[Amazonian worldviews] have a strong “constructional” dimension. Amerindian constructivism is particularly salient in mythical accounts narrating the creation of the world and the different life forms that populate it. It conceives of all living beings as composite entities, made up of the bodies and parts of bodies of a diversity of life forms, among which artifacts occupy a prominent place. According to these cosmologies, at the beginning there were only people and their artifacts — and sometimes, only artifacts. These artifacts are conceived of as the primordial building blocks out of which the bodies of people, and even gods, were first created. In this Amerindian view, artifacts fall on the side of the “natural” or the given — they were the first divine creations — whereas humans, animals, and plants fall on the side of the “cultural” or the constructed.
Thus anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero, introducing a volume of essays on the role played by made things — variously, masks and flutes, baby slings, headdresses and other bodily ornaments, identity cards, bibles, and airplanes — in the cultural life of the societies of the Amazon basin. Santos-Granero and his colleagues are responding not just to the intrinsic interest of the topic but to a broadly cited view, associated in particular with the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, that the distinguishing feature of the Amazonian worldview is its “perspectival” quality. Here perspectival refers to a tendency, widespread in the hunting societies of the Americas and the boreal taiga and tundra of North America and Eurasia, to view certain animals — generally those significant to the hunt — as possessed of a quality of sociality comparable to our own. These animals have a perspective, they look out on the world, as we do — and see us, variously, as predators, prey, and junior partners in an ongoing effort of worldbuilding. This is so, Santos-Granero says — the worldview of the peoples of the Amazon is perspectival — but that is not the whole story.
In fact we can go further. Not only do material artifacts play a distinguished role in the theory of personhood common to the peoples of the Amazon: we observe something similar practically anywhere we look. Consider, by way of maximal contrast, the words of legal scholar Margaret Radin, from 1982.
Most people possess certain objects they feel are almost part of themselves. These objects are closely bound up with personhood because they are part of the way we constitute ourselves as continuing personal entities in the world. They may be as different as people are different, but some common examples might be a wedding ring, a portrait, an heirloom, or a house.
One may gauge the strength or significance of someone’s relationship with an object by the kind of pain that would be occasioned by its loss.
Further on, Radin qualifies the observation, implicit in the above, that it is considered healthy to be invested in significant objects in the manner described.
If there is a traditional understanding that a well-developed person must invest herself to some extent in external objects, there is no less a traditional understanding that one should not invest oneself in the wrong way or to too great an extent in external objects. Property is damnation as well as salvation, object-fetishism as well as moral groundwork. In this view, the relationship between the shoe fetishist and his shoe will not be respected like that between the spouse and her wedding ring. At the extreme, anyone who lives only for material objects is considered not to be a well-developed person, but rather to be lacking some important attribute of humanity.
Though she does not discuss it, Radin was writing in the context of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Diamond v. Chakarabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), that recognized the validity of utility patents in living things — in the case at hand, a form of the bacterium of genus Pseudomonas engineered to metabolize crude oil.
The older I get — I am forty-eight as I write — the more I experience myself as a shifting bundle of substances and impulses, with perhaps a handful of key artifacts folded in like the coarse aggregate in a concrete. And as I enter my twentieth year of daily sitting practice I am starting to understand that the purpose of meditation, one of its purposes, is to help us receive with humility an awareness that the integrated self is a cheap fiction.
(Of course, cheap fiction has its role too. Six and a half years on I recall with pleasure a week in bed, injured and spent, reading Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four — this was just after I’d finished the first draft of The Meat Question.)
Radin M. Property and Personhood. Stanford Law Review 1982;34/5, 959, 961.
Santos-Granero F. Introduction, in Santos-Granero, ed, The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood (University of Arizona Press, 2009), 21–2.