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6 The Cemí Reveals Its Personhood and Its Body Form The notion of cemí finds similar, though not identical, analogues in other societies around the world, such as among the Ba-Kongo of western Africa, for whom bilongo (“medicine”) is what animates and confers potency to their magic wooden idols (minkisi; see Anderson and Peek 2002; MacGaffey 1993; Voguel 1997). It is also analogous to the paired notions of mana and tapu (taboo) in Polynesia, or the hau and mauri couplet among the Maori of New Zealand (Graeber 2001: 170–178). Cemí thus relates to the notion of “vital essence” that Raymond Firth (1959:225) discussed for the Maori long ago. The conceptual dyad hau/mauri entails “the assumption that behind any material form is an invisible, dynamic power that makes it what it is” and all at once is “the source of appearance and potential for action, which . . . was for Maori philosophers seen as merely the inner expression of an inner nature” (Graeber 2001:177). David Graeber’s definition is applicable to my understanding of what cemí is. To start with, the Taíno-language term cemí refers not to an artifact or object but to an immaterial, numinous, and vital force. Under particular conditions, beings , things, and other phenomena in nature can be imbued with cemí. Cemí is, therefore, a condition of being, not a thing. It is a numinous power, a driving or vital force that compels action; it is the power to cause, to effect, and also denotes a condition or state of being. Among modern-day Arawakan (Northern Caribbean Maipuran) speakers— the Lokono of Guiana and Surinam—semehi means something that is, or tastes and smells, sweet (Bennett 1989:39; Oliver 1998, 2005). The stem “seme/i-” can also be found in the word semičiči, a Lokono noun for “shaman” or “curer.” Thus, in Lokono, seme is an adjective meaning “sweetness,” while semehi is the noun for “sweet.” Other things, especially fruits, that have the condition of being sweet also carry the “seme/i-” morpheme: semeheyo-bali, a noun, is a sweet sage plant (Lanta cara) used by medicine men for curing, while semetho, translated as “sweet-one,” is a noun for a vine (species unidentified) that yields a sweet, edible fruit. In short, most Lokono words with the morpheme “seme-” allude to shamanism or to curing (magical) properties. It is no coincidence that honey, along with the contrasting tobacco, is one of a key pair of opposing elementary concepts widely deployed in Amerindian mythology, famously analyzed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1974) in one part of his Mythologiques trilogy. As there were no honey-making bees in Hispan- 60 Chapter 6 iola, mythology bestowed the sweet but astringent guava fruit (Psidium guajava) with the same role that honey had for continental Amerindians (Oliver 1998:72). But under what conditions does a cemí materialize? Fray Ramón Pané, who was ordered by Christopher Columbus to investigate the religious beliefs and practices of the natives in Hispaniola, provided a detailed description of the context in which an ordinary human being from Hispaniola encounters that which is cemí (Pané 1974, 1990, 1999). His report to Columbus, begun in 1494 and completed by 1498, stated: “The [cemís] of wood are made in this way: when someone is walking along [in the forest], and he sees a tree that is moving its roots, the man very fearfully stops and asks it who it is. And it answers him: ‘Summon me a behique and he will tell you who I am.’ And when that man goes to the aforesaid physician, he tells him what he had seen” (Pané 1999:25–26). To an ordinary human being, the cemí is manifested by an unusual or uncommon sign in nature: a tree moves its roots when ordinarily that is not expected to occur .Through a process of abduction (Gell 1998:15), the man reasons that the tree root is displaying a different nature; it is something other than the ordinary root of a tree given the circumstances of the encounter: it unexpectedly moved; therefore, it is cemí. Abduction is a mode of cognitive operation or inference employed in semiotics and logic discourse. Gell (1998:14) defines abduction as “a case of synthetic inference” and cites the definition given by J. Holland and his colleagues: “Abduction is induction in the service of explanation, in which a new empirical rule is created to render predictable what would otherwise be mysterious. . . . [It...

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