Joanna Overing

Death and the Loss of Civilized Prdation among the Piaroa of the Orinoco Basin
In: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33 n126-128. pp. 191-211.

Citer ce document / Cite this document : Overing Joanna. Death and the Loss of Civilized Prdation among the Piaroa of the Orinoco Basin. In: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33 n126-128. pp. 191-211. doi : 10.3406/hom.1993.369636 http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/hom_0439-4216_1993_num_33_126_369636

Joanna

Overing

Death and the Loss of Civilized Prdation among the Piaroa of the Orinoco Basin1

opposition permeates Piaroa the Orinoco the of the Basin. Though domain Loss most basin Prdation most non-social of the analogical ordering, not and of that but tonotablythis their amongelaborate skills for Orinoco Overing, Deathalterity thetheishallmark ofapply wordly sociality,Piaroa Piaroa Joanna dead. The theto socialisliving,of Civilizedclassificationinof the the for the homes deficient alterity, the logic of strip the dying of all capabilities for civilized prdation, and thus for civilized relations of alterity: save for gender, the dead lose all aspects of personal singularity. The impoverished afterlife of the dead is in sharp contrast to the communities of the living, where a principle of homogeneity is conjoined with a stress on personal difference. The egalitarian social philosophy of the Piaroa allows for the understanding of the apparent perversity of their classificatory logic. The Piaroa explanation of the process of death, along with their descrip tions the asocial spirit world of the dead, combine to form an ele of gant sketch of what they understand to be the possibilities and dif ficulties of the human condition on earth. Since death, as they describe it, brings with it the loss of most aspects of what is necessary for the person to be alive and well in society, the land of the dead is not so much the converse of life but a highly deficient one. Only earthly human beings can acquire the particular predator forces upon which civilized productivity and therefore sociality are dependent. This is a process of being that is at once both the condition for human existence and its predicament. The process of death makes sense only within the context of their reflection upon the process of life, and to a certain extent vice versa. It is the relationship between life and death that is the topic of this paper. The Piaroa understanding of the processes of living and dying fits into their much broader cosmological scheme of agency for beings within the universe as a whole. It is an ontology of being that has historical foundation, and in the Piaroa formulation of their creation time history it was through this history that potentialities for agency changed. It is highly significant that the historical focus becomes increasingly centred upon the agency of this-wordly L'Homme 126-128, avr.-dc. 1993, XXXIII (2-4), pp. 191-211.

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and present-day Piaroa and their distinctly eness from gods past and present, and from the plants, the animals, and the dead. This is not to say that Piaroa cosmology is but a reflection through converse logic of their social life, for it is far from being so. Nor is it about social order or social control, and it would also be an extreme distortion of the facts to see Piaroa myth and cosmology as solely charters for social action. Nevertheless, being centred upon the possibilities and dangers for present-day humans living a social and productive existence, Piaroa cosmology (and their discourse about it) provides for them a theory of the social. As such it is a cosmology that incorporates a complex conversation about the process of being that is uniquely lived and achievable by human beings.2 It would be wrong to see Piaroa cosmology and their highly elaborated discourse about it as one part of a system commenting on another, as for example upon social action or political legitimacy. Cosmology, discourse, power and social practice they all participate in the same process, not separate ones, and they are therefore constitutive of one another. All occupy daily public space, and as such define it. Talk and action must not be treated as different orders of reality. The "problem" of minimalist, fluid societies The Piaroa, a forest dwelling horticulturalist, fishing, hunting and gathering people of the Venezuelan Guianas, belong to that category of lowland peoples who Viveiros de Castro (1992) has recently described as "minimalist societies" which as a class provide us ostensibly with a specific anthropological puzzle: they appear to be top heavy in the area of cosmological discourse in relation to the casualness, and indeed apparent paucity, of their social organization. In the Guianas, we do have a prescriptive marriage rule and the Dravidiantype of therminology through which it is expressed. The relationship termino logythe primary and almost sole means through which social relationships is are expressed, considered, changed. At the same time it is a social classification that in its use adheres insistently, not upon the principles of social solidarity and continuity, but upon the freedom of personal free choice (Overing Kaplan 1975). There is also the local group, or village, the physical structure of which was traditionally the large communal house. Socially it was envisioned as an endogamous cognatic kinship group, comprised (despite the marriages which gave it form) of "those of a kind" with one another (also see Rivire n.d.). Thus, a strong stress in community living is upon a social principle of homog eneity. Equally powerful, and linked, is the principle of personal autonomy. The structure, if one can so label the results of such principles that insist upon social homogeneity and the autonomy of the person, is at once enabling of equality and rsistent to the stabilization of hierarchy (see, for example, Thomas 1982). The Piaroa were particularly offended by, and adamantly so in talk,

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the legitimacy of any notion of social rule. The idea of "the right to com mand" was equally offensive. In short, their high valuation of personal aut onomy especially a person's "right to choose" was by far too strong to allow for any appreciation of the benefit of the social control-like mechanisms that are coterminous with the anthropological understanding of the order and social structure of non-state societies.3 Perhaps it is best to say that the peoples of the Guianas have little or no social structure. This is not such a preposterous statement, for in anthro pology the notion of social structure and indeed of the Social is usually defined by 1) structures of separation and opposition, and 2) structures of inequality, or the institutional elaboration of relations of dominance and subor dination.4 Both run contrary to Guianese daily social life where the playing out of difference and opposition relate most saliently not to the interior of community life but to its exterior. Otherness in Piaroa social philosophy pertains most forcefully to all those people, animals, spirits, and gods who dwell outside the village boundary, and even beyond the community's own experiencing of time. This is not to say that the peoples of the Guianas do not value highly an idea of sociality, and even more the practice of it. In order to discover the path to this indigenous sense of the social, it is better to speak of their aesthetics of the social (see Overing 1989), rather than their institutionalization of it. Their concern is focused upon the attainment of a particular quality of material existence, and not upon its structure at least not as anthropologists tend to use the term. Sociality is a process of being that the Piaroa privilege over any other way of being, and certainly over any structure that might give a guarantee of control and be based upon relations of domination/subordination. Viveiros de Castro (1992) takes another route in explaining the casual social organization of the Arawet, a Tupi-Guarani group of Brazil. He understands the Arawet "other-worldly style of thought" as embodying the high valuation of these other worlds, which leads in the end to their focus being upon feritas and divinitas instead of humanitas. Thus, the world of the social for the Arawet a people for whom truth and desire always lies with the Other and in their future afterworld life with and as cannibal gods is marginalized, and society becomes but a precarious space, a "time of transition, encompassed by that which is exterior to it" {ibid., chap. 1). In contrast, the desires of the Piaroa are directed firmly toward this world which they view as the privileged space within the cosmos, and when in it, unlike the Arawet, they want no contact whatsoever with their dangerous and non-social dead.5 Their concern is always for acquiring the capabilities for earthly living and sociality, for in their view all other ways of being, whether of the dead, the gods, or the animals, are by contrast barren and deficient. Thus we do not have the option (as appears to be the case for the Arawet) of dismissing the informal Piaroa world of the social as but a transitional period leading to a more glorious future in the land of the dead. To unfold the Piaroa theory of the social it is necessary

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to set their understanding of the possibilities for the human alive in this world within the more general context of their descriptions of agency in the cosmos. As an aspect of this more general cosmological scheme, Piaroa afterworlds are a good starting point. The mortuary moiety and clan system of the Piaroa The structure of their afterworlds give evidence to the fact that informal as the Piaroa may be in their this-worldly practice they are nevertheless as capable as the G or the Bor oro of metaphoric elaborations.6 The difference is that while the latter peoples act out their particular vision of cosmological ordering ceremonially as daily social practice, the Piaroa project dual organization onto afterworld and not social space.7 When a Piaroa dies his named spirit (about which more will be said below) travels to one of the clans (iyaenawatu) of above, "of the sky", or to one below, "of the earth". These moieties, each comprised of eight or so clans, are named respectively "the groups of the sky" (hut'ohu iyaenawatu) and "the groups of the earth" (mariweka iyaenawatu) . Each clan is then also distinguished by a name that reflects the dichotomy (high and low) upon which the moiety is based. The sub-groups of the moiety of mariweka carry the names of land animals or objects of the earth, while those of the moiety of hut'ohu have the names of birds, a star, or fruits of high trees. The names of the mortuary clans refer further to specific "lakes of creation". Thus the name is formed by the conjunction of hakwawa, meaning "within"; yo'u, meaning "the lake of"; and the name of the object, animal, bird or plant to which the lake belongs. For example, for the moiety of mari weka there is the sub-group of hakwawa inaekwayo'u, literally translated as "within the lake of the stone", and for the moiety of hut'ohu there is hakwawa chirik'oyo'u, "within the lake of the star".8 These names recount the places of creation for the Piaroa. One prevalent version of the creation of the Piaroa says that Wahari, a powerful god of the mythic past, created the first pairs of Piaroa men and women in separate acts of creation at each of the sacred lakes of mariweka and hut'ohu. He created them from fish that dwelt within these lakes, and it is to the sacred lake from which the first brother and sister pair of one's group was created that a person returns at death. Thus a person's mortuary home is also his/her "place of creation". The moiety system orders both afterworld space (the mortuary clans) and the primordial localities of Piaroa creation. In contrast to the flamboyant moieties of the G of Central Brazil which provide the role of clothing the person as a social self9, the Piaroa moiety system plays little part in the ordering of this-worldly space. It does not pertain in any direct way to the social aspects of the living. First of all, the members of any particular clan, while for the most part separated and dispersed during their lifetimes, are only united at death. Thus as fellow clansmen, the living

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have no obligation to one another; earthly Piaroa do not form political, economic, or ritual ties on the basis of iyaenawatu membership. Moreover, the Piaroa as individuals were frequently vague about which clan they belonged to, or which would be their particular home in the afterlife. Such casual and indeed free-wheeling treatment of group membership was due in part both to its lack of significance for earthly existence and to the fact that mortuary groupings were formed in accordance to principles contrary to social living. Young people, applying the this-worldly, social rule of thumb that allows for a high degree of personal free choice in residence matters, could be rather whimsical about what they understood to be their future home after death. Their option, contrary to the received wisdom of the experts on deathly residence (i.e. the ruwatu leaders), was to dwell in mortuary eternity with their own spouses. This brings us to the most important reason for a person's lack of concern over precision with respect to clan membership, although one not disassociated from its insignificance for this-worldly action. The details about iyaenawatu existence and membership were the responsibility of the religious specialists, the ruwatu. It was the ruwang who through his death chant and ritual drove the named spirit of the dying to its appropriate mortuary home, just as it was also he who cured this named spirit whose illness when still attached to the living was life threatening to the person. The ruwang, to fulfill his own daily obligations, needed to know (as the layman did not) the iyaenawatu membership of everyone for whom he was responsible. Each night in his nightly chantings he recited the list of this membership as part of his curing and protective procedures for the residents of his community. Thus when the Piaroa visited a strange community, in order to secure protection from the dangers of a strange land, they had to tell its ruwang their clan members hip give him sufficient information for him to deduce it. During the or entirety of the visit, the ruwang would then include the visitor's clan within his nightly chantings. The visitor, on the other hand, had no reason to be concerned about or to know the clan membership of those with whom he was visiting (Overing Kaplan 1975). Indeed, most people were unaware of the iyaenawatu membership of many residents within their own villages. Unlike the ordinary person's reflection about iyaenawatu groupings, the ruwatu were more definite about mortuary destination. In shamanic exegesis, a person usually belonged and returned to the group of the father (but see below). In this case, contrary to the dreams of the young, one could not reside in afterlife with a spouse. Primordial creation was of brother and sister pairs, and it was with the intermarriage between pairs from different lakes of creation that Piaroa sociality began. As the theory goes, it was through these initial marriages that all Piaroa are today related as kinsmen. Husbands and wives, in accordance with the principle of patrifiliation that decides primordial and thus mortuary affiliation, must separate for their existence in the iyaenawatu after world.

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Contrary to logic, moiety and clan membership never entered into the actual marriage decision making process. Nor had it ever done so according to all discussion about it, for the insistence was upon the freedom to marry into any group one wished even one's own. However, the ruwatu did create a logical, sort of after the fact, congruence between the system of marriage and that of moiety membership. They were able to do so because it was they who made all final decisions about afterlife residence, since it was they who sent the named souls to their iyaenawatu homes. They thus were able to handle the logical chaos of marriage practice by juggling moiety membership. If a husband and wife were both of the Moiety of the Sky through the principle of patrifiliation, the ruwang would place the one or the other (in accordance to a principle of matrilmoT) into the Moiety of the Earth. It was nevertheless surprising from a list of parental clan memberships (which in turn had probably been juggled) the number of marriages that did fit a cross-moiety scheme of things. The glaring exception were marriages between people of the same "foreign" clan. A substantial number of Piaroa had been incorporated through marr iage into Piaroaland, with the logical operator for such inclusion being the moiety system. I cannot account for the high number of subsequent marriages being between those of the same stranger clan. In sum the dual organization of the moiety system refers not to social groupi ngs but to primordial places of creation, and because the Piaroa return to them after death, to the ordering of mortuary clans. The particular logic of opposition and separation so crucial to the shamanic classification of afterlife and creation is pointedly not replicated in Piaroa social life where through marital intermingling the clans lose their spatial distinctiveness (Overing 1984: 132). Thus in the hands of the ruwatu, afterworld organization through the logic of opposition takes its place within a powerful discourse of alterity that is so highly salient to the interaction of living Piaroa with other beings of both this and non-earthly space.10 Ta'kwa ruwang: the master of personal forces for fertility The most critical part of the death ritual is when the ruwang separates the named spirit of the dying individual from the land of the living. Through chanting he sends it to the appropriate mortuary home through the smoke of the resin over which he chants. This smoke then forms a ceiling that closes earthly space and "the domesticated sky of the living" to the land of the dead. It is crucial for the ruwang to send the spirit to its correct iyaenawatu, and this is because the mortuary clans will only accept the dead who belong to them their own close kinsmen. If the spirit travels to the wrong group, and is there forenot received into the afterworld, it returns to wander the earth where its dangerous aim becomes to devour its kinsmen still alive. However, if the named spirit is successful in arriving at its own land of the dead it becomes transformed

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into the full grown, familiar but youthful and beautified image of the person when alive on earth. In this process the named spirit has become an aweta, a being of the land of the dead. In the village of the dead everyone is hand some and of the same young age. The afterlife is a world with no work and no affines. The awetu with their paternal kinsmen eat and have sex; they dance and enjoy their own ceremonial ritual; they smell the fragrant perfumes of their afterlife home. The named spirit that travels to its mortuary home serves as the person's ta'kwa ruwang, or "master of thoughts", when he or she is alive. It dwells in the living person's heart and head, and is the dwarf reflected in the eye. It is also the ta'kwa ruwang who provides the individual with the vital forces that one needs for living on earth. Before proceeding to more details on the life of the dead, a description of the role of the ta'kwa ruwang in this-wordly action is in order. The ta'kwa ruwang enters the foetus endowing it with the critical "force for life" (or "life of the senses") and thenceforth grows with it. Shortly after the birth of the child this spirit is provided a name that comes from the land of the dead from the grandparental or great grandparental generation. It is the name that fixes the ta'kwa ruwang within the body of the child. The Piaroa emphatically deny the notion of recycling of souls. As one version, the ta'kwa ruwang is given to the foetus by Neyawae (Tadpole), one of the tianawa gods. The Piaroa say that what is important is for the names (and not the spirits) to be continued or recycled throughout the generations, and thus it is the name of a relative but not his or her spirit that comes from the mortuary clan. Once named the ta'kwa ruwang becomes henceforth the person's "master of thoughts", and as such the vital agent that slowly accumulates for the person throughout his or her life all capabilities, knowledge, and powers that allow for a material and social existence on earth. One way to put it, and this seems accurate from the descriptions, is that ta'kwa ruwang once received is there after the active agent of the person. A person's ta'kwa ruwang, along with this spirit's forces of thought, serves to constitute and define his or her unique ness being. of It is the ta'kwa ruwang that gives the person the force or, as the Piaroa phrase it, the "thoughts" for hunting, fishing, gardening, chanting, and also for building houses, weaving cloth, and having children. A person's child is said to be the product of his or her ta'kwa ruwang, as too is one's garden, a blowgun one makes, a chant one sings, a ritual conducted, and the words one speaks. Within the person alive on earth his or her particular powers for work and reproduction, for doing things in the material sense, are said to be beautiful and indeed the source of a man or woman's personal beauty (see Overing 1989). These forces travel to the person's ta'kwa ruwang as gifts from the ethereal tianawa gods who own the crystal boxes of power within which are safely sheltered all the beautiful capabilities for using the earth materially. Through what the Piaroa call "lessons in wizardry", which are

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shamanic rituals, the ta'kwa ruwang of each person slowly acquires more and more of such powers from the gods throughout his or her life. For this reason the old are considered to be stronger than the young, and indeed the "lessons in wizardry" themselves are understood to endow health, making the body more resistant to disease. Very briefly the Piaroa view the forces over which the ta'kwa ruwang is master as powers for creation, or their personal forces for fertility. Thus the Piaroa class together what we would see as very disparate acts working, making artefacts, hunting, the bearing of children, giving life to, transforming, sorcery and curing.11 Children and the products of work alike are understood to be manifestations of a person's forces for fertility, and both the child and the blowgun were said to be "a thought" (a'kwa) of that person. As such it is a product of the forces mastered by his or her ta'kwa ruwang. One of the most striking characteristics of the Piaroa understanding of the human condition is that the idea of a "natural" or "biological" fertility would be alien to them. The forces for human fertility are acquired from non-earthly domains of the cosmos, and in the main from the land of the gods. For instance young women at first menses receive their capacity for reproduction from the gods, and also their capability for mastering these forces. Thus the capability for fertility distinct to women, to bear or not to bear children, is no more "bio logically" based than a shaman's capability to fly to other parts of the cosmos or to transform into a butterfly all such capabilities are considered to be "wizar dry"(maeripa), for they are transcendental powers coming from the crystal boxes of the gods.12 The forces for fertility acquired from the gods during life by the deceased's ta'kwa ruwang are a primary focus of the mortuary rituals. These active, powerf ul forces of the self that allowed a person alive to act upon the world, transforming it for use in his or her own particular way are the powers that the ruwatu in their mortuary rituals strip from the ta'kwa ruwang before sending to its mortuary iyaenawa home. When the ta'kwa ruwang becomes aweta, accepted as a member of the mortuary clan, it has made that irreversible step into the land of the sterile dead. It is through the descriptions of this stripping process that one realizes that the beautiful forces for fertility, those attributes for life and creation that allow for the human condition on earth, are as well the weapons and tools for prdation, or for the cannibalistic process. It was for instance part of the culinary arts to attack, to kill, and to transform into food and artefacts the animals, plants, and fish all of whom lived a human life on earth during the time of creation (see Overing 1986b). The Piaroa understand work itself to be a violent, predatory process, for the powers of ta'kwa ruwang that make it possible are of creation time sorcery and as such were the original means for prdation in the world. Thus mythic episodes clearly link the acquisition of productive capabilities with cannibalism. The fertile powers of ta'kwa ruwang that today make production possible were created by a mad creator god (the

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archetypical cannibal during the history of creation) as powerful predator forces that he acquired by taking dangerous hallucinogens poisoned by the sun. As a result the powers for the culinary arts (for instance curare and the fire for slash-and-burn agriculture, and the fire for cooking meat and vegetables) are understood to be also today weapons of prdation. Most tools and utensils used in the productive process pots and blowguns, curare and cassava graters are said to be physical manifestations of their creator's forces of ta'kwa ruwang, and thus each contains the predator force of its specific Piaroa creator. It is this predator force that gives it efficacy in the production process (see Overing 1992). Indeed, in the Piaroa view all activity allowing for human material existence in this world is founded upon the fertile, but predatory, cannibalistic capabilities of ta'kwa ruwang : not only hunting, but also collecting, fishing, gardening, making artefacts, having children, chanting, curing, protecting, trading, and even talking are considered as predatory performances. In sum the processes of production, reproduction, exchange, and language all are understood alike as aspects of the predator capabilities of a person's ta'kwa ruwang. It is thus understandable that the primary aim of the mortuary rite is upon the ta'kwa ruwang of the deceased, and its forces. To rid the deceased of all his/her forces of ta'kwa ruwang becomes an act essential to the safety of the living. The death chant and the loss of "civilized prdation" The death chant was described to me by one young man as being about the "jaguar spirit", which was his way of capturing the transformation of ta'kwa ruwang after death. Explanations of the process of death, by no means dogma, were characterized by a considerable degree of free variation, and the ruwatu argued vehemently among themselves over the details. One area for argument regarded the fate of the ta'kwa ruwang of a powerful ruwang. Such disagree ment more to do with variability in ideas about aspects of self for the had person alive than with more general principles having to do with the process of death. For instance did a ruwang have two and not just one "master of thoughts"? A spirit of song (menye ta'kwa ruwang) as well as the ta'kwa ruwang of the heart? Or was the first but an aspect, a capability, of the second? Those more abstract in their reflection opted for one life force, and not two, as the ultimate solution.13 Nevertheless, all agreed that at death it was not just the ta'kwa ruwang that departed from the body, but the self also fractionalized into various other forces, most of which were highly dangerous for the living. The fragmentation of a great ruwang was especially threatening, and thus the death chant for him was much more elaborate than for others. As the protector for his community, the ruwang was a warrior fighting against all the dangerous forces that might affect its health and security. Many of the powers

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his ta'kwa ruwang drew upon gave him the strength for these soldier responsibilities. For instance the "spirit of song" within him was also called "the spirit of hunger" and the "spirit of jaguar's breath"; while the spirit of the hallucinogen, yopo, that he smoked each night was his "spirit of battle". The power in general that he had was called uhuru, or "jaguar's roar". All such characterizations paid tribute to his predatory exploits in other worlds. Below are passages from a mortuary chant for a ruwang. Note the concern for eliminating all acquired powers many transformed at death into jaguar or other large cats from the ta'kwa ruwang before its journey to his iyaenawa home. Through the means of this chant I send the dying man to his kinsmen. Before he said "my wife", "my son", "my daughter". He is now dying and he will no longer be able to speak of the living as such. His body is useless for living, so he must go to his grandfathers of before. Go there where they are. There are many people there who died before. I will send you there as a young man. I will send you through this chant so you cannot think badly about your kinsmen your son, your wife, your family who still live. Bad odors of death. I send the fragrant odors of the flowers of the past there to circulate. There you will be separated from us, but happy. Once you have arrived there, you will not think about us, the living. You will be happy with your children, your fathers, your grandfathers who have died. I sing so that your spirit (ka'kwa ruwang) will go up peacefully there to your grand fathers and will not look down at us. I sing the songs of the tianawa gods (Cheheru, Anemei, Yubaeku). Through these songs you go to your grandfathers. Do not think of the sad warime of ours (their ceremonial feast). You will celebrate instead with your relatives there. For this I sing over the resin, and through this smoke I send you to your fathers. It will form a ceiling so that you cannot see us. It will separate us. (The following is specifically for a powerful sorcerer) You are a sorcerer. When you die do not endanger us and those who have spoken badly about you when you were living in this life. When you transform into awetu yaewik'ae (large jaguar spirits of the dead) do not harm us. As awetu do not harm us. I, as a singer, eleminate from these jaguar spirits all you have seen, all the power that you had before. I eliminate all the powers you held within your sacred stones jaguar stone, puma stone, the stones of jaguar of the jungle. With these stones you always transformed yourself. When you were young you had these stones. But when you are a'kwa ruwang you do not need them. You will not be able to use these stones for hunting (as sorcerers hunt). Your ka'kwa ruwang has no power. You will not receive the songs of the tianawa gods as before. By means of this chant I cut off these songs, the songs of life. I also take away your jaguar powers. I, the singer, lock up the songs of Cheheru so you cannot take them there.

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I, the singer, eliminate your food the wild peccary, the armadillo, the anteater all are gone. I remove the weight of your bones, and the meat in your stomach. I leave you clean. I eliminate all that you have eaten. When you arrive to your iyaenawa you will be able to see below the land of the tianawa Gods. Look down at them. Do not look at us or at unknown people. Do not think about what you have done in life, or about your children, your grandchildren, your wife. The chanter strips from the ta'kwa ruwang all those powers it accumulated and over which it was master during the course of the dying ruwang' s lif etime. Thus when his ta'kwa ruwang arrives at its mortuary clan it has lost forever those capabilities particular to the ruwang that allowed him to live a material life as a full and powerful human alive on earth. The singer of the death chant must prevent these forces for life from entering the lands of the dead where their use would be unbearably dangerous for the living. This is because most of the powers for living are also weaponry, and those of a ruwang are especially strong. Jealous of those alive, the dead sometimes scream down to earth in order to kidnap or devour the spirits of the living. They specifical ly the warime, the ceremonial increase feast of living Piaroa. It is long for when these rituals are held that the dead tend to intrude upon their living kins men. For the non-social, non-thinking dead to have the weaponry for prdation of the living would be deadly for humans on earth. As the ruwang dies most of his mighty sorcery capabilities emerge from his corpse transformed into predator animal souls. Before he dies he swallows his sorcery stones so that their spirits do not remain near his own house. After his death they are reborn as yaewi awetu, or jaguars, that emerge from the hands of the ruwang. Other souls are born from his powers. From his eyes emerge bees, and from his larynx there rises a flute and the "spirit of song". From his breath emerges a jaguar guard for the flute. The flute hovers in the mountain air beyond the mortuary home of the ta'kwa ruwang, yet it still, so it seems, provides the sounds for the songs ta'kwa ruwang would sing. An ethereal image until the translation for the "spirit of song" (menye autuis'a aweta) is given, to wit "the screamer of songs soul" . If a living ruwang either through accident or design were to remove the flute from its place, its jaguar guard would kill the thief and thus repossess the flute giving back to ta'kwa ruwang its screaming voice. For neither a man nor a woman is there only one afterlife spirit to which an individual could relate as the continuation of his or her living self. Ocelots (yaewi aweta)14 emerge from the hands of both men and women, and from their eyes come bees (tiaere aweta). The burial grounds for the Piaroa are caves located high in the mountains near their settlements, and the ocelot and bee spirits remain within the cave where the corpse has been placed. They protect the body against any animal or insect that comes to eat the flesh of the dead. They also are agents of retribution, for they return to the communities of the living to kill anyone who harmed the deceased when he or she was alive.

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As M. R. Kaplan (1970) has observed the jaguar, ocelot, and bees are all service souls15, and their function is clearly to kill. In their origin they were created by the creator gods to aid them as killers in the hunt, for their predatory activities against one another. But a Piaroa cannot kill with the hands, for to do so would lead directly to one's own death. The force of big cats and the bees serve as direct substitutes for the hands and the eyes. They provide a mediated kill. The Piaroa are blowgun hunters, and when used in concert the breath, the eyes, and the hands serve as a mediated kill in the hunt. The hands grip the blowgun' s tube: their eyes line its sight to the prey, and their breath propels the dart. Through this joint action a kill is achieved through civilized prdation, rather than murder. Some women become great singers, but otherwise their productive and predatory capacities emerge as ocelots and bees alone becoming the transformations of their capacities for gardening, processing food, collecting and fishing, and for both men and women transformations of their powers for creating tools and ritual paraphernalia. In all these tasks the skills of hands and eyes are needed, but not that of the expulsion of breath. The Piaroa view themselves as predators and life as a predatory process. The way in which events unfolded during mythic time led to a particular kind of cannibalism, and therefore a specific type of death and disease, as a precondition of humankind's nourishment in present day time. Because the Piaroa emerged from the battles of creation history with the exclusive capacities for social eating and for using the poisonous forces for production, they had to continue the war played out in mythic time with those who had lost the fight for the knowl edge of such capabilities (see Overing 1986b, also see below). Prdation suf fered by the Piaroa today is in large part inflicted by beings and gods of creation time who are avenging the loss of their capabilities for the culinary arts. Howe ver, the idiom of cannibalism is all pervasive in Piaroa thinking about social relationships in general, whether about the relations between gods, between gods and humans, between humans and animals, and finally between humans especially between affines, between political competitors, between partners in trading networks (see Overing 1992), and between the Piaroa and all other people. The root metaphor of exchange for the Piaroa is that of two (male) affines preying upon each other's respective domains. Although the Piaroa place an extreme value upon the tranquil life, their discourse on disease and death, eating and sorcery is deeply violent: it is a discourse of prdation, cannibalism and revenge (see Overing 1986b). At death the Piaroa lose all agency specific to their own human prdation. When alive theirs and theirs alone is a civilized prdation. Withi n living body the service souls are domesticated and thereby transformed the into beautifying and beautiful forces. But once the body dies and loses consciousness they can no longer be mastered, and without such taming on the part of human consciousness these forces transform into animals, stripped of the specific human powers for prdation and no longer beautified by the

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human capacity. Although the service souls might kill, as animals they have lost all capacities for the culinary arts. A few more words about the jaguar spirit of breath is in order. Jaguar is the root metaphor in Piaroa discourse denoting danger and alterity, yet it is through the breath of the ruwang that the "spirit of jaguar", or "hunger" enters others besides himself. Each night during his chants he blows his words into containers of both water and honey for all the members of his community to drink. Besides protecting them and himself from the dangers of eating animal meat, he also chants the words "Let me eat like a jaguar". When the people drink these words the spirits of jaguar (transformed tianawa gods) enter their bodies giving them the capacity to eat omnivorously "like a jaguar". If Other is jaguar, so too are the Piaroa, but jaguar as owner of the culinary arts, as in mythic time. In the Piaroa highly egalitarian ontology of existence, predators are the prey of their own prey. The ta'kwa ruwang dwelling in the land of the dead cannot eat as a civilized predator, but like the animals it can devour. It devours the spirits of living kin and eats of its own raw flesh, but it cannot make fire or a blowgun; it cannot cut down trees and build a garden; it cannot hunt or fish. It has no ritual for transforming the animals into vegetable food; it owns no fire to cook their flesh. The ta'kwa ruwang of the dead ruwang has lost its "jaguar spirit of hunger" as well as all other capacities for mediated killing. Its eating can only be (auto)cannibalistic, and this is a consumption that is unmediated by any of those capabilities of the living that enables them on the contrary to consume rather than merely devour. The spirits of the dead, as the Piaroa envision their existence in their afterworld homes, live a life of eternal beauty and youth. As already mentioned, no affines live in their communities, nor does anyone work. This image of deathly existence is not however one of paradisiacal innocence or glory. The beautiful spirits of the dead, enduring in neither a heaven nor a hell, have been stripped through the process of death of all human this-worldly accomplishment to live instead a primordial life of raw desire. For the Piaroa comparing the person alive with his or her identity after death, all that remains for eternal life is that brute aspect of self that cannot think, but can only wail, scream, defecate, fornicate and devour. The dead are duped by their beauty, their perfumes, their false feasts and by the winds bringing to them the odors of cooked food and the sounds of songs. The ruwang, powerful in this life through his possession of the "song of life" and sorcery stones, can only view the lands of the tianawa gods. Fooled into believing that he spends afterlife existence singing together with them their beautiful songs, he in fact spends eternity screeching out the sounds of the ethereal songs merely blown to him by the wind. Although the iyaenawatu (afterworld homes) could be said to be lands of sensual bliss, they are also sterile, infertile communities where it is the fate of brothers and sisters to fornicate with each other without issue for the remainder of eternity, and where, without the means for the production of food, and

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no plant nor animal life, each eats of self for sustenance. As a woman cannot conceive so too is she unable to create a garden. The absence of plants and animals, against whose danger and for whose provision the ruwang must sing, coincides with the absence of songs, hallucinogens, and other weaponry of shamanism.16 In the impoverished world of the dead no one can weave, sew, cook, carve, nor create the tools for doing so. Both men and women have lost the fertility of their thoughts. In contrast to the human alive on earth, the dead have no possibility for achieving either civilized eating or civilized fecundity. Death is not a productive event, as Viveiros de Castro argues (1992) that it is for the Arawet.17 The Piaroa dead, deprived of their "life of thoughts" and therefore of their knowledge of productivity, can be of little use to the land of the living. The dead, like animals, lead a life of raw desire. Unlike humans alive, they cannot lead a life of the social. Sociality and civilized relations of alterity In Piaroa thought the achievement of the social one and the same as the accomplishment of civilized fertility or prdation is a process of existence available only to this-worldly humans. The uniqueness of living human beings their sociality is due to the particular combination of forces for life that they alone are able to acquire. In contrast to all other agents only human beings have the capacity to act through both a "life of the senses" (kaekwae) and a "life of thoughts" (ta'kwarii).18 The dead and animals live a brute life of desire, and both are denied a "life of thoughts". The animals, like the dead, are infertile beings. Neither are able to reproduce through the sexuality of which they are capable. The reproduction of animals is due to human action: the ruwang through his increase rituals gives the animals their young; he recycles their souls (transformed into animal form) from their primordial places of creation beneath the earth, where they dwell in human form.19 In turn, the powerful tianawa gods, while they own all the means for using the resources of the earth and all the forces for fertility, have no life of desires. The gods are fertile beings who reproduce by autogenesis through the hallucinogens that they take (see below), but they do not lead a material existence. Having no life of the senses they do not use the powers they guard within their crystal boxes of predatory powers. They do not hunt, garden or fish, their only food being the hallucinogens they consume. They spend their life in a hallucinatory trance, singing their beautiful "songs of life". The gods, each living separated one from the next within compartments of their ethereal mountain top home, are non-social beings. To explain further, human beings have two distinct advantages over all agents who dwell within their "today time" universe.20 First of all, with the exception of the tianawa gods, they are the only beings who have access to the crystal boxes of these gods, and it is therefore singularly they as beings

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with a life of the senses who can use the specific powers contained with them and enjoy the products of these forces. While other beings might be able to kill or have sex or even reproduce, they are unable to do the work that allows for a material existence of civilized prdation. The second advantage for the Piaroa, and this is related to the first, is that they alone are able to engage in civilized relations of alterity. Such capabilities are a product of history. Mythic time ("before time") concluded with a drastic reordering of the universe which was preceded by the absolute failure of all creation time beings (including the Piaroa) to achieve stable and peaceful relations of alterity. Maddened by the increasing availability of the powerful forces for prdation created in this period, they began to cannibalize each other through their jaguar powers in order to acquire dominion over the culinary arts owned by others. The violence ended when all these forces were thrown out of this earthly world to be housed in the safety of the crystal boxes of the "today time" tianawa gods. At the same time the various types of beings (gods, "plant" humans, "animal" humans, "fish" humans) became distributed in separate worlds and even times. Thereafter most lived isolated one from another, each with their own distinct but depleted life force and their own specific (animal, plant, or fish) form. Power became dispersed, individualized, and those who had once shared and exchanged powers could no longer do so. In this new ordering which became "today time", those who remained human (e.g. the Piaroa) were the only beings who retained the capabilities for either marriage or exchange. Both became possibilities that humans, and humans alone, could achieve, and it is through them that they today can enter into the social state and achieve the civilized fertility that is its mark. Herewith we are presented with that very Amazonian message, namely that the achieve ment sociality requires those different than self. Without alterity there is of no productive capacity.21 The Piaroa understand the culinary arts to be impossible without the acquisition of foreign implements to provide alien force to the production of food.22 In similar vein they understand sexual relations as barren unless between people essentially different from one another. Thus both affines and exchange partners are essential to the creation of human productivity. Space forbids a discussion of the place of exchange within the Piaroa scheme of alterity, but it is nevertheless pertinent to note that the Piaroa firmly separate the external relations of exchange from the internal relations of marriage and the enactment of affinity.23 We are faced with an anthropological conundrum. The Piaroa skills for analogic ordering are most elaborated in the classification of their primordial lands of creation and their homes after death. They therefore explicitly (and seemingly perversely) apply this logic of opposition and separation precisely within those domains that are most notably deficient in alterity where there are no animals, no plants, no affines, no exchange partners. In typical Piaroa reasoning the loss of alterity signifies sterility and the loss of fertility. The clans of the iyaenawatu, clusters of paternal kin, are spatially segregated from

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one other. Whereas in life there is at once the distinction between "I" and "other" and the conjunction, through interaction, of "I" with "other" as a singular whole, within the after world of iyaenawatu eternally young there are sexual distinctions alone. If in the Piaroa reasoning upon difference, alterity is the hallmark of this-worldly social living, why then is their clan and moiety system a singularly potent classification of difference and similarity if there ever was one applied not to the living, but to the land of the dead where all principles of alterity, save gender, are missing? The answer for the dead is that the separation of difference is so absolutely imposed upon them that they lose all contact with the Other, and thus fecundity is lost. The answer is much more complicated for the living, for whom alterity is a mixed blessing. On the one hand it is only through alterity that humans can achieve their own material existence, while on the other, as evidenced by the events of their creation time history, alterity is an exceedingly dangerous path to follow. Because of the violence immanent within all relations of alterity, the Piaroa de-emphasize its demarcation for the purpose of their own social action.24 For instance trade partners from foreign lands are personally classified as "kin", not affines. However it is within the community, the domain of the social par excellence, that relations of difference are most pointedly deemphasized.25 The phrase most commonly used to refer to the membership of one's own community is tutae itso'tu, "my family", or as more literally translated, "the collectivity of like beings to which I belong". The stress is upon the similarity of those who live together. Yet at the same time the creation, expansion, and continuity of the community are all premised upon a principle of difference.26 Even a person's right of membership within a community is established through his or her marriage into (or within) it. Nevertheless the phrase encapsulating the community as "beings of a like kind" is not a mere obfuscatory twist, but a more cogent statement of the Piaroa understanding of the process of sociality than is their emphasis upon the need for alterity. According to the Piaroa, affines (who by definition are alien to each other) become physically "of a kind" through the process of living together. Those who are not originally close kinsmen become so over time through proximity, through the production of children, through working and eating together, and most of all through the sharing and mutual caring for one another through daily work. The process of becoming of a kind is for the Piaroa the social process itself. It is only within the cooperative relations of community life that humans can achieve civilized fecundity. There, the Piaroa can live a productive life: they can hunt, garden, make curare and the blowgun, weave cotton, build houses, and cook. Through work they can trans form animals and plants into food. They can have affines and therefore marry, have children, and care for them within a community of relationships.27 Within the community they can act in concert and cooperate. They can create ritual; they can work together and share food. In the history of the universe it is only humans of "today time" that have the moral agency to transform

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dangerous alterity and the predatory forces forthcoming from it into civilized fecundity.28 They have such moral agency only because they carefully take only limited amounts of the predatory forces contained within the crystal boxes of the gods. With the violence of their creator gods as example, the Piaroa explain that acquiring more of such powers than the person can safely domesticate leads to madness, a paranoia that expresses itself through the desire and attempt to dominate others. Members of a Piaroa community carefully monitor the actions of their powerful ruwatu so as to be on guard should they begin to demonstrate such dangerous madness.29 While such realistic goals for community life might appear prosaic to Western imagination, they are nevertheless the product of a powerful and highly egalitarian social philosophy. As such they are also the key to enlighten us when dealing with the so-called minimalist societies of Amazonia where the stress for social living is persistently upon quality of relations in daily living, an emphasis corroborated by the political one that places value above all upon the achievement of harmony in the productive relations of community life.30 I have argued elsewhere that the Guianese community has existence through time as a political, economic and social unit to the extent that its members are able to achieve, on a daily basis, the political goals of intimacy and informality. To help create the circumstances conducive to these goals, the Piaroa do not strongly mark through classificatory logic the distinctions within the community of affinity, gender, or age. To do so would in their view facilitate the creation of relations of domination and subordination, and thus operate against the work of achieving a. fertile collectivity of like beings. Not to stress difference is a powerful means for keeping hierarchy at bay.31 For the Piaroa, the community as a collectivity of kinsmen living and therefore working together is ideally a community of nurture.32 This should be seen more as a political creed than a mere value emerging from the "domain of kinship", the latter being a more normal anthropological explanation. The Piaroa insistence upon the benefits of the creation of social homogeneity must not be confused with the homogeneity that is the product of death where the loss of personal distinctiveness is death's mark. Rather, theirs is an egalitarian creed that places the emphasis not only upon personal comfort but upon personal autonomy as well. In this creed, both the capacity to create materially and for acting socially are aspects of the person, since the responsibility for both is in the hands of the individual. An indication of the strength of their stress upon the personal and its powers is the Piaroa treatment of personal names which they consider as highly private to the self. The personal name, as already mentioned, becomes attached to a person's ta'kwa ruwang, the spirit of the person that travels to the afterworld and which for the person alive is the master of all his or her personal capabilities. While there is no ban on reciting publicly the names of the dead (who have lost all distinctiveness), the name of a living Piaroa cannot be used publicly once that person begins at the age of 5 or 6 to acquire powers through lessons of wizardry. A person's

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"life of thoughts" a woman's particular capabilities for child bearing, a man's for hunting are highly private to the self and are not considered appropriate for discussion within the public domain. There is no space to discuss further the multitude of means and ways through which the Piaroa express the importance of their own personal distinctiveness,33 but it can nevertheless be said that the stress in the Piaroa theory of power is upon the individual agent's knowledge, capabilities and will. While the social process engendering of homogeneity overcomes the dangers of personal difference it at the same time allows for the continuing creation of personal singularity. London School of Economics

NOTES 1 . I wish to thank the ESRC and the Leverhulme Foundation who each in giving me a Personal Research Grant enabled me to work on many of the issues of this paper. I also wish to thank David McKnight for his comments on the paper. The fieldwork on which the description of the Piaroa is based was carried out with M. R. Kaplan throughout 1968 and for 6 months in 1977. Although the physical structure of community life has changed and was in the process of doing so by 1977, we can but assume that much of the idea system holds today. New fieldwork is now progress by research students. 2. Cf. Carneiroda Cunha (1981: 170) on Krah eschatology. There are various similarities between Krah and Piaroa visions of the afterlife. See below. 3. See the critique given by M. Strathern (1985) on the notion of social control in anthropology. 4. See Overing 1988a, 1993. Also as Viveirosde Castro (1992) says of the Arawet, a Tupi-Guarani people of the Brazilian Amazon, whom he places in his minimalist social organization category: they "did not have" a great many of those features that awaken the professional interest of anthropologists there were no initiation ceremonies, and little emphasis in general upon life-cycle change; there was a fluid division of labour, and so on. 5. Cf. Carneiro da Cunha (1981: 172) on the Krah for whom there is also no continuity between living and dead. 6. See for example the collection of articles in Maybury-Lewis, ed.: 1979. 7. Dual organization also orders mythic time, a period when significantly sociality failed. See Overing 1985a. 8. See Overing Kaplan 1984 and Overing & Kaplan 1988 for further elaboration of clan names. 9. For example see Melatti 1979: 67-68 on the Krah. 10. Cf. VivEiROS de Castro (1992, Prface) on the Arawet. 11. In Piaroa vocabulary, to cure, to make, to transform, and to create had the same root. One could say tu aditusae (I cure) this woman or tu aditusae (I make) this blowgun or garden plant. The word approaching our world for "work" was adi'kwae, while that for creator is "haditino". Compare McCallum (1989, chap. 3) on the Cashinahua where she stresses that for them all phases of production are analogous to sexual procreation. 12. On the implications for gender relations, see Overing 1986a. 13. See Overing 1990 on the topic of shamanic exegesis of chant language. 14. Yaewi can be used generically for "large cats". 15. Also see Overing & Kaplan 1988. 16. The Piaroa explicitly equate the child bearing capabilities of women and the transformational powers of the ruwang. In shamanic exegesis hallucinogenic visions are to men as pregnancy is to women. See Overing 1986b.

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17. Nor is there any evidence that Piaroa mortuary rituals play any part in the "regeneration of life", as Bloch and Parry (1982) have argued to be more or less generally the case for death rites. 18. See Overing 1985b for a discussion of the Piaroa theory of mind and its relation to their "life of the senses". 19. Animals, human dwellers of the jungle, were transformed at the conclusion of mythic time into their animal form and stripped by the creator god of the Piaroa of their "life of thoughts" they lost therefore all their capabilities for the culinary arts. The Piaroa in eating them are therefore committing cannibalism mediated through their own capabilities for civilized prdation. See Overing 1986b for more details. 20. See Overing 1990 for the distinction between "before time" and "today time" in Piaroa cosmogony. 21. See Overing 1984, 1992. Also compare Viveiros de Castro 1992. 22. See Overing 1992, on the metaphysics of difference upon which the Piaroa participation within indigenous trade networks is based. 23. For elaboration, see Overing 1992. Also see McCallum (1989: 263) on the Cashinahua. She notes that for them relations of exchange are opposed to the internal relations of caring and sharing. 24. Such lack of demarcation of difference did not hold for classifications of the beings of the mythical past where analogic elaboration was as complex (though different) as for the today time dead. See Overing 1985a. It is significant to note that mythic beings, because of the violence of their powers, were incapable of achieving sociality (Overing 1989). 25. See Overing Kaplan 1975 on the blurring of affinity through teknonymy. 26. See Overing Kaplan 1975. 27. Cf. Gow (1991) who has described work for the indigenous peoples of the Lower Urubamba in Peru as action that fulfilled the desire to provide for self and the desires and lives of children and other members of the community. 28. Because of the mightiness of their powers, the creator gods could only achieve defecatory fertility, but not the considered reproduction of civilized fecundity. Similarly the tianawa gods defecate their young, and do not give birth in a human way. 29. See Overing 1985b on the Piaroa understanding of madness, where the weight of sanction is upon those with power and not those without. 30. See Overing 1989. Also see McCallum (1989 : 274) on the Cashinahua and Goldman (1963) on the Cubeo. 31. Overing 1993. 32. See Overing 1993. Also see Gow 1991: for the indigenous peoples of the Lower Urubamba as for the Piaroa, personal work and social linkage are constitutive of one another. 33. See Overing 1988b; 1992a.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bloch, M. & J. Parry 1982 "Introduction: Death and the Regeneration of Life", in M. Bloch & J. Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1-44. Carneiro da Cunha, M. 1981 "Eschatology among the Krah: Reflection upon Society, Free Field of Fabulation", in S. Humphreys & H. King, eds., Mortality and Immortality: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Death. London, Academic Press: 161-174. Goldman, I. 1963 The Cubeo. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.

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GOW, P. 1991 Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Kaplan, M. R. 1970 "Death and Sex in Piaroa World Ordering", Paper presented at the 69th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. MacCallum, C. 1989 Gender. Personhood and Social Organization amongst the Cashinahua of Western Amazonia. Ph. D. Thesis submitted to the London School of Economics, University of London. Maybury-Lewis, D., ed. 1979 Dialectical Societies: the G and Bororo of Central Brazil. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Melatti, J. C. 1979 "The Relationship System of the Krah", in D. Maybury-Lewis, ed., Dialectical Societies: The G and Bororo of Central Brazil. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press: 46-82. Overing Kaplan, J. 1975 The Piaroa, People of the Orinoco Basin. A Study in Kinship and Marriage. Oxford, Clarendon Press. 1984 "Dualism as an Expression of Differences and Danger: Marriage Exchange and Reciprocity among the Piaroa of Venezuela", in K. Kensinger, ed., Marriage Practices in Lowland South America. Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press ("Illinois Studies in Anthropology" 14): 127-155. Overing, J. 1985a "Today I Shall Call Him 'Mummy': Multiple Worlds and Classificatory Confusion", in J. Overing, ed., Reason and Morality. London, Tavistock Publication ("ASA Monograph" 24): 152-179. 1985b "There is no End of Evil: The Guilty Innocents and their Fallible God", in D. Parkin, ed., The Anthropology of Evil. Oxford, Basil Blackwell: 244-278. 1986a "Men Control Women? The 'Catch 22' in Gender Analysis", International Journal of Moral and Social Studies I, part 2: 135-156. Oxford. 1986b "Images of Cannibalism, Death and Domination in a 'Non Violent' Society", Journal de la Socit des Amricanistes LXXII: 133-156. 1988a "Styles of Manhood: An Amazonian Contrast in Tranquillity and Violence", in S. Howell & R. Willis, eds., Societies at Peace. London, Tavistock Publications: 79-99. 1988b "Personal Autonomy and the Domestication of Self in Piaroa Society", in G. Jahoda & I. M. Lewis, eds., Acquiring Culture: Cross Cultural Studies in Child Development. London, Croom Helm: 169-192. 1989 "The Aesthetics of Production: The Sense of Community among the Cubeo and Piaroa", Dialectical Anthropology 14: 159-175. 1990 "The Shaman as a Maker of Worlds: Nelson Goodman in the Amazon", Man, n.s., 25: 601-619. 1992 "Wandering in the Market and the Forest: An Amazonian Theory of Production and Exchange", in R. Dilley, ed., The Market in Social Anthropological and Sociological Perspective. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press: 183-202. 1993 "The Anarchy and Collectivism of the 'Primitive Other': Marx and Sahlins in the Amazon", in C. Hann, ed., Socialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practice. London, Routledge Publications ("ASA Monograph"): 43-58. Overing, J. & M. R. Kaplan 1988 "Wotha", in J. Overing & M. R. Kaplan, eds., Venezuela, 111. Caracas, Fundacin La Salle de "Ciencias Naturales: 307-412. Rivire, P. 1969 Marriage among the Trio. A Principle of Social Organization. Oxford, Clarendon Press, n.d. "Houses, Places and People: Community and Continuity in Guiana", in J. Carsten & S. Hugh-Jones, eds., About the House: Buildings, Groups, and Categories in Holistic Perspective. Essays on an Idea by C. Lvi-Strauss.

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Strathern, M. 1985 "Discovering 'Social Control' ", Journal of Law and Society 12 (2): 111-130. Thomas, D. 1982 Order without Government: The Society of the Pemon Indians of Venezuela. Urbana, University of Illinois Press. Viveiros de Castro, E. 1992 From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society, trans, by Catherine Howard. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press.

RSUM Joanna Overing, La Mort et la perte de la prdation civilise chez les Piaroa du bassin de l'Ornoque. C'est au domaine des morts que les Piaroa du bassin de l'Ornoque appliquent leurs classifications analogiques les plus labores. Bien que l'altrit soit la marque de la sociabilit des vivants, la logique de l'opposition imprgne le champ social qui en est justement le plus dficient : les Piaroa privent en effet les morts de tout pouvoir de prda tion civilise, et par consquent de toute capacit entretenir des relations d'altrit rgle. L'existence appauvrie des morts s'oppose ainsi la communaut des vivants, dans laquelle un principe d'homognit se conjugue avec une tension vers la diffrence personnelle. La philosophie sociale galitaire des Piaroa permet de comprendre la logique classificatoire para doxale qu'ils appliquent la socit des morts.

RESUMEN Joanna Overing, La Muerte y la prdida de la predacin civilizada entre los Piaroa de la cuenca del Orinoco. Los Piaroa de la cuenca del Orinoco aplican sus clasificaciones analgicas mas elaboradas al dominio de los muertos. A pesar de que la alteralidad este marcada por la sociabilidad de los vivos, la lgica de la oposicin impregna el campo de lo social que precisamente es mas deficiente : efectivamente, los Piaroa privan a los muertos de todos los poderes de predacin civilizada y por ello de toda capacidad para guardar relaciones de alteridad reglamentada. De esta manera, la existencia emprobrecida de los muertos se opone a la comunidad de los vivos, en la cual un principio de homogeneidad se conjuga con una tensin respecto a la diferencia personal. La filosofa social igualitaria de los Piaroa permite comprender la paradoja de la lgica clasificatoria aplicada a la sociedad de los muertos.