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Kim — U of N Press / Page 172 / / 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] [172], (1) Lines: 0 to 44 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [172], (1) 8 CONCLUSION The more comfortable I became with my Kayabi hosts, the more inadvertently I began to converse with friends such as Fire-of-the-Gods and Bird in the style I was accustomed to talking with my friends and family back in Chicago. More than once I remember being deep in conversation (in Portuguese) and commenting that so-and-so was a “nice person” or “a trustworthy person” or alternately that so-and-so was “not confidant” or was a “jealous person.” Each time I made such a statement I had the sense of a small “start,” perhaps a bit of “culture shock,” on the part of my interlocutor. Never once were comments like this directly confirmed or challenged, as interlocutors back home would have done. After returning from Brazil I read a comment in Ellen Basso’s book The Last Cannibals to the effect that Kalapalo storytellers prefer not to label people’s emotions, motives, or distinctive character (1995, 295). Rather, these aspects of persons are represented through their quoted speech as functions of conversations with others. Thinking back on my stay in Kapinu’a, I believe Kayabi also describe people more in terms of their interpersonal relations, reproducing how a person acted or spoke with others at particular moments rather than labeling someone as a “type of person.” This mode of description is consistent with Amazonian conceptualizations of self and person in which subjective experience and action are not conceptualized as properties of individual subjects but rather as properties of relationships (Pollock 1996; Basso 1995). In writing this book I have self-consciously tried to offer a similar representation of individual people as well as the community of Kapinu’a. Rather than setting out to “tell one person’s story,” as so many life histories do, I have attempted to give a sense of several Kayabi people as they interact with each other, particularly in ritual events. I hope that this mode of portraiture, if I can even call it that, is more in keeping with indigenous ideas about selves and persons. The general picture of the mature Kayabi man that results is one in which the subject is intentionally multiple or “dividual.” Years of travel and identifi- Kim — U of N Press / Page 173 / / I Foresee My Life / OAKDALE conclusion 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 [173], (2) Lines: 44 to 51 ——— 13.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [173], (2) cation with various sorts of others are understood to produce a subject who manages and orchestrates voices rather than one who is uniformly identical to himself. These men are intimately interconnected with a variety of others— ancestors, spirits, and enemies—who speak through them. As a result, their autobiographical narratives are highly dialogic, and they are more akin to symphony conductors than to introspective writers of autobiographies in Western traditions. By approaching autobiographical narratives as they are situated in ritual, they can be understood as social phenomena. In this tradition, ritual genres of autobiography are a medium through which experiences can circulate between people. They often describe as shared what in most Western traditions would be considered private. Dreams of spirits or thoughts during war, for example, are not understood as the property of only one subject or even as originating “within” a single subject. Likewise, while autobiography or life history research often focuses on how the creation of these types of narratives is psychologically meaningful or does certain kinds of subjective work—that is, transforms the narrator in particular ways (see Langness and Frank 1981; Watson and Watson-Franke 1985)—I have emphasized instead how the performances of these kinds of narratives have the potential to transform others. Through their autobiographic narratives, Kayabi leaders encourage others to approach contemporary problems in speci fic ways, and as they do so they also encourage larger transformations of how to think, at a very...

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