On the Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar

Author(s): Steven Lee Rubenstein

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Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 53, No. 1 (February 2012), pp. 39-79
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Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012 39

On the Importance of Visions among the

Amazonian Shuar
by Steven Lee Rubenstein

This essay involves a set of speculations concerning the role plant-granted visions play in the formation
of the Shuar subject. It also reflects on the need for an ethnography of secrecy and the ineffable. In
both these tasks I seek to engage psychoanalytic theory. Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the Real,
the Imaginary, and the Symbolic helps analyze the relationship between the discourse and the silence
of the unconscious. His essay on the “mirror stage” is useful for thinking about bourgeois subjectivity.
Nevertheless, I argue that premissionization Shuar did not go through the mirror stage. First, I argue
that Shuar practices effected the colonization of the Symbolic by the Real, in contrast to bourgeois
culture, in which the Symbolic colonizes the Real. Then I explore the role of desire, violence, and
speech in the construction of different kinds of power. Pierre Clastres’ work helps to explore how
these two cultures clash and articulate on the colonization frontier, while psychoanalytic theory adds
to Clastres a theory of the subject. Ultimately, this article is an experiment in acknowledging the
psychic unity of humanity—while at the same time illuminating the differences between the state
and societies against the state.

In this article, I attempt to write about phenomena that resist
entry into the realm of language, namely, secret power-grant-
ing visions. I am specifically interested in the power-granting
visions of Shuar, a group of perhaps 80,000 people indigenous
to the Ecuadorian Amazon (in most of the travel and aca-
demic literature, they are known as “Jı́varo,” but I avoid the
term because Shuar consider it pejorative).1 This essay is thus
an experiment in dwelling within a cross-cultural moment in
ethnographic research, the encounter with the unfamiliar and
unsettling. I conducted research among the Shuar from De-
cember 1988 to February 1992 and in five summer visits since
then. As I reread in my university office transcripts of inter-
views I conducted with Shuar, I realize that I did not fully
understand the answers to my questions at the time I asked
them. As I reread these interviews, as I do with older eth-
nographies, I try to imagine myself as being back in the field,
dependent on a certain kind of suspension of disbelief, trying
to live in a world where the things to which I must hold my
research and myself accountable, the things I must take as
real, are precisely those things my own culture tells me are
unreal.
Steven Lee Rubenstein is Reader of Latin American Anthropology
in the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies of the
University of Liverpool (86 Bedford Street South, Liverpool L69
7WW, United Kingdom [steven.rubenstein@liverpool.ac.uk]). This
paper was submitted 4 VIII 09 and accepted 9 III 11.
Michael Harner (1968) made Shuar—especially Shuar sha-
mans—famous for their use of hallucinogens in his article
“The Sound of Rushing Water.” But he also pointed out that
in nonshamanic contexts, all Shuar consumed the same hal-
lucinogens as shamans and that all male Shuar took a hal-
lucinogen more potent than that used by shamans. Moreover,
adult Shuar considered it essential to the welfare of their
children that they too consume considerable amounts of hal-
lucinogens. Through life-history interviews of women con-
ducted in 2006, I learned that women also took and continue
to take hallucinogens and, moreover, that they continue to
consider the provision of hallucinogens as essential to good
parenting. In other words, shamanic visions are a specific
subset of a universal set of practices. I began to consider the
possibility that the childhood experiences of the average Shuar
are as important as, if not more important than, the expe-
riences of shamans to an understanding of the importance
of visions in Shuar culture. Shuar routinely characterize these
visions, or the encounters that occur within them, as among
the most important moments of their lives. What is it about
these visions that make them so important?
Harner, a meticulous ethnographer, provides a straightfor-
ward answer:
The Jı́varo believe that the true determinants of life and
death are normally invisible forces which can be seen and
utilized only with the aid of hallucinogenic drugs. The nor-
1. Maurizio Gnerre (1973) has argued convincingly that “Jı́varo”
evolved from the sixteenth-century Spanish spelling of “shuar.”

䉷 2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2012/5301-0003$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/663830
 40
mal waking life is explicitly viewed as “false” or “a lie,” and
it is firmly believed that the truth about causality is to be
found by entering the supernatural world or what the Jı́varo
view as the “real” world, for they feel that the events which
take place within it underlie and are the basis for many of
the surface manifestations and mysteries of daily life. (Har-
ner 1984:135; see also Karsten 1935:444, and see Gow 2000:
62 regarding a similar belief among the Peruvian Piro)
If Harner is right (and as best I can tell, this is a fairly accurate
summary of what virtually every Shuar I have met believes),
then we can no longer call the substances Shuar take “hal-
lucinogens.” They are kinds of palliatives that enable one to
succeed in a world of deception.2 This is why women consume
certain infusions while they are pregnant and give their babies
a few drops of another infusion at birth. It is why parents
will give a more potent infusion to a child who has displayed
a lack of self-control; they hope that the experience will give
the child the strength needed for self-discipline. It is why
fathers will give an even stronger infusion to their pubescent
sons, who will soon participate in feuding and warfare. As
Ann-Christine Taylor put it, plant-granted visions continue
to function for Shuar as “existential amplifiers” (Taylor 1993:
666). But what happens in these visions that makes them
sources of such power?
Sometimes Shuar are granted visions of their future. The
contents of these visions are kept secret until they come to
pass. But there are other aspects of the experience that Shuar
will not talk about. They willingly talk about their visions in
generic terms, as involving an encounter with a spirit. The
name of the spirit and other details of the encounter, however,
are typically kept secret. The ethnographic question leads to
a methodological question: how is an anthropologist to write
about the unspoken?
This question may seem to be methodological, based as it
is in a particular ethnographic situation, but I consider it
2. This essay is to a large degree my effort to view Harner’s account
not as a belief to be interpreted or a proposition to be tested but as an
invitation to imagine what this world would look like if I were to take
this point of view seriously. This is how I understand Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro’s (2011:133) recent demand that
the anthropologist’s idea of seriousness must not be tied to the her-
meneutics of allegorical meanings or to the immediative illusion of dis-
cursive echolalia. Anthropologists must allow that “visions” are not be-
liefs, not consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively: not
worldviews, but worlds of vision (and not vision only—these are worlds
perceivable by senses other than vision and are objects of extrasensory
conception as well).
As Viveiros de Castro notes, this kind of seriousness is necessarily ac-
companied by humor, in a way that leaves no room for irony. It seems
to me that irony comes fairly easily to the many well-read Shuar I know
(e.g., Federation officials and indigenous activists)—but I have long mar-
veled at how effortlessly other Shuar are able to move from deadly se-
riousness to laughter. The results of my own efforts in this essay are
some necessarily illiberal thoughts. If I have succeeded, some readers will
take them seriously, and others will consider them jokes, but, I hope, no
one will read them as ironic.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
theoretical as well, since it leads me to reflect more generally
on an ethnography of the ineffable. There is a line here, and
after wavering considerably, I realize that I cannot take either
side. On one side is the possibility that my informants are
fully aware of and understand their visions, although they
keep this knowledge secret. On the other side is the possibility
that something occurs in visions that cannot enter speech.
The possibility of the latter makes it impossible to know which
of the two is the case. I suggest that both are in play simul-
taneously.
In his examination of secrets, sociologist Georg Simmel
(1950:312) concluded that “we simply cannot imagine any
interaction or social relation or society which is not based on
this teleologically determined non-knowledge of one an-
other.” In an earlier essay in which I reflected on the secrets
that largely defined my relationship with an individual Shuar,
I pursued Simmel’s suggestion that the temptation to confess
or betray is the source of the power of the secret (Rubenstein
2004:1055–1061). In the course of my fieldwork, however, I
have spoken to many more Shuar about their visions, in an
effort to learn the secrets of power. They readily told me about
the immense importance of plant-granted visions and of the
effects these visions had on their lives. But they repeatedly
refuse to tell me what occurred in their visions, and they
consistently insisted that some visions are kept secret from
everyone. So this essay is at least as much about the power
of secrecy as it is about forms of power.
I would like to suggest that some secrets are powerful be-
cause they are mimetic of the ineffable. My use of the word
“mimetic” invokes philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s tri-
adic semiotic.3 As Michael Taussig has shown, the mimetic
faculty is often essential to the ways people perform their
relationship to the ineffable. Like the symbolic, it is a field of
power: “Once the mimetic has sprung into being, a terrifically
3. In addition to the symbolic, in which the relationship between a
signifier and its object is entirely arbitrary, Peirce called attention to
indexes that compel attention because they are directly connected to their
object (e.g., “where there is smoke (index) there is fire (object)”) and
icons that share some quality with, and are thus mimetic of, their objects
(e.g., a map of a village or a diagram of circuitry; Peirce 1998 [1903]).
(It is important to note that, like symbols, icons depend on convention.
One must learn what maps are before one can recognize them as iconic;
Taussig 1993:51–52.) “Indexes” and “icons” make it possible to signify
without using language.
For example, when the protagonist of Janet Hendricks’s account of a
warrior’s narrative describes his difficulties breathing through blood, he
employs the onomatopoeia “shupi shupi,” Hendricks remarks that in an
English-language narrative, one would more likely describe the sight of
blood rather than the sound, and that the sound of labored breathing
would have been described in different terms. She concludes that Shuar
favor sound over other senses (1993:189). I believe that she is missing
the point, because she has shifted the object of her analysis from Tukup’s
narration to his actual experience. I believe that the importance of on-
omatopoeia in Shuar narration has to do with the importance of the
iconic relative to the symbolic, rather than the importance of sound
relative to sight (see Kohn 2005 for another example of the usefulness
of these distinctions in understanding an Amazonian culture).
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
ambiguous power is established: there is born the power to
represent the world, yet that same power is a power to falsify,
mask, and pose” (Taussig 1993:42–43).
What happens in these visions that makes them sources of
such power? As I suggest below, it may have something to
do with the way visionary encounters form a kind of sub-
jectivity that can stand up to a tension in Shuar culture be-
tween valuing freedom and valuing power. This kind of sub-
jectivity is fundamentally distinct from the bourgeois
subjectivity proposed by Sigmund Freud and his followers.4
It is made possible by the way Shuar visions mediate the real
and the symbolic—registers that in many ways parallel a dis-
tinction made by Jacques Lacan—and, consequently, by an
ambivalent relationship between visions and speech.
The central concern of psychoanalytic theory is “the un-
conscious,” that is, the thoughts and ideas a person cannot
put into words, not because of some lack of competence but
because of some mechanism of repression. One could argue
that by definition the contents of the unconscious are not
meaningful, but Freud argued that the unconscious works and
that the workings of the unconscious have knowable, mean-
ingful effects that we can talk about. Of all psychoanalytic
theorists, Lacan was perhaps the one most concerned with
the significance of the chasm between the unconscious and
the conscious and of the ways that talk is both unavoidable
and a danger to psychoanalysis. Lacan was concerned that
analysts had come to take the role of language in analysis for
granted without considering the ways it can distort or disguise
as easily as it can expose and explain. He argued that “the
Symbolic”—the order constituted through language—is a
realm of misrecognition and impossible desires. Given the
importance of secrets and distorted speech in Shuar culture,
I believe that anthropologists must take Lacan’s concerns se-
riously as well.5
4. These theories are controversial for a diverse range of scholars, so
I must pause to explain my own position. I do not accept the work of
Sigmund Freud and his followers as a universal theory of the human
mind. I do, however, find in it a compelling account of the formation
of bourgeois subjectivity. Now that Shuar territory has been colonized
and reorganized along bourgeois forms of production and governance,
many Shuar are emulating this kind of subjectivity, an issue this article
can point to but not explore in depth. But I also find certain concepts
in psychoanalytic theory useful in developing an account of the formation
of Shuar subjectivity (which complements Elke Mader’s 1999 analysis of
Shuar personhood), which is a central concern of this essay.
5. Another reason anthropologists should be more interested in de-
bates in Freudian theory is the ways these debates challenge assumptions
about the bourgeois subject as an autonomous individual. A first reading
of Freud would suggest that he was primarily interested in the operation
of different “drives” (which he contrasted to instincts; Freud 1961 [1920],
1962 [1905]). For most followers of Freud, however, his work is most
notable for its attempts to model the structure of the mind (which in
turn help explain the dynamics of different drives). Freud’s models are
considered “topographic,” not because he identified each element with
a different place in the brain but because he understood the functioning
of each element in terms of its position relative to the other elements.
The first topographic model distinguished between the unconscious, the
preconscious, and the conscious (Freud 1955 [1900]:513–616). The sec-
41
This essay is necessarily speculative. As an “ethnography of
the ineffable,” it is also an experimental alternative to an
ethnography of “representation.” Although the “crisis of rep-
resentation” of the 1980s questioned the right of anthropol-
ogists to represent their informants, this crisis centered on an
understanding of culture as representation and of ethnogra-
phy as interpretation (see Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz
1973; Marcus and Fisher 1986). But it is important for eth-
nographers to acknowledge that our informants may have
experiences and their cultures may involve practices, or di-
mensions or registers of experiences or practices, that resist
representation.
This essay thus lingers on a second encounter, between
ethnographic fieldwork and writing. To acknowledge the im-
portance of the secret or ineffable in the lives of our infor-
mants, I look for ways to write not “about” these experiences
or customs but “around” them. There is, of course, a good
deal that Shuar have to say about plants, visions, and powers.
Just as such talk frames experiences about which my infor-
mants do not speak, my interpretations of this talk are for-
warded to frame (and thus acknowledge) that which I cannot
interpret.
Psychoanalysis and Ethnography
As only a few other anthropologists have engaged Lacan (e.g.,
Crapanzano 1980; Ivy 1995) and my reading of Lacan is se-
lective and not shared by all Lacanians, I begin with a brief
comment about my approach. One reason I believe that an-
thropologists should find in Lacan’s work a productive path
to engage psychoanalytic thought is his attention to language.6
ond topographic model distinguished between the id, the ego, and the
superego (Freud 1960 [1923]). For an account of how these two models
relate, see Freud 1949 [1940]; for present purposes, it is sufficient to note
that the ego cuts across the dividing line between the unconscious and
the conscious. Lacan takes this a step further, in that in his account the
ego cuts across the line between internal and external; his model takes
more account than Freud’s of the way social dynamics shape psychological
dynamics. One thing I find valuable in this line of thought is a fractured
and conflicted account of the bourgeois subject (see Borch Jakobsen 1988
[1982]) that stands in stark contrast with the idea of the autonomous
individual, which has dominated bourgeois ideology and social science
since the Enlightenment (Habermas 1994; Marx 1978 [1844]; Wolf 1982:
7–10).
6. I believe that Lacan’s identification of the unconscious with language
addresses quite precisely a point initially made by Franz Boas regarding
Freud.
While I believe some of the ideas underlying Freud’s psychoanalytic
studies may be fruitfully applied to ethnological problems, it does not
seem to me that the one-sided exploitation of this method will advance
our understanding of the development of human society. . . . To give an
example: The phenomena of language show clearly that conditions quite
different from those to which psycho-analysts direct their attention de-
termine the mental behavior of man. The general concepts underlying
language are entirely unknown to most people. They do not rise into
consciousness until the scientific study of grammar begins. Nevertheless,
the categories of language compel us to see the world arranged in certain
 42
Lacan relied on Saussurian linguistics, especially the distinc-
tion between parole and langue, and the implications of the
arbitrariness of the sign (see Saussure 1966 [1915]). For Lacan,
the difference between signified and signifier constitutes an
unbridgeable space of “misrecognition” (méconnaissance).
Lacan’s Saussurian analysis means that one’s language, and
everything of the subject’s that is mediated by language, is
always intimately human but also “Other”—alien—to one’s
self.
This is not the place to review the many critiques or al-
ternatives to Saussure’s dualistic semiotic. In some cases, a
dialogic or performative approach to language is more useful
(some have argued that Lacan takes a performative approach
to language in that language creates the subject; Lee 1990:75–
79).7 One reason I find Lacan’s reading of Saussure appro-
priate is because it resonates with a dualistic view of the world
that permeates Shuar culture.
Another reason I find it useful is that attention to the
specificity of language is a first step to recognizing what is
culturally specific and relative. As psychoanalyst Bruce Fink
noted,
We are born into a world of discourse, a discourse or lan-
guage that precedes our birth and that will live on after our
death. Long before a child is born, a place is prepared for
it in its parents’ linguistic universe: the parents speak of the
child yet to be born, try to select the perfect name for it,
prepare a room for it, and begin imagining what their lives
will be like with an additional member of the household.
The words they use to talk about the child have often been
in use for decades if not centuries, and the parents have
generally neither defined nor redefined them despite many
years of use. Those words are handed down to them by
definite conceptual groups which, on account of our lack of knowledge
of linguistic processes, are taken as objective categories and which, there-
fore, impose themselves upon the form of our thoughts. (Boas 1940
[1920]:288–289)
Lacan was struck by the way Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of marriage and
kinship approached the territory of Freud’s unconscious, and he supposed
that this had to do with his debt to linguistics; I suspect that it may also
owe in part to his debt to Boas (Lacan 1968:48).
7. See Sherzer and Urban’s (1986) call for a “discourse centered ap-
proach” and Mannheim and Tedlock’s (1995) call for a “dialogic” ap-
proach to language. Instead of seeing speech as partial examples of a
language, these approaches see language as something that emerges only
through conversations among people. This approach shifts focus from
an abstract system of meanings to actual social interactions occurring
within social and cultural contexts.
Both approaches are relevant to my argument. As the ethnographic
record makes clear, dialogue occupied a central place in Shuar language.
Gnerre (1986) and Hendricks (1993) demonstrate that even Shuar mono-
logues took place within dialogic contexts (the one exception is mono-
logues directed to the wakán′ of plants and animals, as well as instruments
of shamanic power; these monologues are delivered in the register of
song; Taylor and Chau 1983). Nevertheless, for Shuar, speech is a domain
in which recognition is always perilous and threatens to dissolve into
misrecognition.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
centuries of tradition: they constitute the Other of language.
(Fink 1995:5)
This point provides a razor for working through what may
be universal in Lacanian thought and what may be limited
to bourgeois culture (see Zaretsky 1976). For example, while
the arbitrariness of the sign and the way meaning is consti-
tuted through difference may be universal, the appropriate-
ness of castration as a trope to refer to the process of sub-
jectivation, central to Lacanian thought, may not be. (Indeed,
if my analysis below is correct, for Shuar the key trope of
subjectivation is the incorporation of the visionary power).
Against the Symbolic, and that which enters into language,
is that which resists entry into language. Lacan calls this “the
Real.” Since the Real does not enter language, it is impossible
to describe it directly; we can, however, imagine what it is
not. For example, we can try to imagine the consciousness
of a baby before it has any awareness of language. Lacan
sometimes speaks of the Real and the Symbolic as develop-
mental stages—babies are born, as Freud wrote, “polymor-
phously perverse” (meaning that the entire body is an un-
broken erogenous zone, for which anything can be an object
of erotic gratification).
So too, Lacan’s real is without zones, subdivisions, localized
highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the real is a sort of
unrent, undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to
be full everywhere, there being no space between the threads
that are its “stuff.” It is a sort of smooth, seamless surface
or space which applies as much to a child’s body as to the
whole universe. (Fink 1995:24)
As the baby enters the Symbolic order, “in the course of
socialization, the body is progressively written or overwritten
with signifiers: pleasure is localized in certain zones, while
other zones are neutralized by the word and coaxed into
compliance with social, behavioral norms” (Fink 1995:24).
Lacan explicitly distinguishes the Real from “reality.” Since
we cannot put the Real into words, it does not exist as such.
It is the Symbolic that constitutes reality (see Berger and
Luckman 1966): “a world that can be designated and dis-
cussed with the words provided by a social group’s (or sub-
group’s) language” (Fink 1995:25).
Although one may identify the Real and the Symbolic with
developmental stages, they coexist: a baby is born into a world
of language, and older people begin encoding its body as soon
as it is born (and in many societies, before). Similarly, the
Real is a spectral presence through the life of the individual;
Lacan (1978:vii) identifies it as the unconscious.8 “The real is
8. Lacan’s identification of “the Real” with the unconscious marks an
important break from other Freudians, who see the unconscious as the
result of repression. Lacan starts with the Real and calls attention to the
production of the Symbolic. Lacan suggests that although fragments of
the Real can be and are transformed into the Symbolic, there is always
a certain portion of the Real that is left over. As we shall see in the
conclusion, this “leftover” or “surplus” Real is of central importance to
Slavoj Žižek.
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
perhaps best understood as that which has not yet been sym-
bolized, remains to be symbolized, or even resists symboli-
zation; and it may perfectly well exist ‘alongside’ and in spite
of a speaker’s considerable linguistic capabilities” (Fink 1995:
25). In this sense, the Real and the Symbolic are better thought
of as registers than as developmental stages.
Between the Real and the Symbolic is another stage, or
register: the Imaginary. The Imaginary consists of images peo-
ple form of themselves and others.9 For Lacan—in sharp con-
trast to other psychoanalysts—“the foremost imaginary object
is the ego” (Fink 1995:84). Whereas many psychologists and
sociologists refer to this process of self-definition as “inter-
subjective” (Mead 1934, 1964), Lacan terms the ego “moi,”
“me” (the objective case; the “me” is acted upon), in contrast
to the subject, the “I” that acts. While other psychoanalysts
(especially in the United Kingdom and the United States)
sought to help strengthen the ego of their analysands, Lacan
viewed the Imaginary as the problem. He argued that “it is
an analyst’s job to intervene in the patient’s real, not in the
patient’s view of reality” (Fink 1995:25)—that is, in the un-
conscious, the unspeakable.
Cultural anthropologists face some problems that are very
similar to those of psychoanalysts. It is often quite obvious
to me that those Shuar who represent themselves to me most
articulately are those who, having considerable experience
talking to Euro-Americans or Europeans, have learned how
to reflect back to me what they believe I wish to hear (and,
certainly, what is most intelligible to me). I suggest that one
reason anthropologists and colonized peoples (such as Native
Americans) so often have conflicting anxieties about “cultural
representations” is that such representations are “Imaginary”
in the Lacanian sense, a self-serving or defensive construction
that “makes sense” in the context of whatever politics con-
stitutes the ethnic boundary at the time but usually fails in
some way when it is actually taken to be identical to the
collective subject.10
Moreover, cultural relativism is at least in part a theory of
cultural repression, in that it posits that “culture” often shapes
our thoughts, feelings, and actions in unreflexive ways—a
powerful idea but one that creates all sorts of hermeneutic
problems. For example, I worry that the forms of ethnocen-
trism I can most easily express and explain in language are
9. Just as Peirce proposed the iconic and the indexical to talk about
nonsymbolic media for meaning, Lacan sees the Imaginary as a nonsym-
bolic register for meaning: “While Saussure teaches us that language is
essentially structured by difference, we cannot assume that all difference
is perceived by virtue of language alone. The animal kingdom—in which
the imaginary predominates, the symbolic generally playing little or no
part—proves that difference is already operative at the level of the imag-
inary” (Fink 1995:189, n. 6).
10. In this context, the discourse that is “Other” to the image of
indigenous peoples could have been Social Darwinism and Unilineal
Evolution in the nineteenth century or the human-rights discourse of
the United Nations and international nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) in the twentieth century (Kuper 2003; Merlan 2009; Stocking
1968, 1987).
43
the least serious of the biases that threaten my understanding
of another culture. Often, the questions that I ask my infor-
mants demand that they put into words things the meaning
of which may best be indexed by how hard it is for them to
do so.
In this essay, I use the Lacanian registers of the Imaginary
and the Symbolic to refer to developmental stages because I
am in part raising questions about early-childhood sociali-
zation. But I am even more interested in how I, as an an-
thropologist, can use these terms as registers, to make sense
of what does not enter Shuar discourse by examining it in
relation to what does enter Shuar discourse. A brief consid-
eration of one of Jacques Lacan’s most notable essays both
highlights the contrast between Shuar culture and our own
and illuminates some of these seemingly mysterious features
of Shuar culture, especially the questions, What makes the
encounter with the arútam wakán′ so important to Shuar, and
Why must key elements of this encounter be kept secret?
The mirror stage. An important phase in childhood so-
cialization involves the internalization of one’s self-image
(Grosz 1990:46). According to Lacan, an important moment
in this phase is the “mirror stage,” which not only inaugurates
“the Imaginary” but also effects an essential split in the sub-
ject. Some have argued that Lacan uses the term “mirror”
metaphorically (e.g., Homer 2005:24; Laplanche 1976:81).
Perhaps this is because the term is used metaphorically by so
many other psychoanalysts, especially followers of object-
relations theory. Yet Lacan and object-relations theorists were
careful to emphasize the differences between them.11 I suspect
11. After all, it was Freud himself who argued that the ego first emerges
through a representation of one’s bodily form (Freud 1960 [1923]:25–
27). Psychoanalyst Malcolm Pines contrasts the “specular-image” ap-
proach of the “French School” and the metaphorical usage of British and
American psychoanalysts. A critical difference is that the specular use of
the term need not refer to a social interaction but that the metaphorical
uses do (Pines 1985:211); D. W. Winnicott, too, distinguished between
his use of “mirror” and Lacan’s (Winnicott 1971 [1967]:111). Heinz
Kohut (1971), the founder of “self psychology,” made the metaphorical
notion of “mirroring” central to his approach. (Psychoanalyst Daniel
Stern [1984:5, 1985] prefers the term “attunement” to mirroring, in part
to avoid confusion.)
Psychiatrist Susan Pawlby (1977) argues that metaphorical mirroring
is a process that begins close to birth and is initiated by the mother. At
first, the mother imitates her baby; then she gives positive feedback when
she perceives the baby imitating her. “The mother’s answering gesture
provides the infant with an interest-holding event which is temporarily
contingent upon his own performance of a similar event. Thus, inten-
tionality and reciprocity are inserted by the caretakers into their beginning
dialogues with their infants” (Pines 1985:215). Winnicott argued that the
metaphorical mirroring of the mother had priority over one’s relationship
with a literal mirror. He suggested that, as the expression on a mother’s
face reflected that of her baby, a baby looking at its mother saw itself
(Winnicott 1971 [1967]:112). It could then look in a mirror to see, in
its own reflection, a recollection of its mother’s approving face (Winnicott
1971 [1967]:113). According to ego psychology, the purpose of therapy
is to reinforce this sense of self by having the analyst act as a mirror.
In my reading, Lacan’s mirror stage is explicitly literal. At stake in this
distinction is his critique of other psychoanalysts. Lacan’s argument turns
this sequence around and puts the literal mirror first: by using “mirror”
 44
that this reading reflects the ways that actual mirrors are taken
for granted in bourgeois society; it effaces bourgeois depen-
dence on mirrors (indeed, I believe that part of the power of
Lacan’s reflections is to suggest a profound ambivalence that
is reenacted daily by virtually every member of the bourgeois
upon preparing for bed, waking up, urinating, or defecat-
ing).12
I share the view of those who read Lacan as referring to
an actual mirror in part because this is the means of the
apprehension of one’s body as a whole (rather than feelings
about one’s self) and because (unlike the faces of other peo-
ple) it reflects an image that is simultaneously “accurate . . .
as well as delusory” (Grosz 1990:39; see also Fink 1995:36;
Metz 1982:46; Silverman 1996:10–11). In the mirror stage,
the child identifies with an image of itself. My point is to
highlight the importance of the asocial or antisocial (and thus
objective) elements of the mirror stage.13 Metaphorical mir-
roring reflects the mother’s intentions, feelings, or desires. An
actual mirror conveys to the child nothing but what the child
projects onto the mirror, recast according to the optical prop-
erties of the mirror.
Lacan was taken by the fact that “the human child, at an
age when he is for a short while, but for a while nonetheless,
outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can
already recognize his own image as such in a mirror” (Lacan
2006 [1949]:75). This image is mimetic of the child’s actions;
that is, it establishes an iconic but not symbolic representation
of the child:
This act . . . immediately gives rise in a child to a series of
gestures in which he playfully experiences the relationship
between the movements made in the image and the reflected
environment, and between this virtual complex and the re-
ality it duplicates—namely, the child’s own body, and the
persons and even things around him. (Lacan 2006 [1949]:
75)
For Lacan, this fact plays a decisive role in the psychological
development of the child between the ages of 6 and 18
literally, he sets up an argument that psychologically healthy mirroring
is not merely perilous but impossible (this point is made very clearly in
Lacan 2006 [1946]:151). The infant’s subjectivity is divided before any
caregiver can reflect back on the baby a positive image of the subject.
(Although, according to Bruce Fink, it is the metaphorical kind of mir-
roring with the mother who plays with her child in front of a mirror
that causes the child to invest so much in its mirror image [Fink 1995:
36]). Moreover, I suspect that those who insist that Lacan was using the
word metaphorically are attached to the claim that Lacan’s theories (at
least, in this reading)—or, more to the point, bourgeois subjectivity—
are universal.
12. Although usually, and ironically, “unreflexively” (in the meta-
phorical sense of the word).
13. By “objective” I mean to invoke Silverman’s emphasis on Lacan’s
points in Seminar VII: “The mirror image fulfills ‘a role as limit’—‘it is
that which cannot be crossed’” (Silverman 1996:11; see also Lacan 1992
[1986]:151). Lacan uses “object” in another sense, to refer to egos.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
months.14 It provides the child with a whole or gestalt image
of itself, one that “symbolizes the I’s mental permanence” at
a time when the child cannot walk and is still nursing, that
is, a time of “motor impotence and nursling dependence”
(Lacan 2006 [1949]:76). It is thus a glimpse of the future—
of the autonomous whole the child may become—while at
the same time a distortion, especially given that, as a mirror
image, it presents the child with an image that is literally the
reverse of the child’s embodied perspective.
In short, the first occasion the infant has to form a self-
image, an identity of itself as a singular whole, the infant
identifies with an image that is and is not itself: the distorted
image of the mirror. The child cannot but have an ambivalent
relation to its self-image; there is always a gap (béance) be-
tween one’s experience of one’s self and one’s image of one’s
self. What the child ultimately beholds is, in Lacan’s terms,
its own “want-of-being.” The mirror stage is just the first time
in a lifetime during which the subject will hold onto an image
of itself that displaces one’s physical self, an image that, for
Lacan, is forever inauthentic, displaced from a truth that is
itself absent.
This mirror image is “the symbolic matrix in which the I
is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified
in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before
language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject”
(Lacan 2006 [1949]:76). That the precipitation of a “self” that
is fundamentally alienated from itself occurs through an en-
counter with the baby’s own image of itself means that any
future mirroring with anyone else will only feed an illusion.
As Lacan wrote, “the important point is that this form situates
the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination,
in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for
any individual” (Lacan 2006 [1949]:76). (Inter alia, Lacan’s
model suggests that the ego forms as a result of acts of rec-
ognition or misrecognition. This view contrasts with the pop-
ular belief that one begins with an ego or self-image that can
be influenced by acts of recognition or misrecognition.)
14. According to a review of observational and experimental data,
Papoušek and Papoušek (1974) noted that infants react to mirrors as
early as 18 weeks of age and that they have a significant response rate
to eye contact at about 20 weeks. Experiments by Lichtenberg suggest
that children do reach a point where they discover “that the mirror will
not only ‘capture’ and reflect visual information about an object placed
before it, but that the mirror conveys information ‘out there’ about
themselves.” This stage occurs between 15 and 21 months of age (Lich-
tenberg 1985:201). Psychiatrist Robert Emde concluded that infant self-
recognition emerges only in the second year (Emde 1983).
Under experimental conditions, the experimenter controls the envi-
ronment. I do not believe that this renders the experiments useless. On
the contrary, I think that it is important to acknowledge the more general
control adults may have over the infant’s environment. It is quite possible
that infants enter a “mirror stage” but do so through their parents’
prodding and encouragement (Fink 1995:36). In any event, my argument
hinges on the point that while it is quite likely that children enter a
mirror stage, it is just as likely that this is a culture-bound event and is
perhaps even restricted to bourgeois culture.
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
The literal mirror gives way to metaphorical mirroring, and
the child’s ego takes shape in this social milieu:
“Imaginary relations” are not illusory relationships—rela-
tionships that don’t really exist—but rather relations be-
tween egos, wherein everything is played out in terms of
but one opposition: same or different. They involve other
people who you consider to be like yourself for a variety of
reasons. It could be because the two of you look very much
alike, are similar in size or age, and so on. In the case of
an infant, it is generally that child in the family, extended
family, or circle of friends who bears the greatest affinity to
the infant in terms of size, age, interests and abilities and
who also stands in a similar relation to a parental or au-
thority figure. (Fink 1995:84–85)
The mirror stage ends as a developmental stage with the
child’s acquisition of language. But the Imaginary continues
as a register, alongside the Symbolic, because the béance of
the mirror stage haunts all future social relations.
Through language, the child, and then the adult, can ac-
tively seek a recognition it can never receive. As Jonathan Lee
explained,
What the child would appear to ask for, in her first attempts
at speech, is the satisfaction of her bodily needs. But what
Lacan emphasizes is that the linguistic translation of these
needs—what he calls demand—is inherently interpersonal:
demand is always addressed to another person, at first a
parent or caretaker. Indeed, the child is not simply asking
for food when she demands this of her parent; rather, she
is using the demand for food to provoke the parent, the
other, into recognizing her existence as a force to be con-
tended with. In such recognition is held the promise of
something to fill the béance between body and moi, and it
is that which is at the heart of what the child will regard as
parental love. In short, the child’s demand for food actually
masks a deeper longing for recognition by the other, rec-
ognition that will in some way make up for the child’s
fundamental want-of-being. It is this profound but always
only implicit longing for recognition—itself a product of
the mirror stage—that Lacan designates by the term desire
(Lee 1990:58–59).
This desire can never be fulfilled; that is, the child’s want-of-
being can never be fulfilled, because any other person to
whom one might direct one’s desire suffers from the same
want-of-being. Although this problem has its origin in the
mirror stage, for Lacan it is ultimately a problem in and with
language. Because one’s words are always the words of some-
one else, they are never really one’s own (Lee 1990:49–50).
If there is any truth in the mirror image, it concerns the
impossibility of self-identity, an instruction that is confirmed
or seconded in language itself (where the signifier can never
be itself). But this negativity can be read as a positive: the
suggestion that the infant may become something else. Such
a “becoming,” in which some parts blossom as others wither
45
or drop off, or as some parts unhinge as others connect, may
have more in common with the corporeal experience of the
baby—disorganized, not fully in control—than with the im-
age of the baby as whole. All an analyst can do, according to
Lacan, is challenge the analysand to reject misrecognitions
and unfulfillable desires and accept that what we are today is
not what we were yesterday or will be tomorrow. Lacan ends
his reflections on the mirror stage with an enigmatic but
hopeful note: “In the subject to subject recourse we preserve,
psychoanalysis can accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit
of the ‘Thou art that,’ where the cipher of his mortal destiny
is revealed to him, but it is not in our sole power as prac-
titioners to bring him to the point where the true journey
begins” (Lacan 2006 [1949]:81).
What is at stake, for psychoanalysts and anthropologists
alike, is to understand how people are able to forge mean-
ingful lives in a world not of their making. This accomplish-
ment depends not only on the cultural resources available but
also on the kind of subjectivity. In the remainder of this essay,
I use Lacan’s concepts of the Real, the Imaginary, and the
Symbolic to explore how visions played such an important
role in the pursuit of a meaningful life among Shuar, in part
through the constitution of a different kind of subject.
To be crystal clear: I take Lacan’s mirror stage as deter-
minate of a certain kind of subjectivity and not of subjectivity
as such. Among Shuar, I argue, plant-granted visions created
a different kind of subject, one whose freedom does not de-
pend on some sovereignty. This kind of subject did not inhabit
a world innocent of misrecognition and violence—on the
contrary!—but misrecognition and violence were organized
in this world in ways that contrast starkly with those of the
bourgeois world.
Shuar Culture, 1916–1964
Most Shuar live in the montaña: the easternmost foothills of
the Andes and the uppermost fringe of the Amazon rainforest,
between 400 and 1,200 m above sea level, mostly in present-
day Ecuador. They are one of several neighboring groups that
are culturally and linguistically similar—the Achuar (in Ec-
uador and Peru), the Huambisa and the Aguaruna (or Awa-
jún) in Peru—that anthropologists refer to as Jivaroan. My
claims are restricted to the Shuar, although I also draw on
research in neighboring groups.
My claims are also restricted to a specific period, before I
began my fieldwork. To explain: this article is motivated by
questions that arose during my own fieldwork, but it is based
on the realization that I must look beyond the historical ho-
rizons of my fieldwork for the answers. During my research
I often experience a feeling of dislocation, because I have to
interpret what informants tell me in terms of two frames of
reference. One involves institutions with fixed, material lo-
cations: the Shuar Federation headquarters, the hospital, the
marketplace, all in the town of Sucúa; outside of town, a
Shuar centro (“center” or community, i.e., nucleated settle-
 46
ment), someone’s house, a garden, a river—most talk centers
on events or interests that have some clear relationship to
one of these places. Sometimes, however, this talk seems to
drift somewhere past me. I have come to realize that I could
follow what people were saying (even if they were speaking
in Spanish, as they often did in conversation, and which I
relied on in my interviews) only in reference to key Shuar
terms—kakáram, kajeka, akasma, and so on.
I have since learned that most of my Shuar friends expe-
rience this dislocation too. The Shuar world (by which I sim-
ply mean that world most easily described in the Shuar
language) has been shattered by the market economy, bu-
reaucratic and hierarchical political institutions, the spatial
relations of the state, and writing as the authoritative form
of knowledge. This process began when poor Ecuadorians
from the highlands began to settle in Shuar territory, in small
numbers in the 1920s and in large numbers in the late 1950s.
Missionary activities (mostly by Catholics of the Salesian Or-
der but by some evangelical Christians as well) paralleled those
of Ecuadorians, and the state assigned jurisdiction of a Shuar
reserve to the Salesians in 1935. Shuar children were educated
in larger numbers at mission boarding schools starting in the
1940s (although family continued to have an important role
in socialization during visits home).
The creation of the Federation of Shuar Centros in 1964
by Salesian missionaries and their alumni signaled a remark-
able reconfiguration of colonial forces. The Ecuadorian state
recognized a degree of Shuar political autonomy; in return,
the Federation accepted the role of primary agent of mod-
ernization (Rubenstein 2001). This was achieved in part
through a reorganization of Shuar social and spatial relations
and in part through the creation of schools in which Shuar
with specialized training would teach Shuar children to read
and write in Spanish. As late as the 1950s, most Shuar main-
tained a way of life consistent with accounts from the sev-
enteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.15 Within a few
years of the Federation’s founding, its structures, discourses,
and practices had replaced this way of life (Harner 1984:210).
As far as I can tell, all Shuar discourse has been recast in
terms of missionary discourse (or, for younger Shuar, that of
the United Nations and NGOs; see Boster 2003). Beyond this
discourse, however, most Shuar see something else. The world
of the Shuar language remains vividly meaningful to most of
15. As Anne-Christine Taylor (2007:144) observed,
Their culture has proved remarkably enduring and appears to have un-
dergone relatively little change between the Spanish conquest and the
middle of the twentieth century. Comparing early colonial accounts of
the historic Jivaroans, often quite detailed, with the writings of the first
professional ethnographers of these Indians in the twentieth century—
scientists such as Rafael Karsten (1935), Matthew Stirling (1938), or
Gunther Tessman—one cannot fail to be impressed by the close fit be-
tween descriptions produced at an interval of close to four centuries,
and relating to territorial implantation, settlement patterns, material cul-
ture, styles of warfare, appearance, and attitudes.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
my informants, even though so many of its material referents
have given way to a new order.
To make sense of Shuar visions within the frame of ref-
erence of the Shuar language, I must rely on accounts of Shuar
life before the founding of the Federation. I rely on ethnog-
raphies by Rafael Karsten (fieldwork: 1916–1919, 1928–1929),
Matthew Stirling (fieldwork: 1930–1931), and Michael Harner
(fieldwork: 1956–1959, 1964, 1969). Written at different times,
these works are relatively consistent with one another and, in
many ways, with what Shuar tell me today. But, I must em-
phasize, what they describe is not the material world in which
Shuar operate today.
Power/Knowledge
What are we to make of Harner’s claim that for Shuar the
normal waking life is false and the world accessed through
hallucinogenic drugs true? Harner is using “the real” to denote
a realm that we do not recognize but that has all the qualities
the word “real” connotes for us.16 I am not sure whether the
distinction between the natural and the supernatural applies
in Shuar culture, but Shuar certainly distinguish between the
world that can be seen, understood, and manipulated without
the aid of specific plants and the world that they can see
through the aid of such plants.17 All Shuar I have met are
convinced that the visions made possible through the con-
sumption of these plants are always true and are irreplaceable
sources of power, although I never heard a Shuar refer to the
ordinary world as “false” or “a lie.” Against the true or real
world, I suggest that Shuar view the normal waking life as a
world of signification and understand that there is always some
gap between a sign and its object. It may not be a false world,
but it is a world of falsehood and deception.
Their beliefs in the importance of visions do not make
Shuar dreamy, otherworldly people. Harner noted that “the
Jı́varo seem proud of their ability to judge for themselves the
usefulness of continuing or changing their traditional behav-
ior on very pragmatic and personal grounds” (Harner 1984:
196). Indeed, the more time I spend in the company of Shuar,
the more certain I am that “pragmatic” is the single best
English word to describe their outlook on life. Although they
would translate our words “to think” and “to feel” as one
word, enentaimsatin, when discussing with Shuar how one
does this activity, people regularly explain that it involves
considering the consequences of one’s actions. In fact, there
16. I believe that it is significant that Shuar, like Lacan, make a clear
distinction between “the real” and the ordinary life. But Shuar and Lacan
do not mean the same thing by “real.” To Shuar, “false” or “lie” signifies
incomplete or mistaken knowledge; Shuar speak of visions as revealing
hidden things. More generally, Shuar use the word “true” (nekás) to
signify the accuracy of an account.
17. Harner is firm that this occurs only through the use of vision-
granting plants. Karsten claims that Shuar receive true knowledge from
ordinary sleeping dreams but concurs that only in the visions granted
by certain plants may a Shuar encounter forces like the arútam wakán′
(Karsten 1935:445).
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
is another word that one can use for “to feel,” nekáp-ra, but
this word is explicitly sensual (rather than emotional) and is
also used to mean “to experiment.”
I suspect that it is this pragmatic sensibility that led Ann-
Christine Taylor, who conducted field research among the
Achuar, to exclaim,
Indeed, they have very few explicit theories about anything,
and have little taste or talent for explicating the self-evident.
There are no specialists of metaphysical lore and ritual in
this society: even shamans are considered experts in the
manipulation of certain kinds of relations rather than hold-
ers of specialized knowledge. (Taylor 1993:658)
Certainly, Shuar shamans do have specialized knowledge, es-
pecially knowledge they purchase from neighboring Runa
(Quichua-speaking) Indians. But this knowledge is perhaps
closer to the Hellenic notion of technê, craft (specifically, tech-
niques to harm or heal others), than to epistêmê, “pure”
knowledge. Similarly, the dualistic view of the world observed
by Harner may be considered a Shuar metaphysics, but I
would suggest that a Shuar epistemology (if the term is even
appropriate) takes the form of practices through which Shuar
bump into the “true” world and seek to make use of its
powers. Shuar hold that visions are “true” because of the clear
effects these visions have on their lives. Whether Shuar are
ingesting vision-granting plants or attending Catholic mis-
sionary or Ecuadorian schools, they do so for comparable
reasons: to gain useful—that is, empowering—knowledge.
Shuar Social Organization
Before the formation of the Shuar Federation, Shuar had no
territorial or political center, and the basic unit of Shuar social
life was the politically and economically autonomous family
(Harner 1984:41; Karsten 1935:183; Stirling 1938:38). There
was no one Shuar society; there were many scores of auton-
omous social groups, linked by very fluid kinship networks,
trading partnerships, and alliances. Each social group was
organized through one or a cluster of houses; houses would
be abandoned and relocated every 5–9 years.
Men and women played distinct and complementary roles
in the production of food, social life, and warfare. The typical
house consisted of a husband, two or three wives, unmarried
sons, daughters, and sons-in-law.18 Clusters of households
were organized through alliances between sons-in-law and a
father-in-law.19 Sometimes closely allied houses would be 200–
300 yards apart; more typically, they were spread along a small
18. Shuar today refer to this social group as “iı́ shuari” (our people)
in Shuar and “familia” (family) in Spanish.
19. Shuar had no name for such clusters but would identify them
according to the name of the stream along which they were located.
Harner calls them “neighborhoods” (1984:77), and Descola calls them
“endogamous nexi” (1982:303), although Mader and Gippelhauser (2000:
65) did not find a pattern of endogamy.
47
river at half-mile intervals (Harner 1984:78).20 Following Har-
ner’s calculations, there were more than 200 such social
groups in 1956–1957. The actual number would fluctuate over
time as old groups dissolved into new ones.
Shuar are famous for their hatred of authority. According
to Harner, Shuar were well known “as an individualistic peo-
ple intensely jealous of their freedom and unwilling to be
subservient to authority, even among themselves” (Harner
1984:1). This value extended to relations between parents and
children and was central to enculturation. Stirling reported
that “young children are very seldom disciplined in spite of
which, like most primitive children, they are very well be-
haved. The children, especially young boys, have almost com-
plete liberty to do as they please” (although children who
broke clay pots or stole meat, the availability of which was
unpredictable, could be punished through the use of stinging
nettles or the smoke of hot peppers; Stirling 1938:111; see
also Harner 1984:89–90).
Shuar parents located their children in extended bilateral
networks of kin. These networks are in part structured
through Dravidian kinship terminology. They are also struc-
tured by a distinction between nekás (true) and kana (branch)
relatives, a distinction that is clear-cut for a small fraction of
one’s kindred and negotiable for the rest (Harner 1984:97–
98). Yet it is the position of any other Shuar in this network
that determines whether he or she may be counted on as an
ally. And it is the position of any Shuar one encounters in
the networks of others that determines whether he or she is
an enemy.
Like others, one important way Shuar socialized their chil-
dren was through language and speech. “Fathers often spend
an hour or more before dawn lecturing their sons on the
degree of relationship between a variety of enemies and friends
in their own and other neighborhoods” (Harner 1984:103).
According to Karsten, these lectures emphasize the child’s
obligation to avenge old offenses. “This discourse is, at times,
repeated every morning when the house-father gets up, said
with about the same words, and, of course, cannot fail to
make an impression upon the minds of the young ones”
(Karsten 1935:260).
The principal means by which Shuar parents socialized
their children, however, was through the use of vision-grant-
ing plants, which they believe to be a source of knowledge
and power.21 Parents fed children the masticated leaf of the
tsentsemp (Matelea rivularis) either just before a newborn was
brought to its mother’s breast (Karsten 1935:226) or when it
was a few days old (Harner 1984:84), to ensure that it would
be healthy, and again when the child was 2 or 3 years old
20. Among the Achuar, such clusters typically amounted to 10 house-
holds, and distinct clusters were separated by a 2- or 3-day-walk’s distance
(Taylor 1983:333).
21. As Bennett (1992:483) notes, “The use of hallucinogens is very
circumscribed among the Shuar. They drink narcotic beverages only to
communicate with the spirit world. The casual Western uses of hallu-
cinogens for escape, relaxation, or experimentation are foreign to them.”
 48
(Karsten 1935:234).22 Periodically, members of a household
staged “feasts” during which everyone (including small chil-
dren) would fast for a day and then consume natem (an
infusion from the vine Banisteriopsis caapi) to the point of
vomiting, upon which they would sleep to intense visions of
the future.23 Upon waking, people breakfasted on mashed
manioc or plantains and then fasted the rest of the day to
take more natem that night. This practice was repeated for
several days, as it was believed to make people stronger and
cleverer and was considered part of the children’s education
(Karsten 1935:434–435). Youngsters who were blatantly ir-
responsible, especially those who were not respectful of their
parents’ knowledge or authority, were given maı́kua (an in-
fusion from the plant Brugmansia suaveolens), which caused
the child to have visions through the night.24 This was con-
sidered not a punishment but rather a means of education,
for the child was thus put into contact with the invisible world
and shown the same truths known to adults or may have
encountered an arútam (power-granting vision) and been
given adult powers (Harner 1984:90).25 At some point in time,
daughters between the ages of 2 and 8 years were made to
refrain from eating meat for a week before a 4-day festival in
which they would dance during the day and consume tsen-
tsemp and tsáank (an infusion made from Nicotiana tabacum
L.) at night, in the hope of encountering an arútam and to
ensure that they would grow up to be healthy and strong
women (Harner 1984:90–91).26 Similarly, sometime after the
age of 6 a boy would fast and hike for several days with his
father to a waterfall, where he would consume tsáank and
sometimes maı́kua, explicitly to encounter an arútam in a
visionary state that could last up to 3 days.
Of all a boy’s childhood experiences, nothing is considered
to compare in importance with the experience. The power
22. There is some confusion over the classification of tsentsemp. It
may instead be Justicia pectoralis—or J. pectoralis may refer to one of a
number of different plants that have medicinal properties and are given
to children: tsemantsma, tapir, or wirink.
23. Shuar commonly add two other plants to natem: Diplopterys ca-
brerana and Psychotria viridi, both of which contain N, N-dimethyltryp-
tamine (DMT), the alkaloid most likely producing the hallucinogenic
effects in B. caapi mixtures (see Luna 1986). Banisteriopsis caapi contains
beta-carboline alkaloids (harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine),
but according to Bennett, “the amounts in normal dosages are insufficient
for hallucinogenic activity. Beta-carboline alkaloids, however, may inhibit
monoamineoxidases, substances that render DMT inactive” (Bennett
1992:488).
24. Brugmansia contains various alkaloids, notably atropine, hyoscy-
amine, and the highly psychoactive hyoscine (Lockwood 1979).
25. Harner translates arútam as “a vision,” but Mader argues that
arútam is better translated as “power” (1999:163–169). I believe that the
difference between Harner’s and Mader’s translations of the word reflects
the fact that for Shuar, “vision” is “power” (see Hendricks 1988:221–222;
Taylor 1993:660–661).
26. According to Bennett (1992:488), “the physiological effects of to-
bacco are biphasic. Small doses stimulate the central nervous system,
depress hunger and thirst, and relieve pain. Large doses can produce
catatonia, diarrhea, nausea, respiratory failure, visions, and trance (Lewis
and Elvin-Lewis 1977; Wilbert 1987).”
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
deriving from the acquired arutam soul is seen in Jı́varo
terms as an enculturating and socializing device, since its
force is believed to promote almost all the value aspects of
character, including honesty, inclination to work, and in-
telligence; as well as to increase the actual knowledge of the
child. (Harner 1984:91)
In addition to their love of freedom, Shuar are also well
known for their bellicosity. Karsten wrote, “The Jibaros are
no doubt at present the most warlike of all Indian tribes in
South America” (Karsten 1935:259). Stirling agreed: “At the
present time the Jivaros are without doubt the most warlike
group in all South America, and it is probable that this state-
ment would hold true for the past century” (Stirling 1938:
41). In perhaps more measured tones, Harner remarked,
It should not be unexpected that the leaders in Jı́varo society
are outstanding killers and shamans. Although such lead-
ership is informal, almost all neighborhoods have at least
one or two noted killers and a few superior shamans who
are valued as protectors of their neighboring relatives, or at
least of those with whom they are on friendly terms. Such
leadership roles are earned and, in the case of the killers,
acquired literally through life-and-death struggles. (Harner
1984:111)
This situation, in which leadership is not institutionalized and
may be sought by anyone who dares, conforms to what po-
litical anthropologists called an “egalitarian society,” a society
that “does not have any means of fixing or limiting the num-
ber of persons capable of exerting power” (Fried 1967:33).27
Shuar culture did, however, provide distinct paths to power,
each involving different techniques involving vision-granting
plants through which one could access the real world.
Uwishı́n
Uwishı́n is typically glossed as “shaman” or in Spanish as
“brujo/a” (witch) or “curandero/a” (healer). Uwishı́ns arguably
have the most developed technology for accessing and ma-
nipulating the invisible real world and thus provide a para-
digmatic example of how Shuar interact with the real world
(Noll 1985). An uwishı́n is someone who, through an ap-
prenticeship with another uwishı́n, has purchased tsentsak
(shamanic darts) and learned how (after a preparatory period
using tsáank) to use natem to contain, control, and use tsen-
tsak to either harm or heal others (Harner 1984:152–166).
According to Harner, uwishı́ns believe that all tsentsak have
a material and a nonmaterial aspect; uwishı́ns swallow material
aspects (e.g., insects, plants) that bring with them their non-
27. This situation was no doubt influenced by ecological and demo-
graphic factors. Based on a survey of Shuar living east of the Cutucu
Ridge, Harner calculated a population density of 1.19 persons per square
mile (Harner 1984:77). In part because of their dispersed settlement
pattern, Shuar thus lived in a situation “in which resources are widely
available and open to anyone with the ability to obtain them” (Wolf
1982:91).
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
material aspect. To harm another person, an uwishı́n blows
a tsentsak in the direction of the intended victim, who is struck
by the nonmaterial aspect. An uwishı́n who is about to cure
first examines the patient—natem enables the uwishı́n to see
the ordinary world and the otherwise hidden, or “true,” world
simultaneously—to see whether the patient has indeed been
struck by a tsentsak and, if so, to identify the malevolent
uwishı́n. The healing uwishı́n then puts a tsentsak (both ma-
terial and nonmaterial aspects) in his or her mouth. The
nonmaterial tsentsak catches and contains the nonmaterial
tsentsak wounding the patient’s body. The uwishı́n then vomits
out the tsentsak and can show the patient the material aspect
as evidence of the cure (Harner 1984:162–163). One may say
that Shuar use a material but ineffective analogue for an im-
material but effective instrument. I suggest that this dual as-
pect of the tsentsak, the use of something that is perceivable
in the ordinary world and mimetic of something in the in-
visible “true” world, is paradigmatic of other techniques (as
I suggest below when analyzing arútams and anent) for bridg-
ing the distance between these two worlds (see Taussig 1993:
16).
Kakáram
Preoccupied with killing, Shuar were more concerned with
two other invisible powers, the arútam of the killer, and the
muisak, or avenging force, of the victim.28 I have addressed
the circulation of the muisak elsewhere (Rubenstein 2007);
here I focus on the arútam.29 Shuar provide a generic mise
en scène for the acquisition of an arútam wakán′. The most
detailed account comes from Harner and focuses on men:
If the arutam seeker is fortunate, he will awaken at about
midnight to find the stars gone from the sky, the earth
trembling, and a great wind felling the trees of the forest
amidst thunder and lightning. To keep from being blown
down he grasps a tree trunk and awaits the arutam. Shortly
the arutam appears from the depths of the forest, often in
the form of a pair of large creatures. The particular animal
forms can vary considerably, but some of the most common
arutam include a pair of giant jaguars fighting one another
as they roll over and over towards the vision seeker, or two
anacondas doing the same. Often the vision may simply be
a huge disembodied human head or a ball of fire drifting
toward the forest toward the arutam seeker. When the ap-
parition arrives to within twenty or thirty feet, the Jı́varo
must run forward and touch it, either with a small stick or
his hand. This is said to require a good deal of courage, and
sometimes the person flees the arutam instead. But if he
does run forward and touch the vision, it instantly explodes
like dynamite and disappears. (Harner 1984:138)
28. The arútam is not the only “soul” Shuar recognize, although it is
the most important.
29. Perhaps because they were men, Karsten’s and Harner’s accounts
provide far more information about men than about women; conse-
quently, the following account focuses primarily on boys and men.
49
The seeker then returns home but tells no one of his success.
Instead, he sleeps on the bank of the nearest river so that the
arútam, in the form of an old man, may return to him in
his dreams, reveal himself to be the wakán′ (spirit) of one of
the seeker’s ancestors, inform the seeker of his fate, and then
enter the seeker’s body.30 “Upon acquiring this arutam soul,
the person feels a sudden power surge into his body, accom-
panied by a new self-confidence” (Harner 1984:139; see also
Taylor 1993:660–661). One who possesses an arútam is a ka-
káram, a powerful one, and cannot be killed. Indeed, one feels
an overwhelming desire to kill, and a successful and long-
lived kakáram might have killed dozens of people (see Rival
2005:304–305 on the importance of the relation between the
body and the soul in Amazonian understandings of the desire
to kill).
The acquisition and use of arútam wakán′ provided the
basis of precolonial Shuar power; the difficulties in accu-
mulating and controlling it provided the basis for Shuar egal-
itarianism. According to Taylor, the content of the wakán′’s
message “as well as the identity of the dead Jivaroan who
issues it must henceforth be shrouded in utmost secrecy”
(2007:146). One way an arútam wakán′ could be lost was
talking about one’s visions. Since warriors on the eve of a
raid customarily took turns describing their arútam to one
another, a young warrior would have to seek new arútam
sometime in the future (Harner 1984:140). Moreover, they
also believed that after inhabiting the same body for 3 or 4
years, an arútam wakán′ would begin wandering about at
night, as the warrior slept. During such nocturnal walks it
could be acquired by someone else (Harner 1984:141). The
arútam wakán′ inhabited people but did not belong to them.
Shuar thus depended on a power that circulated, and while
one could harness this circulation, one could never control
it absolutely or permanently (see Clastres 1989:209–210).
Shuar culture thus allowed for the concentration of power,
but only ephemerally.
Sooner or later a warrior lost all of his arútam wakán′ and
eventually died. Like nonwarriors, Shuar believed, warriors
also possess a nekás wakán′ (a “true” or “ordinary” soul) that,
upon death, takes the form of a demon (iwianch). The iwianch
represents the opposite of a fulfilling life; it is an ugly spirit
consumed by perpetual hunger and loneliness (Karsten 1935:
30. I must stress that these are ordinary dreams. Waude Kracke (2009:
71) has noted that with a few exceptions (e.g., the Jarawara in Brazil),
a number of Amazonian languages code dreams as “indirect” knowledge
and that among the Brazilian Kagwahiv this knowledge can come from
the spirit of a dead animal or dying person. Nevertheless, he concludes
that dreams are generally “regarded in a sense as deceptive.” Sasha Ai-
khenvald reports that the Peruvian Shipibo-Konibo and Brazilian Tari-
ana-Tucano view their dreams as “unreal” (2004:309, 346–347, 380);
indirect knowledge is in such cases simply uncertain knowledge. Graham
(1994) identifies dreams as an “inner experience” pertaining to “indi-
vidual subjectivity” but describes how Xavante have developed elaborate
“dream-songs” that provide them with expressive forms for communi-
cating inner experiences. Through the singing of these songs in the con-
text of community dances, the individual experience is socialized.
 50
373; Harner 1984:144). Through their beliefs about arútam
wakán′, however, Shuar men transformed death from an ex-
perience of emptiness and consumption into a source of
power and productivity. For it was at the moment of his own
death that a warrior’s own arútam wakán′—the same number
that he had possessed over the course of his life—would come
into existence (Harner 1984:143).
A great warrior could attempt to will his arútam wakán′ to
his sons, by instructing them to leave his corpse seated on a
stool and leaning against the center-post of the men’s end of
his house. The sons and sometimes sons-in-law would then
take turns each night to take tsáank, enter the house in dark-
ness, touch the corpse, and announce, “I am your son, father,”
in the hopes of encountering an arútam wakán′ (this ritual
thus enacts the quest for an arútam through a maı́kua-granted
vision; in this case, the corpse stands in for the wakán′; see
Harner 1984:168–169). The inheritance of an arútam wakán′,
however, was far from guaranteed (see Mader 1999 for a more
comprehensive analysis of Shuar discourse about power as
constantly circulating and transforming).31
Brushing against the Ineffable
Anthropologists usually explore the intersubjective element of
visionary knowledge through accounts of shamans (e.g.,
Buchillet 1992; Hill 1992; Kracke 1992; Townsley 1993), where
a visionary transaction with a spirit empowers a normally
benevolent transaction between the shaman and another hu-
man in the ordinary world. Since shamans typically talk about
their visions with their patients, they are usually good infor-
mants on visionary knowledge. The arútam vision of the
Shuar kakáram is in many ways the structural opposite, in
which a transaction with a spirit in the vision-world empowers
one to kill other humans.32 Despite the decline in warfare,
even today, kakarma (power) is for many Shuar a tangible
quality. But kakárams do not readily talk about their visions.
Elke Mader, who conducted research among the Shuar in
1990, 1991, and 1994, confirms Harner’s account of a two-
part vision (Mader 1999:246; see also Harner 1984:138–139).
She argues that power is transmitted through the words of
the anthropomorphic arútam (Mader 1999:244–246). She
provides a symbolic analysis of typical elements of the arútam
encounter (pp. 227–230) and demonstrates convincingly the
parallels between the imagery in individuals’ accounts of vi-
31. In Lacanian terms, one could say that these moments expressed
attempts to activate “the name of the father”—as Lacan (2006 [1953]:
229–230) wrote, “for without names for kinship relations, no power can
institute the order of preferences and taboos that knot and braid the
thread of lineage through the generations.” Like most Amazonian cul-
tures, however, Shuar social organization is based on generationally shal-
low households, not lineages (see Murphy 1979; Overing Kaplan 1981).
Before the Federation, Shuar did not use patronyms; many did not even
know the names of their grandparents (Mader and Gippelhauser 2000:
65).
32. I am describing the dominant elements of the structure; of course,
shamans can kill, and warriors can also defend their families.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
sions and the imagery in the popular Shuar myth of the cave
of the tayos (oilbirds [Steatornis caripensis]; pp. 249–270). She
argues that there is a detailed discourse linking Shuar visions,
myths, and rituals concerning the transmission of powers and
Shuar feuding and warfare.
Mader provides the most detailed and insightful account
of Shuar symbolism. Her analysis relies not only on her own
interviews but also on accounts collected by the missionary
Siro Pellizzaro and the research of several Shuar students.
While the raw material of this discourse is undoubtedly Shuar,
I am concerned that the fact that this material has entered
discourse is to some degree the accomplishment of mission-
aries and their Shuar students, that is, part of the transfor-
mation in Shuar history from power based on visions to
power based on writing. But even granting that a Shuar dis-
course about power existed before missionization, all eth-
nographic accounts of the Shuar make clear that some ele-
ments of visions enter discourse only under specific
circumstances; my informants suggest that there is some el-
ement of visions that may not enter discourse at all. This
essay is meant to complement Mader’s work by focusing on
those elements that resist entry into discourse or that enter
discourse only in distorted form.
None of my informants would speak to me of the details
of their encounter with their arútam, but they all spoke of
the feeling of strength and purpose that it gave them, qualities
that stayed with them as long as they possessed the arútam.
Taylor provides a different, though equally significant, account
of the beliefs of the Achuar. Noting that the arútam is essential
to the personality of an “outstanding human-being,” she re-
marks that her informants do not speak of the arútam trans-
mitting any “energy” or “force” (as occurs in other Amazo-
nian societies) to the seeker. She then asks, what exactly is
conferred?
The Jivaroan emphasis on the heightened sense of self-
consciousness and purpose, instead of that of strength or
vitality as such, seems to point to a different interpretation,
which is that the arutam serve as an existential amplifier; it
gives not just life, but, more importantly, life with direction
or quality, life linked to a certain set of values. (Taylor 1993:
666)
Although there are some notable differences between Shuar
and Achuar (the Shuar receives and absorbs the arútam itself),
the emphasis on a heightened sense of self, of self-possession,
is shared. What is it about visions that leads Shuar to view
them as sources of power?
To understand these other elements, I wish to reflect on a
double tension within these practices. One is the straightfor-
ward way in which the heightened sense of one’s own self
and vitality is directed toward the extermination of the life
of another self (boys too young to participate actively in a
raid would accompany their fathers on raids; Harner 1984:
139). The other is the conjunction of speech and silence:
Most of his relatives and acquaintances shortly know that
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
he has acquired an arutam soul simply because of the change
in his personality. For example, he especially tends to speak
with great forcefulness. However, he must not tell anyone
that he has acquired such a soul, or it will desert him.
(Harner 1984:139)33
Aside from prowess at killing, combined with invincibility,
the principle diagnostic of a kakáram is the ability to speak
clearly and effectively. This ability is exemplified in autobi-
ographical narratives, which, according to Taylor (2007:148),
are “in fact the only kind of discourse in which experience
of the past is given collective shape” (see also Hendricks 1993).
Yet one of the most important events in the person’s life
is kept out of this autobiography. Mader reports that there
are conditions under which Shuar speak of their visions, but
my informants have revealed to me only those visions that
“have already come true.” It is easy to misunderstand a Shuar
who says that his or her vision was true as likening the vision
to a prediction. Given Shuar views of the ordinary world, it
makes more sense to liken the relationship between the en-
visioned future and the future in this world to the relationship
between the uwishı́n’s nonmaterial but real tsentsak and the
material tsentsak that is its mimetic manifestation. It is not
really that the vision “came true”; rather, it is that the Shuar
came to experience the material manifestation of the vision.
Thus, Shuar talk of their visions is not in my view a violation
of secrecy. In effect, to say that a vision has come true is
simply to say that others have seen it; it is thus their vision
too. The vision entered the social on its own, as it were.
According to Harner, during the visions the wakán′ informs
the seeker of his fate and then enters the seeker’s body. We
could say that the vision enters the seeker’s body; through
the body, the vision enters the world, and the seeker meets
his destiny (see Lacan 1988:159). This complex is so impor-
tant, Taylor concluded, that “Jivaroan culture as tradition is
not an objectified body of knowledge or set of explicitly held
representations, nor is it concentrated in material things or
institutions; it is primarily the means of achieving a certain
kind of selfhood” (Taylor 2007:151). Put another way, then,
what is it about the encounter with the arútam that produces
this kind of selfhood?
Shuar Culture through the Looking Glass
I think that the answer has something to do with the way in
which the plant-granted vision is not like a mirror. Very few
33. Descola (1996:304) reports that Achuar share this attitude:
The uncertainty surrounding the nature of the messages delivered by
arutam, including the fact that it is possible to pretend to have received
them, stems partly from the need to keep the revelation secret, on pain
of forfeiting its benefits. The subject is such an intimate one that my
companions will only speak of it with reticence, even when describing
past visions whose personal relevance has now been superseded.
According to Chacon, however, Achuar speak freely of their visions (Cha-
con 2007:529–532).
51
Shuar before the founding of the Federation, and no Shuar
before European colonization, had a mirror. Adults could use
language to describe one another or fill a gourd with water
to create a reflective surface. But while there are many puddles
in a rain forest, they are usually muddy and can barely reflect
shadows. There may be some rivers and the occasional oxbow
lake that run still enough to reflect an image back, but Shuar
seldom pause before them, and the baby swaddled and slung
behind a parent or, more likely, older sister has virtually no
opportunity to see its reflection.
What if it was not “the specular image,” as Lacan suggested,
that was for Shuar infants “the threshold of the visible world”
(Lacan 2006 [1949]:77) but something else? I propose that
Shuar babies did go through “the Imaginary” but did not go
through the mirror stage. I suggest that the first image a Shuar
was given of itself as he or she became self-aware was not the
deceptive image of wholeness that bourgeois children get from
mirrors.
In place of a mirror, I speculate that the Shuar Imaginary
had a basis that is as material and objective as the mirror in
bourgeois society but quite different in nature: the images
that they encountered were those given to them by tsentsemp,
tsáank, and maı́kua.34 Just as a mirror disrupts the visual plane
against which it is set (for example, creating the illusion of
depth when flat on a wall), visions disrupt any consciousness
of a continuous reality. While each person’s vision was sub-
jective, this realm of the “Imaginary” had an objectivity for
Shuar because it was based on the ingestion of plants; plants
constituted the external and shared point of reference for all
power-granting visions. Most importantly, the vision did not
present the child with an image of itself; it was the medium
for an encounter with another subject.35
Mader provides a detailed analysis of the part of visions
that Shuar recount in words and that thus draws on and enters
into discourse. While I value her analysis, I do not believe
34. Shuar make a clear distinction between plant-granted visions, ka-
ramà, and the dreams that come with sleep, kara. Shuar have no com-
pulsion about sharing and talking about their ordinary dreams with
others. Moreover, they interpret dreams, but not for knowledge of the
self. As Philippe Descola has demonstrated, Achuar have a complex her-
meneutics involving inversion and homology, through which they in-
terpret their dreams to gain knowledge of future events (an arútam may
reveal itself in a dream, but such dreams are speechless and are not
spoken of; Descola 1989:443; see also Peluso 2004:108). Descola’s larger,
and compelling, argument is that Achuar view their dreams more like
the way Claude Lévi-Strauss views myths than the way Freud views
dreams. He concludes that “when dreams want to reason like the struc-
turalist, they can do with the help of the Jivaro” (Descola 1989:449).
Peluso, in contrast, describes how the Ese Eje of the Peruvian Amazon
believe that a pregnant woman’s dream can reveal through the medium
of language the true name, which is the true identity, of her yet-to-be-
born baby [Peluso 2004:110].)
35. According to Karsten (1935:445), “These spirits are essentially the
ancestors (apáchiru) of the sleeping Indian, who give their descendants
advice and instruction. But on the other hand these spirits are also the
souls (wakáni) of the narcotic plants themselves, with whom the Indian
enters into intimate communion by consuming the drinks.”
 52
that it is sufficient to explain the power that Shuar gain
through the vision. In my conversations with Shuar there is
a surplus power, a feeling of power that goes beyond the
wakán′’s account of the future. As Harner and Mader have
both pointed out, the communication of knowledge about
the future is only one part of the encounter between a person
and an arútam wakán′. Both emphasize that a crucial part of
this encounter is the incorporation of the arútam wakán′, or
some of its power, into the person. This Shuar belief is similar
to Lacan’s point that encounters with others not only influ-
ence one’s self-image but also actually constitute the ego, that
is, a part of one’s self. It is this intersubjective mutual rec-
ognition in the plant-granted vision that, for Shuar, establishes
“the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a pri-
mordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of
identification with the other, and before language restores to
it, in the universal, its function as subject” (Lacan 2006 [1949]:
76).
Descola calls attention to this dimension of the self in his
conversations with Achuar concerning kinds of arútam.36 Des-
cola’s careful analysis of anent (a very specific register that I
discuss at greater length below) meant to summon an arútam
makes it clear that it is the formation or transformation of a
new kind of subjectivity that is the essential source of power:
Of particular significance, finally, is the exclamation, “As I
wait in expectation, let him carry me off [jurukuta], as I
wait in expectation, let him rearrange me [iwiaitkuta]”: the
effect of arutam is revealed here in two complementary
modalities. The first evokes the adoption of a child and thus
suggests the creation of a new social identity; the second
indicates a metamorphosis in the course of which the sup-
plicant discovers himself to be endowed with new charac-
teristics. This is confirmed by Tunki who, in answer to the
question “How does arutam act upon the visionary?” replied
“Arutam reorganizes [iwiaitkawi] the personality: it becomes
a new personality.” (Descola 1996:309)
What is the relationship between the verbal and nonverbal
parts of the vision?
Here, I believe, anthropologists may benefit from Lacan’s
methodological arguments against his fellow psychoanalysts.
Most simply put, Lacan felt that his colleagues depended
unquestioningly on language to access dynamics that resisted
entry into language: early-childhood experiences and the un-
conscious. He believed that the discourse created by the an-
alyst and the analysand disguised and distorted precisely those
elements of the analysands’ experiences and desires that
36. Some of his informants believe that there are two kinds of arútam,
one that promises domestic success and one that promises martial success.
Descola, however, is more inclined to the view of others who reject this
distinction, claiming that all arútam grant a “perfect self-control and
sense of one’s own self worth” and that it is this kind of subjectivity,
rather than specific words, that makes both kinds of success possible
(Descola 1996:303).
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
needed analysis. Similarly, Mader’s analysis of the verbal part
of the vision gives us insight into how adults comprehend
their encounter with an arútam. Typical of most adult ex-
periences, it is, of course, mediated by language. And as
Mader’s analysis demonstrates, it of course gives us further
insight into Shuar discourse. But this is only one dimension
of personhood.
How, though, might we understand the portion of the vi-
sion that cannot be verbalized?37 How can we understand the
significance of the plant-granted visions of preverbal Shuar
children? Here I believe that an anthropology of the ineffable
can learn from Lacan’s psychoanalysis of the ineffable (Lee
1990:33–34). For Lacan, the point of entry into an under-
standing of bourgeois subjectivity was the mirror. I believe
that for Shuar the point of entry is the plant-granted vision.
My method is to reflect on the ways plant-granted visions are
and are not like mirror images. This is a speculative exercise,
but it helps us look at other aspects of Shuar culture in new
and interesting ways.
My argument is simple and thus brief. Shuar recognize that
the Symbolic—the order constituted through language—is a
realm of misrecognition and impossible desires (see Basso
1987 for an analysis of language as a realm of deception and
illusion among the Brazilian Kalapalo). We can thus use
Lacan’s analysis of the Symbolic to infer what occurs in the
Shuar vision. If speech is the realm of misrecognition, then
for Shuar their visions are a realm of true recognition, the
true recognition of, and consequently (and most importantly)
by, an Other. In their earliest visions, I propose, babies en-
counters images of the Real—an experience that reinforces
their experience of reality as Real. In later visions, the child
encounters a nonhuman from which it experiences a pure
and truthful recognition, a kind of recognition not possible
from other human beings (which has implications for Shuar
attitudes toward sociality that I explore below).
Like Lacan’s mirror-visionary, the Shuar visionary-Imagi-
nary is built up and modified through a person’s life. How-
ever, whereas Lacan’s Imaginary begins with a literal mirror
37. Of course, an ethnographer may consume any of these plants. This
is what Michael Harner did in an attempt to gain insight into the religion
of the Conibo in the Peruvian Amazon. In 1961, he took ayahuasca (the
Quichua name for natem) and recounted his visions to a master shaman,
who told him, “You can surely be a master shaman” (Harner 1980:8).
In 1964, he returned to Shuar territory specifically to begin training to
become a shaman. The day after taking maı́kua, he began to tell his two
companions what he had seen when one interrupted him: “You must
not tell anyone, even us, what you have encountered. Otherwise, all your
suffering will have been in vain. Someday, and you will know when that
is, you can tell others, but not now” (Harner 1980:16).
Michael Harner entered the “real” world of the Shuar by leaving an-
thropology. The anthropologist is left to work within the limits of lan-
guage. Lacan, Lorenzo Chiesa (2007:13) wrote, intended to demonstrate
that “the ego is nothing but a necessary imaginary function of the subject,
while arguing that the subject cannot be reduced to his imaginary di-
mension.” Perhaps the ethnographer faces an analogous challenge, to
conjure up in language an image of the ethnographic subject, without
suggesting that the ethnographic subject can be reduced to this image.
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
and is built up through metaphorical mirroring, the Shuar
Imaginary begins with a plant-granted vision and is built up
through more plant-granted visions, as Shuar would repeat
the search for an arútam many times in the course of their
lives. I do not question that Shuar also experience meta-
phorical mirroring, that is, the reception of an image of one’s
self through the actions and reactions of another. I point out
only that Shuar insist on a clear distinction between the en-
counters they have with other beings in the real world of the
plant-granted vision and the encounters they have with other
beings in the deceptive world of everyday relations. (Put an-
other way, for Lacan the ego exists in the Imaginary register.
For Shuar, no ego is real in this world. For Lacan, the subject
is split. For Shuar, the “me” and the “I” are allies in a way
that contrasts strongly with their roles in Lacan’s patients.)
For Lacan, the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic may
coexist as distinct registers in the life of an adult, but we have
direct access to the Real only as preverbal infants. Shuar
adults, however, can always have another direct encounter
with the Real through a plant-granted vision and new en-
counter with an arútam. It is for this reason, I posit, that
Harner’s (1984:134) informants told him that the normal
world is a lie, but the world of the arútam is real. The effect
of the vision’s disruption of ordinary “reality,” one might say,
is to reverse the semiotician’s point that symbols are the ar-
bitrary signifiers of objects: visions reveal that there is some-
thing arbitrary about the objects of the mundane world (to
suggest a reformulation of the quote from Harner [1984:135],
at the beginning of “Power/Knowledge”).38
The visionary-Imaginary thus involves a béance for Shuar,
as for the bourgeois analyzed by Lacan. The Shuar béance,
however, takes different forms and functions: a gulf between
the Imaginary and the Symbolic (i.e., between vision and
speech) and, as Harner put it, between the false normal world
and the true hidden world. Put another way, for Lacan the
Imaginary effects a split in the subject; for Shuar, it effects a
split in the world.
But there is no reason to believe that, as was the case for
Lacan’s analysands, who he supposed had all passed through
the mirror stage, Shuar identify the visionary-Imaginary in
terms of a gap between the body as dependent fragments and
the body as autonomous whole. The earliest visions that occur
after the Shuar child enters the Symbolic reflect knowledge
38. According to Aldous Huxley (2004 [1954]:79),
The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be
quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure,
happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance
yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things,
of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, for-
ever vainly, to comprehend.
While the first sentence applies to Shuar, the ambivalence of the rest of
this passage does not: Shuar report leaving the visionary-Imaginary more
sure, self-satisfied, and proud. This is because all Shuar agree that the
realm of the vision is true. If there is something that makes Shuar less
sure, less self-satisfied, and humbler, it is something in the ordinary world.
53
of its split or alienated subjectivity, but one that contrasts
sharply with that of the bourgeois subject. The principal di-
vide that the Shuar encounters within the visionary-Imaginary
is not the distinction between the Shuar and his self-image,
his “me”; it is between the Shuar and the arútam. There is
in this drama a kind of alienated subjectivity, but the rela-
tionship between the Shuar and the arútam is one not of
identification but of attachment. As long as the arútam is
partnered with the Shuar, it is a source of overwhelming
power.
As Shuar typically suggest, in the visions that occur as they
grow older, there is some kind of symbolic communication
that, coming from a nonhuman, Shuar take to be accurate
in the ordinary sense of the word. Perhaps these revelations
of the seeker’s future are the noncorporeal analogue of that
nonsymbolic portion of the arútam that is incorporated into
the seeker’s body. This experience enables Shuar to articulate
another difference internal to the subject, between the Shuar
who ingests the plant-granting vision and the Shuar who is
“rearranged” and augmented by the arútam. But this second
subject is neither the ego in Lacan’s sense of self-image nor
Freud’s “ego-ideal” against which the Shuar may judge himself
(and fall short)—it is the “me” transformed into the “I” who
will return to the ordinary world and a life of action. In other
words, the one thing visions have in common with the mirror
stage is what Lacan identified as the truth of the mirror stage:
not what one is, but what one will become.
Shuar make clear that central to the visionary recognition
is a recognition of what one will become. In contrast to bour-
geois children, for Shuar the experience of the béance is ex-
hilarating and literally empowering. The Shuar visionary-
Imaginary is the inverse of Lacan’s mirror stage: power and
independence signified by the fragmented and metamor-
phosing images of Others issued forth from the plant (not
the wholeness reflected by the mirror). I propose that this
“visionary-Imaginary” constitutes “another Other,” that is to
say, another realm that can, as it were, stand up to language.39
I am not arguing that Shuar did not go through Lacan’s
Imaginary. Shuar children entered into the Symbolic, inter-
acted with other children and adults, and surely formed self-
images through these encounters. I am, however, proposing
that Shuar had and continue to have access to another Imag-
inary, one mediated through visions and constituted through
relations not with other egos (“me’s”) but with other I’s, that
is, the arútams. Shuar could thus have a subjectivity that
avoids or even resolves psychological problems caused by the
ego.
More to the point, the visionary-Imaginary and the Sym-
bolic had functions for Shuar fundamentally different from
those of the Lacanian Imaginary and Symbolic in bourgeois
society. In both, the Imaginary mediates a relationship be-
tween the Real and the Symbolic. In bourgeois society, I sug-
39. It stands up to other people, as well: since visions do not enter
speech, other people cannot play a role in interpreting their meaning.
 54
gest, it is the terrain in which the Symbolic colonizes the Real.
Conversely, I suspect that through visions, Shuar created a
space in which the Real could colonize the Symbolic.
One way it did so was through seemingly endless cycles of
feuding and warfare that repeatedly squeezed, almost to the
point of closure, the cycle of life and death. For Lacan, during
the Imaginary a ruptured identity manifests itself in jealousy
verging on paranoia; frustration with the impossibility of be-
ing the internalized Other explains childish aggressiveness
(Grosz 1990:41–42). For those who view the mirror stage
metaphorically (with Mommy playing the mirror), this phase
ends with the resolution of the Oedipus complex (Grosz 1990:
42–43). Shuar, however, continued to have literal visions into
adulthood, resulting in a desire to kill that was not enclosed
by the Oedipal triangle but rather channeled through exten-
sive kinship networks that organized blood feuds and war-
party alliances.
Another way the Real colonized the Symbolic was through
practices (described below) that disallowed speech or dis-
torted it beyond recognition. Put another way, by punctuating
their speech with certain silences and by distorting speech
beyond recognition during encounters with others or attempts
to conjure up visions for others, Shuar mimicked aspects of
their encounter with an arútam and thus extruded a bit of
the Real into reality.40
Visions, however, enable a Shuar to speak truthfully. It is
not that a vision reveals a particular truth about which the
Shuar may speak; it is rather that the possession of an arútam
manifests itself in the person’s ability to see and speak about
the world clearly. The Shuar term for this quality is paan
chicham (clear speech), which Shuar believe may overlap with,
but be different from, penker chicham (good speech). An an-
thropologist taking a performative approach to language can
say that individual Shuar manipulate speech and use it stra-
tegically to manipulate others with more or less skill and that
the most skillful are considered kakárams. Shuar, however,
believe that a kakáram is sincere and transparent. It is as if
it is the authentic quality of the vision that enters into the
kakáram’s speech.
Above, I called attention to the mimetic relationship be-
tween the material and nonmaterial tsentsaks of the uwishı́n.
It seems to me that the relationship between the paan chicham
and the arútam wakán′ of the kakáram is analogous. Paan
chicham is mimetic of the arútam in its power and truthful-
ness. This leads to an irony, if not a paradox, in that the
kakáram does not speak clearly about his visions.
This paradox is resolved on the eve of a raid, which oc-
casions the principal exception to the taboo on speaking of
40. Similarly, Bruce Fink has suggested that some forms of bourgeois
feminism are, in effect, attempts “to subjectify the real” (Fink 1995:117).
If in Lacanian terms the “phallus” is a function of “the alienation brought
about by language,” perhaps the array of Shuar practices that privilege
visions and that distort or deprecate speech can be seen as forms of
political resistance against the phallic function (Lacan 1977:28; see also
Fink 1995:106).
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
one’s visions. Warriors took turns revealing to one another
the identity of their respective arútams (for Shuar, these often
turn out to be legendary ancestors such as Shakai and
Nunkui). The ultimate proof that one possesses an arútam is
that one could speak its name—one had the knowledge and
also the sincerity and honesty. To prove that one has an arú-
tam, one must give it up.41
It was through this paradox, I suggest, rather than the kinds
of neuroses Lacan treated, that Shuar paid the price for their
divided subjectivity. The split effected by the identification
with and incorporation of the arútam enacted being’s em-
bracing of its becoming. The only threat that this arrangement
presented to Shuar was the possibility of the loss of the arú-
tam. Yet even this loss Shuar managed to make their own by
deliberately disowning their arútam on the eve of a raid, by
violating its secrecy and naming it among the other warriors.
This negation of becoming was simultaneously its realization.
As soon as the warrior pronounced the name of his arútam,
it departed his body; in effect, on the eve of killing, the warrior
committed a form of spiritual suicide (Harner 1984:140). I
think that it is highly significant that this occurred at the
threshold of death, as the warrior would either have killed or
have been killed before the next night fell. Freud grappled
with this dependence of life on death in his various writings
about the death instinct. In light of Shuar beliefs, Lacan’s
account makes more sense:
The death instinct essentially express[es] the limit of the
historical function of the subject. This limit is death—not
as an eventual coming-to-term of the life of the individual,
not as the empirical certainty of the subject, but, as Hei-
degger’s formula puts it, as that “possibility which is one’s
ownmost, unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as
such indeterminable (unüberholbare),” for the subject.
(Lacan 2006 [1953]:262)
This practice is evocative of Lacan’s understanding of the aim
of psychoanalysis: for the analysand to be able to speak his
or her own story (to speak as an “I” rather than as a “me”),
the analysand must recognize life’s dependence on death:42
The events of a subject’s life come to have meaning only
through their relationship to a future point in that life that
is somehow essential and revelatory of meaning. . . . Death
is such an essential and revelatory future moment, not be-
cause it is a nonarbitrary end point of life, but because it
is the one part of the subject’s life that cannot be taken
41. In my analysis of Shuar head-shrinking, I argued that, unlike bour-
geois culture, Shuar culture was not based on the accumulation and
display of valued goods (Rubenstein 2007:364–365). The same principle
is at work here: it is through a verbal display that the arútam is returned
to circulation.
42. To put it succinctly, if vulgarly, it is said that only two things in
life are certain, death and taxes. The latter says much about being the
subject of a state. But if we are speaking of all human beings and wish
to include Shuar, then the one thing in life that is certain is death. It is
this certainty to which Heidegger, as quoted by Lacan, was referring.
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
away from the subject: one’s death is unavoidably one’s own.
(Lee 1990:92)
When one is born into a social world often governed by
convention and taught to express one’s feelings and desires
in a language shared and shaped by countless others, one’s
death is not just the end of one’s becoming, it is most purely
one’s own. In speaking of and thus losing one’s arútam, one
spoke this truth.
The vision entered the space of language and left the kaká-
ram behind. It left the “I” behind, alone to confront its ego,
its “me.” Perhaps battle was as much a contest between the
“I” and the “me” as it was between two warriors: the next
day, a man could say either “I killed him” or “he killed me.”43
The Shuar subject thus entered life on its own as the warrior
entered the space of death (one might say that in order to
kill, the warrior must first be able to die). The murder of
another the next day may thus be considered a kind of rebirth
(which, at some point, will be followed by another trip to a
waterfall, to take maı́kua again, and encounter another arú-
tam).44
The warrior was vulnerable not only in the face of his
enemies but also in the face of his allies. Shuar social life
offered very few occasions for large-scale collective action. A
war party was one of the few occasions for many men from
several clusters to work together. A successful party required
a solidarity that often rested on a weak foundation, especially
as it was quite possible for members of the same party or-
dinarily to be enemies. One could easily take advantage of
the conditions of the raid to kill the other (Harner 1984:185).
Revealing the identity of one’s arútam on the eve of a raid
was one way to heighten the sense of shared purpose. Perhaps
the fact that this act had the effect of expelling one’s own
arútam—of exposing one’s self among one’s fellow warriors—
further heightened the sense of solidarity. The destruction of
a social group was thus preceded by the creation, however
fragile and ephemeral, of one of the largest social groups to
which a Shuar man might ever belong.
Shuar warriors gave up their arútams in return for a brief
period of social solidarity. In the next section of this essay, I
describe certain practices that illustrate the fraught nature of
Shuar sociality that would have made such moments so pre-
cious. These practices involved ritual uses of speech, the prin-
cipal means by which power intruded into the social.
Language and the Space of Death
As in Lacanian theory, Shuar seemed to inhabit a Symbolic
43. This helps us understand the muisak: the “avenging soul” is the
“me” that was killed, pure ego whose sociality can only take the form
of violence.
44. According to Descola, Achuar believe that the arútam does not
depart until after one has killed. The loss of one’s arútam leaves one “in
a state of extreme languor, racked by insatiable hunger, all will annihi-
lated” (Descola 1996:304).
55
register that is defined by violence and vulnerability. Lacanian
thought provides a useful point of reference for comparing
bourgeois culture and Shuar culture, in that it directs our
attention to the relationship between the Symbolic and vio-
lence. But, I argue, the terms and operation of this relationship
are strikingly different in these two cultures. In bourgeois
societies, the name of the father (represented by the phallus)
displaces one’s power over the Symbolic; symbolic castra-
tion—the loss of one’s phallus—is the price one pays for
entering society.45 In Shuar culture, on the other hand, it was
through the actual gain of an arútam that one entered society;
individuals gained mastery over speech through their en-
counter with an unnamed arútam. These individuals chose
the moment of loss—not of the Symbolic but of their kernel
of the Real—by speaking the name of the arútam before en-
tering the space of death.
As feminist theorist Kaja Silverman pointed out, an im-
portant way to begin situating Lacan’s analysis historically
and culturally (and thus moving away from the suggestion
that the value of Lacanian thought depends on the universal
validity of his claims) is by distinguishing between his con-
cepts of “the law of language” and “the law of kinship struc-
ture.” Following the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1951, 1969)
and Gayle Rubin (1975), she argues that according to the
former, the incest taboo between child and parent, central to
bourgeois culture, leads to an erotic displacement that maps
45. Lacan argued that the function of “the Symbolic” (language) in
bourgeois society is determined by the Oedipalized character of the nu-
clear family: “For Lacan, successful negotiation of oedipal conflicts is
quite literally a matter of learning to speak properly” (Lee 1990:64). This
involves literally taking “the name of the father” (i.e., paternity; one’s
name signifies the acceptance that the father has sexual rights to the
mother). In this formulation, “father” is the essential signifier:
The father is the representative, the incarnation, of a symbolic function
which concentrates in itself those things most essential to other cultural
structures: namely, the tranquil, or rather, symbolic, enjoyment, culturally
determined and established, of the mother’s love, that is to say, of the
pole to which the subject is linked by a bond that is irrefutably natural.
(Lacan 1979 [1953]:422–423)
Five years later, Lacan proposed to view the phallus as the essential
signifier. In this sense, “phallus” does not refer to a part of the body (or
one might say, apart from the body: the castrated, or potentially castrated,
penis) but to something more fundamental: the alienation of signifier
from signified and the alienation of speakers from language (Lacan 2006
[1958]:579). In short, language in bourgeois society is phallocentric.
I would suggest that while language may function as the Other for
Shuar as well, their language may not be phallocentric and its function
is not shaped by the dynamics of the Oedipus complex. Lacan himself
suggested that cultures like that of the Shuar cannot be understood in
terms of the Oedipal complex
I think that the Oedipus complex did not appear with the origin of man
(assuming it is not altogether senseless to try to write the history of this
complex), but at the threshold of history, or “historical” history, at the
limit of “ethnographic” cultures. . . . I am convinced that its function
had to be served by initiatory experiences in cultures that excluded it,
as ethnology allows us to see even today. (Lacan 2006 [1946]:150)
I believe that pre-Federation Shuar culture provides a good example of
such a culture.
 56
relations among father, mother, and child. According to the
latter, the incest taboo between brother and sister, central to
nonstate societies, leads to the circulation of women, alliances
between brothers and brothers-in-law, and the organization
of families into larger social units (Silverman 1992:35–42; see
also Lévi-Strauss 1969).46
As Silverman (1992:37) points out, there is no necessity
for the circulation of women. Among the Shuar, who were
matrilocal, one could, for example, say that men circulated.
Of course, one could say that Lévi-Strauss’s point about the
use of women to forge alliances among men held, but the
circulation of men in Shuar society had important conse-
quences. It was used to forge alliances between a senior war-
rior and his sons-in-law (not brothers-in-law). This had two
important consequences. First, it functioned to build up the
power of senior warriors (see also Turner 1979). If institu-
tionalized, this could, one might suppose, have led to the
development of the state. But the second consequence was
that when the senior warrior died, there was no longer any
bond holding the sons-in-law together. They dispersed to
form their own networks of allies. In Shuar society, kinship
did not build up larger social units; it broke them down.47
The senior warrior and his sons-in-law formed an inde-
pendent social group, but they were not autonomous; they
belonged to multiple, overlapping networks of allies. Accord-
ing to older ethnographies, Shuar socialized a great deal. Nev-
ertheless, Harner describes a life that was insecure and at times
lonely. The problem, as I have argued through this essay, is
not a failure of social solidarity but rather the undependability
of networks and, at a more profound level, the lack of trust-
worthiness in recognition, in the truth value of recognition.
The “Symbolic” as a space of death signals the perpetually
troubled relationship Shuar have with both language and
other Shuar. Whereas the Shuar visionary-Imaginary is con-
stituted through the recognition of an impossible other, the
Shuar Symbolic is, I suggest, constituted through, and con-
stitutes, the dangerous—in many cases impossible—realm in
which people encounter ordinary others. In this section, I
46. Silverman is attentive to research by anthropologists, as are Deleuze
and Guattari, but for understandable reasons they give too much em-
phasis to the work of Lévi-Strauss. Although I do not share their emphasis
on the “aesthetics of conviviality,” this essay is strongly influenced by the
arguments about sociality in Amazonia forwarded in Overing and Passes
(2000a). The case studies in this volume provide an important counter-
point to Lévi-Strauss’s account of kinship.
47. Recalling the comment of an insightful undergraduate, Robert
Murphy noted that “the family is the only social unit whose function is
to break up” (Murphy 1971:212). Murphy’s point was that most societies
have developed other institutions that mitigate against this effect. The
complex forms of marriage exchange Lévi-Strauss analyzed at such length
are one example, the Shuar Federation is another. I emphasize that before
the Federation Shuar society was, in effect, coextensive with the family,
because I have come to conclude that Shuar culture is best understood
through practices (especially those involving plant-granted visions) that
magnified, rather than mitigated against, this effect.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
explore the Symbolic as a space of death, first in childhood
relationships and then in adult interactions and relationships.
Speech and the Dialectic of Control
The “Symbolic” as a space of death signals the perpetually
troubled relationship Shuar have with both language and
other Shuar. Whereas the Shuar visionary-Imaginary is con-
stituted through the recognition of an impossible other, the
Shuar Symbolic is, I suggest, constituted through, and con-
stitutes, the dangerous—in many cases impossible—realm in
which people encounter ordinary others.
To understand this, I turn to a different tradition in psy-
choanalytic theory that has addressed intersubjective recog-
nition. According to Jessica Benjamin, the tension between a
desire to dominate and a desire to be dominated is a challenge
all children must confront in their socialization. This is be-
cause infants are fully dependent on older caregivers, espe-
cially their mothers, but at around the age of 14 months they
begin to become capable of some independence. For Benja-
min, the move toward independence is not purely a move
toward separation and autonomy. Ironically, in order to
achieve independence, the child has a new need: the need to
be recognized (by its mother, among others) as independent.
As the growing child explores its world with increasing vo-
lition, it tests the boundaries that surround it. There is the
risk that a child can become, in effect, a sadist, asserting itself
at the expense of others; there is also the risk that the child
will prolong its dependence on its mother, in effect playing
the masochist, surrendering its own boundaries (Benjamin
1988:52–53).
Benjamin’s language concerning recognition suggests the
influence of object-relations theorists such as D. W. Winni-
cott, who first called attention to metaphorical “mirroring”
as a form of recognition.48 As I read her, however, she is not
concerned so much with “recognition” as with the ways a
subject’s power depends on its recurring encounters with re-
sistances. What is important is not the mother “mirroring”
back an image of the infant but rather the mother and child’s
struggle to assert their own agency without obliterating the
other. This “dialectic of control” identifies a challenge in
childhood socialization that persists through adulthood.
Benjamin is working within psychoanalytic terms and thus
within the Oedipal triangle (that is to say, a triangle organized
by desire and threatened or repressed violence) of the bour-
geois nuclear family. Among Shuar, this triangle is ruptured
48. Benjamin draws on the work of “object-relations” theory as ad-
vocated by Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott. In general, Lacan was
critical of their inattention to the importance of language; this issue has
serious consequences for therapeutic practice. I am concerned only with
certain insights that Benjamin has concerning recognition in the realm
of the Symbolic; I do not believe that these specific insights are incom-
patible with my general use of Lacan. What is significant is that Benjamin
goes beyond self psychologists and object-relations theorists by exploring
intersubjectivity in early-childhood development explicitly as a field of
power.
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
in at least two notable ways. In the world of the vision, it is
through the intervention of the arútam and the dynamics of
recognition of which we cannot speak; in the world of speech,
it is through the intervention of a personal, bilateral kindred
that extends far beyond the walls of the natal home and thus
the history of violence (not Freud’s hypothesized castration
anxiety but the threat of actual murder) and alliances that
canalize this network. I believe that familiar narratives of
blood feuds are a means through which the domination drama
between parent and child described by Benjamin is doubly
displaced. First, any tension between parent and child is dis-
placed by enmity toward others. Second and just as important,
domination is displaced by actual violence.
Shuar culture is characterized by both a will to power and
a rejection of authority. Domination, as Benjamin insists, is
a kind of social relationship. The obliteration of another—
the termination of any possibility for a social relationship—
is the expression of power without domination. This may also
explain why Shuar beliefs developed so as to encourage re-
peating the quest for a visionary encounter with an arútam:
such visions, building on infantile visions that predated the
entry into the Symbolic, provided a space where a Shuar, if
he dominated his own fears, could have a social (i.e., inter-
subjective) interaction with a nonhuman, an interaction free
of the complex and perilous negotiations between two hu-
mans.
Dangerous Dialogues
My reflections on the importance of intersubjective encoun-
ters in Shuar visions and the ways they contrast with inter-
subjective encounters among Shuar stand apart from much
research among other Amazonian peoples. There has been a
great deal of research recently on “conviviality” in Amazonian
societies, what Joanna Overing and Alan Passes described as
the “aesthetics of community” (Overing and Passes 2000c:xi;
see also Overing and Passes 2000a). They called attention not
only to how individual agency and sociality were mutually
constitutive but also to the importance of the affective (as
opposed to the purely structural) in this process (Overing and
Passes 2000b:14).
In an ethnography of the Piro of the Peruvian Amazon,
Peter Gow noted that when people believe that all kin “should
live well together,” it follows that kin who live apart are those
with whom one cannot live well (Gow 2001:122). Gow’s com-
ment occurs in the middle of an analysis of elaborate greeting
rituals that occur when Piro of one village visit another; one
could describe his account as a negative dialectic of conviv-
iality. Given their pre-Federation settlement pattern and that
Shuar even today consider the matrilocal homestead the basic
unit of social life, one could say that they provide the extreme
case of Gow’s principle: people do not get along with those
with whom they do not live. In Hendricks’s account (1993:
146), Shuar revalue this negation as something positive: “I
was told that the ‘traditional’ Shuar man was the one who
57
separated himself from others and lived a quiet life avoiding
conflict.”
Shuar are highly social, but because households are dis-
persed, socializing often requires long-range visits (Harner
1984:105–111; Karsten 1935:245; Stirling 1938:96–99). The
apparent contradiction between bellicosity and sociality leads
to another important feature of Shuar culture: dialogic dis-
course (on ceremonial dialogues in native South America, see
Urban 1986; see also Crépeau 1993; Erikson 2000; Surrallés
2003). As noted above, Shuar speech is an indicator of
power—not because speech is a medium of domination (since
no Shuar could give orders to another; Hendricks 1993:7)
but because a skilled orator is taken to possess an arútam.
Much of Shuar speech is structured around explicit calls for
recognition, and in certain cases recognition must be carefully
negotiated, lest one man be given cause to kill another. Ritual
dialogues are both necessary and highly risky activities.
Brief descriptions of two major kinds of ceremonial dia-
logues will establish the basic principles. According to Hen-
dricks, the most important pre-Federation speech form was
the enémak, “war speech” (Hendricks 1993:86). This began
with the approach to and entry into a house: a visitor first
announced his presence from a distance, with a call; at the
entrance of the house, brandishing a shotgun or lance, he
declared, “Winiájai [I am coming].” At that moment, the host
jumped up, brandishing his own shotgun or lance, and began
questioning the visitor to establish who he was and the pur-
pose of his journey. The dialogue consisted of stereotypic
phrases, contracted to two to four syllables and shouted as
the two men stepped forward and backward; the entire ex-
change could take up to 15 minutes (Karsten 1935:283–285).
When large war parties assembled, the men formed two lines
facing one another to perform the enémak collectively. If two
strangers chanced upon one another on a trail, they also
performed the enémak to establish their relationship and in-
tentions.
The other major form of ceremonial dialogue was (and in
many places, still is) the aujsatin, or visiting speech. As with
the enémak, this began with the approach to and entry into
a house: a visitor first announced his presence from a distance,
with a call; at the entrance of the house, brandishing a shotgun
or lance, he declared, “Winiájai [I am coming].” The visitor
remained, as it were, in a state of suspended animation—
“coming”—until the host responded, “Winitia [You may
come].” According to Karsten, this period could be prolonged
until the guest and host had both seated themselves, the host
had arranged himself, and a woman of the household had
served manioc beer. Once the host had formally acknowledged
the guest, the guest would shout for 5 or 10 minutes—the
nature of his journey, news from home, and if he was a
stranger, to identify who he was, where he was from, and how
the two men were related (if they were) and to affirm friend-
ship and support. During this speech the host periodically
shouted back an appropriate term of recognition (“yes,”
“true,” “quite so,” “no,” “I don’t know”). When the visitor
 58
finished, the host reciprocated with his own speech (Karsten
1935:245–247; Stirling 1938:96–99).
As Janet Hendricks writes, these exchanges “provide par-
ticipants with an opportunity to display personal power, ag-
gressivity, knowledge and skill, while at the same time pre-
venting open conflict by acknowledging the power of one’s
opponent” (Hendricks 1993:87–88). “Acknowledgment” is
also a key function of the semantically limited, but essential,
declarations listeners make while listening to a speech. Robert
Crépeau has argued that in situations where social solidarity
is weak, Achuar visiting speeches, empty of content, have a
phatic function in demonstrating mutual respect of the rules
for social interaction and communication (Crépeau 1993:93).
I add that in a culture where “the effective use of language
is considered to be a decisive factor in a man’s success in
social and economic activities” (Hendricks 1993:86), the use
of speech to acknowledge the speech, the presence, and the
very existence of others is equally important. What speech is,
in effect, acknowledging is the presence of a person with an
arútam. That power, which the Shuar recognizes in the silent
realm of the vision, is acknowledged by other Shuar in the
realm of speech.49 Significantly, it is through gesture and voice,
but not words, that men perform mutual dominance.
But these speeches are not entirely void of content, and
they have immediate communicative functions. Shuar chil-
dren are brought up in a world where their families are in-
volved in a variety of blood feuds, and whenever two men
meet, they must discover immediately the nature of their
relationship to assess whether they are friend or foe. During
an enémak exchange on a path, for example, two men have
a very short period of time to determine whether, through
kinship relations, they are ancestral enemies. A man who is
highly knowledgeable about his networks of kin and who
wishes to avoid a conflict can identify himself in such a way
as to assure amicability. Otherwise, one will kill the other.
The same holds true when one visits another’s house: “Failure
to manipulate kin classification successfully can result in the
visitor’s food or beer being poisoned or in his being ambushed
by the host after he leaves the house” (Harner 1984:103). In
the realm of speech, the wrong kind of recognition means
death.
Secret Songs and the Vision of Sociality
One might infer that the dispersed settlement pattern puts
extra pressure on intrahousehold relations. Yet Karsten, Stir-
49. My view is close to that of Alexandre Surrallés (2003:787), in his
analysis of the greeting rituals of the nearby Candoshi: “The ceremony
is not focused on signification but on the preconditions of signification:
that is to say, the ceremony occupies a spectrum that extends from the
perception of the presence of others to the first instances of categorization,
those of identity and alterity of the participants.” As Surrallés points out,
this is achieved primarily through decoration and vision, the sustained
reciprocal gaze of each other’s face, face paint, and ornamentation. I
believe that this was important for Shuar as well, but my concern is the
significance of the channel of speech.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
ling, and Harner observed that domestic relations between
men and women and between adults and children are for the
most part characterized by liberty and harmony. There is,
however, an interesting record of unfulfilled desires and hurt
or angry feelings. These enter language, but in a way that
further illustrates a profound ambivalence toward language:
anent. An anent, I suggest, is the closest speech can come to
the visionary-Imaginary—and it does so in a form virtually
unintelligible to other people.
Anent are highly formalized statements that typically por-
tray a desired situation. Shuar (like the Aguaruna and Achuar)
believe that they were composed by legendary heroes in a
mythic past (although anent often include Spanish words that
sometimes describe objects of recent invention, such as “air-
planes, jukeboxes, ink, books, and so forth”; Taylor and Chau
1983:99). Men and women have their own anent, which they
share only with people of the same sex. Close kin may pass
on their anent to others; one may also seek to purchase anent
from an elder. Among the Aguaruna, one can learn an anent
only with the aid of tsáank that has been chewed by the elder.
Once one has memorized the anent, one must abstain from
sexual relations and consuming certain foods for several days
(Brown 1986:72, 168).
“Anen are not characterized by directive speech. Few com-
mands are to be found in them. Instead they consist primarily
of descriptive statements about the singer or the future state
of things” (Brown 1986:168). Nevertheless, anent are not ref-
erential, that is, they are not used to communicate infor-
mation; they are performative: they are believed “to have a
direct effect on the course of events” (Taylor and Chau 1983:
92). They are usually addressed to the productive activities of
a household, such as hunting and cultivation, and harmonious
relationships among people related through marriage, espe-
cially husbands and wives and brothers-in-law (Taylor and
Chau 1983:94). Michael Brown concluded,
The manipulative quality of anen shares much in common
with the power of visions. Both are constituted by evocative
imagery that illuminates a desired future state. Consumption
of psychotropic substances figures in the performance of
anen and the search for visions. Although both are essentially
private experiences, they place the actor in direct contact
with ancient sources of knowledge, thus projecting past and
present into the future. Visions and anen are attributed a
palpable quality that distinguishes them from other phe-
nomena: they are both reified, referred to as “things” that
have a life of their own. This reification underscores the
degree to which the performer of an anen sees himself as
engaging in a real operational procedure rather than as per-
forming a purely symbolic act. (Brown 1986:169–170)
Anent are not speeches about visions; they are speeches that
function in many ways like visions. The singer of an anent,
I propose, is seeking to communicate a vision to another
Shuar (this is why it is essential that anent are believed to
have been authored by mythic heroes like Nunkui and Shakai,
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
for these are the arútam that are the sources of visions). We
could then view the words of the anent to be not like a prayer
(or plea), an exhortation to the earth, or an animal, or one’s
spouse, but rather the iconic representation of a vision to be.
Critically, these speeches are removed by Shuar as much
as possible from the realm of social discourse. Anent are secret;
some people refuse to reveal their anent to an ethnographer;
others are willing to produce in speech what they termed
“imitations” of their anent (Brown 1986:187). The language
of anent is heavily distorted: some syllables are repeated, oth-
ers are contracted, parts of suffixes are dropped or changed,
and in some cases new suffixes, which have no semantic value
but affect the rhythm of the anent, are added (Taylor and
Chau 1983:97). These changes often render one person’s anent
unintelligible to others (Taylor and Chau 1983:99; Brown
1986:31). Most importantly, anent must be sung (an anent
that is not sung is only an “imitation” of an anent, and not
a real anent). Taylor and Chau (1983:95) argue that “song”
is not a native category; what we call singing “is a meta-
linguistic device used . . . to signal the ‘otherness’ of the
language one is speaking.” Anent are sung alone, or, if in the
company of intimates, sung sotto voce. Sometimes, an anent
is merely played on a musical instrument (Taylor and Chau
1983:94).
Taylor and Chau (1983:96) call attention to the similarities
between anent and shamanic chants (see also Buchillet 1992,
on the power of the inaudible in Desana healing rituals, and
Hill 1992, on the instrumentality of music in Wakuéni healing
rituals; Townsley 1993 provides a detailed analysis of the com-
bination of chanting and “twisted language” in Yaminahua
healing rituals). “Song,” they suggest, is the language of the
pasuk (a shaman’s familiar; i.e., an assistant that in the real
world of visions often takes the form of an animal) and tsen-
tsak. I believe that the relationship between the words and
the melody of the anent is analogous to that between the
material and the nonmaterial tsentsak, or dart, used by sha-
mans. With both anent and tsentsak, I believe, one may say
that Shuar use a material but ineffective analogue for an im-
material (or unspoken) but effective instrument. I suggest that
the material (or spoken) analogue is a technique for bridging
the distance between the ordinary world and the invisible
“true” world.
Perhaps song is the language of the arútam wakán′ (or
“arútam soul”)—this would explain why an anent played on
a musical instrument has force but the words of an anent
spoken without music are considered an imitation. The di-
lemma for Shuar is that words constitute the language of
human beings; in the words of the anent, Shuar turn language
against itself. The language that warriors use to communicate
to one another the identity of their arútam has the effect of
driving their arútam away. Perhaps by making language un-
recognizable to other humans, Shuar hope to create in their
solitary or soft chanting of anent a space in the mundane
world where the truth of the imagination may abide. In their
59
solitude, what they imagine most is productivity and the com-
panionship of others.
Reflections of F on the Subject
What is at stake in this article is how we talk about the
difference between state and nonstate societies. It is not sur-
prising that this is hard to talk about. Pierre Clastres (1989)
began his provocative Society against the State (originally pub-
lished in 1974; English translation published in 1989) by ask-
ing whether it is possible for us to talk about such peoples—
“primitive” or “archaic” societies, including Amerindians, es-
pecially in Amazonia—without having to characterize them
in terms of a lack of the institutions of coercion and sub-
ordination that we take for granted, in other words, as “state-
less” societies. He suggested that rather than trying to un-
derstand such societies as lacking in power, we need to try
to understand them as standing against a certain kind of
power, namely, the “command-obedience” relationship. The
rest of his essay consists of his reflections on what kind of
power can be antithetical to the command-obedience rela-
tionship we so take for granted.
Clastres argued that all power hinges on a relationship be-
tween speech and violence and that state societies (in which
command-obedience is considered acceptable or even nor-
mal) are characterized by the conjunction of the two (as We-
ber [1978:54] put it, “the legitimate use of physical force”;
emphasis in the original) and that nonstate societies employ
a variety of strategies for keeping the two dimensions of power
separate. In an intellectual tradition that perhaps includes
Hobbes as well as Rousseau, Clastres believes that there are
always people who are tempted to conjoin the two or that
people may be aware of a desire within themselves to do so.
“The State” exists not only as potentate but also as potenti-
ality: as an idea, or the glimmer of an idea, somewhere in the
mind (see Abrams 1988). Consequently, the performance of
the practices that keep speech and violence separate consti-
tutes a “history of their struggle against the State” (Clastres
1989:218; emphasis added).
The Shuar add to Clastres’ examples another, and impor-
tant, kind of history of a people’s struggle against the State.
Among the Shuar, speech and violence are conjoined in the
person of the kakáram: the search for the power of voice and
the search for the power of physical violence are one and the
same. Nevertheless, their pre-Federation social organization
cannot be understood in terms of the command-obedience
relationship, and it could hardly be characterized as a state.
Given that the head of each household could aspire to be a
kakáram, that the typical kakáram could generally rely con-
sistently only on the support of his sons-in-law, that each
cluster of allied households formed a politically and econom-
ically autonomous unit, and that these units typically dis-
persed when the elder kakáram died, one might characterize
the history of the pre-Federation Shuar as a people’s struggle
against Society.
 60
Nevertheless, I think that Clastres is right to call attention
to the relationship between speech and violence. His analysis,
however, lacks a theory of the subject, and I think that the
interplay between speech (or discourse, or the Symbolic) and
violence in the constitution of “the subject” is essential for a
full understanding of the difference between the state and
societies against the state. What I am attempting to do in this
essay is to add to Clastres’ analysis of political practices in
egalitarian society an analysis of the formation of “the subject”
in one egalitarian society.50
I end this essay with some reflections on the relationship
between different kinds of subjects and different configura-
tions of speech and violence.51 I find psychoanalytic theory
as provocative a set of reflections on the “subject” in bourgeois
states as I find Clastres’ reflections on “power” in nonstate
societies. In both kinds of societies, there is some kind of
problem with “the subject,” but the problems (and hence, the
subjects) are different. Lacan’s mirror stage is an encounter
with the self that one can never become; Shuar visions involve
an encounter with an other that no other human can be.52
Language and the limits of language are key to both, and an
adequate understanding of the subject requires a reconsid-
eration of the Symbolic.
In keeping with much psychoanalytic theory, the Lacanian
subject is the desiring subject, desire signifies a lack, and desire
is constituted through the Symbolic. Philosopher Gilles De-
leuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari have argued that this
is a bourgeois view. While they employ Lacan’s distinction
between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, they ex-
plicitly treat desire as a presence. They argue that humans are
born into a social world organized by flows between different
organs of different people and things and that desires produce
these flows (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:1–2, 46–48).53 In non-
50. See Kracke (1978) for a psychoanalytically informed analysis of
leaders in an Amazonian society.
51. Thus far, I have been using the word “subject” to refer to the
person, whether an “I” (subjective case) or a “me” (objective case). For
Lacan, the distinction between the “I” and the “me” is decisive, and it
is only the former that is, properly speaking, the “subject.” I am not sure
that this distinction applied to pre-Federation Shuar, but I do find Lacan’s
attention to the desiring subject illuminating.
52. My attention to comparative paradigms of intersubjectivity par-
allels what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1996:190) calls the “symbolic
economy of alterity” (see also Gow 2001; Vilaça 2010), although I draw
on an intellectually distinct approach. This essay is in part a preliminary
step toward a specific engagement with this emerging literature and in
part an argument for the relevance and value of Lacan and Žižek to this
larger project, especially when analyzing the colonization frontier.
53. Deleuze and Guattari, moreover, accept Freud’s conceptualization
of the unconscious and often use Freudian language to develop their
arguments. Nevertheless, they read Freud’s case histories as often-
insightful documents of psychosocial dynamics of bourgeois families and
not as documents of a universal theory of psychic dynamics. They insist
that the Oedipal triangle and the experience of desire as a lack are ex-
pressions of bourgeois ideology. Against the classic Freudian view (while
crediting Melanie Klein [1930] for emphasizing that a child’s psycho-
logical development is influenced by its relations with others beyond the
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
capitalist societies, flows are coded, regulating specific flows
between specific organs on specific occasions, and people are
territorialized, meaning that flows among them are local (pp.
139–153). As various kinship systems and their political and
economic, as well as social, functions illustrate, mothers, fa-
thers, brothers, and sisters are never just mothers, fathers,
brothers, and sisters—they always have other functions.54
The Clastrian question is, what kinds of desire organize
speech and violence in ways that frustrate or serve the com-
mand-obedience relationship? For Shuar, I have argued, it is
an augmentation of the person—specifically, the attachment
of the power of the arútam through a plant-granted vision
(rather than the mirror stage or castration anxiety)—that cre-
ates the desiring subject. This subject desires, above all else,
not pleasure but power.55 Shuar experience this desire not as
a lack but as a surplus of speech and a desire to kill.
Although speech and violence are combined in the kaká-
ram, they are functionally separate in that the threat of vio-
lence is never used to support the use of speech to command.
Arguably, high levels of violence, or the threat of violence,
promoted a dispersed settlement pattern among Shuar that
undermined any attempt to institutionalize alliances among
large numbers of kakárams under the leadership of one. More-
over, the desire to kill constitutes a kind of power that can
never take the form of a command-obedience relationship:
the only thing a kakáram wishes of potential victims is to kill
them, not to command them. Speech and violence connect
most directly not through a command but through the nam-
ing of one’s arútam on the eve of a raid. And it is this act—
an autonomous act—that detaches the arútam-power from
the kakáram’s body. It is the separation of the vision and
speech, the violation of which initiates the separation of the
arútam from the body, then—rather than the separation of
nuclear family), they argue that
from his very early infancy, the child has a wide-ranging life of desire—
a whole set of nonfamilial relations with the objects and the machines
of desire—that is not related to the parents from the point of view of
immediate production, but that is ascribed to them (with either love or
hatred) from the point of view of the recording of the process, and in
accordance with the very special conditions of this recording, including
the effect of these conditions upon the process itself. (Deleuze and Guat-
tari 1983:48)
54. I suggest that it is systems just like these that Joanna Overing and
Peter Gow have observed among the Piaroa of Venezuela and the Piro
of Peru, respectively. Specifically, Overing has suggested analyzing social
life in terms of coded flows (Overing Kaplan 1986:147, 149). As Gow
makes clear, such flows are not organized like capitalist flows, where one
person’s possessions are another person’s lack; rather, they are organized
through highly coded and productive desires:
People are not talking about the “rates of exchange” between different
commodities such as game and sexual favors, nor about their respective
property rights over products or their own bodies. In native Amazonian
daily life people are talking about hunger and sexual desire, and the
satisfaction of these desires by other people. (Gow 1989:568)
55. Power may be a cultural value and personal aspiration, but the
kakáram, dependent as much on fluid social networks as on the recog-
nition of an arútam, cannot be considered some primitive version of the
autonomous individual.
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
speech and violence per se (see Clastres 1989:152–155)—that
distinguishes Shuar politics. I also take this to mean that the
Shuar subject is essentially fragmented (albeit in a way that
is fundamentally distinct from Freud’s bourgeois subject).
The Oedipal State
I conclude with an account of the bourgeois subject, because
I think that this kind of subjectivity helps explain why Shuar,
who successfully resisted the Inka and the Spaniards, were so
quickly and peacefully subjugated by the modern state. In this
account, I rely heavily on the work of various critical theo-
rists.56 Deleuze and Guattari argue that the workings of class
domination are better understood through an analysis of de-
sire than through interests (1983:257). Deleuze and Guattari,
philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and Kaja Silverman have forwarded
very compelling, and complex, analyses of what Silverman
(1992:2) calls the “libidinal politics” of capitalism by bringing
Marxian and Freudian thought into engagement. I cannot
hope to do justice to their arguments, but this conclusion is
heavily indebted to their work.
Political theory, which not only is a set of theories about
states and their subjects but also is produced by the subjects
of states, largely concerns itself with classifying different kinds
of states, analyzing the different rights and duties of the sov-
ereign and its subjects, and evaluating the relative strengths
and weaknesses of different kinds of states. For political an-
thropologists, the existence of nonstate (or egalitarian) so-
cieties highlights certain seemingly universal features of states:
the command-obedience relation that Clastres emphasizes
and the class stratification that Morton Fried (1967) empha-
sizes. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1971 [1848]) fa-
mously remarked, the history of all such societies is a history
of class conflict. In these theories, the state is fundamentally
opposed to human freedom.
The Enlightenment project was to theorize a new kind of
order that would guarantee the freedom to choose one’s way
of life (i.e., a system in which the sense of subject as actor
would displace or determine the sense of subject as acted
56. Strictly speaking, “critical theory” refers to the work of the Frank-
furt School, that is, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse,
and Jürgen Habermas. These scholars drew on the works of Marx and
Freud to reformulate the Enlightenment project and to analyze the origins
of fascism in bourgeois culture. Although not aligned with the Frankfurt
School, the scholars I rely on in this section—Deleuze and Guattari,
Žižek, and Silverman—are engaged in similar projects, and I am using
the term to refer to their work as well.
Most critical theorists use the word “subject” to refer to both the
grammatical sense of one who acts and the political sense of one who
is subject to some ruling order. The tension between these two senses
may have something to do with why Lacan believed that there is some-
thing fundamentally unstable about the subject. At least, this is how Žižek
interprets Lacan.
61
upon or spoken for). Proponents of the liberal state57 and of
capitalism (i.e., the bourgeois state) claim that these systems
have either achieved this goal or are the best means available
to achieve it. As one of the central objectives of indigenous
political movements, to seek the recognition from the state
(and thus enjoy the rights of its subjects), entails recognizing
the legitimacy of the state, indigenous peoples must care about
the truth of this claim. The struggles of the Shuar Federation
for legal recognition suggest that the Shuar accept this claim.
Žižek’s work is of value not only because it provides an
important critique of this claim but also because the very
critique helps explain why Shuar would nevertheless find the
bourgeois project appealing. As I read him, the great paradox
of capitalism is not that it promises freedom while delivering
inequality but rather that it does so in a way that convinces
people that the solution to problems caused by capitalism is
more capitalism. The key lies in the means through which
the bourgeois subject is produced. According to critical the-
orists, the bourgeois subject came into being historically
through the rise of the labor contract, which first emerged in
Europe in the fourteenth century and became the dominant
and paradigmatic relationship with the industrial revolution
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see also the work
of conservative legal historian Henry Maine [1946 (1861)]).
According to Marx (1976 [1867]:668), the creation of capi-
talism—the transformation of money and other commodities
into “capital”—begins with an act of mutual recognition:
Two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must
come face to face and into contact: on the one hand, the
owners of money, means of production, means of subsis-
tence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they
possess, by buying other people’s labour-power; on the other
hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour-power,
and therefore the sellers of labour.58
These new workers were free in the sense that they were not
part of the means of production (like slaves and serfs) and
in the sense that they were “free from, unencumbered by, any
means of production of their own” (Marx 1976 [1867]:668;
see also pp. 165–166). The relationship between the capitalist
and the worker was thus, it seems, predicated on the mutual
recognition of two free and equal actors. This may have been
the case in the fourteenth century, when feudalism was col-
lapsing but before capitalism was institutionalized. Former
serfs undoubtedly and very reasonably considered the labor
contract to be a major improvement over their former con-
57. By “the liberal state” I mean states that claim legitimacy based on
some combination of the rule of law and representative democracy, which
emerged after the Glorious Revolution in Great Britain (1688), the Amer-
ican Revolution (1775–1783), and the French Revolution (1789–1799).
58. According to Marx, this is not a natural scenario but rather an
encounter that had its origins in England in the fourteenth century, when
the Black Death disrupted feudal relations, in some cases enabling lords
to take direct control over the land of dead peasants and in other cases
freeing peasants from their dead lord. Thus, at the same time a demand
for and a supply of free workers came about.
 62
dition. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, however, the
dependence of workers on wage labor was anything but a
victory.59
This kind of contract developed before actual bourgeois
states, and it provided the basis for the “social-contract the-
ories” that have been used to legitimize the bourgeois state.60
According to these theories, the basis of this kind of state is
not the command-obedience relationship around which feu-
dal society revolved but the contract entered into among free
and equal people. In turn, this kind of state enacted laws that
supported and enforced the wage-labor contract while ex-
acerbating economic and political inequalities among its sub-
jects.
The Marxist critique of capitalism is that the encounter
between capitalist and worker in fact involves a misrecogni-
tion that itself is predicated on and perpetuates more pro-
found misrecognitions. The fundamental misrecognition is
that the capitalist and the worker are equal, or free in the
same way. (As Silverman [1992:7] notes, in Lacanian thought
the Imaginary and Symbolic identifications are “mutually co-
ercive.” Perhaps this explains why the mirror is so important
in bourgeois society, not just as a play object for parents and
their babies but to the point that most people look at them-
selves in a mirror not only when they awake but also shortly
before going to bed. The image it reflects—that one’s opposite
is one’s equal—supports the fiction of the labor contract, that
the worker and the capitalist, while formally opposites, are
nevertheless equal.)
That capitalists own the means of production has a series
of important consequences. For example, British political
economists such as Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo ar-
gued that as long as the supply of workers is greater than the
demand, workers will need capitalists more than capitalists
need workers, wages will be lower than profits, and capitalists
will, on average, be wealthier than workers (see Marx 1976
[1867]:689, 720).
59. The ability of former serfs to demand of landowners wages in
return for their labor certainly seems to have been a victory for the
commoner. The situation began changing at the end of the fifteenth
century, when English landowners realized that they could make more
money by selling wool to Flemish mills than by renting land to farmers.
When possible, landowners seized free holdings by force; this process
was intensified and backed by the force of law with the enclosure acts
in the eighteenth century. Laws were passed that forbade small land-
holders from owning livestock, ensuring their destitution. Newly landless
people had no choice but to seek employment under any condition—in
the sixteenth century, a series of laws were passed making idleness and
begging illegal, punishable by flogging, imprisonment, and in some cases
enslavement. It was through such laws that, as Clastres would put it,
violence and speech combined to produce “the worker” as a subject of
power.
60. Social-contract theory, which argues that the only legitimate basis
for the state is the consent of the governed, was developed (in very
different forms) by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Contemporary advo-
cates of social-contract theory have also been influenced by Immanuel
Kant.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
According to Žižek, however, this is but the material con-
sequence of another kind of misrecognition: that the freedom
of the worker is a form of freedom. “This freedom is the very
opposite of effective freedom: by selling his labor ‘freely,’ the
worker loses his freedom—the real content of this free act of
sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital” (Žižek 1989:22).
Thus, for Žižek, the wage-labor contract undoes the entire
Enlightenment contract.
However, as Žižek points out, this is because this contract
is premised on yet another kind of misrecognition: that labor
power can be a commodity like any other. Marx (following
the political economists of his day) argued that labor is unique
in that it is labor that transforms everything else into some
useful product (Marx 1976 [1867]:53; see also Kołakowski
2005:227–228). “The crucial point not to be missed here,”
Žižek (1989:22) insists, “is that this negation is strictly internal
to equivalent exchange.” In formal terms, the exchange of
labor power for a wage is entirely fair; the price set by the
abstract forces of supply and demand, it is the act of exchange
that by definition establishes the equivalence between a quan-
tity of money and a quantity of the worker’s time. The “catch,”
as he puts it, is that the commodity sold by the worker, labor
power, can be used by the capitalist to produce other com-
modities that are worth more than the wages paid for the
labor power. The process of capitalist production thus pro-
duces something new (something that would not come into
existence, e.g., with the exchange of bread for meat, in Smith’s
famous example), what Marx termed “surplus-value.” It is
this surplus value that Marx believed to be the real source of
wealth in capitalism, being reinvested in new technologies that
have enabled capitalism to grow into a global system.
In capitalism, not only is labor viewed like any other com-
modity but the meaning of labor (as a producer of all other
values) is also displaced onto a different commodity: money
(see Žižek 1989:24). This is because money can buy anything;
Marx does not consider this an essential property of money
but rather one that attaches to money only when it comes to
be used to purchase labor power. Unlike feudal lords, capi-
talists invest a portion of their wealth in developing new
markets and new technologies, thus creating ever more com-
modities that one might purchase with money and thus mak-
ing money seem not only more desirable but also more pro-
ductive and powerful. Marx calls this last misrecognition
“commodity fetishism” because people believe that money—
whether an inert object mined by humans (e.g., silver and
gold) or printed by humans (e.g., paper money) or just an
idea, today represented electronically—is talked about as if it
were alive and had the power to reproduce, like real living
things.61
61. An anthropologist does not need Marx to reach this conclusion
about bourgeois culture. I witnessed an example of this when I was
growing up in New York and saw television commercials for the Dime
Savings Bank in which people were told that if they put their money in
the bank it would grow, illustrated by a cartoon of someone burying a
dime in the earth, and a tree growing out as if the dime were a seed.
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
Now the point is not that people literally believe that money
is alive (an equally important part of my socialization [see n.
61] was my mom—no capitalist, but a believer in savings
banks—repeatedly insisting that “money doesn’t grow on
trees”). According to Žižek (1989:30–33), the power of ide-
ology is not that people believe in an illusion (e.g., that money
can grow) but that people acknowledge the reality but live as
if things were not so. This is evident when the state response
to failing banks is to lend banks money and the response to
a credit-default crisis is to encourage people to borrow more
money.
The critical question is, what keeps people believing things
they do not “literally” believe? According to Marx, the work-
ing class was first produced from the sixteenth to nineteenth
centuries through state violence, which compelled ever-grow-
ing numbers of people to sell their labor power. But subjects
of the bourgeois state must be produced anew in every gen-
eration, before entering the labor market (and without the
constant and immediate use of violence).62 What kind of cul-
tural and psychological work has to occur to sustain this series
of misrecognitions? Critical theorists argue that this kind of
subject—the subject ready and willing to enter into the wage-
labor contract—is produced through the bourgeois family.63
Eerily, while revising this article in Liverpool—and during one of the
worst credit crises in capitalism’s history—I can watch a commercial for
Barclay’s Bank that begs viewers to have faith that if they put their money
in the bank it will grow, this time accompanied by a computer-generated
image of someone planting a pound coin in the ground, which then
grows into a money tree. The technology behind the commercials may
have undergone a “revolutionary” change, but the symbolism remains
the same. For an analysis of such beliefs at the periphery of the capitalist
system, see Taussig (1980).
62. A theory of the bourgeois subject is not a theory of class con-
sciousness. In Marxian theory, the different positions of capitalists and
workers in the labor contract means that the two classes have antagonistic
interests, the consciousness of which will eventually lead to violent con-
flict. The presumption of equality in the labor contract, however, pretends
that both parties are similar kinds of subjects. Members of both classes
traffic in alienated labor power and fetishize commodities, and most
crudely one could say that these actions define one kind of bourgeois
subject (even as they define two different classes). According to Žižek
and Deleuze and Guattari, this subject is a “desiring” subject that is
produced through the Oedipal drama of the bourgeois family.
63. There has been a good deal of research by feminist scholars on
the relationship between the bourgeois family and capitalism, although
this research has largely focused on the relationship between husbands
and wives. The rise of capitalism led to the breakdown of peasant and
aristocratic households and the emergence of a new family form. The
class system, combined with a sexual division of labor, transformed re-
lations within and between families. Capitalism separates the workplace
from the household, production from consumption, and labor from plea-
sure. As Michèle Barrett (1988:221) noted, this kind of household can
play a critical role in absorbing surplus production. Reviewing recent
debates among feminist theorists and sociologists, Silverman concludes
that the ideology of the family not only has economic determinants but
also has a critical function within capitalism (Silverman 1992:49; see also
Kuhn 1978:57–58; McDonough and Harrison 1978:28). This argument
does not assume or require that all families match the bourgeois ideal.
Barrett distinguishes between “households,” which can be organized in
a variety of ways, and “familial ideology,” which represents the ideal of
63
According to bourgeois ideology, the household is the
proper place for sex and the production of children. Freud’s
insight was that independent of whatever virtues parents con-
sciously seek to instill in their children, it is the very structure
of the household, the way that it triangulates desires, that
produces “the subject.” Although Freud was relatively unin-
terested in capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari and Žižek find
in psychoanalytic theory the link between the kind of subject
produced by the bourgeois family and the kind of subject
who will experience the labor contract as the foundation of
freedom.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, when capital becomes
productive and money becomes the primary way through
which social relations are ordered, the formerly coded “flows”
that connected people and objects in highly specific ways
become “decoded.” Crude examples of such decoding include
the beliefs that “everything has a price,” that people will do
anything if offered enough money, and, more commonly, that
“my money is as good as anyone else’s” (i.e., money does not
care whether someone is high- or low-born, cultivated or
uncultivated).
To all appearances, the bourgeois family is clearly set off
from this uncoded world: “There ensues a privatization of
the family according to which the family ceases to give its
social form to economic reproduction: it is as though dis-
invested, placed outside the [social] field” (Deleuze and Guat-
tari 1983:263). Within the privatized family, mothers, fathers,
brothers, and sisters are, or appear to be, simply themselves.
In fact, they provide the interior limit to the utter decoding
of all flows. The Oedipal triangle of “mommy-daddy-me” sets
the stage for castration dramas through which desire comes
to be experienced not as productive but as a lack. “We are
all little colonies and it is Oedipus that colonizes us” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1983:265).
Whereas Freud used the language of myth to understand
this process (thus identifying one family’s personal drama as
archetypical of all families), Lacan seeks instead to describe
an abstract structure common to such families. He thus ex-
plains desire-as-lack by describing the subject, the “I,” not as
an identity but as a position within this structure. Specifically,
it is a location situated between two registers that are alien
to one’s self: the Real (which, by definition, has not yet entered
and perhaps can never enter into the Symbolic and is thus
unavailable to one’s consciousness) and the Symbolic (the
entire cultural world that exists through the words and deeds
of others but is introduced to the subject, and is for Lacan
signified, by “the name of the father”). One may think of this
location as empty, but Lacan’s argument is that it is precisely
this empty location that defines the subject.
a given class (Barrett 1988:199). According to Barrett, this ideology reflects
not necessarily a specifically capitalist logic but rather the ideals of an
emerging bourgeoisie that was seeking to establish its social and cultural
dominance over other classes (Barrett 1988:202–203; see also Foreman
1977; Zaretsky 1976).
 64
Put another way, the subject is constituted through lack:
it is what is neither Real nor Symbolic. This lack defines the
subject as a desiring subject. According to Lacan, there is
always some portion of the Real that cannot enter into the
Symbolic and that anchors this lack. But one can desire only
what one can imagine. For example, at first this desire may
simply be for milk. As the child grows and develops an image
of herself as a person, as a desiring subject, she will realize
that her mother is not just a source of milk but is another
desiring subject, and the girl may come to desire her mother—
or, more precisely, to desire being desired by one’s mother.
And she will discover that her mother has other desires. The
child’s desire will turn toward other objects, drawn from a
repertoire of objects available in her culture. But none will
ever satisfy her. None of them can. No object taken from that
“Other” that is the Symbolic can ever fill the lack that exists
because of that “Other” that is the Real.64
That portion of the Real that is cut off from one’s self is,
according to Lacan, what Freud meant (in the terms of his
Oedipal myth) by “castration.” Put another way, some portion
of the Real that cannot be symbolized is what is “left over”
(reste) from the process of symbolization. Lacan refers to this
“left-over” as surplus—specifically a surplus pleasure (plus-
de-jouir), meaning a pleasure that one cannot use. Lacan also
calls this jouissance (a pun on jouis-sense, “enjoyment-in-
sense” or “enjoy-meant”). A simple example of this may be
the pleasure some people experience when shopping, espe-
cially upon entering a supermarket or department store where
one is surrounded by objects that one cannot purchase in fact
but could purchase in fantasy (when I was growing up, this
image was a common sign of the superiority of capitalism
over communism in popular American culture; in the film
Moscow on the Hudson, the overwhelming—i.e., “surplus”—
bounty of a supermarket causes the protagonist, a Soviet de-
fector, to faint). Žižek refers to this surplus pleasure as a “hard
kernel” of the Real that exerts an obscure and uncontrollable
force on society. All societies must find some way to channel
this force, but most cannot. It is thus fundamentally desta-
bilizing.
In capitalism, however, the lack that defines the desiring
subject is masked by the lack created when one sells off one’s
64. In his seminar of 1959–1960, Lacan drew on a distinction Freud
made between das ding, that “thing” that belongs to the unconscious
and is unrepresentable, and die sache, the symbolic representation of
something (Freud 1960 [1923]). He called attention to das ding as that
object of desire that one believes to be lost, but which, according to
Lacan, one never had in the first place. Objet petit a, on the other hand,
are all those things one actually may have or not have. For Lacan, the
distinction is critical to ethics: “To make oneself the guarantor of the
possibility that a subject will in some way be able to find happiness even
in analysis is a form of fraud. There is absolutely no reason why we
should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream” (Lacan
1992 [1986]:373), the ”bourgeois dream” meaning living in “the service
of goods[.] Private goods, family goods, domestic goods, other goods
that also solicit us, the goods of our trade or our profession, the goods
of the city, etc.” (Lacan 1992 [1986]:372; see Lee 1990:168).
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
own labor power, which one must do if one lacks ownership
of the means of production (Žižek 1989:49). But in bourgeois
ideology, purchasing commodities can fill this lack, so above
all things people desire money (indeed, equating it with free-
dom)—and therefore are willing to work for wages.65 Heiko
Feldner and Fabio Vighi (2010:2) summarize Žižek’s argu-
ment thus: “Capitalist ideology functions by surreptitiously
converting jouissance into value—into something which is
valorised and exchanged.” For Žižek, jouissance is a “hard
kernel” of the Real, a signifier of trauma (the castration ef-
fected by the Symbolic) that constitutes a problem in every
society. He suggests that capitalism is so durable because it
provides (through the exchange of alienated labor power for
fetishized commodities) a salve for the wound of castration.
This model of the subject depends on two elements: first,
a distinction between the registers of the Real and the Sym-
bolic and second, the use of “phallus” and “castration” as
signifiers of desire and lack. I find the first element useful in
analyzing Shuar culture but not the second. For this reason,
I find the work of Deleuze and Guattari especially useful. For
them, “castration” is neither privileged nor the privileged sig-
nifier of the Symbolic. It is the effect of culturally specific
processes. As I understand them, it is capitalism, through the
bourgeois family and specifically the Oedipal drama, that pro-
duces this traumatic wound that transforms desire into a lack
that can never be filled.66 As I read them, it is the Oedipalizing
65. As Marx (1964 [1844]:147–148) put it,
The increase in the quantity of objects is accompanied by an extension
of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every
new product represents a new possibility of mutual swindling and mutual
plundering. Man becomes ever poorer as man, his need for money be-
comes ever greater if he wants to overpower hostile being. The power
of his money declines so to say in inverse proportion to the increase in
the volume of production: that is, his neediness grows as the power of
money increases.
The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the modern
economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces . . .
Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm. Subjectively, this is
partly manifested in that the extension of products and needs falls into
contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, unnatural and
imaginary appetites. Private property does not know how to change crude
need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice, and whim; and no
eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means
to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favor
for himself than does the industrial eunuch—the producer—in order to
charm the golden birds out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbors
in Christ. He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved
fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid
appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses—all so that he can then
demand the cash for this service of love.
66. Žižek (1989:50) criticizes Marxism for never having come to terms
with this trauma. Indeed, his 1989 work provides an interesting contrast
to Deleuze and Guattari’s 1983 work, originally published in 1972. De-
leuze and Guattari’s work, while haunted by the failure of Leninism, is
relentlessly critical of capitalism; Žižek’s work, while never accepting the
superiority of capitalism, relentlessly mocks Leninism. I wonder whether
this has something to do with the fact that the former was published in
the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre, and the pub-
lication of the Pentagon Papers (and of course after France lost its war
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
family that solves a problem in the capitalist mode of pro-
duction.
I consider Deleuze and Guattari’s historicization of the Oe-
dipal complex and castration anxiety a significant advance
that helps us better understand the difference between bour-
geois societies and societies like that of the Shuar. According
to them, castration anxiety cannot simply be interpreted as
the experience of desire as a lack. It is also the mark of a
relocation of violence in the production of the subject. Here
we see the value of a theory of the subject for Clastres’ model:
it identifies another kind of violence (psychic rather than
political, in the strict sense) on which the command-obedi-
ence structure of the bourgeois state depends.
For Deleuze and Guattari, one of the pivotal case studies
manifesting Freud’s complicity with this Oedipal colonialism
is “A Child is Being Beaten” (Freud 1955 [1919]), which
describes a fantasy, often accompanied by masturbation, that
an indefinite number of children of undetermined sex are
being beaten by someone (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:61).
According to Freud’s patients, this fantasy involves a series
of three displaced identifications through which children work
through their Oedipal dramas.67 It begins with an identifi-
cation with the child being beaten and ends with an identi-
fication with the father who is beating the child. Freud’s point
is not that everyone is a sadomasochist; rather, the dynamics
of the Oedipal triangle makes it likely that children will have
both sadistic and masochistic fantasies as they negotiate the
passage from childhood to adulthood.
As Deleuze and Guattari point out, none of Freud’s patients
describes the second fantasy. It is Freud’s construction, meant
to help him make sense of the relationship between the first
and third fantasies (and how—within the fantasy—boys and
girls swap positions). Rather than take this as an accurate
account of some patients’ dreams, Deleuze and Guattari take
it as revealing a dynamic inherent in the Oedipal triangle: the
internalization of sadistic fantasies (when one identifies with
the castrating father) and masochistic fantasies (when one
experiences violence as a substitute for, and thus a form of,
love). It thus exemplifies psychoanalytic theory’s place in
bourgeois ideology.
This is a disturbing and provocative analysis, but I think
that it fills an important gap in Žižek’s analysis of capitalism
because it shows how pleasure (e.g., in constant shopping
sprees) can also express a kind of violence and how a violation
in Vietnam), whereas the latter was published after Gorbachev announced
that all Soviet troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan and an-
nounced his policy of perestroika (although more immediately, Žižek left
the Communist Party of Slovenia following the JBTZ [i.e., Ljubljana]
trial in 1988).
67. In the first fantasy, the father beats a sibling; since the sibling is
a rival for the father’s affections, the beating signifies the father’s love
for the patient. In the second fantasy, the father beats his daughter as
punishment for her incestuous desires, although this beating is also a
substitute for the father’s love and thus pleasurable. In the third fantasy,
the patient enjoys watching a father-substitute beat other children, thus
combining sadistic form with masochistic pleasure.
65
(e.g., going to work) can be experienced as a kind of pleasure.
Castration may be a metaphor, but metaphors such as these
are played out through fantasies, repressed desires, or dreams,
where the violence one experiences is, at that moment, real.
Cynics may say that the threat of violence is always present
in bourgeois societies, while the faithful believe that democ-
racy ensures the consent of the governed. The fact remains
that bourgeois states need subjects who do not require the
constant and arbitrary exercise of brute force to be obedient.
Moreover, they need subjects who can serve as agents of the
violence of the state (a necessity if, as Weber stated, the state
is to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force).
For Deleuze and Guattari, the violence that is both symbolic
and terrifying exists in the dreams of children, and it is this
combination of symbolism and violence that produces bour-
geois subjects:
Simultaneously the boys are beaten-initiated by the teacher
on the little girl’s erotic stage (seeing machine), and obtain
satisfaction in a masochistic fantasy involving the mother
(anal-machine). The result is that the boys are able to see
only by becoming little girls, and the girls cannot experience
the pleasure of punishment except by becoming little boys.
It is a whole chorus, a montage: back in the village after a
raid in Vietnam, in the presence of their weeping sisters,
the filthy Marines are beaten by their instructor, on whose
knees the mommy is seated, and they have orgasms for
having been so evil, for having tortured so well. It’s so bad,
but also so good! (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:61)
Perhaps one must have read The Heart of Darkness (or have
seen Full Metal Jacket) and must remember the My Lai Mas-
sacre to understand their point (our fantasies have the greatest
force when they are inexplicable, and they thrive when we
forget our own history).
The point, for this essay, is that bourgeois subjects do not
make great warriors. Even after going through training that
is designed to desensitize and habituate themselves to the act
of killing, conscripts become generally reluctant killers. What
traumatized American soldiers the most during WWII was
not the fear of being killed: “Fear of killing, rather than fear
of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure”
(S. L. A. Marshall, quoted in Silverman 1992:63, emphasis in
original)—this is the form in which subjects of the state strug-
gle against the state. When converted into an occupying force,
bourgeois soldiers often end up questioning their identity as
civilized men and women. Both situations cause tremendous
stress. As this essay was being revised, Time reported on the
difficulties in “bringing relief to thousands of damaged sol-
diers”: “Army troops, TIME has learned, are seeking mental
help more than 100,000 times a month. That figure reflects
a growth of more than 75% from the final months of 2006
to the final months of ‘09, according to Army data” (Thomp-
son 2010:22).
What is remarkable in these accounts is not the terror of
being shot at or being a constant target but the trauma of
 66
being made a killer. I believe that this is because—and in stark
contrast to men in “societies against the state,” such as the
Shuar—these soldiers are not killing for their own jouissance,
but for the pleasure of their commanders, of the state. By
literally emasculating others, under the orders or in the in-
terests of the state, they are simultaneously enacting their own
symbolic emasculation.
Society against the State. “In a democratic order,” Žižek (1989:
147) writes, “sovereignty lies in the People.” There is one
serious danger in such a situation: “But what is the People if
not, precisely, the collection of the subjects of power?” This
is how he analyzes the totalitarian states that plagued the
twentieth century, principally Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s
Soviet Union. The ideology of these regimes (and the fact
that they, like many other dictatorships, employed the device
of elections) points to a fatal problem in Rousseau’s theory
of democracy: the concept of “the People.” Žižek (1989:147)
concludes that “the Lacanian definition of democracy would
then be: a socio-political order in which the People do not
exist—do not exist as a unity, embodied in their unique rep-
resentative.” What better way to characterize the pre-Feder-
ation Shuar? What I have tried to demonstrate in this essay
is how certain beliefs about plant-granting visions play a cen-
tral role in sustaining such a society.
Žižek insists that entry into the Symbolic creates a “hard
kernel” of leftover or surplus Real that makes trouble for every
society except capitalist ones, where it is harnessed to “solve”
the very problems it creates through constant revolutions (in
the means of production). This occurs not only through the
intervention of the Symbolic as such but also through a spe-
cific symbolic order based on the labor contract, through
which the mutual recognition of capitalist and worker is the
means by which workers give up their labor power to the
capitalist. This produces surplus value, which is used to pro-
duce the commodities that workers buy in an impossible
attempt to fill the void.
I propose that the Shuar have found their own solution to
this problem, a solution that can be expressed as the “mirror
image” of capitalism: the Shuar enter a particular kind of
Imaginary based on plant-granted visions, where the mutual
recognition of the arútam wakán′ and the Shuar is the means
by which the vision gives up some portion of its power to
be incorporated into the individual Shuar. This produces a
jouissance that Shuar experience as a drive to kill, a drive that
I do not even try to understand and a kind of killer that I
do not think bears comparison to any kind produced in bour-
geois society.
Here we see the value of a theory of the subject for Clastres’
model of societies against the state. If, as Lacan suggested, all
psychic economies are threatened by a surplus of pleasure
(jouissance), Shuar managed this by giving up their share of
the Real (when naming their arútam and losing its force on
the eve of a raid) in return for the pleasure of killing (or
trying to kill) another. Shuar thus used jouissance to create a
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
system without internal limits. Whenever power threatened
to concentrate within Shuar society, feuding threatened to kill
the most powerful men or send the most powerful men into
war, where they could be killed.
Violence was thus as central to pre-Federation society as it
is to the state, but in significantly different ways. For Shuar,
the arútam created a desire to kill, but in ways that subvert
the Symbolic. Power was derived not from a coordination of
the Imaginary and the Symbolic (whether it be “God” or “the
People”) but rather from a coordination of the Imaginary and
the Real. It was the intrusion of the Real into the individual’s
Imaginary that created the kakáram. Clear, truthful speech
occurred in the register of the Symbolic, but I believe that it
should be understood as an index of that “hard kernel” of
the Real that for the kakáram was not traumatic but a form
of jouissance. This jouissance perhaps should be viewed not
as surplus pleasure but as surplus power. This power could
never take the form of a command-obedience relationship:
killing someone makes it impossible to command them; death
dissipates surplus power. No state can form through this kind
of violence.
Shuar visions involve a recognition that occurs in both the
Real and the Imaginary. This is not a break with the Real.
On the contrary, some part of the Real, in the form of the
force of the arútam, adheres to the Shuar subject. The ineffable
plays such an important role in Shuar power because it marks
the intrusion of the Real into real life. There were, no doubt,
attempts to bring the Real directly into the Symbolic, but, I
propose, Shuar beliefs about visionary knowledge and power
doomed such attempts to failure. In Clastrean terms, the point
at which speech and violence actually met, with the speaking
of the name of the arútam on the eve of a raid for Shuar,
was the point where this excess of power dissipated (i.e., the
arútam departed the body). Violence and speech were brought
as close as possible, but the resulting discharge, the killing of
another, could be indexed by the reputation of the killer but
not transformed into an enduring command-obedience chain.
No state can form through this kind of speech.
Colonialism. Among anthropologists, Michael Taussig popu-
larized the idea of the “space of death” in his work on the
inhabitants of Putumayo, Colombia. As he described it, “The
space of death is crucial to the creation of meaning and con-
sciousness, . . . We may think of the space of death as a
threshold, yet it is a wide space whose breadth offers positions
of advance as well as of extinction” (Taussig 1984:467). For
Taussig, the space of death accurately and precisely names the
“room without a number” in which dissident Argentine-Jew-
ish newspaper publisher Jacobo Timerman was tortured in
1977. Taussig is especially concerned with “cultures of terror,”
those spaces of death “based on and nourished by silence and
myth in which the fanatical stress on the mysterious side of
the mysterious flourishes by means of rumor and fantasy
woven in a dense web of magical realism” (Taussig 1984:469).
This is the state where violence punches through speech, per-
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
haps, one might say, where the state reaches its outer limit
(perhaps most recently expressed for Americans in images
from Abu Ghraib).
In a way, this essay is my attempt to comprehend what the
“space of death” might have been like in a “society against
the state.” Before the founding of the Federation, Shuar lived
in a world in which “men sleep with their guns at their sides,
rarely go more than a few hundred yards from their houses
without weapons, and when visiting another family, expect
their hostess to sample the beer, before she serves it, to prove
it is not poisoned” (Harner 1984:186). I believe that Taylor’s
(1993:666) emphasis on “existential ‘health’” and the “mean-
ingful life-course in accordance with the epic values typical
of a warrior culture” has an important critical function in
contrasting the power and freedom granted by the arútam
vision with the power and freedom granted by the wage-labor
contract. But I am concerned that it can be read to roman-
ticize the conflict-ridden lives of Shuar.
Lacan understood that “thou art that” (where his patients
entered their own space of death) could not stand for a com-
pleted, integrated, or fulfilled identity. It is reported that many
of Lacan’s patients could not understand this and that they
often stormed out of his analytic sessions in anger. Shuar
exited the space of their visions not with a desire to kill their
arútam but with “a tremendous desire to kill” somebody (Har-
ner 1984:139). Whom one killed, exactly, depended on the
tricky terrain of language; the detailed accounts of enmities
learned from childhood, the ability to manipulate kinship
relations, the luck, good or ill, of whom one met on the path.
This was a world in which, no matter how powerful one was,
one’s identity was always subject to renegotiation. I suggest
that the desire to kill, felt after acquiring an arútam, was an
index of a Shuar’s awareness that power points toward the
space of death and that destiny is a state not of grace but of
war (or, as Clastres might have put it, that Hobbes’s state of
war, an ongoing war against the leviathan, is the only state
of grace).
I have tried not to minimize the violence that, to be honest,
still threads through Shuar society. This violence, unleashed
against several Spanish towns in a series of uprisings between
1579 and 1599, resulted in the death of most of the Spaniards
and the abandonment of all but one of the towns (whose
survivors relocated). “In this manner, the territory of the
Jı́varo was left free of Spanish presence [and] the Jivaroan-
speaking peoples succeeded in maintaining a high level of
autonomy until well into the twentieth century” (Santos-Gra-
nero 1992:215–220).68
Since Ecuadorians returned to settle the Amazonian region
in the early twentieth century, there have been no reports of
68. These towns were established between 1546 and 1576 by settlers
to whom the crown had granted the right to exploit Indian laborers to
extract gold from local placer mines. Although the warriors were pre-
dominantly Jı́varoan, they were supported by Andean Indians, who had
been relocated to the Amazonian region, as well as some disaffected
mestizos.
67
organized violence by Shuar against settlers.69 This “space of
death,” however, is still an active presence among the Agu-
aruna in Peru. As Shane Greene has noted, plant-granted
visions are still “the first step” toward becoming a kakáram
(Greene 2009:81). Bikut, the legendary hero whom many
Aguaruna liken to Jesus, Buddha, and Socrates, is the em-
bodiment of the entry of the space of death into the ordinary
world. A young man who kept ingesting maı́kua (in Agu-
aruna, baikua) “in search of more and more powerful visions,”
at one point he stood up and declared that he had been
transformed into Bikut. “He was consumed by aggression, so
much that his family was forced to restrain him in the house
by tying him to his stool. Bikut’s baikua-induced dementia
was, however, also the source of a unique and unbeatable
warrior spirit” (Greene 2009:92). In stark contrast to Socrates,
who drank hemlock in order to die, Bikut drank baikua in
order to kill.
Greene opens his ethnography with a conversation between
an elder warrior and a bilingual teacher (who had founded
one of the four oldest regional indigenous organizations) over
the difference between visionary knowledge and textual
knowledge. Perhaps because no single Aguaruna organization
has the legitimacy and hegemony of the Shuar Federation
(and, as Greene points out, there are more than a dozen
different Aguaruna organizations), Aguaruna warriors can still
act as leaders at critical moments.70 This was the case in 1979,
when a group of warriors waited in the forest while another
group peacefully occupied the unauthorized camp of film
director Werner Herzog (the peaceful action succeeded in
ejecting Herzog and his crew from Aguaruna territory, but
the warriors later burned the camp as an outlet for their
aggression [Greene 2009:186–187]). In January 2002, more
than 100 warriors massed and attacked a community of set-
tlers from the Andes, leaving 15 colonists dead. Greene re-
marks that he could not “even fathom the kind of violence
69. The growing threat of oil exploitation is leading to an escalation
of conflict that recently erupted into violence that appears to have been
spontaneous. In January 2009, the Ecuadorian Congress passed legislation
allowing companies to prospect on communal and indigenous land, with
other provisions specifically meant to encourage foreign mining in the
Amazonian region as well as the Andes, sparking nationwide protests
(Dosh and Kligerman 2009). In late September, approximately 500 Shuar
blockaded the highway connecting Morona Santiago to the rest of the
country, and they engaged the National Police on September 30. At a
press conference later that night, president Rafael Correa reported that
“Tremendously violent groups armed with shotguns and rifles waited for
police and met them with gunshots.” According to different reports,
between 35 and 40 police were wounded, one Shuar was killed (it is
unclear whether he was intentionally killed and who shot him), and 11
more were wounded.
70. In addition to the Shuar Federation, there is also an association
of Shuar founded by evangelical Christian missionaries Frank and Marie
Drown in the 1960s, an organization of Shuar centros that broke away
contentiously from the Federation, and an organization of Achuar centros
that separated amicably from the Federation. These other organizations
are all considerably smaller than the Federation; today their leaders seek
to maintain amicable relations and to coordinate their activities.
 68
that these Aguaruna men decided to use” (Greene 2009:152).
At one point during my dissertation fieldwork, Euro-Ecua-
dorian settlers expressed real fear of a violent Shuar uprising.
That the violence of the arútam can leave the vision to create
in the ordinary world such a space of death is indeed terri-
fying, but I suspect that what makes this so unfathomable to
Greene is that this potentiality is not terrifying to warriors.
So I think that it is a mistake to characterize the Shuar
space of death as a culture of terror. Terror, I have concluded,
belongs to the state because states have an existential depen-
dence on a belief in secure boundaries. But the self-destruc-
tion of paranoid military dictatorships in post-Perón (Isabel),
post-Perón (Juan) Argentina was just one example of the state
at its limits. States sometimes reach their paranoid limit when
they enter into spaces where they see no other states to mirror
back to them an acceptable self-image. For Taussig, Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is paradigmatic, but so are the
Americas: “The space of death is one of the crucial spaces
where Indian, African, and white gave birth to the New
World” (Taussig 1984:468). Taussig’s study centers on the
rubber-gathering areas and stations along the Putumayo River
between 1900 and 1912 and the survivors of that little ho-
locaust. For colonialism marks a frontier for societies against
the state, too; it is where states come face-to-face with their
own nightmare.
In the Amazon, capitalist culture, in which people believe
that their desires are infinite and that money can buy anything
(in other words, that people will do anything for money, if
offered enough of it), encounters cultures in which desires
are coded and canalized, where people regularly feel free to
ask for what they want of another and do as they please.
When the British Parliamentary Select Committee on Putu-
mayo asked Peruvian rubber magnate and politician Julio
César Arana what he meant when he said the Indians did not
wish to be civilized and indeed were cannibals, he replied,
“What I mean by that is that they did not admit of exchange,
or anybody to do business with them—Whites, for example”
(quoted in Taussig 1984:482). Perhaps an encounter with this
carefree lack of desire fomented in Arana and others un-
manageable anxieties about their own excessive desires. The
absence of Indian desire reveals that bourgeois desire is a
presence, after all.71
The province now called Morona Santiago illustrates a dif-
ferent colonialist dynamic. It lacked rubber trees to exploit,
and although people have long suspected that there are oil
71. I think this is why Arana interprets this as a sign of cannibalism:
he believes himself to have value only insofar as others desire the goods
he has to sell. If people do not want what he has to sell, he has no value.
One who feels truly worthless might kill oneself, put oneself in a position
to be killed (see Harner 1984:181–182), or—as I think may be the case
here—fantasize one’s own obliteration. Moreover, as Gerald Sider (1987)
has suggested, cannibalism can function as a metaphor for violent in-
corporation, and white fears might reflect the projection, onto Indians,
of a desire to incorporate Indians into an economy controlled by whites,
in coded form.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
deposits under Shuar territory, there was no serious interest
in exploring for and extracting it until recently. But after the
1941 war, Shuar were suddenly located on the contested bor-
der with Peru. Under these conditions, Ecuadorians did not
rely on the exorbitant violence of the rubber boom. It tried
to use relatively peaceful means to convert Shuar into bour-
geois subjects. Put another way, instead of mobilizing the
state’s space of death to colonize natives, the state relied on
capitalism’s libidinal economy to colonize and pacify the
Shuar space of death.
Today, headhunting is illegal, and many Shuar prefer to
rely on the Shuar Federation or Ecuadorian courts, rather
than feuding, to resolve conflicts. But Shuar are paying a price
for peace. One example is how the “pacification” of the Shuar
has turned out to mean the appropriation of Shuar violence
by the state, which has embraced an image of Shuar as war-
riors. Thus, in the Cenepa War (1995–1996), special brigades
of Shuar soldiers named “Arútam” and “Iwia” fought, not
against Achuar, but against Peruvians.72
While Shuar violence has been subordinated to the direc-
tives of the state, Shuar speech is being subordinated to au-
thorized publications. The Shuar Federation cares more about
the recognition of the state than it does about the recognition
of arútams. In the process, it has embraced an “ideology of
dependence and hierarchical order [that is] is in sharp con-
trast to the pre-Federation ideology of individual autonomy
and balance of power” (Hendricks 1988:224). The Federation
thus realigns Shuar agency to promote their incorporation
into a class-stratified society. It claims to defend Shuar culture,
but through publishing books about Shuar myth and ritual
rather than through the quest for plant-granted visions or
warfare. In this context, it is not surprising that many Shuar
talk openly about their visions; they have been colonized by
speech—not the speech of the kakáram, but the speech of the
literate (see Hendricks 1988).
This move toward literacy began as the project of Salesian
missionaries. Elmer Miller (1970) called attention to the way
that Christian missionaries in South America were subverting
native belief in the power of visions as they revealed the power
of the written word. The Salesians have dedicated themselves
to transcribing Shuar myths and rituals, to enlisting young
Shuar in this project, and to using written accounts of Shuar
beliefs and practices, including accounts of visions, in their
schools (see Boster 2003). But attempts to preserve indigenous
culture through the production of written texts may thus have
unintended consequences. Descola tells a moving story in
which a Christian missionary, having committed the words
to paper, performed a flawless aujmatin (visiting speech) be-
72. Almost every Shuar with whom I spoke embraced the new role
of the Shuar in the Ecuadorian military. For leaders of the Federation,
this role is evidence of Shuar patriotism, creating a debt that the state
must repay through its support of the Federation (Brysk 2000:142). Many
members of the Federation, however, speak of the Cenepa War not as a
victory for Ecuador but as a victory of the Shuar and declare that it was
they who were appropriating Ecuadorian violence.
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
fore an Achuar kakáram. Rather than feeling honored, or
comforted to know of a new means for reproducing his cul-
ture, the old man was saddened by the realization that writing-
power had made vision-power obsolete (Descola 1996:353–
356).
Descola’s informant recognized the power of the priest be-
cause the priest had succeeded in reproducing an Achuar
ritual so accurately. I suspect that priests convinced large
numbers of Shuar and Achuar of the authenticity of their
claims to truth and power because they exhibited some of
the virtues of the kakáram—they were articulate and char-
ismatic speakers and generous in their gifts of manufactured
goods. But other missionaries had tried to convert Shuar in
the past and failed. There must be another reason why the
Shuar, who had been famous for resisting the power of the
state even from Inka times, succumbed so quickly to state-
sponsored efforts to pacify and evangelize them in the mid-
twentieth century.
My final speculation is that this has to do with some of
the features of capitalism to which Marx (especially in Žižek’s
reading) called attention and that distinguish it and liberal
states from tributary empires like the Inka and the Spaniards.
The labor contract promises the two things that Shuar valued
most: power and freedom. That it involves the alienation of
one’s labor power would not necessarily have troubled Shuar,
who were used to the exchange of their arútam powers or
the exercise of violence during raids. I suggest that the first
generation of Shuar who had regular contact with settlers in
the twentieth century saw that the settlers who had access to
money were able to purchase a seemingly endless variety of
manufactured goods. They need not have felt any malaise,
and all my informants agree that their grandparents and par-
ents continued to seek the powers available only through
plant-granted visions. But money must have appeared to them
to be a new kind of desirable power.
How did their children make sense of this new world? One
informant, who was born 12 years before the founding of the
Federation, told me,
The food settlers eat, they bring from elsewhere, they bring
from outside, and it is a good food, no? It is better than
the papachina [probably the taro corm] that we cultivate
and that did not have any value. They did not eat the pa-
pachina while I did eat rice, but there was the sense of shame
because I did not have money. I don’t have money, because
money has to do with it, if I had had money or my parents,
we would eat rice, the same as them. If you have money it
has value and if you don’t have to spend any money it
doesn’t have any value; that is it, more or less.
A generation of Shuar understood commodity fetishism be-
fore they understood what a life of wage labor entails.
Shuar also routinely complain about the racism that they
experienced as children, from Ecuadorian teachers. Might it
be that it was through this entry into a different (Hispanic)
Symbolic that Shuar children experienced a kind of “castra-
69
tion,” one experienced as a lack that could be filled only
through the pursuit of expensive commodities? Racist teachers
are like the arútam wakán′ in that they are supposed to grant
power, but their message of the Symbolic—Lacan’s “thou art
not”—is not emancipating but demeaning. What most Shuar
learn at mission schools and from observing settlers is that
one can have the speech of the other but not its power; this
is what Oedipalization is all about. The missionary and the
settler are the vanguards of state expansion. At stake are two
radically contrasting regimes of recognition: for Shuar, the
real, the essence, is internal. This means that they cannot
recognize whether or not a Shuar possesses an arútam; they
can only infer as much through its effects. Ecuadorians, on
the other hand, recognize their inferiors immediately; their
schema of essences is superficial, immediately recognizable in
the ordinary world. Ecuadorian racism gives the settlers an
identity that binds them to the state and its laws of language,
but this racism, in turn, gives the Shuar an image of him- or
herself as marginal.
Simultaneously, the Shuar Federation (and Ecuadorian laws
considering inheritance) is creating “the name of the father”
through local patrilineages (Rubenstein 2002:240). Although
many households still function in many ways as they used
to, as mobile and ultimately ephemeral loci in fluid social
networks, Shuar territory is being reinscribed through the
creation of landing strips and, more importantly, roads. Dif-
ferent communities have radically different levels of access to
market towns, which determines what portion of land can be
devoted to the production of commodities. While actual
household structure remains fluid, a familial ideology is being
instilled in Shuar, one that coordinates the sexual division of
labor with the emerging class system.
Following Žižek and Deleuze and Guattari, I believe that
the myth of a contract that is between equals and freely en-
tered into is the guise through which one becomes complicit
in one’s own symbolic emasculation. To be clear, I am arguing
for a certain kind of equivalence between the murders exe-
cuted by Aguaruna warriors against poor settlers that Greene
(2009:152) reports and the contract that a capitalist enters
into with a worker or the state enters into with its subjects.
The significant difference is not that Aguaruna violence is
literal and the violence of these contracts is metaphorical. It
is the transformation of the violence from literal to symbolic
that is precisely what makes the key difference possible, that
is, the reversal of the direction of violence from being against
others to being against one’s self. In both cases the victims
are innocent, and for me, the importance of the theoretical
apparatus of this essay (Lacan, Clastres, etc.) is how they help
me conceive of that unoccupiable locus from which both
forms of violence are equally appalling and equally unfath-
omable but still equal. For Shuar, I believe that Ecuadorian
colonialism was the process through which, at some specific
point (which, pace Zeno, cannot be isolated analytically), they
momentarily came to occupy this locus, where one system of
violence could be exchanged for the other.
 70
Shuar today exhibit a variety of attitudes toward the diverse
forms of power in their world. Older Shuar often freely talk
about the plant-granted visions of their youth, perhaps be-
cause they long ago traded in the value of the vision for the
value of the written word, probably because they believe that
the days of feuding and warfare are behind them and do not
fear the loss of an arútam power. Many younger Shuar seek
as much formal education as possible, hoping that textual
knowledge will bring them power (including, many say, the
power to help their communities). Many feel that they have
no choice but to sell the timber on their land or seek wage-
paying jobs in order to feed and clothe their own children.
Some question the value of plant-granted visions and other
rituals practiced by their parents. And others are profoundly
disturbed by the kind of power that comes with literacy and
money, because they are not convinced that it will bring them
either power or freedom.
Ironically, at the same time that the Shuar Federation se-
cures the recognition of the Ecuadorian state and, moreover,
produces more and more written accounts of Shuar myth and
ritual, more and more Shuar express an anxiety that they are
losing their culture (see Rival 1997 on a similar tension among
the Ecuadorian Huaorani). Their world has changed, but it
continues to be one of deception and misrecognition. I know
several Shuar who have continued to seek plant-granted vi-
sions or say that they will. And for some, there is still a great
deal at stake in secrecy.
The End of Analysis
Descola remarks on the profound identity crisis of the old
kakáram when he encountered the power of writing; this is
a pain that is echoed when my informants relate to me stories
of their experiences at mission schools (Descola 1996:353–
356; see Lyons 2001, MacCormack 1991, and Orta 2004 for
discussions of the dynamic between visionary, textual, and
oral sources or forms of knowledge in indigenous-missionary
relations in the Andes). Descola’s larger point, that what we
literati imagine to be a positive form of recognition may in
fact be devastating to Amerindian culture, is one of the
thoughts motivating this essay.73 Thus, when I crouch forward,
73. Analyzing indigenous adaptations of missionary and other NGO
technologies, Stephen Hugh-Jones argues that the popularity of the books
published through the Coleção Narradores Indı́genas do Alto Rio Negro
among Tukanoans reflects a history of objectifying their culture in ma-
terial form. He further suggests that, in contrast, the Kayapo affinity for
video reflects their history of ritualized political performances (Hugh-
Jones 2010). I would argue that the Shuar equivalent would not be the
Mundo Shuar series of books published by the Salesians, but rather Radio
Arutam, also established by the Salesians. Although many Shuar possess
a copy or two of a Mundo Shuar book, I never saw any give them the
importance that Tukanoans give the ethnographies about them. All Shuar,
however, listen to (and on occasion broadcast a message through) their
radio station, and it plays an important role in their ethnic (or national)
consciousness. Following Hugh-Jones’s argument, I would suggest that
this reflects a prior history of political expression through speech.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
pen and notepad in hand, only to hear an informant tell me
that her vision is a secret, I do not perceive an obstacle to
my research but rather a social fact that, in this context, is
also an act of resistance against colonialism. I also perceive
an invitation to reflect on those bits of a culture the impor-
tance of which lies in their not being shared.
Shuar understand that mutual acknowledgment between
people is superficial and fleeting. As Taylor points out, “As
in any competitive social structure, the hierarchy of individ-
uals is very unstable and their relative positions are constantly
shifting” (Taylor 2007:151). An ally, even a relative, today may
become an enemy tomorrow.74 Shuar tell me that it is their
power-granting visions that provide them with the resources
to negotiate this shifting terrain. I would like to suggest that,
for Shuar, visions play the role that Lacan hoped analysis could
play for his patients. Visions interrupt discourse and take a
Shuar to “the ecstatic limit of ‘Thou art that’ where the cipher
of his mortal destiny is revealed to him” (Lacan 2006 [1949]:
81). But these visions accomplish even more: they bring Shuar
to the point where the true journey begins.
Bob Scholte argued that “the possibility of communicative
interaction is the irreducible epistemological precondition to
any anthropological knowledge whatsoever” (Scholte 1969:
440). Following Lacan, I would suggest that mutual recog-
nition is impossible in the realm of language. But I do not
mean to entirely disavow Adolf Bastian’s principle of the psy-
chic unity of humankind, which Scholte evokes in the quo-
tation above. As my observations on Shuar culture suggest,
Shuar themselves are aware of the impossibility of recognition
in language. An anthropology in the Bastian tradition may
still be possible if we acknowledge this as a situation shared
by all humans. Shuar, after all, do not then give up entirely
on speech. Neither should anthropologists give up on eth-
nography. The speculations in this essay—the chain of ideas
unleashed—sometimes feel as if they could go on forever. Yet
to admit that they are speculations is to call them into ques-
tion. I am not enough of a Lacanian to dismiss them as
illusions. But perhaps one could say that they are surrogates
for (or traces of) some unspeakable kernel of the Real that
an anthropologist encounters through ethnographic field-
work. This kernel fuels a “surplus jouissance” that an an-
thropologist feels when encountering a “society against the
state”—and a desire to return to this kernel, even when pro-
fessional obligations and the academic calendar make this
impossible.75
74. To acknowledge that this applies to anthropologists (and mission-
aries, employees of NGOs, and anyone else who wishes to be an ally of
the Shuar) as well is not easy, but I think that it is necessary if we are
to take Shuar culture seriously.
75. Or, to put this in other terms, to say that there is something about
the Shuar that I cannot tell you about is not to admit to my failure or
limits as an ethnographer. It is rather to suggest that fieldwork is my
maı́kua and Shuar are my arútams (acknowledging their reality and my
tenuous attachment to them does not mean I wish to be a Shuar, but it
does mean that I can no longer view my own world quite so seriously).
And in telling you this, I lose them—and must go back to the field, soon.
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
Unlike traditional psychoanalysts, Lacan rejected the idea
of sessions of uniform (and necessarily arbitrary) duration.
He believed that the act of terminating a session was itself
part of the therapeutic process and had to be determined
strategically by the analyst, whether the result was a session
that lasted 2 hours or one that lasted 2 minutes. I am con-
cerned that ethnographers today recommend ideal periods
for fieldwork that conveniently fit university rules concerning
leave or the dictates of funders (while we strategically forget
the often idiosyncratic practices of earlier fieldworkers). Iron-
ically, I believe that most of my colleagues agree that fieldwork
never ends. Surely, this testifies more to the unpredictability
of social life than to its regularity. We might do well to follow
Lacan’s example and rely less on convention and more on
deliberate experimentation in deciding when one must leave
the field or end an article.
I believe that this would be a necessary component of an
ethnography that seeks to identify precisely those places where
we seek—and, thank God, fail—to “capture” our object of
study. Such places do not signify the failure of anthropology
(or rather, they do signal the failure of an anthropology that
we do well to disavow). On the contrary, I propose that such
places are the closest anyone can come to recognizing the
creative vitality of our informants and their culture. This
place, I argue, is where we recognize that our informants have
their own lives (messy and unpredictable, but also containing
vital self-direction) to live and that ethnography can, and
must, come to an end.
Acknowledgments
This article is based on fieldwork funded by the British Acad-
emy and support from the University of Liverpool. I began
work on this article as a 2008–2009 Fellow at the National
Humanities Center; I am very grateful for their support, es-
pecially Karen Carroll’s editorial expertise. The director, Geoff
Harpham, greeted us with the dare to be daring; I owe much
to his challenge and encouragement. I am very grateful for
Hayder Al-Mohammed’s constant challenges to my reading
of Lacan. I am also thankful for the encouragement and as-
sistance of many people: Mariela Bacigalupo, Jeff Blank, Ni-
colas Bock, Natalia Buitron-Arias, Jessica Brantley, Michael
Brown, Carol Clover, Victor Corva, Magnus Course, Michael
Demers, Kim Fortun, Magnus Pharao Hansen, Geoffrey
Harpham, Freya Jarman-Ivens, Anahid Kassabian, Susan Rob-
erta Katz, Lêda Leitão Martins, Carlos Londoño Sulkin, Barry
Lyons, Elke Mader, Elizabeth Mansfield, Kate Marsh, George
Mentore, Todd Ramón Ochoa, Daniela Peluso, Orin Starn,
and Michael Wood. I must also thank three anonymous re-
viewers for their penetrating and immensely constructive
comments. Finally, I thank my Shuar informants, who forced
me to view secrecy not as the absence of information but as
a positive force.
71
Comments
Oscar Calavia
Departamento de Antropologia, Centro de Filosofia e Ciên-
cias Humanas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropolo-
gia Social Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Campus
Trindade, 88040-970 Florianópolis, Brazil
(occs@uol.com.br). 1 X 11
I deeply sympathize with Professor Rubenstein’s display of
anthropological imagination. Perhaps I should not. Nowa-
days, most anthropologists prefer to focus on Indian voices,
but Rubenstein speaks about Shuar silence. Even more, he
builds a nearly all-embracing discourse on ineffability: visions
and secret visions. Perhaps it is too broad: I will be able to
comment on only a small part of his vast endeavour. Ruben-
stein’s paper warns us against some tacit premises in eth-
nological research and escapes from the sheer dialogue-centric
practice in contemporary anthropology.
He writes it taking some risks. Psychoanalytical wording is
not welcomed in ethnological discussions, since it could em-
bed a leaning toward universalizing the assumptions of the
bourgeois soul. I think that Rubenstein succeeds in using
psychoanalysis as a sort of Western folk knowledge, deeply
rooted in Western practices and even in Western furniture—
mirrors, of course, but also doors, bedrooms, and bath-
rooms—that can be displayed in contrast to another folk
psychology, that of the Shuar. This is healthy, I presume.
Recent ethnological studies of the Amazonian Lowlands in-
clude a large number of inquiries into person-building, and
nobody would doubt that an Amazonian soul is not a unified
device but a confederation of very dissimilar constituents that
have been nurtured at home, inherited from ancestors, earned
in war, and so on. However, I suspect that there is a hidden
trend toward, at least, choosing some of these parts as an
equivalent to the Western Self. Moreover, there is in Brazilian
ethnology a core argument on the worth of alterity over iden-
tity. Identity is, in the end, a limit of alterity: it is the Other,
not the Self, that is the ground of reality, and the Self is no
more than a non-Other. I suspect that these analyses are seen
as interesting but hardly verisimilar and perhaps as a bit ex-
otic. Identity is an element too important in our own tradition
to comprehend other traditions without it. So this socially
constructed Amazonian person is expected to bear a set of
feelings and emotions very akin to ours: otherwise, how could
the empathy so required in ethnographical research be pos-
sible? Especially when dealing with issues as tough as war,
feuds, headhunting, and cannibalism—past and present, ac-
tual or virtual—it is tempting to minimize them, to deny
them as colonial fantasies, or to admit them as a sort of sacred
stuff socially instituted but far away from the individual psy-
che. Rubenstein’s digression through the Lacanian mirror
aims at the very psychological core of identity: dealing with
ayahuasca instead of mirrors, Shuar children do not perceive
 72
themselves as the primary form of the Other and consequently
do not perceive others as replicates of them. Identity can have
little, if any, meaning. That is full of psychological conse-
quences, since, as Rubenstein points out, because they grow
among foreign spirits instead of neighbor selves, Shuar are,
for instance, good warriors. Shuar war was far less lethal than
ours, but also it hurt far less the killer’s soul.
I like Rubenstein’s comparison between ayahuasca and mir-
rors: the Lacanian “mirror,” of course, but above all concrete,
material mirrors. Ayahuasca has been understood as a vision-
enhancing drug, a means of shamanic search, and a sort of
God inside the pantheon in the backwoods. In all these cases,
ayahuasca is generally transparent: through it we can see social
and cosmological patterns that owe very little to ayahuasca
itself. A mirror, on the other hand, is not transparent: a mirror
raises concepts that would be unthinkable without the ma-
terial existence of mirrors. In Western tradition, there is a
large array of optical instruments or devices that show similar
structural value: telescopes and microscopes, of course, but
first and foremost the perspective box, which ordered space
in Renaissance paintings. These perspective representations—
and these vision-enhancing tools—are not part of our every-
day experience unless we live across from a grand plaza or
work in an astronomical observatory. However, they consti-
tute our idea of spatial reality, the very base of our idea of
effective reality. Ayahuasca is, in the Upper Amazon—a place
apparently devoid of any large material culture—a similar
kind of device: it furnishes another world vision away from
daily experience but endowed with a higher cognitive worth.
It grounds art forms and philosophical notions about sociality
and reality. It is a concept-raiser object.
Magnus Course
Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science,
University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a
George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, Scotland (magnus
.course@ed.ac.uk). 13 X 11
This essay certainly cannot be faulted for lack of ambition.
It addresses a core problem, perhaps the core problem, of
anthropology: the ways in which we are different and the
ways in which we are the same. While most recent Amazon-
ianist anthropology has taken the former aspect of the prob-
lem—difference—as an axiomatic truth, Rubenstein draws
our attention back to the issue of what exactly it is that an
anthropologist may or may not share with the people with
whom he or she works. The end result of his investigation is
again a reinsertion of difference, but the path he takes to get
there is, well, different. While I am persuaded by the overall
direction of the essay, I focus my comments here on the one
aspect of Rubenstein’s argument I remain unconvinced by:
the idea that language can be unproblematically located within
the Symbolic.
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
There seem to me to be several problems with this assertion,
most of them stemming from Lacan’s misunderstanding of
the nature of language. For ultimately, Lacan’s approach to
language is nothing more and nothing less than the repro-
duction of one very particular language ideology that takes
language as wholly symbolic. This assumption leads Lacan to
have two problems with language: first, that our words always
turn out to be the words of others and second, that our words
are necessarily divorced from the Real. I am not convinced
that either of these issues corresponds to Shuar anxieties about
language. Let us address each of his concerns in turn.
Amerindian people, like Lacan, frequently locate the force
of language outside of themselves. Yet having never suffered
in the first place from a folk theory of speech as emanating
solely from within, as isomorphic with an individual inten-
tionality, they cannot be said to view the alterity of language
as a problem from which only Lacanian analysis can save
them. The rooting of language in the Other is not as obfus-
cated in Amerindian language ideologies as it is in the lan-
guage ideology of Lacan’s bourgeois patients. Thus, while for
Lacan language is a realm of misrecognition, for Shuar and
other Amerindian peoples language is precisely a realm of
recognition. The alterity of speech is neither surprise nor dis-
appointment but rather the primary source of its value. This
point emerges at several points in the text: to give but one
example, the force of the kakáram’s speech is precisely in the
fact that people correctly recognize that the words spoken are
not his alone but those of the arútam wakán. Shuar seem well
aware that it is not just language itself that is iterable but also
the very subjectivities from which language itself emerges.
This is in some cases a problem and in others an asset, but
in no case can the entirety of language be reduced to a realm
of misrecognition. Amerindian people have never needed
Lacan to tell them that their words were not their own. They
already knew it, embraced it, and indeed, based entire ritual,
social, and cosmological complexes on it (Course, forthcom-
ing).
Yet the Amerindian “recognition” of the alterity of language
that I have highlighted above is itself encompassed by an ever
greater problem. Put simply, most Amerindian people, unlike
French intellectuals, do not locate language solely within the
Symbolic; for them, the relationship between signifier and
signified is anything but arbitrary. Yet while the importance
of word as index and as icon is central to many Amerindian
language ideologies, it has been more or less eradicated from
the Saussurean strand of thinking on language to which both
Lacan (and to a lesser extent, Clastres) subscribe.
The Shuar classification of this world as “symbolic” does
not imply that language is wholly symbolic, for language is
not confined to this world. Witherspoon’s (1977) classic eth-
nography of the Navajo also described an ontology in which
this world is composed solely of “symbols” of inner forms,
yet it is precisely words—nonarbitrary, nonsymbolic words—
that allow Navajo to go beyond the “symbolic” outer world
and access the “true” forms of the inner world. Language, or
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
at least certain kinds of language, seem to fulfill a similar
function among the Shuar. For it is clearly the speech of the
arútam wakán that is at the heart of the visionary experience,
provides the vision seeker with power, and gives the seeker
access to “truth.” I wonder, then, how can speech and vision
be respectively opposed as the realms of misrecognition and
recognition? Put simply, Lacan’s confinement of language
within the Symbolic is actually the universalizing of one very
particular language ideology. Language undeniably has a sym-
bolic aspect, but as the Shuar seem to understand well, it is
also a lot more than that. In different contexts, speech means
different things, and it “means” them in different ways. While
the speech of the everyday may indeed be “false,” it seems
that the speech of the arútam wakán is, quite literally, the
essence of truth and recognition. A Lacanian (mis)under-
standing of language cannot help us here.
Tony Crook
Department of Social Anthropology, University of St.
Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, United Kingdom
(tony.crook@st-andrews.ac.uk). 19 X 11
It is instructive that the Shuar not-speaking about their visions
should provide Rubenstein with a platform to speak and spec-
ulate about such an all-encompassing and wide-ranging vision
of his own. The capacity to enchain and reconcile examples,
encounters, topics, and theorists in this particular way surely
owes something important to the aesthetics of Shuar knowl-
edge-practices. But saying this is intended to mark a different
way of approaching ethnographic method and understanding
the disciplinary project. Since the so-called crisis of represen-
tation in anthropology, questions of voice have created an
apparently causal elision between what informants and an-
thropologists do and do not say and between textual and
political representation, and hence they have created a reluc-
tance to speak for others or put words into their mouths. The
gaps in ethnographic analysis caused by “secrecy” provide a
case in point. As Rubenstein suggests, identifying something
as a “secret” appears to immediately raise questions about
what else people are unable to speak about and to set off
ramifications for what an ethnographer might reasonably ask
or expect to hear and subsequently what might have to be
left to speculation, history, or theorization.
“Partial Truths” provided the literary turn’s manifesto
(Clifford 1986) and accustomed a generation of anthropol-
ogists to a particular conceit of art imitating life, whereby one
mark of authentic anthropology enables the culpable admis-
sion of the limitations and deficiencies of one’s own data,
analysis, and interpretation to stand as a methodological
marker of sociological accuracy and ethnographic faithfulness.
Although these mimetic elisions (“the closest anyone can
come,” in “The End of Analysis”; “fieldwork is my maı́kua
and Shuar are my arútams,” in n. 76) provide Rubenstein—
73
quite understandably and inevitably—with an arbitrary end-
ing point, it would be disingenuous to ignore the wider im-
portance of the question posed here: What are anthropologists
to make of unspoken secrets and unvoiced visions?
Based in the Angkaiyakmin village of Bolivip in Papua New
Guinea and dealing with Melanesian knowledge-practices and
anthropology’s depiction of “secrecy,” my own work (Crook
1999, 2007) might provide a basis for a comparative comment
here. And yet this is to rely on a commitment to “knowledge”
and “secrecy” as culturally variable manifestations of universal
forms or to identify instances of the unspoken or unvoiced
as forms of the “secret,” while it is the further notion of
implicating a correlate social division that marks the apparent
basis of comparison. Such tropes appeal to a separate domain
of knowledge as constituting a separate domain of reality and
a separate domain of people (most often men). That these
equivalences make ready sense is precisely the problem. In-
deed, the deployment of these tropes and a reliance on a
model of knowledge derived from Euro-American meta-
physics was responsible for creating the “Min Problem”—a
supposed “black hole” where an assumption of indigenous
“secrecy” led to the failure of anthropological analysis: I argue
that this approach is exemplified in Barth’s pioneering work
on the Baktaman (e.g., Barth 1975, 1987, 1990, 2002), which
remains a prominent theorization of secrecy, in Melanesia at
least.
While derived initially from Melanesian materials, Herdt’s
(2003) influential theorizations of secrecy develop Barth’s
model (Herdt 1990) and an approach to an “alternative, hid-
den cultural reality” (Herdt 2003:xi) and yet also trace “the
role of the anthropologist as cryptographer of secrecy” (Herdt
2003:27) back to an Iroquois-mimicking Victorian gentle-
men’s club initiated by Lewis Henry Morgan. Because any
anthropological project seeks to come to know through me-
diating a social division—classically, to understand the inside
of a culture by becoming an insider—then this elision of
epistemological and sociological domains can appear self-evi-
dent, and yet it implicates what I call “anthropology’s secrecy”
as a methodological premise: valuing the knowledge not
known and valuing the participation that facilitates and marks
it, ethnographers might readily imagine that one is inseparable
from the other—for all concerned. These analogies can sit
comfortably with social constructionist commitments and af-
ford affinities with other dualisms, such as Lacan’s and Saus-
sure’s, even when the place of the arbitrary is reversed. But
this is to imagine a particular articulation between “knowl-
edge” and “society” and corresponding expectations for cer-
tain kinds of conversations.
Ethnographically, Rubenstein’s argument turns on the in-
terpretation of the consequences of Shuar warriors’ calling
the name of their arútam spirit on the eve of a fight: the
effect is to conjoin the men, but rather than abandoning, and
being abandoned by, the arútam—whose importance appears
indispensible—might it be that the calling serves to conjoin
the arútam, too, if only as further evidence of the stakes that
 74
the warriors share? But perhaps this is to think in Melanesian
terms, for as much as Weiner’s (1995) Lacanian anthropology
or Gillison’s (1993) or Mimica’s (2008) engagements with
psychoanalysis, Harrison’s (1993) ethnopsychology of warfare
also comes to mind here and suggests some other conver-
sations that might be had.
George Mentore
Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, 100
Brooks Hall, P.O. Box 400120, Charlottesville, Virginia
22904, U.S.A. (gm3c@virginia.edu). 22 IX 11
Experiments should be applauded. Ovation should rise, rais-
ing the roof, its clamor rain down on the audacity of research.
The impudence to confront the intellectual monster of the
unthought by thinking it into being deserves a drenching in
acclaim.
To think the unthought is to presence it into being. The
unthought, like secrecy, comes into being instantly expressive
of itself and all that it claims to conceal. Anthropological
thinking similarly appears to presence the unthought, pro-
viding contemplation “about” the thoughts of cultural others
while simultaneously concealing and revealing the presence
of its own bourgeois Euro-American thinking. Yet what to
make of an anthropological contemplation “around” the arú-
tam wakán, which makes effable that which is ineffable in
Shuar experience?
Like the Shuar body—folded around an arútam and em-
powered by its ineffable presence—these experimental
thoughts wrap themselves around an anthropological other,
bringing themselves and their other into being and empow-
erment. Nonetheless, they preserve the tension of a difference.
The Shuar experience of visions can overcome any notion
of specular subjectivity and permit a capacity for intimately
feeling the heightened presence and the exercised power of a
tactile being. In one motion, their vision experience touches
and is touched, thereby traversing any interlude between self
and other by denying difference its separate reality. Or is it
that “the tactile . . . precedes, or perhaps more accurately
defers, the separation of the subject from its objects” (Shil-
drick 2006:45)? In either case, while operative in both spiritual
and material worlds, it is in the world of spirit that the in-
timacy of truth arrives directly—unmediated by the singular
corporality of the other. And if we can here understand ka-
karma (power) to be possessed in ways that allow it to be
harnessed and circulated, we can nevertheless still be arguing
that not even its ephemeral concentration will be as significant
as its use. We would, of course, need the additional Shuar
notions and experiences about temporality in order to judge
how effective our algorithms would be for a fuller under-
standing of their representations of power and subjectivity.
The anthropological attempt to fold thinking around the
subject turns, in challenge, from surface and reflection and
Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 1, February 2012
their technique of penetration to tsentsemp, tsáank, and
maı́kua and their specific tactic of encompassment. Bodily
ingestion of these forms of power permits enentaimsatin
(think/feel), a power experienced tangibly through vision. In
the way Shuar bodies enfold the plant-granted visions, em-
powering them with enhanced thinking/feeling, the anthro-
pological contemplation of this process similarly encompasses
the reflective thinking of the specular bourgeois. In other
words, its speculation of the specular successfully experiments
with the possibilities of vision, just as Shuar successfully test
the potential of the arútam.
And here let us draw attention to the Shuar nekáp-ra (“to
feel,” presumably in its primary sensual, rather than emo-
tional, meaning of “to touch” but apparently also meaning
“to experiment”). As we applaud loudly the anthropological
thinking of the unthought, let us additionally pay tribute to
the Amerindian experience of touching/experimenting. Let us
not forget to compliment the Amerindian effort at research,
which invariably “unfolds along the lines of a metaphysical
experimentation with substances such as blood, flesh, semen,
and bones” (Maranhão 2003:68). And if we grant in ourselves
this recognition and praise for their testing of ways to be
human, different from our own, could we not also push to
our consciousness (and morality) the acknowledgement that
“[i]n killing an enemy or an animal, the killer spills blood,
may lose some of his own, concretely or symbolically, and
alters the balance of flesh in the world of the living and the
world of the dead” (Maranhão 2003:69)? If we can, then their
restoration of “metaphysical balance” should not be thought
of primarily in terms of a “war machine” (Deleuze and Guat-
tari 2000) or of a “power . . . possessed” (Foucault 1979:26).
Such modernist thinking, carried over to the indigenous Am-
erindian experience, does not allow us to avoid the monster
of the unthought, which comes concealed in the anxiety of
the ineffable.
In the way that Shuar appear skeptical about the reality of
the material world—preoccupied as they are with the truth
of the world of spirit—we appear “concerned . . . with a
repudiation of the everyday: with a sense of being shouldered
out from our ways of thinking and speaking by a torment of
reality” (Diamond 2008:71). We cling to thoughts of power
and reality in terms of material magnitude. Amerindian so-
cialities seem to prefer doing so in terms of spiritual intensity.
The difference in the traversal of the interlude has to do with
an experience felt rather than observed.
Reply
One can write an essay as speculative as this only in the hopes
of inviting constructive and stimulating response; it is grat-
ifying to know that I succeeded. Most of these comments
point to research I have not yet done, and all I really can do
Rubenstein Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar
is thank the reviewers for their engaging thoughts and for
pointing out new directions. I appreciate Calavia’s warning
against grounding an argument about an Amazonian culture
in a theory that may be inseparable from bourgeois material
culture and worldviews. He also urges me to consider work
by Brazilian anthropologists emphasizing alterity over iden-
tity. I confess that of the structuralist legacy, I am more in-
terested in the dialectic, the perpetually unstable relationship
between being and becoming, than in binary oppositions as
such (see Lacan 2006 [1955]). Course suggests that Lacan’s
inherently structuralist language ideology obscures the Shuar
view of the relation between language and experience. To
address this strong argument, I clarify below my use of Lacan’s
dialectics and Peirce’s semiotic. I am profoundly grateful for
Mentore’s insightful suggestion of further exploring Shuar
practices and conceptualizations of tactility, a line of inquiry
that I suspect will become crucial in my future attempts to
advance my understanding of the nonsymbolic and nonlin-
guistic parts of the arútam vision.
I admire Crook’s efforts to think in “Melanesian” terms—
I tried to think in “Shuar” terms. He questions whether or
how “secrecy” can be emptied so as to function as a (uni-
versally applicable?) heuristic device. For me, the challenge is
how to write, when Shuar and psychoanalysts both tell us
that some thoughts resist entry into speech or that some
meanings resist entry into thought. In Crook’s own work,
secrecy often becomes a sign of incompleteness; perhaps we
are each trying to reconfigure absence as presence and explore
its effects. He also points out that ethical and representational
issues arise when anthropologists take on the role of the cryp-
tographer of the unspoken secrets of other cultures. This point
demands continued consideration; I note for now that my
own point of reference is not the “crisis of representation”
but earlier reflections by Hymes (1969) and more recently by
Taussig. As I read them, the aim of their reflections was to
comment not merely on “the limitations and deficiencies” of
anthropology but rather on the colonizing power of the Eu-
ropean and settler states.
So I was a little surprised that none of the commenters
engaged with what I consider to be my more significant ar-
gument: the critique of our own bourgeois culture. I hope
that by clarifying this issue, I may also reply to their main
points.
Since graduate school, my work has been motivated by an
attempt to understand how a warrior society was so quickly
subjugated by commodity and wage-labor relations. In my
life history of Alejandro Tsakimp, I remarked that his dis-
course echoed both the possessive individualism of bourgeois
culture and the nonpossessive individualism of pre-Federation
Shuar culture (Rubenstein 2002:11). The idea for this essay
emerged as I reviewed new accounts of childhood experiences
of mission boarding schools. My informants were angry about
epithets like “savage” or “Jı́varo,” but they seemed to view
them less as attacks than as mistakes, as forms of misrecog-
nition. This made me wonder whether one might productively
75
analyze Tsakimp’s discourse in terms of a misrecognition. My
essay argues that Shuar were willing to exchange one regime
of violence (which produces an egalitarian society and a spe-
cific kind of political subject) for the other (which produces
a stratified society) because a difference was misrecognized
as an equivalence.
This task led me to adopt Lacanian theory as a heuristic
device for teasing out the differences between processes of
subject formation in pre-Federation Shuar society and those
in our own. I found Deleuze and Guattari’s and Žižek’s anal-
ysis of repressed dynamics such as the Oedipus complex very
helpful in understanding how we bourgeois come to desire
our own subjugation. It seemed to me that Shuar must have
a locus for some dynamic that is formally comparable but
can function to produce an equally powerful desire not to be
subjugated.
I began writing this essay when, reflecting on Lacan’s di-
alectical approach, I first considered approaching my infor-
mants’ refusal to tell me the contents of their visions not as
an obstacle to my understanding their importance but as a
clue to that locus. What would an ethnography of the Shuar
look like if one began with the claim that the true reality is
accessible only through secret visions? Could I refigure these
secrets not as an absence in my knowledge but instead as a
presence in the lives of Shuar?
Thus, my use of Lacan and other theorists is meant to help
clarify both the key similarity and the key difference between
the violence of headhunters and the violence encoded in the
contract that a capitalist enters into with a worker or the state
with its subjects. This would help me understand how Shuar
could misrecognize the liberal contract—with a capitalist or
the state—as a form of power equivalent to the power of the
wordless arútam. This is why I feel able to claim a moral
equivalence between capitalist wage labor contracts and war-
riors’ murders of settlers or police (see “Colonialism”). This
is my attempt at an authentically anarchist anthropology,
which examines “societies against the state” in order to further
our critique of our own liberal state.
I admit that, as Calavia notes, my approach to Lacan is
risky. I have deliberately attempted to use psychoanalysis “as
a sort of Western folk knowledge” deeply rooted in the fur-
nishings of the capitalist economy and the liberal state. I am
interested in insights into bourgeois culture, both because it
is ours and because it is this culture that is colonizing the
Shuar. This is an attempt to avoid the trap of assuming uni-
versal validity of a particular model of subjectification. Rather,
I think that my analysis shows how Lacanian theory is bound
to bourgeois society, how it must be retheorized to describe
the process of subject formation in societies with other tech-
nologies of recognition, and what happens when these two
regimes of subjectivity meet in a colonial process.
Course critically asks how speech and vision can be op-
posed, respectively, as the realms of misrecognition and rec-
ognition. I do not mean to suggest that Shuar believe that
recognition is impossible in language. These terms are op-
 76
posed only in a dialectical sense: the mutual negation is also
mutually constitutive. If Shuar believed that all speech is re-
liably and predictably false, then they would have no ambiv-
alence about speech. Indeed, one can use words to deceive
only if there is a pretension of accuracy. Shuar I know value
words and care very much what others have to say but are
often highly suspicious of words. This form of sociality is one
effect of the authentic recognition of the arútam wakán′, as
is the violence of the warrior.
Course is right that Lacan’s structural language ideology
obstructs our access to meaning outside of the realm of the
Symbolic, but I do not think that my argument hinges on an
equation of language with the Symbolic. Using Peircean con-
cepts, I suggest that the speeches of the kakáram are iconic
of the power of the arútam wakán′. Here speech has nonsym-
bolic functions (see the discussion of paan chicham in “Shuar
Culture through the Looking Glass”). I did not mean to sug-
gest that the words of the kakáram’s speech are those of the
arútam wakán′. Ethnographic sources agree that a person who
has received the power of the arútam wakán′ cannot talk about
it without losing it. So speech is only one portion of the
visionary experience. The power of the arútam is incorporated
into the being of the Shuar and thus transformed in the
process transforming the Shuar; this is not accomplished
through speech. These dialectics thus constitute that basically
anarchic power that for so long stood against the state. Maybe
we bourgeois need psychoanalysis, but my point is that Shuar
need the arútam wakán′.
—Steven Lee Rubenstein
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