The Fire of the Jaguar by Terence S. Turner (review)

The Fire of the Jaguar, Terence Turner’s analysis of the Kayapo myth of the origin of cooking fire, has itself taken on a near mythic character. Turner, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago until his death in 2015, and a specialist in the Kayapo of the Brazilian Amazonia, a Gê-speaking people practicing swidden agriculture supplemented by hunting, fishing and gathering, had a lifelong engagement with the Kayapo, visiting them almost each year since his initial visit in 1962. Indeed, his engagements with the Kayapo exceeded academic norms, as Turner advocated for the Kayapo and was also the president of Survival International USA, a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) advocating Indigenous peoples’ rights around the world. With his death in 2015, Turner left behind a number of unpublished papers. During his life, Turner maintained that his analysis of the myth of the origin of cooking fire could always be pushed deeper; after his death, his widow, Jane Fajans, at Cornell University, took up the task of publishing the manuscripts. The Fire of the Jaguar offers both Turner’s analysis of the Kayapo myth of the origin of cooking fire and shorter essays, which advance theoretical critiques of structuralism, perspectivism, animism and Marxism.

The Kayapo myth of the origin of cooking fire starts at a time when people did not have fire and did not cook their food. The central character is a young boy abandoned by his relatives and taken in by a jaguar, who possessed an everlasting fire. One day, when the jaguar went hunting, the young boy decided to flee. He killed the jaguar’s wife and stole an ember of the fire. On his return to his village, the young boy was invited to the men’s assembly. The men asked the boy to guide them to the jaguar’s house in order to bring the fire back to the village. By transforming themselves into various animals, the men succeeded in acquiring fire. Since that day, people have had fire and have eaten cooked meat. Turner’s analysis of this myth emphasises the ideas that transformation plays a central role in mythical thought and that myths should be analysed in light of their social context. Turner asserts that this myth constitutes a model of socialisation for Kayapo society by providing patterns of affect and action aiming to reconcile personal lives with experience of the social environment. According to Turner, mythic thought is the highest level of self-organisation in society because “it treats contradictions in the structure of society and the cosmos as surmountable or resolvable within the terms of that structure itself ” (138).

The remainder of the book can be divided into three parts. In the first part, “Beauty and the Beast: The Fearful Symmetry of the Jaguar and Other Natural Beings in Kayapo Ritual and Myth,” Turner proposes that myth structure is “a hierarchically organized system of transformations of a single set of symbolic oppositions that recurs as the basis for each successive episode of the narrative” (3–4). Myths, in Turner’s analysis, are modeled on the society that produces them. He argues, therefore, that myths reproduce social, cultural and ecological patterns and should be understood in light of those references. He adds that myths and society are both homologous and isomorphic generative processes. In other words, myths and society are parallel processes that interproduce themselves. Turner considers that comparative myth analysis, on the scale proposed by Levi-Strauss in the Mythologiques, could only be attempted with limited success. After all, anthropologists have yet to undertake a complete comprehensive analysis of individual myths. While Turner does not dispute the importance of comparative analysis, he “simply question[s] an approach that substitutes it for . . . the comprehensive analysis of the structures of individual myths and their relations to their particular social and cultural contexts” (6).

With the second part, “Cosmology, Objectification, and Animism in Indigenous Amazonia,” Turner proposes theoretical insights into the concept of cosmology, using his own interpretation of Marxist concepts and drawing on Kayapo ethnographic examples. Turner...