Mimesis and Alterity

A Particular History of the Senses

Michael Taussig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351853866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this ambitious and accomplished work, Taussig explores the complex and interwoven concepts of mimesis, the practice of imitation, and alterity, the opposition of Self and Other. The book moves from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, to the fable of colonial 'first contact' and the alleged mimetic power of 'primitives'. Twenty years after the original publication, Taussig revisits the work in a new preface which contextualises the impact of Mimesis and Alterity. Drawing on the ideas of Benjamin, Adorno and Horckheimer and ethnographic accounts of the Cuna, Taussig demonstrates how the history of mimesis is deeply tied to colonialism and the idea of alterity has become increasingly unstable. Vigorous and unorthodox, this cross-cultural discussion continues to deepen our understanding of the relationship between ethnography, racism and society.

1

In Some Way or Another One Can Protect Oneself From Evil Spirits by Portraying Them

He is driven not merely to awaken congealed life in petrified objects—as in allegory—but also to scrutinize living things so that they present themselves as being ancient, ‘Ur-historical’ and abruptly release their significance.

—T. W. Adorno, “Uber Walter Benjamin”

He is driven … to awaken congealed life in petrified objects. Thus, Benjamin, in addressing the fetish character of objecthood under capitalism, demystifying and reenchanting, out-fetishizing the fetish. And if this necessarily involves a movement in the other direction, not awakening but petrifying life, reifying instead of fetishizing, doing what Adorno describes as the scrutiny of living things so that they present themselves as being Ur-historical and hence abruptly release their significance, then a strange parallel is set up with my reading of the Cuna shaman of the San Blas Islands off Panama, faced with a woman in obstructed labor and singing for the restoration of her soul. By her hammock in his singing he is seeing, scrutinizing, bringing into being an allegory of the cosmos as woman through whom is plotted the journey along the birth canal of the world—an action he undertakes by first awakening congealed life in his petrified fetish-objects, carved wooden figurines now standing by the laboring woman. With them he will journey. To them he sings:

The medicine man gives you a living soul, the medicine man changes for you your soul, all like replicas, all like twin figures.¹

Note the replicas. Note the magical, the soulful power that derives from replication. For this is where we must begin; with the magical power of replication, the image affecting what it is an image of, wherein the representation shares in or takes power from the represented—testimony to the power of the mimetic faculty through whose awakening we might not so much understand that shadow of science known as magic (a forlorn task if ever there was one), but see anew the spell of the natural where the reproduction of life merges with the recapture of the soul.

The Objectness of the Object

Like Adorno and Benjamin, if not also this San Blas Cuna shaman, my concern is to reinstate in and against the myth of Enlightenment, with its universal, context-free reason, not merely the resistance of the concrete particular to abstraction, but what I deem crucial to thought that moves and moves us—namely, its sensuousness, its mimeticity. What is moving about moving thought in Benjamin’s hands is precisely this. Adorno pictures Benjamin’s writing as that in which “thought presses close to its object, as if through touching, smelling, tasting, it wanted to transform itself,” and Susan Buck-Morss indicates how this very sensuousness is indebted to and necessary for what is unforgettable in that writing, its unremitting attempt to create “exact fantasies,” translating objects into words, maintaining the objectness of the object in language such that here translation is equivalent to more than translation, to more than explanation—to a sizzling revelation exercising the peculiar powers of the mimetic faculty.²

The Object

I want to begin with the problem to be found in Baron Erland Nordenskiold’s compilation An Historical and Ethnological Survey of the Cuna Indians, published in Sweden by the Gothenburg Ethnological Museum in 1938, six years after the baron’s death.³ It was edited by Henry Wassén and, as its title page states, was “written in collaboration with the Cuna Indian, Rubén Pérez Kantule,” a twenty-four-year-old secretary to the Cuna Nele de Kantule. (Nele is a title meaning High Chief and Seer which Nordenskiold and Pérez sometimes employ as a proper name.) You can see intimations of anthropological sympathy between the Swedish baron and the high chief’s secretary from the frontispiece portrait photograph of Nordenskiold and that of Rubén Pérez, set above the title of the book’s first chapter. Both well-groomed, in suit and tie, they share the same posture, these relaxed yet alert investigators of things Cuna.

Having been forced by illness to leave the land of the Cunas after a mere month of study there in 1927, two years after their successful revolt against the Panamanian government, the baron had invited Rubén Pérez to spend six months in Sweden to become his secretary and assist him in the interpretation of Cuna picture- drawings. When Pérez arrived in Sweden, he brought what Nordenskiold judged to be very valuable manuscript material—“songs, incantations, descriptions of illnesses, and prescriptions, all written in the Cuna language and mainly in our system of writing”—as well as a great many notes in English and Spanish concerning Cuna traditions and history dictated to him by the Nele, the Great Seer himself.

The problem I want to take up concerns the wooden figurines used in curing. Cuna call them nuchukana (pl.; nuchu, sing.), and in Nordenskiold and Pérez’ text I find the arresting claim that “all these wooden figures represent European types, and to judge by the kind of clothes, are from the eighteenth and possibly from the seventeenth century, or at least have been copied from old pictures from that time.” (345)^*

Pérez had never seen a wooden figure with a ring in the nose. Only the women wear such a ring. But Henry Wassén, asserting editorial prerogative, added a note saying that such figures do exist, however, and referred the reader to one, “certainly very old,” which had been given him in 1935 in Balboa by Mrs. Dove L. Prather, to add to his collection. Not only the Indians collect nuchus.

Nordenskiold raised the question whether the figurines were a relatively modern invention among the Cuna, based on their observations of the Catholic saints. (426) There is indeed reason to suggest that the figurines are a creation of relatively modern times, possibly no later than nineteenth century. “Until very recently,” wrote the U.S. anthropologist David Stout in the 1940s, “none of the primary sources on Cuna history mention nuchus.”⁴ In an article he published in 1940, Wassén speculated on the influence African slaves may have had on Cuna and Chocó Indian “magic sticks.” He wrote, “that the carved sticks which are used by the Kuna medicine singers are equipped with figures of Europeans in cloth from an older period and have been influenced by figures of the saints etc., strengthens my opinion that the Kunas have adopted these sticks relatively late.” As an afterthought he added: “The figures of, for example, the Spaniards on the sticks could be explained as an emblem of power.”⁵ Certainly there is no mention whatsoever of the figurines in the detailed account left by the pirate’s surgeon Lionel Wafer concerning his four months’ stay among the Indians of the Darién Peninsula in 1681, and Wafer was extremely interested in Indian medicine and curing ritual. Indeed, his prestige and safety among them depended on such knowledge. He reports vividly on lively healing ritual involving the mimicry of what he takes to be the voices of spirits conversing with the healer. But there is no indication of figurines.⁶

In any event, whatever the temporal relation to European colonialism might be (and whatever could be learned from it), Nordenskiold was sure of one thing: “It is certain at any rate that the wooden figures which the Cunas carve and use as abiding places for their helping spirits, no longer look like either Indians or demons, but like white people.” (426) And half a century later, in 1983, with the authority of having spent four years among the Cuna, the anthropologist and former U.S. Peace Corpsman Norman Chapin made basically the same point—the figurines “almost invariably are carved to look like non-Indians; if they are made to represent Indians, they are somewhat more exotic, wearing suits and hats with serrated tops, and are occasionally riding horses.”⁷

Baron Erland Nordenskiold (from An Historical and Ethnological Survey of the Cuna Indians, 1938)

Rubén Pérez (from An Historical and Ethnological Survey of the Cuna Indians, 1938)

Cuna curing figurines. Drawn by Guillermo Hayans (circa 1948)

Cuna curing figurines

The Problem: Mimesis Unleashed

At this point the problem can be fairly stated (with some wonder, mind you) as to why these figures, so crucial to curing and thus to Cuna society, should be carved in the form of “European types.” In short: why are they Other, and why are they the Colonial Other? This question leads to still more of a very particular and particularizing sort, because in asking it I am, as a “European type,” brought to confront my cultured self in the form of an Indian figurine! What magic lies in this, my wooden self, sung to power in a language I cannot understand? Who is this self, objectified without my knowledge, that I am hell-bent on analyzing as object-over-there fanned by sea breezes and the smoke of burning cocoa nibs enchanting the shaman’s singing?

Something trembles in the whole enterprise of analysis and knowledge-making here: the whole anthropological trip starts to eviscerate. And about time, too. For if I take the figurines seriously, it seems that I am honor-bound to respond to the mimicry of my-self in ways other than the defensive maneuver of the powerful by subjecting it to scrutiny as yet another primitive artifact, grist to the analytic machinery of Euroamerican anthropology. The very mimicry corrodes the alterity by which my science is nourished. For now I too am part of the object of study. The Indians have made me alter to my self. Time for a little chant of my own:

And here where pirates arm in arm with Darién

Indians roamed,

Of their bones is coral made.

What Enlightening spirits can I sing into Being

For rethinking the thinking Self,

Its European histories, its other futures?

Embodiment

These questions are entwined in the puzzling fact that there is a fundamental split between the outer carved form of the curing figurines and their inner substance. For the ethnography emphatically states, as a Cuna article of faith, that the spirit of the wood, not its outer form, determines the efficacy of the figurine. Thus we are forced to ponder why it is then necessary to carve an outer European, non-Indian form. Why bother carving forms at all if the magical power is invested in the spirit of the wood itself? And indeed, as our puzzling leads to more puzzling, why is embodiment itself necessary?

This question in turn turns on an equally obscure problem, the most basic of all: how are such figurines supposed to function in healing? I find it exceedingly strange that in the research on Cuna curing I have consulted, not only is there almost nothing written directly on the figurines, let alone on their healing function, but that this problem of why they exist and are used is not posed.

Certainly the anthropologist can record and speculate upon the famous curing chants such as the Muu-Igala (The Way of Muu) and the Nia-Igala (The Way of the Demon). Central to both is the odyssey undertaken by these figurines, or rather—and this is the point—by the spirits they “represent” in their search for the abducted soul of the sick person. And the anthropologist can mention other functions of the figurines as well. Nordenskiold (427) presents the case of a girl of the Narganá community who used to dream a lot about people who had died. Rubén Pérez took a figurine that she had held in her hands for but a few minutes to the shaman, who was then able to diagnose her visions as those of evil spirits, not of deceased persons, and to declare that unless she bathed in certain medicines she would lose her reason. In another instance, a man who fell ill in a settlement along the Gulf of Urabá took in his hands one of these wooden figurines, held it in the smoke of burning cocoa nibs, and then had a friend take it to the seer, who kept it in his house for some time, until in his dreams its soul told him from what kind of disease the Indian in far off Urabá, was suffering. (348) Bathing one’s head in the water in which a figurine has been placed is a way of acquiring strength to learn a new skill, especially a foreign language. (365) Furthermore, figurines can counsel the healer. Rubén Pérez used to believe that the seer or nele received instruction from the figurines about what medicines to use for different illnesses. But the nele later told him that he learned these things from the illness demons themselves, although sometimes the figurines would give him advice. (348) The figurines have the power to make evil spirits appear before the seer, whose powers are quite miraculous, as itemized in the baron’s and Rubén Pérez’ text:

There are a great many things that Nele of Ustúpu knows. He is able to see what illnesses are affecting any person who comes to consult him. When he examines a sick person he seats himself facing the patient and looks at him. He sees right through him as if he were made of glass. Nele sees all the organs of the body. He is also able, with the assistance of the nuchus [i.e. figurines] to give his verdict as to what illness a patient whom he has not even seen is suffering from. Nele can foretell how long a person is going to live. It is of the greatest importance that he is able to say when and how a person’s soul is carried away by spirits.

(83)

And the text concludes at this point that the seers possess these occult powers, “thanks to the nuchus [the figurines], the tutelary spirits.” (83)

Then again, there is the astonishing carving and subsequent use of as many as fifty or more figurines as large or larger than humans in the community-wide exorcism of serious spiritual disturbance of an entire island or region. These exorcisms last many days. The chief figurine in one such exorcism in the late 1940s was said by an American visitor to be a seven-foot-tall likeness of General Douglas MacArthur (and we will have occasion to think again of this representation of the general when we c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Report to the Academy
• 1 In Some Way or Another One Can Protect Oneself From Evil Spirits by Portraying Them
• 2 Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds
• 3 Spacing Out
• 4 The Golden Bough: The Magic of Mimesis
• 5 The Golden Army: The Organization of Mimesis
• 6 With the Wind of World History in Our Sails
• 7 Spirit of the Mime, Spirit of the Gift
• 8 Mimetic Worlds, Invisible Counterparts
• 9 The Origin of the World
• 10 Alterity
• 11 The Color of Alterity
• 12 The Search for the White Indian
• 13 America as Woman: The Magic of Western Gear
• 14 The Talking Machine
• 15 His Master’s Voice
• 16 Reflection
• 17 Sympathetic Magic in a Post-Colonial Age
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index