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 Troop 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 Te University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Tis 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 fgures and tables ix editor’s introduction xiii Or why myth matters Jane Fajans foreword xix At long last David Graeber 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: Te myth 9 Chapter Tree: Te social setting 19 Chapter Four: Cultural associations of the symbolic elements in the myth 37 Chapter Five: Te structure of the myth 55 Chapter Six: Te macaw and jaguar episodes 93 Chapter Seven: Te fnal pair of episodes 109 Chapter Eight: Conclusions 121 viii THE FIRE OF THE JAGUAR part two 147 later articles Beauty and the beast: Te fearful symmetry of the jaguar and other natural beings in Kayapo ritual and myth (the 2011 R. R. Marett Lecture) 149 Cosmology, objectifcation, and animism in indigenous Amazonia 173 Te crisis of late structuralism 205 Bibliography 245 Index 251 List of fgures and tables Figure 1.1. Initial situation: lacking fre on earth, humans warm bits of meat in the sun. Figure 1.2. WB and ZH leave their household for the forest, where WB climbs up to the macaws’ nest on a clif. Figure 1.3. WB is stranded in the macaws’ nest after ZH angrily pulls out the ladder. Figure 1.4. WB refuses to throw down macaws, having thrown down a stone instead, and refuses to return home with ZH. Figure 1.5. 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. Figure 1.6. Te boy casts a shadow on the ground, which the male jaguar mistakes for prey; once he recognizes it is diferent than the boy, he pounces on the macaws and assumes a friendly attitude to- ward the boy. Figure 1.7. Te male jaguar persuades the boy to come down and come home with him, where he will feed and care for him. Te boy’s development is thus incorporated into a new setting. Figure 1.8. Te 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. Te boy repeatedly fees the menacing female jaguar and climbs a tree; the friendly male jaguar repeatedly persuades him to come down again. Figure 1.10. Te 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 fre. He does so and gath- ers a piece of fre and emblems of each gender as he leaves. Figure 1.11. After killing the female jaguar, the boy takes a piece of the fre, along with the bow and arrow, roast meat, and cotton string, and heads back alone to the village. Figure 1.12. Te boy arrives in the village and goes to his sister’s and mother’s house, showing them what he has brought back. Te men then summon him to the men’s house to show them the items. Figure 1.13. Te 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 fres and bring them to their individual houses. Table 1. Contrastive relations and transitional forms between “society” and “nature.” Figure 1.14. Te general triadic structure underlying all the episodes of the myth of the origin of cooking fre. Figure 3.1. Te Kayapo village as cosmogram. Te men’s house is in the center of the plaza, surrounding by extended-family houses; be- hind 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). Te 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, coifure, and or- naments worn along with Western dress. Figure 3.8. Man and boys with ceremonial body painting, ornaments, and white down covering central body and thighs. Te 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 “fy.” 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. editor’s introduction Or why myth matters Jane Fajans One of the most infuential papers I read in my frst year of graduate school in anthropology was Terry Turner’s interpretation of the Oedipus Myth (Turner 1969). It was a masterful reanalysis of what was already an iconic subject in the structural analysis of myth (cf. Levi-Strauss 1963: 206–231). Shortly after that academic introduction, I met Terry at a conference on Symbolic Anthropol- ogy at Stanford University. I could say that it was love at frst sight and that “the rest was history,” but life sometimes takes a bit longer to acknowledge its inevitabilities. What I can say is that my meeting with him inspired me to get to know his broader work, and I vividly remember reading his papers “Te Fire of the Jaguar” (see Part I, this volume) and “Transformation, Hierarchy, and Transcendence in Ritual” (Turner 1977) (which was initially entitled “Groping for the Elephant”). Although the latter, like many of Terry’s other papers, was eventually published, “Te Fire of the Jaguar” languished on his desk, unpub- lished. Yet, in spite of existing only in mimeographed form (remember those?), it became widely circulated among his students and colleagues. Tese informal distribution networks steadily expanded, but Terry was never ready to let go of this work or acknowledge it as fnal. Originally intended as a book, he continued to tinker with it intermittently over the course of the next forty-fve years. Tis xiv THE FIRE OF THE JAGUAR is not the only manuscript he neglected to publish; his fle cabinet sits full of them. In fact, I’ve been known to say that Terry only relinquished his texts when he had an editor badgering him to meet a deadline. Nonetheless, he did manage to publish a large number of articles in a far wider array of publication venues than most anthropologists publish in, including not just peer-reviewed anthro- pology journals and edited volumes, but also forums for the general public. A partial list of his publications appeared in 2006 (Turner 2006), and some other works are included here (see “Referenced cited”), but Terry never did pull all of his works together into a single bibliography. Many other articles, however, remained in draft form, often virtually ready for publication. Such was the fate of some of the previously unpublished papers in this volume. Since Terry is no longer around to continue his tinkering or otherwise hinder their publication, I have embarked on the task of ensuring that many of these papers move from mimeo to published form, in no small part due to the badgering of HAU editor, Giovanni da Col, for which I’m immensely grateful. In my mind, “Te Fire of the Jaguar: Te Origin of Cooking Fire” always topped the list of Terry’s works to publish. In this volume, we have paired this essay with several other analyses of Kayapo ritual, social life, cosmology, and socialization practices that combine to give a rich picture of Kayapo life. In Terry’s analytical perspective, ritual, social organization, politics, and person- hood were all intricately intertwined with daily life and social continuity.