Translated from:
Antipodal. Magazine of Anthropology and Archeology
Print version ISSN 1900-5407
Antipod. Rev. Anthropol. Archaeol. no.28 Bogotá May/Aug. 2017
PARALLELS
"I am a jaguar." A cross-reading between philosophy and anthropology on statements with animal content in the Inga and Kamëntsa communities *
"I love a jaguar." A Transversal Interpretation, between Philosophy and Anthropology, of Shamanic Accounts of Animals in the Inga and Kamënsta Indigenous Communities
"Eu sou jaguar." A cross-reading between philosophy and anthropology on statements with animal content in the Inga and Kamëntsa communities
Jennifer Andrea Rivera Zambrano **
1 Externado University of Colombia riverazjennifer@gmail.com; jennifer.rivera@uexternado.edu.co
SUMMARY:
This text gives an account of a conceptual exercise of interpretation between philosophy and anthropology; The approach presented is that the descriptions that survive in the present among the scholars of the Inga and Kamëntsa communities and the "jaguars" can be understood, in contrast to perspectives of symbolic association, as becomings: affective relationships of men who experience forces that are not theirs and that in that process they carry out something particularly creative in themselves, as a way of transcoding between the animal and the human in the production of individuation. This perspective is developed through a conceptual approach from the contemporary philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, in order to establish a dialogue with anthropological understandings about the event of being-jaguar. The purpose of this text is to provide a reading of the zooanthropomorphic event from the concept of becoming . To do so, i) the construction of individuations is identified through the statements of experts from the Inga and Kamëntsa communities, with which ii) the conceptualization of this particular relationship as becoming is opened , in light of some illustrative developments by Reichel- Dolmatoff on the were-jaguar; iii) finally, the effects of becoming as the creation of meaning are made explicit.
Keywords: Anthropology; philosophy; knowing; Jaguar; becoming-animal; yage
ABSTRACT:
This paper gives an account of a conceptual exercise of interpretation which lies between philosophy and anthropology. Its approach is the idea that, in contrast with notions of symbolic association, as a state of becoming, the descriptions which still persist in the Inga and Kamëntsa indigenous communities of the relationship between their saberdores ("knowers"/wise men/shamans) and "jaguars" may be understood as the affective relations of men who experience forces that are not theirs and that during that process, they summon something which is especially creative in themselves as a way of achieving a trans-coding between the animal and the human in the creation of individuation. Its approach is based on the conceptual framework of the contemporary philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, with the aim of establishing a dialogue between that philosophy and anthropology's understanding of the "being a jaguar" phenomenon and providing an interpretation of the zoo-anthropomorphic occurrence with the use of the concept of becoming . Towards that end: i) the construction of individuations is determined by an analysis of the accounts of sabers of the Inga and Kamëntsa indigenous communities, which; ii) reveals the conceptualization of this particular relationship as becoming in the light of some developments which are in line with the notions of "the jaguar man" of the anthropologist Reichel Dolmatoff; iii) Finally, the effects of becoming as a creation of meaning are explained.
Keywords: Anthropology; philosophy; knowing; Jaguar; animal-becoming; yage
SUMMARY:
This text presents a conceptual exercise of interpretation between philosophy and anthropology; It is proposed that the descriptions that survive are not present among the knowers of the Inga and Kamëntsa communities, and as "painted onças" can be understood, in contrast with perspectives of symbolic association, as porvires: emotional relations of homens who experience forças que no It is only suas that, in this process, we do something particularly creative in ourselves as a way of transcoding between the animal and the human in the production of the individual. This perspective is developed through a conceptual approach to contemporary philosophy by Deleuze and Guattari, in order to establish a dialogue with anthropological understandings about the event being on. The purpose of this text is to contribute with a reading of the zooanthropomorphic event from the concept of porvir . For this reason, i) the construction of individuals is identified by means of two statements by knowledgeable people of the Inga and Kamëntsa communities; com isso, ii) opens to the conceituação of this particular relationship as porvir à light of some illustrative developments of Reichel Dolmatoff on the homem-onça; iii) finally, explicitam-se the effects of porvir as creation of meaning.
Keywords: Anthropology; philosophy; onça-painted; porvir-animal; knowing; yage
Both anthropology and archeology have given space to the reading of the zooanthropomorphic link between knowledgeable men and jaguars to their credit. Various sources about the social functioning of Amerindian communities of the past give an account of this particular phenomenon. Evidence of this are the descriptions of feline-shaped objects in terracotta, the narrative fragments in which reference is made to were-jaguars belonging to pre-Hispanic cultures 1 and the literary records of the Colonial period that show important elements about this reality of the zooanthropomorphism 2 . Also, in various living South American communities documented in the last century, the existence of guardian animals is identified. These considerations that have been woven regarding the phenomenon of zooanthropomorphism allow us to affirm that the Jaguar-knowledgeable relationship is identified mostly as a component of the worldviews recognized within the national and South American territory 3 (Pineda 2003).
In general terms, this understanding is supported by the archetypal or antithetical decipherments experienced by the man of power in the community 4 , and is understood as part of a cultural dynamic of the past. This corresponds to a mode of approach known as symbolic association, that is, interpretations based on diachronic associations between various ideological-religious components that would legitimize the permanence of the zooanthropomorphic phenomenon. This mode of interpretation has made it possible not only to make visible the richness of the daily practices of the communities, but, of course, to think about the extraordinary way in which life is made in our territory. It is of our interest to dialogue with this approach and present another reading key for the phenomenon described through an understanding of the relationships of the knowing man with the jaguar, from and with the drives that go through him in his particular context. We consider that these human-animal relationships can be recognized as becomings, forms of experimentation on one's own life based on constitutive elements from the condition that configure processes of individuation of the knowers.
In the upper Putumayo region, among the Inganos 5 and the Kamëntsá 6 , a practice that is remembered by the Sinchiwairas 7 takes place , the taking of yagé 8 , on the occasion of a cure or other type of need 9 . This ritual healing experience has an open character, of insertion, of indigenous people, of "settlers", and passers-by. In the shot, the sinchiwairas narrate their experiences with yagé. At midnight, when the participants have already ingested the first yagé totuma, the sinchi begins to observe their states, and, while conversations are woven between the guests, he intervenes to affirm that in his visions he could be somewhere, crossing the river, hunting tapirs, collecting some plants. The wise man narrates that he travels through particular places, and in these, he dialogues with people or animals or plants; These talks show you new alternatives to the reason or problem for which yagé is taken. In terms of McKenna, Luna and Towers (1986, 80), connoisseurs experience processes of double reality with ayahuasca, with which they contact spirits to acquire knowledge or powers: "The idea that certain plants, animals and inanimate objects, such as mountains, lakes and rivers, have a spirit, it is implicit in the cosmogony of many Amazonian peoples [...] These spirits, sometimes called the mothers of the corresponding plants, animals or objects, can be contacted to acquire. of them knowledge or certain powers". For the community in question, what McKenna and others describe as mothers are known as aire -waira-; Each organism that lives in the environment has a certain air , a certain wind . Within this representational universe, the wind manifests the self -ness of each being, that is, it symbolizes that which makes it exist.
While the yagé begins to take effect on the bodies of the participants, questions arise: is the jaguar part of their lives? The sinchiwaira ( s) respond yes, that, just as there is the "tiger chili", with which the first inhabitants of these lands killed a large snake that in one night ate many sinchis , there is the "tiger yagé", " with whom one sees the future, goes hunting". And among their stories, they affirm, of themselves or of other experts: "I am a jaguar, [...] I am a hummingbird, [...] I am yagé" 10 . The statement "I am a jaguar" participates in a double reality, in which a "supersensible" level is expressed (animality), which is carried out in the daily practices of the community (the human). A silent presence of content that expands in experience. In other words, the indigenous knower - the one fully rooted in his culture - manifests in himself the conjunction of forces present in the environment, which, in an area of contiguity, through taking, enables the knower to enter into a relationship of heterogeneous that exceeds the usual social relationship for non-indigenous people.
NEW INDIVIDUALS...
To understand this great framework of relationships, a non-linear, heterogeneous and dynamic perspective is necessary, in accordance with the rhythm of the experience that being a jaguar proposes. In this way, the metamorphosis of the sinchi is explained because the connection with the jaguar is not limited to a single way and understanding of the animal. On the contrary, these people understand that if a relationship with the jaguar is possible it is because there is an exchange of relationships that interconnect the human with the world. An example of this is presented by Deleuze and Guattari (2006) through the orchid and the wasp; These authors indicate that between the wasp and the orchid there is a relationship that is not composed of similar elements since neither the orchid is an animal, nor the wasp a plant, and, however, there is a special codependency between the two that allows them future species to survive and remain, by dint of relational exchanges, of relational compositions against nature. This, in his words, is an involutionary change or creative evolution , to the extent that entities can enter into a relationship according to their degrees of power. The statements "I am a jaguar, I am a hummingbird, I am a yagé" speak of the relational nature of life; That is to say, they account for a coexistence referring to symbioses in which beings of diverse natures without characteristics of hereditary filiation participate, as a form of communication or contagion between different populations - between heterogeneous ones. Thus, relationships are evident in a transversal way, "an evolution in the strict sense, that is, the possibility of a descent whose degrees of modification depend on external conditions" (Deleuze and Guattari 2006, 241) 11 .
In various situations, relationships are established between heterogeneous people that come into contact and provoke a new way of being, according to the conditions of the environment. This means that not all relationships are strictly relational chains, but rather systems that open lines of creation. The jaguar assemblage is mediated by the game of relationships into which the sinchi enters , which produce the spectacle of the transformation into a jaguar - the night, its sounds, the jaguar, old age, the predisposition for vision, the vegetation, the spectators (the prey), revenge, the interconnection of the ways of the jungle.
Seen from a contemporary philosophical position, discussions about logical determinism are nullified in these types of examples by showing that, in the discursivity of the community, in my opinion, the exchange or transcoding of animal and human elements makes sense. This happens to the extent that everything can enter into a relationship, whether the most similar or the most different: there are relationships between animals, relationships between man and animal, which does not mean that they can also occur with other elements of the physical universe. . Thus, the character of a heterogeneous relational logic is constituted by the temporal combinations of extension, movement and rest with the context. All reality is produced by the game of variable relationships between the organisms that relate and that, in turn, configure another being, a new individuation.
In this relational game, the knower is no longer a subject, although he expresses constant concern for his audience and delegates orders under a minimum of reasonableness, but he is not a jaguar either. The jaguar-man is born from the sum of relationships between these two entities, which in the between-two reveal the particularities of the jaguar power that make up this new being: a knowing-jaguar with all the wisdom of the first and all the power of the second. The intertwining of affective molecules composes an environment of indiscernibility. From this it follows that each thing, each element in its relationship, constitutes the jaguar assemblage, as well as the knowing assemblage. These spatio-temporal relationships or determinations are not predicates of the jaguar (animal), but rather dimensions of multiplicities.
The experiences of sinchi show that the relational process consolidates a mode of multiplicity in the degrees of complexity that the subject experiences in the intertwining of the environmental molecules that are exerted on him. There is no way that desire and need are not filtered, along with other specifically affective components that constitute a molecular environment. The molecular, here, refers to the speeds of the affects that are redistributed as indeterminate particles and pass through the subject. This implies that the self is continually surpassed by multiplicity, by molecules of affects that are redistributed within it.
There is a symbiosis that occurs between the sinchi and the medium - read the "pinta" or vision of the connoisseur in the shot as a correspondence of relationships between diverse series; it creates a different nature, an individuation. Symbiosis refers to the connection between disjunctive series; in this case, between an animal lineage and a human lineage, as molecular participation. This indeterminate connection supposes a capture-type encounter, in which the two entities are captured in a different one. "Thus, symbiosis is equivalent to the composition relationship between multiplicities that change their nature by dividing" (Sauvagnargues 2006, 85-86). The consistency of this redistribution lies in the affective correlations, in the molecular multiplicities that cross the self. Flows of particles in relationships of movement or rest, in which they enter to configure a new area of environment (understood as the space of indiscernibility between the human and its current infinity).
Specifically, what is presented is the connection between parts of the current infinity, a symbiosis between biological lineages, cultural constructions, etc., which in the encounter captures the entities and determines a new nature, a new form. These entities, those in the middle, make up a dependence from which a singular compound emerges, an individuation . Therefore, symbiosis generates an other, a change in the subject position that is singular, different and, therefore, real in relation to the previous.
We can affirm that the subject compositions that the knowers manifest in their orality are inhuman relations of man with his current infinity, a crush of molecular compositions, flows of affects that displace substantiality or subjectivity to occupy and compose a new individuality.
If the knower reveals forces that are not his, it is because particles flow there, as an exchange of affections: animal, vegetal, imperceptible molecularities; All possible modes are zones of environment, of co-presence, that are far from the characteristics of "person." The knower will no longer be defined by determining forms: subject or substance, but by the particles that belong to him in certain relations of movement, of affectation (of affecting and being affected). The knower is diluted in the dynamism of the affects and degrees that make up an individuation different from that of the subject. Or as Deleuze and Guattari indicate: "If we have imagined the position of a fascinated I, it is because the multiplicity toward which it noisily tends is the continuity of another multiplicity that acts on it and distends it from within. That is why the I is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities" that interweave in the knower and generate events of becoming (2006, 254). Therefore, in these statements there is a becoming-jaguar that accounts for acts in which a subject (the sinchiwaira ) is desubjectified by affective components that circulate according to the molecular transmissions (all the mental dimensions of the Jaguar) of which he is part.
Pages ago we pointed out in a note some "personifications" that Reichel-Dolmatoff interpreted of the jaguar in the Kogi, Tukano and Paez communities. Below, we will present some of these ideas, in order to illustrate a component of animal development. The transformations of the experts of these ethnic groups reflect, according to the anthropologist, acts of power: warrior power and voracious-virile power, from a relationship between the animal and the human. These animal-human assemblages account for a process in which objective animal relations are also carried out in some subjective relations of the human being with animals (Deleuze and Guattari 2006, 242). Every time two diverse species meet, they establish some type of relationship; More specifically, think of a hunter: he establishes a symbiosis with the animal, a struggle of forces in which the hunter is already an animal on the prowl. In this case, it will be understood that the hunter has entered the landscape of the animal (which is now the prey), and reveals in his dynamism forces that are not his, he has become other, he has become an animal because in him the molecularities of hunting organization 12 .
What takes place in the knower-jaguar relationship is the formation of a compound of sensations that manifests an animal relationship with the animal. We speak of a compound of sensations because they are dissimilar interweavings between the human being and the other, which in turn make up the future . They are relationships framed in the line of affection, and they involve all the drives that go through the knowing man and that are evident in the encounter with exceptional individuals (an exceptional individual is the animal or the component that shares an exchange of affection with man). . However, this relationship involves much more than an individual; In it, a group-type pact is exercised that produces in this subject his own future.
It becomes because there is an outsider, an intruder, an enemy that exceeds the position of the subject, an anomalous 13 . Let's see this through the following fragment of a Desana myth compiled by Reichel-Dolmatoff:
Once, a woman rejected her husband, who wandered alone in the jungle. She found a jaguar in human form. The jaguar-man carried a basket with his jaguarian clothing. The were-jaguar asked the man where she was going, and the man replied: "My wife doesn't love me and that's why I'm going to get lost in the jungle." The were-jaguar asked where the woman lived. "There," the man pointed out; and the jaguar-man said: "I'm going to help you win her back." The werejaguar carried a hoe on his shoulder. The devouring jaguars always carry that hoe. Only the werejaguars use it. They use the hoe to grab people with it. The jaguar-man went to lie down waiting for the woman; She was in human form, but in reality she was a huge black jaguar. The woman went to the pier carrying a pot. When she was close enough to her, he grabbed her with her hoe. She only saw a huge jaguar. The other people only saw blood stains and jaguar tracks. The jaguar-man returned the woman to the man: "She is the one who doesn't love you," he said; "Come with me to the maloca of the Western fountains, we are going to drink cashirí," he told the couple (1978, 126-127).
For his part, Reichel-Dolmatoff, in his analysis of the Tukano, concludes that "[...] the jaguar is the antithesis of the organized and regulated way of life that others lead; it is the enemy of all; it is the powerful carnivore among timid and tame herbivores; that is why the jaguar is a stranger" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978, 133). One might think why the indigenous -Kogi, Tukano, Paez- becomes a jaguar, why he becomes anomalous , and the answer is that, if the indigenous enters into a relationship with the animal, it is because it exceeds him, because it occupies an unfathomable place in his desire, to balance the forces of the community. Among the Desana, according to Reichel-Dolmatoff, the jaguar man represents the libidinal power that is satisfied only in hunting for a woman, in devouring her (sexually), and then returning her to her husband. This shows that the anomalous 14 is, in the first instance, the outsider who is lurking, the threat to man (for this reason it is necessary to make an alliance or pact with him, as we will see later).
For Reichel-Dolmatoff (1978), as for Eliade (2001), the shaman's desire is to dominate the jungle to access knowledge-power 15 and effectively explore the territory (humans, plants, animals), but the jaguar has made it impossible for him, in his condition as a predator. To this extent, the jaguar is not only the natural animal that roams the jungle, but multiplicities circulate in it: the animals of the jungle, the unknown; In the feline, understood in this way, lie the multiple relationships that the knower desires (predatory behavior, dominance, sexual aggression); and in this condition it is also an environment zone, a "pack". For this reason, the particles of jaguar molecularity, the affects, crowd on the ego of the knower, on his subjective mode of organization, and produce becoming.
The Desana myth states that the man the indigenous man encountered was wearing a "jaguarian garment":
When they were both asleep, he put on his jaguar clothing and went to bed. When they woke up they saw a huge jaguar lying there and they talked about it. But the jaguar listened. He moved his ears as if to say, "I'm listening." Then he took off his jaguar suit. "What were you talking about?" he asked; "do not be afraid of me; this is how I change my dress" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978, 126).
For the Desana group, according to Reichel-Dolmatoff, the word suriró, while used to designate clothing, also describes the state of a person, being invested or clothed with certain qualities. So this jaguar-man is already covered in the multiple affections of the jaguar; he is covered by something that does not belong to him: predatory behavior, attack, sexual aggression, ultimately, anomalous desire and the multiplicity of the pack sustained in all these possible modes. This behavioral pattern becomes evident when, at the end of the myth, the were-jaguar warns the couple not to tell what happened, otherwise they would die - and, in fact, after talking about the matter, both die on the same night. -.
[...] When they reached the end of their trip they saw a large painted maloca. "Take my tail," she said; "by holding onto it they can follow me." He was the boss of everyone else there. He had gone to dance with them. [...] When he entered the maloca he took off his jaguar clothing. They danced there, and when they had danced they left again. When jaguars travel like this you can hear him panting. The were-jaguar took the couple back to his mansion and warned them not to talk about what they had seen. "If you talk about this, you will die," he told them; "If you say so, you will immediately have to come to my maloca. Next year if you are still alive, I will come back for you and take you with me again," he said. A long time passed after the couple left their land, a year or so. [...] The other people asked them what had happened to them, but they did not want to say. At first they listened to all the questions, but in the end they got tired and told what had happened. They both died that same night (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978, 127).
Establishing relationships with the jaguar has to do with the propagation of jaguar molecularities on the molar plane - to enter into a relationship is to occupy, to infect what exists, to cover ( suriró ) -. As Reichel-Dolmatoff of the Desana community states with the term suriró, man is clothed with the animal; or the molar plane is infected by the multiplicities that cross it and that make up the jaguar multiplicity - hence every process of individuation is exercised by a contagion. In this way, it is understood that said multiplicity is the entire herd, that is, all the interrelationships that populate it and make it up in a specific situation. Therefore, every relationship established with a herd has as its purpose characteristics of propagation, of occupation. That population that intends to spread will expand a settlement over what is already occupied, will infect what exists and will cause a new and different type of multiplicity that makes it possible to say "I am a jaguar."
The knowledgeable person experiences, over a period of hours, a "crazy" night 16 , the affective dynamisms of a series of lives that make up life itself. Becoming is the experience of the knower that has made it possible to generate a new individuation between the jaguar and man. The jaguar becomes thought in the knower, expectant thought, at the same moment in which the knower becomes a jaguar. This surpassing is consolidated, meanwhile, in the dynamism of becoming, a jaguar becoming occurs in a non-jaguar. For this condition to exist, the knower ventures to become an animal from a non-animal, resorting to an active micropolitics directed by the jaguar powers. Micropolitics is the opposite of macropolitics, which secures and conquers (the majority) the minority. Micropolitics has the effect of mobilizing from a diagonal or block of affection, a jaguar power that has no point of origin (a point opposite to a line); It is in the middle, it is no longer a subject but an affective block that abandons - deterritorialized - the points, the coordinates, and proliferates affects.
Here, the punctual system or the body is subordinate to the lines of flow, and indicates the proliferation of the flow (its precipitation, its fury or its agony) of community configuration or normality within the group; becoming that implies multiplicity, celerity, ubiquity, metamorphosis and betrayal, power of affection. Given the liberation of the body, a jaguar line of flight passes between the subject, and as it grows it forms something foreign to official memory, anti-memory of the sense of dwelling. The body is deterritorialized in a jaguar becoming, but the jaguar in which it becomes is in turn deterritorialized, ungenerated, becoming (becoming colors, sounds). The knower is deterritorialized in an animal deterritorialized in image; The wise man does not imitate the animal, he becomes.
This, then, is a double becoming: the knower only becomes a jaguar when the jaguar becomes a sensation; He becomes a jaguar in the ritual on the condition that the jaguar in turn becomes sound and color, a sensation that gives consistency to his notion of his world . Therefore, becoming is producing itself and is real without there being an animal that has become, without there being an animal upon which it becomes. It is real because it has no other subject than itself, because it only exists in the becoming of which man is the subject and from which the knower creates a world, in the conjugation of affects, that covers the real world in transparency. This world creates new lines with other molecularities that establish a multitude.
It is worth saying that the implementation of this contagion is carried out from two levels. The first, the genetic structural organization plan, in which the forms are developed and the subjects are subjectified (their forms, their motives, their characters, their feelings). In the second, in the plane of consistency or composition, relations of speed and slowness, of rest and movement of unformed elements, of affects between non-subjectified entities are carried out (Deleuze and Guattari 2006, 270). In this second plane, the molar powers (family and subsidiary organizations) typical of the organizational plane are inhibited and space is made for molecular distributions.
The resource of constituting family and social life through work and organization shapes the social subject. These molar processes are, however, surpassed by the molecular distributions in the uptake of entheogens; In the actualization of the rite, all those organizational formalizations are reconfigured in a unique way. The consistency plan overlaps the organization plan; or, in other words, the animal action, in the taking, is superimposed on the ego of the knower. Hence all becoming is a molecular becoming, since it is the particles of affections (jaguar) that pass through the self.
With this it is evident that the consistency of becoming lies in molecular multiplicities, coexistences of durations of the plant, smell, animal, object, natural effect type. In this way, it becomes clear that the relationship of the knower is not only with a jaguar but with the modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, and contagion. The knower - who, in the strict sense, is no longer a knower but a matter of affections - is also the herd. This condition generates new edge or border relationships with the herd. The jaguar is the power of the anomalous and the edge of its pack; and compared to this, the knower is in turn an anomalous , since she - the herd - installs him in an edge position with respect to the constant filiative molar formations of the community. His anomalous position allows the knower to establish himself on the border, between two, between the group and the jungle; and, therefore, he makes the pact with the jaguar multiplicity.
Thus, becoming a jaguar, as a block of sensations, implies the simultaneity of a movement in which the knowing subject is removed from the majority (community), while the jaguar - outsider - emerges from the minority; an exchange given by a block of alliance in which the two, animal and human, enter into a becoming-jaguar. Contagion distends the ego in the circulation of particles of affections; The self of the knower (development plan) is infected by the molecularities that populate and form it (consistency plan), and this new assemblage blurs the category of man among the multiplicities that occupy it. In this new regrouping of a symbiotic nature, the individual has been composed and surpassed by other degrees of individuation, which then form another individual, another intensity.
NOT A BODY... A BLOCK OF SENSATIONS
The knower who says of himself "I am a jaguar" does, in fact, something about himself and his environment. This requires an approach that takes into account the relationships between these two terms. Therefore, this statement will be understood as an expression of an animal-becoming: a series of transcoding relations between the human and the animal, which circulate between an outsider and a knowing subject. The effect or result of the relationship is a molecular configuration that, as a network of meaning, is evident through the body, as becomings inhabiting meaning and knowledge.
At this moment the question arises: where does becoming circulate? The relationships and relaxations mentioned between the plan of organization and development and the plan of consistency are only possible, in the case of becoming-jaguar, through the body. One of the conditions in which the expert is immersed to fulfill his desires is the sacrificial exercise of his body: organic intoxication. Provided that the multiplicity or circulation of becomings is installed in his body, the knower exercises his own disintegration through the multiple changes that the Banisteriopsis caapi plant provides him. This exercise on one's own body gives rise to the configuration of a body without organs (CsO) 17 . The knower goes from one assemblage to another from the sacrifice of the body. By filling itself with the plant, in the shots, by having plant blood and being "painted", the plant-body composes with the man-body another body, a haecceity located on the border between the organic and the inorganic, a being of edge.
For example, according to the knowledgeable Ingano Domingo Cuatindioy, in conversations held with the author, in his particular journey he obtains a power, as a vision-power, in relation to the knowledge of nature such as hunting, the essences of the universe, the encounter with the first sinchiswaira . Taita Domingo Cuatindioy says that in a previous shot he was on his way through the mountains and met the older taitas, and then with the little tiger yage. He was a senior taita. On the way he sniffed the plant that he would give to a man to heal him. This is expressed in several of his pictorial works From him 18 from him, where, in his words, he paints the places through which he has traveled in the world of forces.
The plant conveys the subsequent pacts that will lead him to become a jaguar, among others. In the plant multiplicity the jaguar multiplicity and all the heterogeneous symbioses in which the self distends are trapped or lie. What is being carried out is a line of flight that will border different dimensions of multiplicity in this process of desubjectification.
To account for the above, we will use the records of talks with experts from the Inga and Kamëntsa communities that the author had the opportunity to share in 2005, as they show the creation of lines of flight as a dynamic of future.
Our ancestors transformed into jaguars to defend themselves from the curacas of lower Putumayo, who liked to do evil. In the past, they walked among men, they travel the roads at night. The true taitas, since their blood is painted by the yagecito, can become jaguars. "So, Taita, you are also a jaguar?" "Yes, I am a tiger, sometimes a guinea pig, a river, a yage, everything depends on the little yage" 19 .
These words show the three dimensions that make up becoming: 1) becoming animal, 2) becoming plant and 3) becoming molecular, in which a mutation of perception and sensation is noticed, and the emission of a molecular jaguar. In this way, the bodily exchange that the knower experiences is a series of assemblages that deterritorialize the molar structure of the self. All of them, in different rearrangements of the living, project the joints of multiplicity that singularly recompose the ways of being of those who are crossed by becoming. The knower is involved in segments of becoming that lead from one to another. The intensities and powers of affects redefine the organs depending on the leak that has passed through the body. This means that if the body is the condition of becoming, it is because the body as cartography is a determination crossed by variable characters that compose and recompose it in a total and continuous variation in favor of one's own life plan.
Therefore, the CsO appears here as a new vital production, from which the emissions of particles of different accelerations are produced that are perceptible in and by the organ. In this way, animal, vegetal and molecular relationships in the body take place in an open field of diverse combinations, no longer of similarity or closeness, but, in favor of life, bodies acquire other individualities according to the functions that the organs acquire. These transformations are the folding, the plication between one individuality and another in its compossibility , a folding that subsists as an anonymous population. The organs are no longer organs, they are materials through which faster or slower intensities flow: movements.
When it became dark and night came, he lay down and fell asleep; When he woke up he saw that he was no longer a man but a tiger, a very big tiger. The next morning he was no longer a tiger but a man again. He could change the figure of him constantly. That is the shaman man, the man who becomes a tiger, who converts invisible forces into pure matter (Guzmán 2004, 79).
According to Antonio Guzmán's story, we would say that the inclusion of forces in the organism is equivalent to the levels with which the body is capable of perceiving or sensing; movements of affects that subsist in subjective perception (mediating perception), but that are already being, simultaneously, at the moment in which they approach above the threshold of subjective perception (which in turn becomes perceptible in the capture provided by the CsO). It will be understood that in the transit of affects, in the exchange of actions and passions, the body as an organic entity is composed or decomposed with other bodies, and the result is the deterritorialization of its organicity towards a machinic function (a CsO).
The knower has all those structural-genetic forms with which he relates and coexists disrupted by inhuman ways (impersonal affects) that transmute the way in which he manifests himself as a subject. What used to be breathing is now sniffing; What used to be seeing is now being on the lookout; What used to be roaming is now stalking; animal powers that establish a new experiential territory. These relations of movement and rest reconfigure organic functioning through machinic modes .
For that matter, the knower makes his body a new body with the animal, with the plant or with a natural element; Its organs are redefined as materials through which the animal's intensities pass: feline particles depending on the molecular environment it enters. The jaguar relates to an environment, to its food, to light, to darkness, its actions are in relation to... There is its indiscernibility. It is not the jaguar and its characteristics or ways, it is its action in relation to the molecular environment in which the knower is immersed. Possibility in which the body captures microphenomena, microperceptions.
The previous examples show that the knower deploys his plan of consistency with the entheogen. The agent of becoming, however, is not only equivalent to the entheogen, it can also be faith, art or, ultimately, any motive that redirects perception and manages to transform life. In the case of the ignorant knower, the agent of his multiple becomings will be the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, whose consumption promotes a perception no longer given between a subject and a perceived object, but in the capture of the particles of the entities in motion, their acceleration or deceleration 20 . The vine intervenes with its speeds in the body and invades perception and desire 21 , in such a way that the imperceptible is perceived, and, at the same time, perception becomes molecular: simultaneous movement. The agent of becoming will then be that which intervenes in perceptual speeds, molecularizing what is perceived. In this way, perception is already molecular, it captures the movement of the imperceptible, and, with the participation of the agent, the imperceptible will be perceived, in addition to desire investing perception and what is perceived. It is a change in which the subjects and forms disappear due to the surpassing of the thing, since it will invade the desire, the perception, the thoughts of the sacrificed body.
At this point, we can conclude that becoming-animal is configured by a movement that is characterized by: 1) an individuation that is consolidated in a series of relationships with other degrees of speed belonging to other individuals, such as the jaguar; In this relationship, the movement of the jaguar explodes the knower's own sphere of knowledge or perception of reality; 2) an anomalous positioning , in which there is a contagion of molecular flows that go beyond the molar area, incited by a desire that makes an alliance with another (the jaguar population) viable; 3) an experimentation of the body made possible by the intensities that displace the organizational points; The action power of a body is increased by recomposing itself (CsO) as a function of life. Hence, life is not only the possible events of a normalized space, or a normalized ideal of sociopolitical agents, but the eternal rebellion, the perennial leap over them. In this way, life has an expansion as a process, a plus in its propagation. Magma of becoming that generates in its contraction the opening or reconstitution of new dynamics of meaning in the social world.
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22 This text arises from the developments achieved to date, regarding a research carried out between 2009 and 2011 around the statement "I am a jaguar" as settler becomings of meaning and knowledge in the construction of Inga territory in the face of the emergence of social problems in the upper Putumayo region in Colombia. See "The becoming of animals in the construction of territory. Deleuzian approach to the statement 'I am a jaguar'", master's thesis, Universidad del Rosario, Colombia.
1 Various archeology studies, specifically those dedicated to the field of Colombian pre-Columbian iconography, describe how the anthropo-zoomorphic figures of different pre-Hispanic groups recurrently highlight the man-animal association. In this regard, Anne Legast states that in the pieces from the Sinú region prior to the 10th century, the headdresses, pectorals and pendants realistically represent human bodies from which bird heads emerge, and that in general they integrate human characteristics into the figure. animal (2005, 36-37). Likewise, Pineda describes the possibility that the findings of gold necklaces and nose rings from pre-Hispanic societies (early Zenú and Calima) have served for some members (the shamans) to transform their human faces into felines (2002, 40-41). Along these lines, Brezzi indicates that the ceramic representations with jaguar features in the Tulato culture are not simply the representation of animals, but that in them it is possible to trace various degrees of anthropomorphism: firstly, in the upright position of the jaguar; secondly, in the feline characteristics of certain human figures: a large "libidinal tongue", garnished jaws and sharp fangs; and, thirdly, in the truly hybrid figures. All of them, according to the author, manifest the metamorphoses that occur in the cult of the jaguar (2003, 198-202).
2 Likewise, from a colonial historical perspective, it is possible to trace the statement about the jaguar to the 17th century. Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala states in The First New Crown and Good Government, regarding the sixth Inca, the Inca Roca, and his son Guamán Cápac Ynga: "(...) they say that they became otorongo (jaguar)" (1992 (1615), 82). Similar testimonies, which abound in colonial narratives, point to possible transformations that surpass the ways in which the individual defines himself today, and that exceed both common sense and the conventional normative point of view that projects his uniqueness. Hans Staden, in the narration of his stay among the Tupinamba community of Brazil, in 1554, reports on the existence of human groups that believe themselves to be animals; This author describes the "savagery" of one of these groups: "And the same Konian Bébe, had a large basket full of human flesh in front of him and was eating a leg, which he put near my mouth, asking me if I also wanted to eat it." I replied that no irrational animal devours another, how could a man then devour another man? He then sank his teeth into the meat and said: 'Jau warw sche' which means: I am a tiger, it is tasty! this I withdrew from his presence" (Staden 1945 (1557), 147-149).
3 Antonio Guzmán highlights the special capacity of the shaman to "manipulate the energies" that open his possibility of transforming at will into a tiger and a man: "Well, I think that, like yai, the shaman is a quadruped tiger. (... .) He could change his figure constantly. That is the shaman man, the man who becomes a tiger, who converts invisible forces into pure matter" (Guzmán 2004, 79). Cases like these are not uncommon in Latin America and indicate, by virtue of the objects and information coming from different indigenous communities, that the phenomenon of the transformation of human into animal is part of the practices in which a specialized man, the shaman or knowledgeable, with the resource of entheogenic plants, makes trips or encounters with "suprahuman" life. Thus, various anthropological analyzes establish the existence of a traditional phenomenon and explain in a symbolic way how shamans, in the exercise of "flight" mediated by an entheogen, ascend or descend through the worlds of spirits to negotiate health and illness, hunting, marriage, planting and other circumstances and activities (Pineda 2003). Analogously, Osborn states that with the consumption of entheogens, mammals in the world below are capable of becoming carnivorous males in the intermediate world; mammals from the middle world can become carnivorous birds in the world above, and birds from the middle world can become shamans in the world above. The shaman sees himself as a jaguar, a bear or a bird, depending on whether he travels to the world below or above; and these animals, in turn, see themselves as people in their respective worlds (Osborn 1990, 30). The connections between these worlds, which the entheogen allows us to glimpse, from this perspective would be essential and mutually symbolic, since a real and an imaginary level are conceived, and the second explains the first.
4 Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff addresses the problem of being a jaguar in the Colombian context, in which the statement is made manifest through myths and ethnographic narratives. According to the author, the personifications of the jaguar in the Kogi group are characterized by exercising dominance over the mountains, through feline-type warrior chases. In other latitudes, the need for revenge among the Tukano leads to the transformation of man into a jaguar to get even with enemies (killing them). On the other hand, the jaguar shaman, in the Paez community, is related to the use of his voracious power and his virility to sexually violate women; and even in a certain story, when he is hungry - once he has transformed into a jaguar - he feeds on fruits that are women. According to Reichel-Dolmatoff, in these mythologies the act of eating is related to the act of copulation, and for this reason he interprets many expressions related to food in a psychoanalytic key, as sexual manifestations. Devouring, for the Desana community, also has to do with kidnapping women from other clans (exogamy) (1978, 59-65).
5 Quechua-speaking indigenous community located in the municipality of Santiago and its surroundings, in the Sibundoy valley, upper Putumayo, Colombia.
6 Indigenous community located in the municipality of Sibundoy, in the Sibundoy valley, upper Putumayo, Colombia. Both communities cohabit the territory of the valley and share, in proportion, practices such as drinking yagé, food and clothing. It should be noted that these practices have their particularities and differences in each community.
7 Sinchiwairas is the name given to those who know, shamans or taitas; They organize the duty of the community, they summon and are summoned to resolve conflicts and heal illnesses. To fulfill these functions, they specialize in the knowledge of the sacred plants of their region, and they also receive knowledge transmitted orally from generation to generation.
8 Drink made from Banisteriopsis caapi , also known as ayahuasca, regarding whose consumption in Colombia, specifically in the Amazon, Vaupés and Putumayo, there are records at least since 1873 (Spruce 1873; Reinburg 1921; Fischer 1923; García 1958; Reichel -Dolmatoff 1972; Ramírez and Pinzón 1986; McKenna, Luna and Towers 1986). In his compilation, Schultes describes it as a type of malpigiaceae. "At least three species were used as hallucinogens in the Colombian Putumayo: Banisteriopsis caapi, B. inebrians and B. quitensis " (Schultes 1986).
9 This community has among the constituent elements of its being and activities the ingestion of the entheogen ayahuasca - Banisteriopsis Caapi -, since the connoisseur uses it as a vehicle to achieve, with the different forces of nature, the materialization of knowledge in the pints. The pints correspond to the flow of color spots ( rigcha ) that the knower experiences. So much so, that in the Inga community, as well as in the Kamëntsa, the central structural element is color. These communities live color, because yagé gives a vision of the world. Color, for the Ingano, is an expression of life, of the emotional state; darkness, contrary to color, is death. Color is presented as the dynamics of "vital energy." Thus, for the Knowledgeable: "(...) everything has its color deep down."
10 This information was collected by the author in the course of ethnographic research carried out in the upper Putumayo, in 2005.
11 It is worth clarifying that Deleuze and Guattari raise the need for this type of evolution at a theoretical level, and that we have taken this concept to explain the phenomenon of relationships and their difference from kinship.
12 With a different, but equally interesting, position, Viveiros de Castro understands the animal-human reality from a perspective that perceives it in a single sense. The common original background of all species is humanity, as a relationship between subjects through hunting; not as a type of animality, but because hunting is a type of war, of natural relationship between subjects. Hence, those who know in the ecstatic journey adopt the perspective of non-human subjectivities and can see how animals see themselves as humans: "The human side of non-humans" (Viveiros de Castro 2005). However, this proposal does not cease to have an overly anthropocentric appearance that dismisses the fact that in becoming an animal, man, in fact, participates in a "bestiality"; Hunting is, above all, animal in nature, since it is always the animal that, due to its biological and ethological adaptation, kills, stalks, captures its prey and survives because it does so. This is what the subject experiences when he is displaced by the position of "hunter", of predator, by "an inhumanity experienced immediately in the body" (Deleuze and Guattari 2006, 276).
13 Following Deleuze, the anomalous or anomalous does not only refer to that which is outside the norm and an established order, but, by being at the limit of the norm, it is also simultaneously the limit of the counterpart of the norm. . This is found in a border position, between two laws or norms that conflict and that place the anomalous in the possibility of becoming. Deleuze says regarding the relationships that are woven in the works of Anglo-Saxon literature, Penthesilea and Melville: "(...) it would be necessary, therefore, to define a special function that is not confused with health or illness: Anomalous function. The Anomalous is always on the border, at the limit of a band or a multiplicity; he is part of it, but he is already making it pass to another multiplicity, he makes it become, he draws a line between" (Deleuze and Parnet). 2004, 52).
14 I bring up the reference that Sauvagnargues makes to Canguilhem to underline the anomalous concept : "The anomaly is defined as a 'fact of individual variation' that illustrates the Leibnizian principle of indiscernibles, that is, the epistemological primacy of difference. Well, the norm, for Canguilhem, is 'morphological and functional', variable and fluctuating, not general (...) the anomalous is the constituent difference that is produced as a singular case from which the reflective norm is derived by variation." "Deviation is not only abnormal (it is, we could say, normally anomalous ), but the living thing, just as it does not depend on a dualism between matter and form, is not explained in terms of logical division between individual and species: every living thing is anomalous. All multiplicity is produced by constituent anomie" (Sauvagnargues 2006, 53-54).
15 Cavelier points out the important role of the search and domestication of plants in different climates as a shamanic exercise among gathering and hunting societies, 9,000 years ago (2005, 27-33).
16 This word, from Quechua roots, is commonly used in the regions of Putumayo and Nariño to describe someone who is drunk or intoxicated. Statements such as "he's crazy," as a mockery, emphasize the loss of will and control of the body. It is common in yagé sessions for the most experienced participants to be attentive to the effects that the drink may have on new participants, which comparatively generates food poisoning. But being drunk not only speaks of being in a state of intoxication, but also of the particular state reached by ingesting yagé: the change of vision and new sensitivity that the knower and the participants manage to experience. It seems that the knowledgeable and the most experienced in taking yage manage to have self-control of their body and, even so, see the visions of yage.
17 The body without organs refers to the assemblage by which the body can be redefined, regardless of the forms that determine it (of the substance or subject, of the organs and structures of the mental faculties). It is an exercise on one's own life that is not necessarily conscious and that exceeds sensory experience; This experimentation does not disintegrate the physical from the mental but rather unites them in the intensity of a way of life that is evident in the body.
19 This information is an extract from recordings made by the author about experiences with yagé, on the occasion of an ethnographic investigation in the upper Putumayo, in 2005, with the experts Paulino Mojomboy, from San Andrés, Olimpo and Domingo Cuatindioy, from Sibundoy .
20 The ecstatic experience is not linked, for all peoples, with the use of entheogens; However, it may be affected by other external agents, such as the extreme cold of the Arctic. Various studies agree that external agents incite transformations in perception and in the body. In this regard, see the research of Mircea Eliade (2001) and Peter Furst (1980).
21 It is important to understand that deterritorialization can start from the consumption of the entheogen. However, this consumption does not explain deterritorialization , it is rather the function of a new desire that invests perception.
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