3 Kohn Soul Blindness-2

116 . SOUL BLINDNESS can lose agency in the process. Narcisa is the primary agent here. Dreaming is a privileged form of experience and knowledge, and it was she, not her husband, who had dreamed. Narcisa’s “good dreaming” was the important action. Her husband’s ability to shoot the animal was simply a proximate extension of this. Narcisa’s agency is the locus of cause—it is her dream that counted—and yet her intentions can only be successfully realized by extending herself through objects. Without a gun, she can’t shoot a deer, and because men gener- ally are the ones who carry guns in Ávila, she must involve her husband. In this context, however, he is not really a person but rather, like a gun, he becomes an object, a tool, a part through which Narcisa can extend herself. T e distribution of selves and objects in this situation should, Narcisa hoped, have looked as follows: Narcisa and Alejandro should have been united as a single individual in a “continuity of reaction,” oriented, together, as predator toward the killing of a deer, here thought of as a prey object. Narcisa and Alejandro, in other words, should have become an emergent single self, whereby two selves become one by virtue of their shared reaction to the world around them (see Peirce CP 3.613). For such a “continuity of being” (CP 7.572), as Peirce has it, creates “a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism” (CP 5.421). T is emergent self need not have been equally distributed. Narcisa would have been the locus of this agency, and Alejandro, like Hilario’s dog, would have become an arm—an object through which Narcisa extended her agency. But things did not turn out this way. T e continuity of reaction oriented itself, not along species lines, but along gender ones, and these crossed species boundaries in ways that disturbed the particular predator/prey distribution that Narcisa had hoped for. T e doe noticed Narcisa. Neither the buck nor the husband ever noticed anything. T is is not the way Narcisa wanted things to turn out. Narcisa and the doe here were the sentient selves, united, incon- veniently, it turned out, through a continuity of being as a higher-order single self. In “never noticing anything,” the males had become objects. SEEING BEYOND ONESELF Alejandro and the buck remained unaware of those other selves in their pres- ence. T is is dangerous. If trans-species interactions depend on the capacity to recognize the selfhood of other beings, losing this capacity can be disastrous 99780520276109_PRINT.indd780520276109_PRINT.indd 111616 224/06/134/06/13 88:17:17 AAMM SOUL BLINDNESS . 117 for beings, such as these two males, who are caught up in the webs of predation that structure this forest ecology of selves. Under certain circumstances we are all forced to recognize the other kinds of minds, persons, or selves that inhabit the cosmos. In this particular ecology of selves that entangles Alejan- dro and the buck, selves must recognize the soul-stuff of other selves in order to interact with them. T at is, in this ecology of selves, to remain selves, all selves must recognize the soul-stuff of the other souled selves that inhabit the cosmos. I’ve chosen the term soul blindness to describe the various debilitating forms of soul loss that result in an inability to be aware of and relate to other soul-possessing selves in this ecology of selves. I adopt the term from Cavell (2008: 93), who uses it to imagine situations in which one might fail to see others as humans. Because in this ecology of selves all selves have souls, soul blindness is not just a human problem; it is a cosmic one. Soul blindness, in this Ávila ecology of selves, is marked by an isolating state of monadic solipsism—an inability to see beyond oneself or one’s kind. It arises when beings of any sort lose the ability to recognize the selfhood—the soul-stuff —of those other beings that inhabit the cosmos and it emerges in a number of domains. I enumerate a few examples here to give a sense of the range and prevalence of this phenomenon. For instance, something known as the hunting soul allows hunters to be aware of prey in the forest. Shamans can steal this soul with the eff ect that the victim can no longer detect animals. Without this soul, hunters become “soul blind.” T ey lose their ability to treat prey-beings as selves and can therefore no longer diff erentiate animals from the environments in which they live. Hunting is also made easier by the soul loss of prey. Men who kill the souls of animals in their dreams can easily hunt them the next day because these animals, now soulless, have become soul blind. T ey are no longer able to detect their human predators. Shamans do not only potentially steal the souls of hunters, they can also steal the souls of the vision-producing aya huasca plants of their shamanic rivals with the eff ect that these plants become soul blind; ingesting them no longer permits privileged awareness of the actions of other souls. T e invisible darts through which the shaman attacks his victims are pro- pelled by his soul-containing life breath (samai). When darts lose this breath they become soul blind; they are no longer directed at a specifi c self but travel aimlessly, without intention, causing harm to anyone that happens upon their 99780520276109_PRINT.indd780520276109_PRINT.indd 111717 224/06/134/06/13 88:17:17 AAMM 118 . SOUL BLINDNESS path. Jorge’s aya was soul blind in a manner very similar to the shaman’s spent darts, it lacked the ability to engage in normative social relationships with its living relatives, and was therefore seen as dangerous. Adults sometimes punish children by pulling at tufts of their hair until a snapping sound is made. T ese children become temporarily soul blind; they become dazed and unable to interact with others. T e crown of the head, especially the fontanel, is an important portal for the passage of life breath and soul-stuff . Soul blindness can also be eff ected by extracting life breath through the fontanel. Delia described the jaguar that killed the dogs as having “bit them with a ta’ on their animal-following crowns.” Ta’ is an iconic adverb, a sound image, that describes “the moment of contact between two surfaces, one of which, typically, is manipulated by a force higher in agency than the other” (Nuckolls 1996: 178). T is precisely cap- tures the way in which the jaguar’s canines impacted and then penetrated the dogs’ skulls. T at people in Ávila consider such a bite lethal has much to do with the ways in which this part of the body permits intersubjectivity. T e dogs’ deaths, then, were the result of a complete loss of their “animal-following” capabilities—the radical and instantaneous imposition of soul blindness. Some notion of the motivations of others is necessary for people to get by in a world inhabited by volitional beings. Our lives depend on our abilities to believe in and act on the provisional guesses we make about the motivations of other selves. It would be impossible for people in Ávila to hunt or to relate in any other way within this ecology of selves without treating the myriad beings that inhabit the forest as the animate creatures that they are. Losing this ability would sever the Runa from this web of relations. PREDATION Hunting within an ecology of selves is tricky business. On the one hand, the sharing of food and drink, and especially of meat, is, throughout Amazonia, crucial to the creation of the kinds of interpersonal relations that are the basis for community. Growing children should have plenty of meat, and their grand- parents and godparents should also receive regular gifts of meat. Relatives, compadres, and neighbors who come to help clear forest and build houses also need to be fed meat. Sharing meat is central to the fruition of social ties in Ávila. And yet that meat that is shared and consumed was also, at one point, a person. Once one recognizes the personhood of animals, there is always 99780520276109_PRINT.indd780520276109_PRINT.indd 111818 224/06/134/06/13 88:17:17 AAMM SOUL BLINDNESS . 119 the danger of confusing hunting with warfare and commensality with cannibalism. To notice and to relate to the various beings that live in this ecology of selves, these various beings must be recognized as persons. But to eat them as food, they must eventually become objects, dead meat. If the selves that are hunted are persons, then might not people too eventually become dehuman- ized objects of predation? Jaguars do, in fact, sometimes attack hunters in the forest. And sorcerers can assume the appearance of predatory raptors. T is is why, as Ventura noted, one should never try to kill an agouti that runs into the house, for it is surely a relative, transformed into the fl eeing prey of a predatory sorcerer that has taken the form of a raptor. Predation points to the diffi culties involved when selves become objects or treat other selves as objects within an ecology of selves. As I mentioned, at times people consume animals, not as meat, but as selves, to acquire some of their selfhood. Men drink jaguar bile to become puma, and they feed agouti sternums and other soul-containing body parts to their hunting dogs.

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