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28 CHAPTER ONE “Are You Here?” Personhood, Presence, Knowledges, and Knowing “you should teach her to greet,” called Kiyavwiye João Batista to David as we passed his house, some days after we had arrived. Machete in hand, he was standing on the moss-covered slope in the shadow of his house on the main path through Kumene on the rio Urucauá. “Ba pi ay?” he rehearsed me, grinning as he enunciated the words that asked “are you here?” “Good, good,” came the response to my effort. “now you say ‘Ihi, nah ay.’” “ihi, nah ay,” i echoed: “yes, i am here.” “Kabayhtiwah! excellent ! now you ask me, ‘Ya pis?’—‘and you?’” What does it mean to “be here”? There is the “here” that is about being present in a place: to be “here” in arukwa, the region along the rio Urucau á, is to be in homeland and heartland for those who call themselves Palikur, even for those living across the border in French Guiana. This “are you here?” asks, “Do you know where you are?” Then, there is the “here” that is about being present in a time: the present that is the opposite of “the past,” yet also its continuation. With this “here,” “ba pi ay” asks, “Do you see that our paths are crossing?” and then there is the “here” that is about being with, being nearby, and being alongside: a presence that is the opposite of absence. This kind of ba pi ay asks, “Do i have the privilege of your presence? Can you attend to me?” The question is about ethics, attending, tending. it is relevant as much to everyday sociality on the rio Urucauá as it is to matters of race and racism, objects and subjects, objectivities and subjectivities, and styles of doing ethical field research. in this sense, to respond Ihi, nah ay is to affirm “yes, i am here with you in this moment, and in this place. We are together here, as equals, face-to-face. you have my full attention.” “Are You Here?” 29 each of these three readings of what it means to be present, however , are translations that rely on the canons of european philosophy to understand notions of self in space, and time, and ethical relationship . recognizing this brings the questions: What kinds of “presence” are meant in this greeting that is so much part of everyday life along the rio Urucauá, and how do these relate to amerindian philosophical heritages? How might we grasp the question “are you here?” in ways that recognize the different possibilities for what it means to be a person? Over several return trips, after almost a decade of thinking about what happened in our public archaeology project from 2000–2001, after grappling with some 4,000 minutes of stories that David transcribed from video recordings made from 1997 to 2008, and in response to current amazonian anthropological research, some alternative translations began to present themselves. There is the sense of “being here” that affirms that i am not thinking in the form of another creature—as a tracker might follow prey, or as a shaman might think like a spirit. in this sense, to say “i am here” says, “i am not right now taking the perspective of another creature.” Ihi, nah ay also affirms the converse: “another has not taken the form of me. it really is i, and not a predator that has assumed my body, my consciousness, my likeness.”1 The inquiry ba pi ay also invites the hearer into a performance of conviviality . it creates an obligation to respond. To ignore a ba pi ay in everyday practice would constitute a negation of the person who is greeting, and a denial of sociality.2 in about a year of fieldwork, i only once observed someone refuse to respond. if the greeting “are you here” has six possible translations that rest on alternative possible understandings of body and consciousness, place, temporality, creatureliness, and obligations, how many more translations might there be of histories: “Who was here? When? What did they do?” * * * Most anthropological volumes begin with histories, and indeed, the first version of this book began with a lengthy chapter on Palikur history that has long since been recycled. Why that should be so is the subject of the rest of the book. The first four chapters—on personhood, space and time, astronomy, and geometry—question the assumptions about reality, and nature, and the nature of reality that...

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