The Fire of the Jaguar
Hau Books Executive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Katharine Herman Editorial Board Carlos Fausto Ilana Gershon Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié Jonathan Parry Joel Robbins Danilyn Rutherford Anne-Christine Taylor Jason Throop www.haubooks.com
The Fire of the Jaguar Terence Turner Edited by Jane Fajans Hau Books Chicago
2017 Hau Books and the estate of Terence Turner. All content of this title, including the foreword, has been approved by the editor, Jane Fajans. Cover, 1927, A. E. Brehm s Jagoear (Felix onza). Foreword, 2017 Hau Books and David Graeber Introduction, 2017 Hau Books and Jane Fajans Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9973675-4-6 LCCN: 2017944968 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is printed, marketed, and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
This volume received a Norm and Sibby Whitten SALSA Publication Subvention Award for Anthropological Monographs on Lowland South America as well as a subvention from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University.
Table of Contents List of figures and tables editor s introduction Or why myth matters Jane Fajans foreword At long last David Graeber ix xiii xix part one 1 the fire of the jaguar: the kayapo myth of the origin of cooking fire Chapter One: General problems and methodological issues 3 Chapter Two: The myth 9 Chapter Three: The social setting 19 Chapter Four: Cultural associations of the symbolic elements in the myth 37 Chapter Five: The structure of the myth 55 Chapter Six: The macaw and jaguar episodes 93 Chapter Seven: The final pair of episodes 109 Chapter Eight: Conclusions 121
viii The Fire of the Jaguar part two 147 later articles Beauty and the beast: The fearful symmetry of the jaguar and other natural beings in Kayapo ritual and myth (the 2011 R. R. Marett Lecture) 149 Cosmology, objectification, and animism in indigenous Amazonia 173 The crisis of late structuralism 205 Bibliography 245 Index 251
List of figures and tables Figure 1.1. Figure 1.2. Figure 1.3. Figure 1.4. Figure 1.5. Figure 1.6. Figure 1.7. Figure 1.8. Initial situation: lacking fire on earth, humans warm bits of meat in the sun. WB and ZH leave their household for the forest, where WB climbs up to the macaws nest on a cliff. WB is stranded in the macaws nest after ZH angrily pulls out the ladder. WB refuses to throw down macaws, having thrown down a stone instead, and refuses to return home with ZH. After ZH returns to the village, WB languishes in the macaws nest, dying of thirst and starvation and resorting to consuming his own urine and excrement. The boy casts a shadow on the ground, which the male jaguar mistakes for prey; once he recognizes it is different than the boy, he pounces on the macaws and assumes a friendly attitude toward the boy. The male jaguar persuades the boy to come down and come home with him, where he will feed and care for him. The boy s development is thus incorporated into a new setting. The boy s relationships to the male and female jaguars become increasingly polarized: increasingly positive toward the jaguar father, increasingly negative toward the jaguar mother.
x The Fire of the Jaguar Figure 1.9. The boy repeatedly flees the menacing female jaguar and climbs a tree; the friendly male jaguar repeatedly persuades him to come down again. Figure 1.10. The male jaguar gives a bow and arrows to the boy at the river and tells him to shoot the female jaguar next time she threatens him while he takes his meat from the fire. He does so and gathers a piece of fire and emblems of each gender as he leaves. Figure 1.11. After killing the female jaguar, the boy takes a piece of the fire, along with the bow and arrow, roast meat, and cotton string, and heads back alone to the village. Figure 1.12. The boy arrives in the village and goes to his sister s and mother s house, showing them what he has brought back. The men then summon him to the men s house to show them the items. Figure 1.13. The men go to the jaguars house to fetch the jatoba log and bring it back to the men s house, where the women come to light their own fires and bring them to their individual houses. Table 1. Contrastive relations and transitional forms between society and nature. Figure 1.14. The general triadic structure underlying all the episodes of the myth of the origin of cooking fire. Figure 3.1. The Kayapo village as cosmogram. The men s house is in the center of the plaza, surrounding by extended-family houses; behind them is the a-tuk zone and an airstrip, beyond which is the forest. Figure 3.2. Kayapo drawing of the village of Kapôt. Figure 3.3. Kayapo society in spacetime: vertical space and linear time. Figure 3.4. Kayapo society in spacetime: concentric space and cyclical time. Figure 3.5. Homologies between the Kayapo social body and kindred. From ego s perspective, the inner zone is natural (black) and the outer zone is social (grey). The vertical axis indicates the passage of time in growth and generations. Figure 3.6. A child s face painting: the upper portion (outer zone) is painted red and the lower portion (inner zone) is painted black. Figure 3.7. Mother and child with Kayapo body painting, coiffure, and ornaments worn along with Western dress. Figure 3.8. Man and boys with ceremonial body painting, ornaments, and white down covering central body and thighs. The upper part of
List of figures and TABLES xi their faces is painted with black jaguar spots, while their mouths are painted red. Figure 3.9. Men s collective dancing encircling the central plaza, wearing feather headdresses to help the dancers fly. Figure 3.10. Airplane adorned with Kayapo feather capes. Figure 3.11. Mats being placed over logs covering the hole where a deceased person is buried. Figure 3.12. Family visiting a cemetery to remove weeds from a relative s grave mound. Headbands are attached to poles next to graves of people who received beautiful names.