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Kim — U of N Press / Page 161 / / I Foresee My Life / OAKDALE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [First Page] [161], (1) Lines: 0 to 41 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [161], (1) 7 THE COSMIC MANAGEMENT OF VOICES One crisp morning in the dry season as I lay in my hammock under my mosquito net, with a wool blanket covering me from chin to feet, I thought about the effect that Kayabi ritual performances have upon those involved. Thanks to the Kayabi education monitors who tutored me almost daily during my stay, I had started to better understand these events. Rather than worry so much aboutmyplaceinthem,Istartedtothinkmoreaboutwhichspiritbeingsmight be present, where the shaman was traveling, or what sort of encounter a Jawosi song was describing. To be sure, I did still worry about myself, hoping that my choral Jawosi singing was not ruining my tape recordings or wondering if it would be rude to ask someone to step out of the action for a moment to ask them a question. Nevertheless, as my understanding grew, I started to get ever so slightly closer to comprehending the experiences of Kayabi participants. Many classic works on ritual in anthropology have viewed rituals as transformative , drawing attention to the fact that they are able to restructure participants ’ emotions, perceptions, or interpretations of reality (see, for example , Geertz 1973; Ortner 1978; Turner 1969, [1967] 1982). Kayabi rituals also work to shift participants’ consciousness, particularly their sense of how they are situated within the cosmos, that is, how the present moment they are experiencing fits with other times and how those presently living relate to others, both human and “other-than-human persons” (Hallowell 1955) who also inhabit the cosmos. The autobiographic portions of the performances are crucial in this process, as it is the quoted speech and distinct points of view invoked in autobiographical accounts that bring ritual participants into subjective alignment with these other times and beings.1 Bringing participants into subjective alignment with these others is not a simple task. In Kayabi cosmology the present is plagued by the most heightened form of “perspectivism” (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Unlike past epochs, at present animals, humans, and spirits all have very different bodily forms, behaviors, foods, and ways of speaking. Much as elsewhere in the Amazon, thesedifferencescausethemtoperceiverealityfromverydistinctpointsofview Kim — U of N Press / Page 162 / / I Foresee My Life / OAKDALE part 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [162], (2) Lines: 41 to 56 ——— 6.5pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [162], (2) (Viveiros de Castro 1998). As a result the present is plagued by disharmony, predation, and war. All three of the Kayabi ritual genres presented in this study attempt to transcend this current state of fragmentation. As in other Amazonian cosmologies , “the whole is not (the) given . . . [t]he whole is, rather, the constructed, that which humans strive to bring forth” (Viveiros de Castro 2001, 28). That autobiographical narratives are about how one person—the leader standing before his audience—has managed to take on the position of various others over the course of his life and to orchestrate these other voices into some sort of whole makes the visible body of the narrator a very powerful symbol of this perspectival unification. Each ritual, however, attempts to transcend contemporary cosmological fragmentation by aligning and distinguishing very different sets of subjective positions. The vision of the cosmos and the place of contemporary life within it that each ritual suggests are, therefore, not identical to each other. I have characterized the different visions each ritual offers as the “progressive,” “degenerative,” and “presentist” positions. To understand the different ways these rituals situate participants and restructure their consciousness, I begin by explaining the spaces and times that make up the Kayabi cosmos. The Nature of the Present AccordingtoKayabicosmologythereweretwoearths(awa)priortothepresent one. The first was destroyed by a flood. It now exists where these floodwaters still persist, “down below” on the river bottom. The second one arose when the water receded and ended when the sky was formed, creating that which is “above.” We currently live in the...

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