The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle

Philippe Descola
Translated by Janet Lloyd

The New Press, $25

by Jeffrey Gustavson

Aiming to avoid the specialist "ghetto" that is often the lot of academic writings, Philippe Descola has set out deliberately to write an ethnological monograph that would also appeal to a wider audience: "I have backed a hunch," he writes, "that ethnology . . . can be at once instructive, edifying and entertaining, it can fulfill a scholarly function while pondering the conditions in which it operates, retrace a personal itinerary, and at the same time reveal all the richness of an unknown culture." His hunch has proved right. The remarkable Spears of Twilight, based on a three-year research trip among the Amazonian Jivaros that Descola took in the late 1970s, covers its subject in proper depth, delving thoroughly into kinship, gender relations, agriculture, conflict prolongation and resolution, rites of passage, myths of origin, and other topics, and yet does so in a lithe, fresh and admirably unforced style. ("Beneath our wings," he writes of first glimpsing the Amazon jungle, "the forest looked like a huge, lumpy carpet of broccoli.") Furthermore, the passage of nearly two decades has not had the unfortunate effect--as it often can with mere memoirists--of rosying up the equivocal reality of a youthful adventure; Descola preserves the honesty of his novitiate, and alludes a few times to the monotony of daily life and the slow rate of progress in his work: "You cannot imagine the incommensurable boredom that sometimes assails us in Capahuari, this little village with no access to the outside world, where the same faces day after day bring us the same stories."

The trip begins when, with the backing of Claude Lvi-Strauss, Descola and his friend and collaborator Anne Christine make their way by cargo boat from France to Puyo, a ramshackle frontier town in Ecuador, and thence by small plane and on foot to a clearing in the jungle on the Capahuari River. There they are abandoned by their guides before the thatched-roof dwelling of one Wajari, an Achuar Indian "famous the whole length of the Capahuari." With remarkably little fuss, this redoubtable juunt ("great man") takes them in and becomes their initial informant.

On one of their first days in Wajari's household, Descola arises at dawn to join his host in drinking wayus, an herbal infusion that men consume every morning; he listens, cursing his linguistic deficiencies, as Wajari begins telling his son a long, captivating story; soon the infant of one of Wajari's wives begins crying, suffering from its second bat bite in a few days. To calm him, Wajari bounces him on his knee, "then lifts him up at arm's length and briefly sucks his penis." After that, the two men go into the bushes to ritually vomit (wayus in large doses being an emetic), then Wajari goes off to the river to defecate, afterwards splashing and roaring "I am Wajari! I am strong! I am a jaguar that prowls in the night!" Next he tosses three puppies into the river to teach them to swim, and their yelps attract the trumpet-bird that guards the house, whose shrill cries arouse the rest of the dogs, "all" the babies, and the family's pet marmoset. After one of his wives has thrashed the menagerie into submission and given her husband his breakfast of manioc beer and boiled taros, Wajari braids his hair, puts ornaments in his ears, and paints an elaborate design on his face. And all this before six-thirty in the morning!

The operatic expressiveness Wajari displays during his ablutions takes on a less obstreperous form in one of the most interesting and unusual features of the lives of the Achuar: the anent, talismanic or propitiatory poems that both women and men sing to themselves under a wide variety of circumstances. Descola explains:

The anent serve to transmit messages to the spirits and creatures of nature in tones that are now threatening, now humble. The spirits are entreated to help or to intercede; the natural creatures, whether plants or animals, are warned to conform to the ideal norms of their species. These supplications may also be addressed to human beings: through them, it is possible to transmit one's most secret thoughts to people far beyond earshot and thereby to affect their feelings, actions or even destinies.

For instance, a woman who has recently planted a new variety of manioc in her garden sings:

Being a Nunkui woman, I am always calling nourishment into existence
The sekemur roots, there where they push, there where they are, I made them be like that, nicely separate
Being of the same species, when I have passed by, they continue to be born

In his gloss, Descola explains that Nunkui is "the creator and mistress of cultivated plants," and sekemur is a vegetable with roots like those of the manioc; one of the defining features of anent is indirection, restraint, circumlocution--the real subject or actual outcome desired are rarely named. Likewise, he writes, "it is not possible to appropriate these magic songs simply by listening to them. It would also be necessary to know their purpose and the circumstances in which they may be used"--which is why the Achuar don't object to their anent being tape-recorded.

A husband whose wife is punishing him by not preparing his meals sings this anent:

Your anger, your painful anger has brought me to this
With nothing to eat, I remain sitting here, abandoned, calling upon the deity
Drying my ruffled feathers, I huddle here
Because of your anger, your refusal to nourish me
Here I sit, alone and full of shame, invoking the deity
In a leafless tree, drying my ruffled feathers, I huddle here without consolation.

In the following anent, sung to herself though addressed to her husband, a woman "implicitly likens herself to a silky marmoset or saimiri, one of the little monkeys that Achuar of all ages tend to carry around":

My little father, my dear little father, my little father, your little thighs delight me
My little father, your little thighs attract me
My dear little father, I talk to your little bronzed testicles
My little father, I withdraw from your little thighs, I talk to them and cherish them tenderly, . . .
I love your little torso, I miss it when I let go of it.

Descola says that these anent are transmitted to adolescents by their elders ("Once equipped with her little repertory of anent, as it were her spiritual trousseau, a young girl is ready to become a married woman"), but he also says that for the Achuar collective memory is almost non-existent: "Their past seldom goes back beyond childhood memories and is soon lost in the adjacent world of mythology. Few of the Achuar know the names of their great-grandparents, and the tribal memory that covers four generations at the most is periodically swallowed up in confusion and oblivion." This raises the intriguing possibility that the Achuar are a tribe with a high proportion of poets in their ranks, or else one peculiarly receptive to the thought patterns sympathetic to what outsiders regard as poetry. How else could it be that there are so many anent, "each . . . adapted to a most precisely defined situation," and so little information of any other kind about the ancestors who presumably composed them? Descola never really resolves this seeming paradox. Still, the minds of most Westerners, too, are filled with nursery rhymes, mnemonic ditties, and the like whose origins they know nothing about; and many of us, if we happen to know our great-grandparents' names, know very little more than that about them.

Perhaps the answer lies with another of the main threads in Descola's narrative, the institution of the uwishin (shaman), whose long, dramatic anent may inspire those less driven to occultism to formulate shorter ones for more ordinary occasions. Descola quotes from an hour-long incantation, reminiscent of Walt Whitman and Charles Olson, sung by a shaman who has primed himself by drinking a hallucinogenic decoction of lianas:

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me!
Me, me, me, while I make my projectile penetrate
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, I am in harmony
Making my Iwianch spirits rise up
I make them pass through the barrier of darts
I make them penetrate the wall of little arrows . . .

Like a river carrying away its bank, I cover everything with my flood, I overflow everywhere,
Unmoving on this very spot
Stretching into the depths, I am blowing
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. . .
Even when they are embedded, out of reach,
I unhook the tsentsak [magic dart] with a dry tap, blowing
Clearing a path for myself, I completely beguile the stranger who has invited himself into your body, by blowing, by blowing, me, me, me, me, me, me!

I have the power of rivers in flood, ceaselessly I call for the waters to overflow
Formidable I am, like the waves rolling on the pebbles, without respite ensuring my victory, all fragrant, all perfumed, I make Tsunki [river spirits] roll, me, me, me . . .

Before devoting himself to ethnology, Descola was a student of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris. He modestly represents his turning away from abstract studies to the empiricism of anthropological field work as proceeding from "an insidious sense of inadequacy vis-ý-vis the world, too powerful to be successfully overcome yet too weak to lead to a major revolt." Fair enough. But Descola does at least himself a disservice when he writes of the profession of ethnologist, "Ill at ease in the great plains of imaginary representation, we are obliged to knuckle under to the servile obedience to reality from which poets and novelists liberate themselves." Imaginative writers' imaginations are not so free, nor his own so fettered, as he supposes. All books must struggle to keep from being slammed shut in disgust or, worse, left languishing half-read; except for textbooks, readers only finish books that are engaging and whose authors are likable. Regardless of where a book falls on the spectrum of factuality--whether one is reading a nonfiction book like Thor Heyerdahl's Fatu-Hiva, or a roman ý clef like Herman Melville's Typee, or a pure fiction like Sylvia Townsend Warner's Mr. Fortune's Maggot, all of which present naÔve Westerners sojourning on paradisal tropical islands--the pleasure to be derived from them is essentially the same: a quickening and an expansion of one's sense of possibility, either as a traveller, as a writer, or as a reader: There are such places, and I could go there; but even if there aren't, or even if I can't, it doesn't matter--I can make them up. The Spears of Twilight is in part an adventure story, too; the fact that it's also a serious work of anthropology is almost beside the point. Descola, never mind how, has given us a vivid portrait of a people whose intense reality mysteriously intensifies our own--a scattered tribe of ex-headhunters whose evanescent lives are complexly spiced with anonymous poetry seems, to the inhabitants of a century that began with the harsh doctrines of psychoanalysis and relativity and then moved on to much harsher ones, an oddly apt image of our condition.

Originally published in the Summer 1997 issue of Boston Review