (exteriority), on the other. The latter, on one side, to the assumption of a contiguity between beings, as per in evolutionary theory (similarity); and, on the other side, to a clear separation and

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similarity of interiority

similarity of interiority animism

totemism

difference of exteriority7

similarity of exteriority

difference of interiority

difference of interiority

similarity of exteriority

naturalism

analogism difference of exteriority

Figure 1. Descola’s (2005) four ontologies.

distinction between the different types of beings (difference). Thus, the author recognizes in any “human” culture the major presence of one of the ontologies presented in Figure 1. Descola (2005) asserts that animism occurs in indigenous peoples from tropical South America (such as the Yanomami), northern North America, Siberia and parts of Asia. It is an ontology that sees similarity of interiorities among beings (all, whether humans, nonhuman animals, plants, or stars would have a “spirit,” for instance) and difference of exteriorities (although all beings have a “soul,” each one appears in a different corporeality). In this sense, there is no strict distinction between humans and nonhumans: enemy or unknown peoples, for example, who present themselves in a “different” body, with other adornments, may be seen of another kind, another “species.”8 Another ontology above is totemism, found in peoples of Australia and North America: it recognizes similarity of both interiorities and exteriorities. The different kinds of beings one sees are not classified by “species” or “races,” but rather by their physical, psychic, and moral properties (“round,” “dark,” “sleepy,” etc.). Thus, one may ontologically merge beings from different species, which may result in identity between humans and nonhuman animals, for example. Analogism is found in some peoples of Central America, the Andean world and West Africa, and presupposes difference of both interiority and exteriority. It is a perception in which all beings are singular, so there is no relevant distinction between different species: the comparison between distinct beings is made through analogies. As in animism and totemism, analogism does not reserve ontological exclusivity to the human in comparison with other beings. Finally, naturalism is the ontology of Western people: it classifies beings considering similarity of exteriorities (“physically,” all animals, plants, and other living beings descend from the same ancestor, including Human), but difference of interiorities (Humans would possess a “soul,” “conscience,” “moral,” or whatever as exclusiveness to other beings). Note that, among all four ontologies, naturalism is the only one which operates a strict split between nature (nonhuman’s place) and culture (Human’s domain). Additionally, Viveiros de Castro (1996) defends an understanding of Amerindian peoples’ worldview that goes beyond animism: the Amerindian


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perspectivism. He proposes that Amerindian peoples see the relation between all beings according to each being’s perspective (his point of view). For instance, the indigenous man sees a peccary9 as a peccary and a jaguar as a jaguar; but it is assumed that the peccary, in his turn, sees man as a jaguar, and a frog, for example, who is the peccary’s prey, as a peccary; and the jaguar sees man as a peccary, and so on. That is, it is assumed that all beings see themselves as humans and other beings from the same perspective that humans do. In a hasty (and naturalistic) analysis, we could label this cosmology as “anthropocentric”; though, through a more comprehensive reflection, we conclude that, in fact, it is rather ethnocentric: it is the admission of the limitation of any being’s perspective, including ourselves; if everyone is potentially human, then human is nothing but a point of view. According to this theory, Amerindians see relationships among beings in a way that is opposite to the Western view: for the Amerindians, each being has a different “nature” (a different body), but all have the same “culture,” once the relationships between beings can be transposed from one perspective to another. Thus, all “culture,” that is the organization of relationships that produce meaning in the world, is also exchanged, and only the position, the perspective, is changed. In other words, actors differ, but the roles (and the play) are always the same.10 Based on both anthropologists’ propositions, we may conclude that categories such as “nature” and “culture” are insufficient for the understanding of Amerindians worldview and so is the notion of Human as a being who is radically different from the rest of the cosmos. Since myth is a privileged form of expression of any culture’s worldview, we assume that Amerindian myth narratives may be a “bomb,”11 capable of blowing up a euro-anthropocentric worldview, especially in its assumptions about the relationships between Humans and nonhumans so that later, maybe as a micro big bang, we may build, from the fragments, a new universe of understanding and a new understanding of the ontological universe: more integrative and conscious of our kinship with any existing being, with any set of cosmic dust organized in the form of a life.

Methodology This paper is the result of a wider research and some of the analysis had to be shortened to fit an article format, following the criteria we try to expose now. Psychology arises in Western sociocultural context and it develops mostly in Eurocentric paradigms, until today, so the Bible is widely known by the society of psychologists. When a cultural voice is so hegemonic as the Western myth is, one must rise other voices, so they are heard: when equality does not exist, there is not neutrality. That is why we chose to make Amerindian analysis longer than the Western, as a try to balance a very unbalanced sociocultural situation. Hereupon, we analyze the first three chapters of The Book of Genesis, first book of the Bible, once they narrate world creation and the expulsion of Adam and Eve

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from the Garden of Eden. The Bible is the best-selling book in history (Chapman, 2015) and the creation myth par excellence of Western culture. On the other hand, we selected the document entitled The Falling Sky: Words from a Yanomami Shaman, a book that condenses the narratives that Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa has told to anthropologist Bruce Albert during three decades of friendship. We analyze Chapters 2 and 4, once these correspond to the 27 pages of world and beings creation narrated in the book: they bring a complete description of the xapiri: “spirits” of the forest all beings descend from, according to the mythology. In the first chapter, narrator briefly tells his personal history; in the third one, he narrates his shamanic initiation; the other chapters correspond to several other topics on the Yanomami people, which total 729 pages. The Yanomami (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015) are a culturally isolated hunter-gatherer and small farmer society, made up of approximately 33,000 people, divided into 640 communities, distributed in a tropical forest space, occupying territories belonging to Brazil and Venezuela. We shall highlight some peculiarities of the work with indigenous myth narratives. The first one concerns oral support: it is expected that stories to which we have access today have undergone changes in their content, if compared with ancestral versions; in this sense, we operate with Boesch’s (1991) conception of myth, who defines it as a structure underlying all narratives, rites, ideas, and singular social practices that can be accessed for study, that is the myth is not the narrative, but it underlies it. The second one is about translation: the text corresponds to the understanding of a French anthropologist, who, even possessing the indisputable qualification of having interacted with the narrator for decades, is still a foreigner to the Yanomami language and culture. This brings us to a third peculiarity, which concerns the very nature of the I-other encounter: there is no possibility of total mutual and specular understanding (Sim~ao, 2010). The (always) partial communication is typical of the intersubjective encounter—especially in an interethnic encounter, in which one is subject to a nebulous zone of affections, whose attempt of objectification implies to equivocate in assimilating the perspective of the other (Guimar~aes, 2013).12 Those considerations emerged within the scope of psychology, based on the methodological challenge of understanding alterity within ethnological studies. According to Viveiros de Castro’s (2004) concept of controlled equivocation, in order to translate a text between cultures, one must take into account the difference of meaning of text and context, rather than similarity. Aware of those peculiarities, we adopt the methodology of dialogical analysis of cultural psychology, which considers each element of a relationship as a subject (Bakhtin, 1979/1997): when confronting texts, or elements of a text, we seek to set up a dialog, that is, a construction of meanings. Thus, we proceed to the descending trajectory analysis proposed by Guimar~aes (2016), which consists in glimpsing the Gestalt whole of each narrative and, then, to its decomposition in parts not totally elementary, but that correspond to the smallest unit bearing the meaning of the whole. After identifying the antinomies expressed by narrator, we try to follow


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the way they reconfigure themselves and make the dynamics of meaning, which, then, gradually changes. By means of the methodology exposed above, the next topics are dedicated to the analysis of Western and Amerindian myths of world creation here selected.

Analysis of The Book of Genesis “In the beginning,” there is a God who creates and a world that is created: two distinct and separate entities. The first actions God performs are precisely those of making primordial separations: heaven and earth, day and night, light and darkness, waters from above and below, primordial past with no turning back. When God creates nonhuman animals, the regime of separation puts, on one side, He and mankind; and, on the other, nonhuman beings, doomed to be dominated by man: that is subject and object. On the seventh day, God rests from “all the work that he had done,” so the work is over. Time is set in two separate instances: past, time of world’s creation; and present, where world things happen. Time is linear. Man is made of dust—a pole that connects him to earth and world, but his life is given with the divine breath which binds him to heaven and God. Originally placed in paradise, man is, in the beginning, positioned near to the divine pole. In the Garden of Eden, the food trees, plentiful, connect man to an earthly need: feeding. The other two trees, unique and forbidden, are able to provide eternal life and knowledge of good and evil—attributes that are near to heaven and the divine. Adam crowns his world domination by naming all nonhuman beings. From Adam’s flesh, God creates woman. Both, because of ignoring good and evil, are not ashamed of their nakedness, as we may see in Table 1. The serpent persuades the woman to eat the fruit of knowledge, then she and Adam commit the sin, from that they realize they are naked and cover themselves. The antinomies between Humanity and animality, heaven and earth, are quite highlighted, as shown in Table 2.

Table 1. Garden of Eden antinomies before original sin. Knowledge and eternal life: forbidden Man: names nonhumans

Feeding: allowed Nonhumans: are named

Table 2. Antinomies in the original sin. Woman: innocent originary Humanity Innocence: original Humanity Innocence: heaven Human: knowledge, dressed

Serpent: perverse animality Knowledge: causes disconnection with origin Knowledge: earth Nonhuman: ignorance, undressed

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Table 3. Antinomies of the expulsion of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve near to God: heaven and eternal life Heaven: idleness and painless Man: divine origin

Adam and Eve far from God: earth and finite life Earth: labor and pain Man: impossibility of return to heaven

Figure 2. Biblical ontology scheme.

When God finds the contravention, the punishment granted to the three characters performs the mythical Boeschian (1991) function of justifying—and inventing, we could say—the ontological status of beings in the world. The animality of the serpent turns cursed, and its way of moving is defined as abject; the woman is condemned to the pain of childbirth and to subjugation by man; to Adam, the sweat and pain of working in the farming. Adam names the woman as Eve and both are dressed and expelled of the Garden of Eden by God, who blocks the entrance back to paradise with angels and a flaming sword: these antinomies are schematized in Table 3. Figure 2 shows the ontology expressed by the biblical myth. Note that the relationships are unilateral: God with Adam, Adam with Eve (except copulation), God with the world and, especially, Human with the world. Considering the sum of mentions meaning “Human” (“Human,” “Humans,” “man,” “men,” “woman,” and “women”) and those meaning “animal” (“animal,” “animals,” and the animals species that are mentioned), we see, in Table 4, that “Human” equals to more than half of this universe.


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Table 4. Count of morphemes referring to “Human” and “animal” in Chapters 1–3 of The Book of Genesis. Mentions to “Human” Man Woman Sum

Mentions to “animal” 17 18 35 51%

Animal Specific animals Sum

5 29 34 49%

Analysis of The Falling Sky Beginning of the world Although there is a narrative beginning, history itself does not “begin,” since, “before the beginning,” things were already happening, as one may notice in Table 5.13

The demiurge and the first humans The first woman arises: previously a fish, she lets herself being captured as a woman, giving birth to the descendants of Omama, the humans (the “Yanomami,” in the narrator’s words).14 Then, we meet Yoasi, Omama’s brother: he was evil and had a thought “full of forgetfulness.” Yoasi and Omama are two sides of the same creation: good and evil, day and night, as we may see in Table 6.15 This dialogical notion is fundamentally different from the worldview in The Book of Genesis, which, as we have seen, is pervaded by a regime of excluding separation.

The animal ancestors Finally, Omama creates the xapiri “spirits” of forests, water, and animals, so they protect living beings from diseases, epidemics, chaos, and the falling sky.16 Albert elucidates the complex relationship between human and his ancestors: simultaneously nonhuman animals and immanent17 ancestors of current humans (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 614). In the chapter The Animal Ancestors, Kopenawa introduces the xapiri as images of the animal ancestors, which were transformed at the first time, but which look like humans. Those spirits behave and look absolutely anthropomorphic: they dance, work, sing, smoke, get angry, kill, can be brave or coward, beneficent or maleficent, beautiful or terrifying, cheerful or angry, young or old, they defecate, desire the opposite sex, have fun and have children. On the other hand, they are different from ordinary humans: they have very small penises, are tiny, usually very beautiful, fragrant, attend pure waters, and are immortal (Table 7).18

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Table 5. Antinomies of The Falling Sky’s first paragraph. Primordial animal: human, but animal named

Current animal: currently prey, but previously human Current humans and animals: descended from xapiri Recreated forest: perennial

Primordial animals: xapiri entities (“spirits”) Previous forest: chaos, never-ending metamorphosis Previous inhabitants: voracious, monstrous ancestors

Later inhabitants: as we see them today

Table 6. Antinomies of Omama and Yoasi. Omama: good, eternal life, Sun Sun and Moon seen by common people: different from humans

Yoasi: evil, death, Moon Primordial Sun and Moon (“images”): humanlike

Table 7. Antinomies of xapiri ontology. Xapiri: “spirits” of animal ancestors Primordial animality: immortal Xapiri: human animals Xapiri: are good and ward off evil Xapiri: brave

Humans: descended from animal ancestors Common beings: mortal Common people: animal humans Xapiri: may be angry and kill humans Some xapiri: cowards

The xapiri behave analogously to the “real” animal or entity they are the image of, so they are as diverse as the entities we see with “ghost eyes” (nonshaman eyes). We realize the shaman is the “father” of xapiri and that the former, in order to hear their voices, must “die” by ingesting the dust of trees, as well as the spirits, who also die ingesting the powder through the shaman, as shown in Table 8.19

The complex ontological relationships Later, we know that all forest beings, especially game animals, have a utup€ e image, that is: not only humans, but all known forms of existence share the fact that they have a “spirit,” who is their “true center” and “true interior.”20 The narrator tells the animals that are hunted today have subjectivity, and, moreover, have the image of the same ancestor as human’s which is as human as humans of today are. The difference is that, because they have animal names, their specific ancestors eventually metamorphosed into game animals.21 Thus, there are human–peccary,22 human–deer, and human–agouti ancestors, and so on, so that the human–nonhuman double is present not only in humans


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Table 8. Antinomies of xapiri ontology. “Dead” shaman: sees the xapiri “Dead” xapiri: contactable by the shaman Xapiri: immortal, clean, do not eat game meat Young and beautiful xapiri Xapiri: image of all beings. Bird, armadillo, jabuti, macaws, toucans, fish and so on

“Alive” shaman: does not see them “Alive” xapiri: noncontactable Common people: mortal, dirty, eat game meat Old and ugly xapiri Common people: humanlike, protected by the xapiri

Table 9. Antinomies of ontology of utup€e images and relationships between human and nonhuman. Game animals: have a utup€e image (“spirit”) Living beings: corporeal plurality Ancestry: all were human and animal at the same time Prey flesh: has human ancestors

Humans: have a utup€e image (“spirit”) Xapiri: unique, but with many “images” Present: differentiation through names and appearance Human predator: has ancestors who became animals

living today, but also in their images of the past (utup€ e) and in those of all other animals, as we may see in Table 8. Hence, the animals we eat today are our distant relatives. Note the importance of the names given to beings and things: here we have the inversion of “culture” and “nature,” if compared to Eurocentric patterns, as we have pointed out in the third-to-last paragraph of “Methodology” section, on “controlled equivocation” (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). These notions are schematized in Table 9. In Figure 3, we outline the Yanomami ontology, as narrated just above. Note that all concrete (“living”) beings, whether human or animal, have a direct unilateral relationship with their primordial ancestry (irreversible time), but also an indirect bilateral relationship: ontologically, each species matches a single utup€ e image, which, in turn, matches directly the primordial ancestors; through the figure of the shaman, we have communicative access to utup€ e images and, therefore, to primordial human–animals, that is: the humanity–animality relationship is immanent, referenced in the past and manifested in the present.

Care and immanence Later, we find out that, for the narrator, “owner” is “what the whites say” to refer to the relationship of parent and child.23 It is important to remember the notion of “care” (Fausto, 2008) imbricated in Amerindian asymmetric relationships: if, in Western world, “owning” is valued, in Amerindian worlds “ownership” gives place

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Figure 3. Yanomami ontology scheme.

to “being responsible” and “caring.” Xapiri care for living beings, adults care for children, humans care for their domestic animals, and so on. Another notion must be highlighted: “when we say the name of a xapiri, it is not just a spirit we name, it is a multitude of similar images. Each name is unique, but the xapiri it denominates are unnumbered” (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, pp. 116– 117). That is a common notion in many indigenous ethnic groups: living beings manifest, as phenomena, singularly, before our eyes. However, behind the “appearance,” a single name is hidden and, therefore, there is a single essence: what we have here is a universal reference and a singular manifestation; a common collective ancestry and an actualization in personal present. There is an essence, an organization, a being, which is beyond space and time, goes back to ancestry and, ultimately, refers to the cosmos itself, with which a person, whether human or not, can connect, mediated by a symbol, that is by the name of xapiri, which is only one. Observe, in the figure above, that no being can establish direct contact with the “true name,” the “true center” of being: it is through a symbol, materialized in the xapiri, that the connection with totality is established or, in


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other words, with the utup€ e image. It is no wonder that the dream is a privileged vehicle for reconnection with cosmic totality in many different Amerindian cultures: through it, one can establish contact with something that is, at the same time, center and totality of existence. Transformed by the y~ akoana powder, Kopenawa assumes that someone may access this dimension of universality: “I think Omama’s son today is dead. His image, however, still exists . . . I saw it in the time of dream, along with that of our forest, in tears” (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 86). Indeed, even in naturalistic terms, we may pose the question: when a person acts, in the here and now, who is acting? An “individual” who is isolated and independent of what is around him and his ancestry? Or a set of agential factors, combining environment, ontogenesis, and a biological heritage that refers to, at least, billions of years ago (phylogenesis)? Someway, our ancestors’ lives, whether human or not, are influencing our actions right now. In this sense, there is nothing mystical about saying that the past ancestors—who are the same to all of us—are present and echoing in us at every moment. Yanomami mythology seems to “intuit” this notion with the simplicity and naturalness with which we, Westerners, see the presence of an object that is before our eyes. Kopenawa’s (1998) speech in another occasion confirms that: Whites are ingenious – they have many machines and goods, but no wisdom. They no longer think of what their ancestors were when they were brought up. In the early days they were like us, but they forgot all their ancient words. (p. 21)

Life and death Contrarily to what happens in The Book of Genesis (between humans and divinity), here the similarities between the habits of the “living” and the xapiri are many. The xapiri enjoy tobacco as much as humans do; they are warriors and have weapons; practice revenge and fight with ferocity, even to kill; so we conclude that, just as the “living” ones, they also die. Here we refer to Viveiros de Castro’s (2009) notion of “death as an almost happening” in the Amerindian world: the encounter with the supernatural beings of the forest and, therefore, the very essence of these forests, seems to have the nature of “almostness,”24 that is of a constant becoming between life and death. Death, like life, is constantly happening and, at the same time, not happening.

The “representativeness” of nonhuman animal In Table 10, we present the sum of mentions, in the text, meaning “human” (“human,” “humans,” “man,” “men,” “person,” “woman,” and “women”) and those meaning “animal” (“animal,” “animals,” in addition to the various animal species mentioned). Mentions to “human” equals to only 25%, which means less than half the proportion in which they appear in The Book of Genesis.

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Table 10. Count of morphemes meaning “human” and “animal” in the Chapters 2 and 4 of The Falling Sky. Mentions to “human” human Man Person Woman Sum

Mentions to “animal” 29 11 2 27 69 25%

Animal Specific animals

38 166

Sum

204 75%

Final considerations We start our final considerations with an interpretative comparison between the relationships presupposed between “human” and nonhuman animal in both myth narratives. Then, we propose a brief discussion on the social uses of myths and, finally, we extend our findings to a reflection on their implications to the hegemonic theoretical–methodological approaches in psychology that presuppose the Western notion of Humanity as a “universal condition.” Western and Amerindian narratives here analyzed present majorly opposing conceptions on the presupposed relationships between “humanity” and animality. In the former, there is initially a world that is created, and then, possessed by Human. In the latter, initially there were humans (“people,” more precisely), and only then the world is created: the condition of “peopleness” is presupposed in all existing beings, from the earliest age; people used to metamorphose into animal forms on and on, and then the demiurge creates the world, in order to stabilize them in their present visible forms, whether animal or human. Thus, in the Bible, there is a primordial world of order, and then Human is expelled into a world of chaos, near to animality; in The Falling Sky, first there was chaos of metamorphose and then the demiurge creates an ordered world with humans, animals, and their xapiri spirits. In the Western narrative, initially Human was near to God and far from earthly animality of sin; in the Yanomami one, in the beginning, human was near to a spiritual animality (what we could call “sacred”) and then he comes to the world and becomes more distant from it, and closer to what appears to be humanity. In The Book of Genesis, “Human” means nearness to the divine, agentive power, protagonism, and ownership over other beings, while “nonhuman” is basically a set of objects, intended for Human’s use. In The Falling Sky, “human” is not our biological species’ feature, but rather an inherent quality of any being: all beings are human in their own domain of existence, thus, “human” is rather a characteristic of being subject, a prerogative of all, including and especially “nonhumans,” from which all humans descend immanently, in the present. In the Bible, animality is the constant threat of lurking chaos that lies within us, which must be purged by sacrifice and purification (cf. Boesch, 2002): Human near


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to God and far from corporeity is pure, far from God and near to the flesh is animal and, thus, impure. In Yanomami cosmology, in turn, the chaos to be repelled is the threat of the falling sky, and it is from this prophecy of imminent world destruction that we can comprehend all the myth and ritualization involved in the treatment of Yanomami and many other Amerindian peoples with the “environment” and nonhuman beings, that is with “nature,” in a naturalistic denomination. The xawara epidemic brought by the same “People of Merchandise” that brings the tractors, chainsaws, and gold-digging tools to destroy the forest environment is more than the threat of chaos: it is chaos itself, alive and concrete. The xapiri spirits perform the indispensable function of dancing so that the sky keeps in its place and the xawara epidemic does not decimate the Yanomami people, and hence the shaman’s ritual of purification, “dying” by means of consumption of the y~ akoana powder. Chaos, for the Yanomami, is not in animality; on the contrary, it is repelled by the contact with it, intermediated by the xapiri. In the first paragraphs, we discussed on how the Bible remains, presently, as an implicit myth is Western culture, even in science (cf. Gadamer, 1954/2010). It means that the reality where the myth was born, and the one that followed until the present, found useful keeping it alive, in spite of many other narratives that did not find the same echo in reality and, then, ended up being silenced before getting to us. In The Book of Genesis, myth plays the role of justifying life’s adversities in the arid, patriarchal and civilized (i.e. “protected” from wild life and mostly inhabited by Humans) agricultural pre-Christian world and, more than that: this world of pain and suffering is the nonhuman animals’ terrain. Originally alien to this world and presently living in it, Human’s life in preChristian world feeds and is fed by biblical myth. Let us go now to Amazon rainforest, with its virtually infinitely diverse life. The colors are many, so are the beings, and what can and what cannot be seen get mixed up: here, human’s life cannot be thought or lived out of the relationship, or dialog, with the diversity of live around. Yanomami myth reaffirms and is reaffirmed by this world where integration between the different forms of being is necessary to physical, symbolical, psychical, spiritual, personal, and collective life. Living together with nonhuman animality is frequent and necessary, but yet it remains mysterious—how can one really comprehend what that different being (that one who does not speak my language) is thinking, other than “dying and becoming a ghost”? Plurality of life in the rainforest highlights the difference, hence the intermediation of xapiri spirits, humans and nonhumans, who are others, and with whom one can only communicates “become other.” The self, for cultural psychology (i.e. from James, 1890/1983, to Hermans, 2001), is usually understood as one’s subjectivity, which is constituted in alterity: what I am is what the other is not. It is no surprise that Western peoples’ self is Human, once our alterity is also so. But how to explain a world where the otheranimal has disappeared? Where is he or she? Are not their bodies part of

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“everybody”? It is in this semiotic hiatus that the myth of Human as totality gets stronger, because it fulfills this gap with sense, organizing the potential chaos. So, what we learn from this confrontation of two myths is that the “Human condition” may be not so “universal” as hegemonic Western thought believes, once “Humanity” itself, as defined in Eurocentric sociocultural contexts, does not exist among Yanomami and other Amerindian peoples (on this issue see also the commentary of Guimar~ aes (2012) to Moghaddam (2012)). This is not about comparing processes of Humanization and de-Humanization, but about questioning the very notion that “feeling empathy” equals to “Humanizing.” It is about clarifying that the Human category is not ultimate and absolute: Yanomami people do not deHumanize their Human enemy peoples, but rather “de-Yanomamize” them, which is absolutely different. And then, what happens when our very last ontological foundation is relativized? So do the premises of theoretical– methodological approaches based on that foundation. Psychology is born and raised in a certain place and time: one guided by a naturalistic ontology that presupposes an insurmountable abyss between culture—Human’s domain (but not human’s)—and nature—a category negatively defined, meaning all stuff that is not Human. This Human’s “alienation” of nature, which is a fundamental (and tragical) premise of a huge number of theories in psychology and humanities—from psychoanalysis to developmental psychology, from critical theory to linguistics—is not a universal condition: it is rather socioculturally constructed, though this fact remains often neglected in the research. Highlighting the guidance that “Humanity myth” promotes in psychology making is an example of how one always departs from a certain limited perspective when approaching an object of knowledge. That is the reason why different voices must be heard, and that should be the goal of cultural psychology. The sociocultural context where psychology arises demands a “science of the individual Human” and of “Human behavior,” that is its birth is linked to a Human-referenced Euro-anthropocentric worldview, one which had and has a compartmentalized vision of knowledge, being and things as a presupposition, especially with regard to the Human and nonhuman opposition. Thus, the knowledge of Human was assigned to psychology, on the assumption that it could be possible for one to get to know Human detached from his environmental context. However, as cultural psychologists, we need to get in touch with other conceptions that confront the cultural matrix of emerging psychology and, then, the inclusion of these other matrices may lead to revisions to what psychology itself is. Considering that psychology is a discipline that faces the limits of the modern project of constructing such epistemic subject, cultural psychology faces it more intensively. The purpose of cultural psychology is to produce general psychological theories about the cultural mediation of the self, others, and world relationships. Our conclusion is that to achieve this aim, cultural psychology needs to understand how other cultural perspectives on the topics approached in the investigations participate in the process of knowledge construction, transforming the proper psychological conceptions and practices (Guimar~aes, 2018).


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We understand that if cultural psychology intends to access the meaning of deeper expressions of people from traditions that are different from those in which psychology has been constituted as science, it is necessary to know how to place these expressions before the cosmological background to which they are genetically linked, being that the theoretical–methodological deepening of this research (cf. Guimar~aes, 2016; Sim~ao, 2010) is an effort in the direction of making the access to the meaning of the other’s expressions possible. And then, take it seriously. Declaration of conflicting interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Fundaç~ ao de Amparo a` Pesquisa do Estado de S~ ao Paulo—Fapesp (grant number 2016/23681-1) and by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientıfico e Tecnol ogico—CNPq (grant number 154729/ 2014-0).

Notes 1. Although formal English requires “it” when referring to a nonhuman being, our choice is to refuse to reaffirm this use of language that positions nonhuman animals as objects, instead of subjects. 2. We adopt the word “Western” to generally refer to the peoples of European culture, which includes all countries in the Americas. Mostly, “Western” here appears in opposition to “indigenous peoples of Americas.” We could else use “white,” “modern,” “Humans”—in the absolutely ironic sense attributed by Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2014)—“non-indigenous,” “Jewish-Christian,” or “Eurocentric” as well as “Western,” that is our choice, once it is still the more comprehensive expression and the most used in the literature consulted throughout the research. At times, however, we use “Eurocentric,” in order to emphasize specifically the hegemonic character of Western culture (cf. Quijano, 2000, on neocolonialism and its influences in science). 3. Once one of the most relevant findings of this research is precisely that the concept of “human” is absolutely different in Western and Amerindian cultures, we chose here to spell this word differently, according to the culture it refers to and its function: “human” (lower case, regular) when it is a noun and “human” (lower case, italic) for an adjective, both referring to Amerindian culture; “Human” (uppercase, regular) for a noun and “Human” (uppercase, italic) when it is an adjective, both in Western culture; and “human” (in brackets), when it does not refer to any culture in particular. 4. Observe that “Humanity” is a historically constructed category—as we suggest on Enlightenment’s Declaration, for example—and the groups included under this category depend on historical nuances, such as man/woman, Human/animal, healthy/mad, and

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.


so on. Yet, we chose to focus specifically on the opposition Human/animal, because of the central importance this duality appears to have for indigenous peoples’ cosmologies. Actually, after our contact with the Amerindian worldview, it seems like the question is another one: would not the basis of all inequalities be precisely on Human/nature separation? Rousseau (1754/2005) shows us that this question is present in Western imaginary since long ago. All translations from Portuguese were made by the authors of this paper. Previously, the classification of animism, naturalism, and totemism appears in Descola (1996). We chose to translate “physicalite´” to “exteriority,” once the original word is commonly employed in French. Cf. Le´vi-Strauss (1957) on this issue and its subsequent Viveiros de Castro’s (1996) problematization. A typical mammal from Brazilian forests, similar to a wild boar. See Latour’s (2009) discussion on Descola’s (2005) and Viveiros de Castro’s (1996) quarrel about the notions of animism and Amerindian perspectivism for the understanding of Americas indigenous peoples’ thought. Metaphor used by Viveiros de Castro (Latour, 2009) to present his Amerindian perspectivism, which could “blow up” the categories of “republican” thought in Anthropology. Guimar~aes (2014, 2016) takes the notion of equivocation from Viveiros de Castro (2004) and discusses in depth the terms, situation and possibilities of interethnic dialog, besides the forms and consequences of not dialoguing. In the beginning, Omama and his brother Yoasi came into existence by themselves. They did not have father nor mother. Before them, in the first time, there were only the people we call yarori. These ancestors were human with animal names and kept metamorphosing on and on. Thus, little by little, they became the game animals that we now shoot and eat. Then it was Omama’s turn to come into existence and recreate the forest, for the former was fragile. It metamorphosed on and on, until, finally, the sky fell on it. Its inhabitants were thrown down under the earth and became the voracious and sharp teethed ancestors whom we call a~ opatari. (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 81)

14. “Omama fished T€ ep€ er€ e-siki’s daughter from a great river. . . Later, we left the vagina Omama’s wife, Thu€ eyoma, the woman he took from the water. . . She was a fish being, who let herself be captured in the shape of a woman” (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 82). 15. Omama got furious with his brother Yoasi, because he, against his will, had brought to the forest the evil beings of disease, the n€ e wari, and also those of the xawara epidemic, who, like them, are human flesh eaters. Yoasi was evil and, his thought, full of forgetfulness. . . Omama wanted us to be immortal, like the sun being – called Mothokari by the shamans. He wanted to do things well and put a really solid breath of life in us. So he looked for a hardwood tree in the forest, in order to get it standing, so it imitated the shape of his wife. Therefore, he chose a ghost tree, pore hi, whose skin renews continually. He wanted to introduce the image of this tree into our breath of life, so that it would remain long and resilient. So, when we got old, we could change our skin and it would always be


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smooth and youthful. It would have been possible to continuously rejuvenate and never die. That was Omama’s desire. However, Yoasi, taking advantage of his brother’s absence, put the bark of a tree of fibrous and soft wood in the hammock of Omama’s wife, which we call kotopori usihi. Then, the bark folded into one of the hammock’s side and began to tilt to the floor. Immediately, the Toucan spirits began to chant their stinging lamentations of mourning. Omama listened to it and got mad with his brother. But it was late, the evil was done. Yoasi had taught us to die forever. He had brought death, this evil being, into our mind and into our breath, and that is why our mind and breath became so fragile. Since then, humans are always close to death. (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 83) 16.

Omama finally created the xapiri to. . . protect us from death. . . created the spirits of the forest urihinari, the spirits of the water unari and the yarori animal spirits. . . Omama revealed to his son – the first shaman – the use of y~ akoana and taught him to see the spirits he had just brought into existence. . . He said to him these words: “With these spirits you will protect humans and their children, however numerous they may be. Do not let evil beings and jaguars come to devour you. Prevent snakes and scorpions from stinging them. Take away the smoke from the xawara epidemic. Also protect the forest. Do not let it turn into chaos . . . Hold the sky so it does not fall” (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 84)

17. For Deleuze (1995), the immanent can only be understood in itself: immanence is the affirmation of the totality of existence and rejection of planes of duality, such as the dual transcendence we saw in the Christian narrative above. 18. The xapiri are the images of the yarori animal ancestors that metamorphosed in the first time. . . The xapiri, however, look like humans . . . They are tiny, just as light dust, and are invisible to ordinary people. . . His songs are magnificent and powerful. Their thinking is right and they work hard to protect us. However, if we behave badly with them, they can also become very aggressive and kill us. . . The true xapiri are very brave! Only a few of them are weak and coward. . . Moreover, even if they are very old and blind, the xapiri remain immortal. (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 111)

19.

To really see them, you have to drink the powder of y~ akoana. . . The xapiri only let their voices be heard if their father, the shaman, dies with the y~ akoana. . . They also die with the y~ akoana, just as their father, and so they start to dance and sing for him. (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, pp. 111–112)

20. All the forest beings have a utup€ e image. It is these images that the shamans call and bring down. . . They are the true center, the true interior of the animals we hunt. . . The animals of the forest, compared to them, are ugly. They exist, merely. They do nothing but imitate their images. They are just food for humans. (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 116)

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21.


The images of animals that shamans make dance are not those of the animals we hunt. They are his parents’, who came to existence in the first time. As I said, the images of the ancestors we call yarori. Long ago, when the forest was still young, our ancestors, who were humans with animal names, metamorphosed into game animals. Humans-peccary turned peccary; humans-deer became deer; humansagouti turned into agouti. . . These are the ancestors turned into others that we hunt and eat today. . . The animal ancestors of the first time did not disappear, therefore. . . Their ghosts keep existing. . . When the yarori animal ancestors metamorphosed, their skins became those of game animals and, their images, xapiri spirits. That is why they always consider animals as ancestors, equals to themselves. . . The same for us, as much as we eat game meat, we know that they are human ancestors turned into animals. . . In the first time, they were as humans as we are. They are no different. Today, we give ourselves the name of humans, but we are identical to them. So, for them, we remain theirs. (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, p. 117)

22. The anthropologist Bruce Albert uses the term “human” to translate the word “Yanomami,” although he stresses that, for this people, “Yanomami” means “we,” “Yanomami people,” not “all humans.” It seems to be a very ethnically centered cosmology. 23. “Omama is jealous of his spirits! He’s their real father. He is their owner, as the Whites say” (Kopenawa & Albert, 2015, pp. 121–122). 24. In Portuguese, “quasidade.”

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Author biographies Douglas Kawaguchi is a doctorate candidate and an MSc in Psychology, Undergraduate in Psychology and Graduate in Social Communications, all from University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil, with Interchange from University of Lyon II, France. Granted researcher with support from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientıfico e Tecnol ogico—CNPq (National Counsel of Scientific and Technological Development) and a Verbal Interaction and Knowledge Construction Lab (USP) and Cultural Psychology Group (USP) member. Focuses his investigations in myth, narrative, anthropocentrism, Cultural Psychology, and Analytical Psychology. E-mail: [email protected] Danilo S Guimar~ aes is professor at the Institute of Psychology (University of S~ao Paulo, S~ ao Paulo, Brazil). He has been working with theoretical and methodological issues concerning the cultural construction of senses, from a semiotic-cultural and constructivist perspective in psychology. His focus of investigation is the process of dialogical multiplication out of tensional boundaries between cultural alterities, psychology, and Amerindian peoples. E-mail: [email protected]