Weaving a Good Existence with the Principle Word of Life: An Ethnography of Daily Life with a Group of Singers of the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc in Leticia, Colombia

Alon Yeheuda Leibel Hirchberg

Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Amazonia Leticia, Colombia

2025

Weaving a Good World with the Principle Word of Life: An Ethnography of Daily Life with a Group of Singers of the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc in Leticia, Colombia.

Alon Yeheuda Leibel Hirchberg

Tesis de investigación presentada como requisito parcial para optar al título de: Maestría en Estudios Amazónicos (Investigación)

Director:

Ph.D. Carlos David Londoño

Codirector:

Ph.D. Juan Álvaro Echeverri

Línea de Investigación:

Historias y Culturas Amazónicas Grupo de Investigación:

Etnología y lingüística amazonica

Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Amazonia Leticia, Colombia

2025

This palm, when it starts to grow, keeps attached to its trunk the base of the leaves that decay and fall. There, inside those pockets, ferns and weeds grow, a scorpion may make its house or the ants build their nest. The palm, still young, appears as if it were full of things, very complex. The more it has, the more it weighs. At some point during the rainy season, the sheer weight of that stuff makes it fall to earth, leaving the sight of the simple, elegant stem of the marija palm. All the bewildering stuff it had was only on the surface; now, on the ground, it will decay and rot to feed it through its roots. The more it carried waste, the more nourishment it will have.

Juan Álvaro Echeverri

Declaración de obra original Yo declaro lo siguiente:

He leído el Acuerdo 035 de 2003 del Consejo Académico de la Universidad Nacional. «Reglamento sobre propiedad intelectual» y la Normatividad Nacional relacionada al respeto de los derechos de autor. Esta disertación representa mi trabajo original, excepto donde he reconocido las ideas, las palabras, o materiales de otros autores.

Cuando se han presentado ideas o palabras de otros autores en esta disertación, he realizado su respectivo reconocimiento aplicando correctamente los esquemas de citas y referencias bibliográficas en el estilo requerido.

He obtenido el permiso del autor o editor para incluir cualquier material con derechos de autor (por ejemplo, tablas, figuras, instrumentos de encuesta o grandes porciones de texto).

Por último, he sometido esta disertación a la herramienta de integridad académica, definida por la universidad.

Alon Yeheuda Leibel Hirchberg

05/08/2025 El 5 de septiembre, 2025

Abstract

Weaving a Good Existence with the Principle Word of Life: An Ethnography of Daily Life with a Group of Singers of the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc in Leticia, Colombia

This thesis provides a “thick description” of the intricacies of daily ritual life in a small group of indigenous men from the Putumayo-Caquetá displaced to Leticia, and explores how they engage with one another and outsiders to maintain a longstanding yet amorphous social group despite heterogeneous moral commitments. Through ethnographic and sociolinguistic analysis of enacted emic concepts I argue the group is defined by its dialectical daily practices which navigate the tensions of contradictory desires. By exploring the intricacies of the group’s social dynamics I identify shifting structures of relationality and opposition in ritualized speech acts. I situate these shifting structures in the debate between a moral community and symbolic economy of alterity, and propose that a dialectic of the two is needed to engage with my field site, where these shifting structures manifest emically as a process of personal becoming and world making. I then explore how this process is enacted in daily practice by placing emic theory into dialogue with both naturalist and multinaturalist semiotic accounts of being and world. I propose that the same paradoxes of these semiotic accounts lie at the heart of the group’s striving for a good existence. I then explore how these paradoxes manifest as the management of conviviality and hostility in a framework of Sickness and Healing. I conclude with examples showing how the daily practice of the group consists of subtle metacommunicative acts that play with the vicissitudes of alterity by drawing on the embodied semiotic resources of The Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc.

Keywords: Murui (Witoto), daily-practice, sociality, semiotics, worldmaking, morality, sickness and healing).

Resumen

Tejiendo una Buena Existencia con la Palabra Principio de Vida: Una etnografía de la vida cotidiana con grupo the cantores de la Gente de Tabaco, Coca, y Yuca Dulce en Leticia, Colombia

Esta tesis provee una descripción detallada de la complejidad de la vida cotidiana y ritual de un grupo pequeño de hombres desplazados del Putumayo-Caquetá hacia Leticia, y explora cómo interactúan entre ellos mismos y con gente ajena para mantener un grupo social duradero pero amorfo, a pesar de tener compromisos morales heterogéneos. A través de un análisis etnográfico y sociolingüístico de conceptos émicos enactuados, se argumenta que el grupo se define por sus prácticas cotidianas dialectales que navegan las tensiones de deseos contradictorios. Por medio de explorar las complejidades de las dinámicas sociales del grupo, identifico estructuras cambiantes de inter-relacionalidad y oposición en actos de habla ritualizadas. Se sitúan estas estructuras cambiantes en el debate entre la comunidad moral y la economía simbólica de la alteridad, y propongo que se necesita una dialéctica de los dos para entender el contexto de mi investigación en donde estas estructuras cambiantes se manifiestan como un proceso de volverse-ser personal y construcción de mundo. Posteriormente, se explora cómo este proceso se enactúa en la práctica diaria a través de poner en diálogo la teoría émica con relatos semióticos de ser y mundo naturalistas y multinaturalistas. Sugiero que las paradojas que se encuentran en estos relatos semióticos son las mismas que permanecen en el centro de la búsqueda de una buena existencia del grupo. A continuación, se explora cómo estas paradojas se manifiestan como el manejo de la convivialidad y la hostilidad en un esquema de enfermedad y curación. Se concluye con ejemplos que demuestran que la práctica cotidiana del grupo consiste en actos metacomunicativos sutiles que juegan con las vicisitudes de la alteridad, aprovechando recursos semióticos encarnados en la Palabra de Tabaco, Coca y Yuca Dulce.

Palabras clave: Murui (Uitoto), práctica cotidiana, socialidad, semiótica, enfermedad y curación

Contents Pg.

Introduction

8

1. “Los Nokaidos”

12

1.1 My Friend Sebastián

12

1.2 John’s Office

13

1.3 Sebastián’s Deceased Brother Luis

15

1.4 Words Under the Maraca Tree

16

1.5 The Coca Patio, “Nokaido”

19

1.6 Conclusion

25

2. The “Principle Word of Life”

25

2.1 Introduction

25

2.2 The Dance group Kaɨ Komuiya Uai

26

2.3 The People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc

31

2.4 The Socio-linguistic Landscape of Nokaido

32

2.5 kaɨ komuiya uai - Principle Word of Life

34

2.6 Conclusion

41

3. The World-Making of the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc.

42

3.1 Introduction

42

3.2 A Source of Creative Agency

45

3.3 Where Symbolic Economy and Moral Community Meet

49

3.3.1 The Philosophy of the Axe as a Double Structure

50

3.3.2 Shifting Centres of Moral Community

53

3.4 Double Structures of Being

62

3.5 The Processual Interaction

67

3.6 Conclusion

71

4. The Production of Moral Structures of Being

72

4.1 Introduction

72

4.2 The Construction of Self and World

73

4.3 The Hollow of Humanity as a Theory of Becoming

77

4.4 Building an Ontological Heuristic

93

4.5 Epistemological & Ontological tensions

102

4.6 Conclusion

111

5. Navigating Tensions in the Daily-practice

113

5.1 Introduction

113

5.2 A Moral Source of Conviviality and Conflict

114

5.3 Illnesses of Knowledge and Being

126

5.4 How Words Heal

141

5.5 Conclusion

158

Conclusions

Introduction In January 2023, while I was still formulating my research project, my then thesis director Juan Álvaro Echeverri brought me to the evening meeting place of the Indigenous dance group called Kaɨ Komuiya Uai (henceforth KKU) in the city of Leticia. For the next four months I continued to get to know members of the group and discussed conducting my masters research with them. During this time we came to preliminary agreements about the timeframe of the research project and our reciprocal responsibilities within it. I conducted a dedicated field work period from August 2023 to January 2024. The group KKU and I continued to maintain constant interaction and dialogue until I left the city in May 2024.

The initial objective of the research project was two-fold. First, I sought to learn about the group KKU’s relationship with the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNAL) in terms of the successes and failures of their past collaborations. Secondly, I was to collaborate in the drafting of a new proposal for an outreach project (proyecto de extensión solidaria) with the group KKU to help fund their efforts in cultural revitalization. These remained the primary goals throughout, however, as I got to know the group KKU I realized that before I could comment on the successes and failures of past institutional partnerships, I would first have to understand what success meant to the group KKU and its members, why the group existed, what the daily-practice which they sought to reproduce actually entailed, and why it was important. In doing so, I came to understand that my initial research question regarding successes and failures was socially and politically untenable and ran counter to the group KKU’s daily-practice. My intention to explore past bilateral moral failures in dealing with the UNAL originated from a position of ignorance regarding the workings of group KKU’s relationships. I came to realize that the more visible institutional collaborations that the group KKU would engage in, could not be accomplished or made successful without maintenance of day to day practices that allowed to group to reproduce itself across two decades, adapt to the vicissitudes of life in Leticia and respond creatively to new opportunities. This thesis has come to focus on a thick description and analytic exploration of the intricacies of daily ritual life, which larger scale socio-political studies may gloss over and fail to capture. I explore how a small group of men engage with one another and outsiders to maintain the existence of an amorphous social group, defined by loose subscription to particular values, and moral commitments. From afar these may be described as a culture or tradition, however on

closer inspection it becomes apparent that these commitments may be diverse and at times contradictory. In this thesis I argue that a set of practices that define the group KKU and allow for its reproduction across time are material and allow for the constant navigation of tension wherein the success of one party may mean failure to another. Although similarly accented practices may exist across differently gendered spaces, the focus of this project emerged out of initial dialogues with men who were former students of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and were now active members in the group KKU. The strength of the extended participant observation originates from two key interlocutors inviting me into their dialogue, and then later the friendship I developed with Sebastián. Though I did interact with women associated with the group KKU they were less privy to the continuous negotiation, and re-affirmation of consent throughout my field work, and I cannot consider their consent to be as voluntary, informed, and continuous as the men of whom I speak in this work. For this reason, and due to relatively less access to feminine spaces this work must be considered in a male-focused context. Even though the “feminine” features quite prominently, it exists in this work primarily as a reflection of masculinity. This is a potential weakness born out of my attempt to learn and fulfill a moral masculine habitus. The more I did so, the more it seemed that as a researcher close consensual relationships with women became untenable. It is for this same reason that I also focus on the stable everyday practices of the group and attempt to steer clear of sensationalist moments or political events. Although I do not mention people by name when it is not necessary, and anonymized where possible, due to the nature of the study true anonymity is not possible to achieve. All naming of people or detailed descriptions are done with the attempt to minimize any social harm. The more intimate and personal accounts are limited to individuals with whom I established close relationships. These individuals like Sebastián were privy to the full course of the research project, and received continuous consultation throughout my period of fieldwork. However, I maintain the assertion that what is portrayed in this thesis is my “anthropological” take on the lives of real people, who possess their own theories, understandings, and knowledge practices. The anthropological is not to be confused with the lived experience of participants, nor their own first hand accounts. The present work is divided into five different chapters. Chapter one provides an ethnographic introduction to the group KKU and the spaces where I spent the majority of my time throughout my fieldwork. The ethnographic descriptions in chapter one are intended to serve as a brief entrance into my field site, day to day activities, and the social

context upon which the following chapters are based. To a reader unfamiliar with such environments, they may appear opaque, or perhaps exotic. I present these, emphasizing the ordinary moments that were the basis of my research and slowly gained better understandings of the meaningful daily-practice of my principal interlocutors of the group

KKU.

In chapter two, I introduce my hosts and main interlocutors in so as far as they are related to one another and myself, in the context of the social group known as Kaɨ Komuiya Uai (the Principle Word of Life) which is made up primarily of people who identify as People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc. After providing a brief introduction into the formation and history of the group KKU, and the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc as a socio-cultural complex, I explore the intricacies of the group’s identity, membership and social dynamics. I conduct this exploration through the concept of kaɨ komuiya uai (literally “our-life-word”) after which the group is named, and the context within which the group KKU’s daily practices are enacted. In doing so, I show the centrality of a constant shifting between privileging opposition and interrelation in the group’s daily practice.

In chapter three, I take a step back to position my initial analysis within the context of the relevant scholarly literature, in order to provide a focused direction for the arguments to follow. I connect my initial analysis of the double quality of the group KKU’s daily practice to Juan Álvaro Echverri’s poststructuralist model of a “double process of culture in the making”. I argue his model of “culture in the making” side stepped the contemporaneous debate between Amazonianist scholars who privileged either the analytical perspective of moral worlds of intimacy or the symbolic economy of alterity. Echeverri implicitly integrated key aspects of the two perspectives. I conclude the chapter rendering this integration explicit through the exploration of perspectival quality of moral structures, and, how it is key to emic conceptions of personal becoming and worldmaking, exhibited by the group KKU and People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc more broadly.

In chapter four, I explore how the workings of the group KKU’s everyday actions may enact the meaningful shifting of structures of being and world. I argue that a semiotic framework rooted in the concept of lifeworld is useful to begin thinking of the construction of self and worldmaking in relation to Word. I place this into dialogue with the emic historical-narrative known as the Hollow of Humanity, which deals with the personal and bodily ontogeny of the first human beings, the origin of uai or Word, and the first

words ever spoken by humanity. After an initial introduction of the thematic convergence between local theory and a biosemiotic account of being, I discuss its origin in Peircean semiotics, and the perennial contradictions it purports to solve. Rather than discard traditional semiotics due its fundamental issues, I propose that the same paradoxes of knowledge and being lie at the heart of Amazonian daily life and the group KKU’s striving for a ñue iyano, a good existence.

In chapter five, I aim to explore ways in which epistemological and ontological paradoxes analogous to those inherent to emic worldmaking manifest themselves in the daily lives of members of the group KKU. I take violence and conflict to be a potential site for seeing the practical consequences of such paradoxes. I focus on its rarity, and how the majority of conflicts are related to alcohol consumption, drunkenness, and associated behaviours, and position these paradoxes in broader discussions of Amazonian sociality and conflict. I then discuss the specifics of the group KKU´s treatment of alcohol and drunkenness as examples of unmoderated social practices of humour potentially bleeding into hostility, and delve into the group KKU's emic conceptions of these behaviours as illnesses of knowledge and being. I conclude this section with ethnographic examples that show how the daily practice of the group KKU in the coca patio of Nokaido consists of subtle metacommunicative acts, that using controlled humour, play with the vicissitudes of these epistemological and ontological paradoxes. I argue that this is how different members of the group KKU actively manage alterity and the shifting of double structures of being by drawing on the embodied semiotic resources of The Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc in a framework of illness and healing.

1. “Los Nokaidos”

1.1 My Friend Sebastián

The sun sets here in Leticia everyday at the same time. At around 4:15 PM the heat of the day begins to subside and the sky begins shifting in hues. All across the region the birds begin to congregate and their chatter fills the air just as they themselves take to it. I sit in a small office at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia typing these first words of my thesis, and my friend Sebastián sends me voice messages on What’s App.

“Allan Hushber, Hush!”

I write: “Sebastián qué cuenta?

Sebastián responds in audio:

No, bien Allan, aquí descansando un rato. Estaba allá por el pueblo, pasar un rato ahora voy bajar un rato a Nokaido por ahí a las cinco y media, no sé si mi hermano John ahorita va para universidad me dijo ahorita. De pronto le pidieron mambe.

(No, all good Allan, here relaxing a little. I was over there in town for a bit, spent some time… now I’m going to go down to Nokaido at around five thirty, I don't know if my brother John is going to pass by the university soon, he just told me. Maybe they asked him for mambe)

He goes on to ask me for a classmate's phone number in order to see if she still needs the ambil she had wanted at the end of February or the beginning of March, in order to prepare the vegetable salt needed as an admixture that is combined with pure tobacco paste to make what is called ambil. He says, “...y yo no tengo ambil también, toca quemar sal. Mañana creo que me toca quemar sal” (and I don’t have ambil either, I have to burn salt. Tomorrow I think I'll have to burn salt)”

… Sebastián and I spent the two last days of 2023 cooking and preparing ambil where he lives in Km 5 with his wife Yenny and three kids. Almost two months later we still have around half a standard ChocoListo container full of unmixed tobacco paste (lacking salt). Up until this point we only used the tobacco paste that Sebastián's partner/wife cooked after reprocessing the tobacco leaves. On December 30th, we went to find the unripe maraca fruits in Km 7 where his brother John lives and has his coca gardens near the elder Valdemar’s nearly completed maloka.

1.2 John’s Office

When we arrived, Sebastián and I entered and took a seat in the mambeadero, at which point I saw John. He was there cooking his own tobacco. He gestured to me from the opposite corner of the maloka and as I got closer he told me, “come sit in my office”. I took my container of mambe and handed it over to him. We sat side by side on a few wood planks stacked along the wall of the maloka. We exchanged ambil and mambe. After we greeted each other, he asked me how much longer I will be in Leticia. I told him that I would be going to visit my family in May, but that I didn’t know when I would return. I said that it depended on where I could find work, and that I was waiting to hear back about various jobs in Canada, in Spain, and in Leticia. I also told him about an article I was trying to write. After a floundering explanation that I assume he understood even less than I did, I say “…pues, es complicado.'' John seemed to interpret this expression of uncertainty as something needing correction, and began a discourse that felt strong and overbearing. Yet it was to be expected from John and his particular personality. He assured me, with a stern look from his round, soft face, that it was not complicated, but was instead simple. He said that with faith in the Creator and the tobacco, nothing is complicated and pointed his index finger upwards and then towards his bottle of ambil that was by his feet. I looked over at Sebastián on the other side of the maloka, not feeling in the mood to have someone tell me that writing my first academic article on Murui cosmology and biosemiosis, with the hope of publication, is something “simple”. I listened patiently, and smiled at how incongruent our mindsets seemed to be, and waited for Sebastián to give me the sign that he was ready to go find the maraca. John appeared to notice all this and laughed. Maybe he saw that I was not ready for such a spiritually potent discourse at that moment. I should not have expected a different reaction from

John, because of his general demeanor, but also because of the particular moment. John’s rejection of my uncertainty was particularly marked because the words we spoke were by the side of a pot of simmering tobacco paste. John stood up to stir the tobacco paste every now and again to prevent the thickening fluid from sticking to the bottom of the pot and burning.

At that moment, I did not account for how many hours he must have been labouring over this small pot, nor for the shift of one's mind set that such spiritually significant work induces. This is something that I had experienced before, and would experience again the following day as Sebastián and I cooked our tobacco. Eventually, Sebastián came over to us and asked a few brief questions regarding the quantity of tobacco paste we could expect to extract from the large roll of Peruvian tobacco I had bought. John responded with only a few words, and advised us to filter the liquid well and multiple times because that particular kind of tobacco frequently contains a lot of dirt and debris. Sebastián and John both carried themselves in a very dignified and serious manner and exchanged what seemed to be almost cold words between brothers. I asked Sebastián if we should head out to find the “baba” (slime). John let out a little laugh and smiled again to acknowledge how unprepared I was for his discourse. Sebastián said to John in a very matter of fact tone, “we are going to look”. At which point I wonder to myself, if our objective to find a plant from which to extract the “baba” was a secret. Sebastián and I exited out the back door of the maloka and made our way over to John’s coca gardens. After passing through John’s garden of already mature four foot tall coca plants surrounded by short grass, we reached an area where the vegetation changed. Here were small coca seedlings growing in perfectly spaced rows. The bright green of their leaves contrasted with the blackness of the earth. Combined, the colours gave an impression of deep cool richness. Among these rows were patches of young tobacco plants, emerging like green scales from small, carefully weeded, circular heaps of charcoal. Raised beds formed by unburnt log frames slowly decaying were home to a variety of different herbs. Dark clouds and thunder threatened rain in the distance, but in the garden the air was still. As we walked among the young plants, Sebastián uttered the only words since we marched out of the maloka ten minutes earlier. He said, “This is the garden of my brother. The one who passed away”. Not wanting to disturb the silence, I said nothing while we continued to carefully weave our way through. I wondered to myself why Sebastián did not mention his brother by name. It was said almost as though I had not met his younger brother Luis and attended his funeral a week or two before.

1.3 Sebastián’s Deceased Brother Luis

I had passed through Luis’s garden a couple times with Sebastián when we had gone looking for plant mucilage almost six months before. At that time, we went further into the forest beyond the gardens to collect the bark of a particular kind of small-leaved Yarumo tree. It is a lesser known source of mucilage. This was my first time being in Luis's garden after I had met him, and since he had passed away. The few times that I met Luis was in the urban coca patio called Nokaido. It was Luis that would bring mambe to the owner of the space, Don Silva. Don Silva would then sell the mambe in small bags worth ten or twenty thousand pesos, while keeping some of the fine green powder for his personal use. In practice this implied the collective consumption in the mambeadero. Luis carried with him a notebook in which he wrote songs. He and his band composed heavy-metal songs in Murui. He liked to compose music that fused Murui cosmology in the lyrics with other kinds of rhythms. He said that he was trying to find a truly Amazonian rhythm apart from the “traditional”, l that did not also include musical aspects that were foreign to the region. For example, Peruvian cumbias “amazonicas” are heavily influenced by Andean sounds and African rhythms and not totally indigenous to the region. Still struggling with this endeavor, he decided to compose songs in the romantic style. He explained that at least that style is amenable to being listened to in the environment of the coca patio, as opposed to say up-beat vallenato. In my few encounters with Luis, he shared with me his belief that when learning to sing traditional songs you have to find your own voice. This declaration was something that at the moment was considered quite controversial by other people present. The people said in response, “No. One must sing the way one is taught.” I remember the way Luis emphasized his pronunciation of the word “medici-i-i-naa,” and the way he proudly professed his traditional knowledge. I recall one afternoon when we sat opposite each other in the coca patio Nokaido with Abuelo Farirama and Don Silva and how Luis read out to us the lyrics of one of his “romantic” songs. He consulted with Don Silva regarding their efficacy. Both elders acquiesced, saying “está bueno”. Don Silva’s spouse, Doña Flor on the other side of the space, called out to Luis telling him to sing, because we never actually get to hear him. Luis responded with a characteristic laughing grin. He expressed in his drawn-out speech that it wasn't ready. Francy, Doña Flor’s daughter, called out to him as well, telling him to sing the song. After a little bit more of a back and

forth, Luis sitting, holding his notebook in both hands, looked down at the page and moved his lips. The words were hardly audible.

… As we walked through Luis’s nascent garden and the clouds gathered, I saw another side of him. In my few interactions with Luis I saw a young man of my age with a deep passion for self-expression and pride in his Murui identity, but who was clearly struggling. I saw this struggle most evidently in his heavy drinking and his emphasis on medicine and healing. In his garden, I saw the passion he attempted to express in music materialize. In the acidic infertile, Amazonian earth rendered black by ash and charred logs, I saw evidence of what must have been a great blazing fire set in the peak of the grueling summer. In the rich green of sprouting coca, tobacco and medicinal herbs, I saw that the scorched earth had been cooled by rain. Like the song in his notebook that he could not sing, he was not able to cure himself of that which afflicted him. Though he planted the seeds, and they sprouted in the scorched earth cooled by rain, Luis would not be able to harvest his tobacco nor care for his coca. His older brother Sebastián, now passed through the garden tending to his herbs.

1.4 Words Under the Maraca Tree

Approaching where the well-maintained gardens end and where the underbrush had regrown among the sparse trees, we stopped at a maraca1 tree. When I looked up, I saw a grand total of zero green, unripe fruits. Sebastián placed his faded army-green backpack at the base of the tree and headed back through the garden to find a long stick to retrieve the seemingly nonexistent fruit. He told me to wait by the tree. As I waited I looked around for a place to sit and rest. There is a fallen tree that looks like a promising seat but upon approaching it, I realize that it is already occupied by the lively traffic of ants of varying kinds. Based on my ignorance regarding the varieties of biting ants, I thought better of taking a seat. I stood there waiting for Sebastián, all the while wondering how on earth we were going to get enough maraca for the tobacco that we already had soaking at Sebastián’s house at Km 5. Soon enough Sebastián returned with what might have been a thin ten foot branch that ended with a short fork. I told Sebastián that I didn’t 1 Sebastián and other indigenous locals referred to the plant as maraca while people in Leticia but from other parts of Colombia referred to it as macambo. Maraca is likely a variety of Theobroma Bicolor (hump & Bonpl. L), the mucilage of which has recently been studied as a possible food stabilizer (Andrea 2024, p.9)

see a single fruit. He pointed and said, “look”. Suddenly, I noticed one green maraca and thought aloud, “well, that's one”. Sebastián used the forked branch to twist off the football sized green maraca fruit. It fell to the ground, with a thud. When he re-positioned himself and the branch, I noticed seven or eight more green fruits that I had not seen before. While Sebastián continued to twist off maracas I retrieved the first one and sat down straddling a log and pounded the heavy fruit against it. I felt the sharp reverberation resonate through my hand and arm, leaving only small dents in the maraca’s ribbed shell. Sebastion sat facing me on the log and split another fruit down the middle with the medium sized machete we brought from Valdemar's maloka. He handed me the machete. The fruits were very unripe and the outer shells and inner flesh were extremely tough. At first, we struggled to extract the flesh and seeds. We clawed at the opened fruits with our fingernails. With the next fruit Sebastián took a different approach. He cut off both tips of the oblong pod, and made lengthwise cuts through the outer shell. This made it easier for us to peel away slices of the fruit and gain access to the seeds and flesh, however, it was still a struggle. As I continued clawing at the tough, spongy flesh, I felt the pain of the nail on my right hand’s index finger beginning to lift. Sebastián asked me if I had a spoon in my mambe container. The spoon that Sebastián used in his container is carved of wood with no sharp edges. I tell Sebastián that yes I do. But as I pull it out I warn him that it is the cheapest spoon in Leticia. I handed it to him and we both laughed. It was hardly a spoon. Just a piece of thin sheet metal, cut and stamped with the most minor curvature. Only a few minutes after Sebastián started using it to carve away the maraca flesh from the wedges it snapped in two. I said “I told you so”, and Sebastián repeated “la cuchara más barata de Leticia” and laughed. He continued to scrape away using just the tip. I bit into the wedges with my teeth. I feigned hygiene and quickly spat the mouthfuls of flesh and seeds into my hand. This way we worked and filled a white synthetic sack with the processed fruit. The technique we used led to many of the seeds being cut open, exposing their delicious watery cucumber like innards which we periodically took a moment to eat. The seeds seemed to contain a higher concentration of the mucilage which we would later extract from the hard flesh by soaking them in water. While sitting, we exchanged a few words about my long-distance relationship that was on the rocks at the time, and the idea of traveling to Europe where my partner Amy lived. Sebastián told me that at one point he thought he would have traveled and been living in France. Referring to the period of time when he was still separated from his wife Yenny. She and her kids were back home in La Chorrera, and Sebastián was living in

Leticia and seeing a French woman, “La Francesa”. This was after Sebastián had finished his five year prison sentence in Leticia due to a wrongful conviction rooted in sorcery. It’s from “La Francesa” that he learned how to say, “bonsoir,” with which he enthusiastically greeted me for the first few months after we met, regardless of it being day or night. That is, until he learnt to pronounce my last name “Hirchberg”-- more on that later. I asked him if he thought he would have been able to handle life in a big European city, places where the things like what we were currently doing would be impossible. He said that when you are in a foreign place you adapt, just as you do here in Leticia. As we sat opposite one another tearing into maraca after maraca, he asked me about the song I had started learning from Don Silva in Nokaido recently, that he was still unfamiliar with. Between mouthfuls of maraca I recited the single chorus and verse, and he repeated:

jiyakɨ yaroka dɨona jɨko aikaiza kiode diezena uaitañe omɨko rɨiri uaitañe omɨko rɨiri uaitañe omɨko rɨiri

oniba oniba zɨikie naama bibɨrɨ yaroka dɨona fɨnoka jɨko aikaiza jiode diezena uaitañe omɨko rɨiri uaitañe omɨko rɨiri uaitañe omɨko rɨiri The powerful tobacco hunting dog of origin is small Do not scorn it, eat it Do not scorn it, eat it Do not scorn it, eat it

There, the owner of the hunting dance, in his patio made the powerful tobacco hunting dog It is small Do not scorn it, eat it Do not scorn it, eat it Do not scorn it, eat it

After a few hours of processing the fruit, with sundown approaching and the sky becoming overcast, Sebastián said, “making ambil is work”, lifting both his eyebrows and nodding. He told me to throw away the leftover husks and the four or five fruits left unprocessed. I grabbed a few in my hands and tossed them into the brush. Sebastián told me to take them deeper into the undergrowth. So I pulled out the red rain cover of my old Gregory Zulu backpack and stuffed it full of the maraca scraps and took them into the

brush. I returned, stuffed the sack of maraca flesh and seeds in my backpack, and we headed back through the gardens. Sebastián stopped by Luis’s planters to quietly pick a variety of small leafed herbs. He folded them into his bag, and we continued on towards the maloka. By the time we were passing through, it had gotten dark and the maloka was empty. We continued down the muddy hill with sloped steps cut into the slick gray dirt. We crossed a small black-golden pool where kids usually played. Then we went back up a hill and through a bit of forest before arriving back at the Km 7 community’s football field. It was here, that earlier in the day, that Sebastián and I had parked his motorcycle in front of John’s colourful wooden plank house. With dusk upon us, Sebastián kick-started the engine, I hopped on the back, resting my right foot on the exhaust and my left heel on the frame precariously close to the turning chain and spokes. We exited the football field, made a left onto the paved road, and headed towards the Leticia-Tarapacá highway. We dropped off the sack of maraca at Sebastián's house in Km 5 before returning to Leticia. In the city, he left me at my neighbours home restaurant to have some dinner. He continued on down the block to Nokaido, and then later to the hotel where he worked 5 nights a week, as the resident “shaman.” After eating I went to sit in Nokaido.

1.5 The Coca Patio, “Nokaido”

Since late December I stopped consistently writing in my notebook in the presence of other people, and declared my fieldwork period “officially” over when Sebastián’s younger brother Luis suddenly passed away along with a few other young family members of my main interlocutors. I did not wish to make people feel uncomfortable at such a sensitive time. From that point, I spent time with Sebastián primarily to keep him company as a friend. However, the day described above was not so different from most days I spent while doing field work. Around noon, I would go over to Sebastián’s house where we would have a lunch that his spouse Yenny would prepare. We would talk and do some kind of work, be it cutting lumber for his new house that he was building, digging holes for its timber pillars, picking coca, collecting other plants, or cooking tobacco. Then, at sundown, we headed to Nokaido.

In as few words as possible, Nokaido is an urban coca patio and was my main research site. It is a primarily masculine and formalized/ritualized space where people gather in the evening to partake in dialogue, exchange and consume the “spiritual”

substances of tobacco, coca, with the primary goal being the maintenance of a state of general well being “ñue iyano”, literally a good existence.

The space is located behind and part of the house of Doña Flor and Don Silva in the town center of Leticia, Amazonas. The house is two stories tall and made of a wooden frame. The first floor is made of concrete and tile. The second floor is made of wooden planks. It has brick walls in some places, plastered and painted white. During my time in Leticia of time the house appeared to be in a state of constant renovation and construction. During my fieldwork, I rented a room on the second floor of a three-story brick and concrete building, of “modern” design, just behind the coca patio. The members of the group KKU often joked that I could see who was sitting there from my window. In reality, the brick wall behind the coca patio is too high for me to see anyone from my balcony, but I often did look to see if the yellow-orange light was shining through the space between the wall and the ceiling to determine if people had already gathered. When I first arrived there was a single dim white-blue light bulb that Gabriel Vargas, a graduate from the university and friend of the group, changed in preparation for an event where a group of students from the Universidad Nacional came to do a workshop on dance and weaving. For a few weeks, the mambeadero folks complained that the new yellow bulb was too bright. Eventually they got used to it.

One of the most stable and constant features of the mambeadero was the presence of Don Silva. From around six in the afternoon, you could find him sitting there on his “throne” in the northeast corner of the space. If you arrived early, you might find him on the second floor, perhaps on the balcony that overlooked the street. Often during the day as I biked around the city running errands I would see Don Silva there. He would sometimes call down to me, “bring yarumo!” or “bring firewood!”. Later in the day he might be found sitting or lying on the hammock that was always hung between two of the several black-painted wooden posts with white stripes and patterns that supported the tin roof of the mambeadero. These were eventually repainted a light brown in preparation of an event. Don Silva's “throne” is the only chair permanently located in the coca patio.

It is made of hardwood boards and slats. The wide seat and backrest are joined at a 135-degree angle. Often, you can hear the “cheep cheep cheep” of the chicks hiding underneath or sitting on the backrest.

Don Silva is an older Murui man who is now retired from a lifetime of work as a police officer throughout the country, and whose physical mobility has been hampered in recent years due to various health complications. In front of Don Silva's chair, there sat a

small round wooden table raised just a few inches above the dirt floor. On top of the table, one could find small gourds filled with the remains of previously mixed ambil broth, a small gourd with chaff and leaf veins left over after sifting the crushed coca leaves mixed with the ashes of the yarumo leaves burned in the preparation of mambe. Also on the mambeadero table was the metal cup that Sebastián used to place lit charcoal taken from the firepit to burn copal incense, pieces of palo santo wood, and the orange, red, and violet fruits of the medicinal jaigoko pepper. The smoke from this induces coughing, clears the sinuses, drives out evil spirits, and can cause vomiting in those who are unaccustomed or ill-prepared. Next to the table usually rested a two-liter soda bottle filled with ice water and/or a bucket of caguana with the cup inside.

To the left of Don Silva's chair was Sebastián's bench, where he would always sit. It is a rectangular prism made of two rectangular pieces of wood positioned side by side and joined with two other pieces of wood on both sides. It is also about ten centimeters high. His position next to Don Silva reflected Sebastián's status. He was generally accepted as someone who has traditional authority to one degree or another, based on his behavior and knowledge. After serving in the army, he returned to his territory in La Chorrera to learn his language, Murui-Mɨnɨka. He was trained primarily in the art of counseling, yetarafue, in traditional healing. Later he became certified in medicine, from the side of “white man.” Sebastián works several nights each week at the maloca of a luxury hotel as the resident “shaman,” where he answers questions about his culture and performs healings.

To the left of Sebastián's bench was a shifting semicircle of cylindrical logs cut to about thirty centimeters tall. The first three to the left of Sebastián were more stable. Because of my personal relationship with Sebastián, my bench was located next to his. In what I consider as a mixture of respect, affection, and irony, members of the group would call it the bench of “Grandfather Hirchberg” or “uzuma Hirchberg” bench. This was after one or two months of learning to pronounce my last name by shouting a wide variety of pronunciations: “hirshberg,” “hiiishbeerrg,” “husberg,” a practice that has persisted for over a year since I left Leticia. Every now and then I will get a voice message from Sebastián calling out my name in all manners of pronunciation. On nights when I was not there, or would show up late, my bench was moved back, so that the bench of Wenceslao fills the empty space.

Wenceslao's bench is hardly ever referred to by name, perhaps because he is almost always sitting on it, and because his associations with people are more about their

spatial location than their materiality. Wence is a man of few words, and when he does speak, he always does so very slowly. Beyond a friendly glance and smile to those around him and a few words exchanged during the preparation of substances, he speaks to the group when there is a question about practices, stories, or language. Often, when everyone else has given an answer, Sebastián or Don Silva will direct the question to Wenceslao to see what he thinks, or ask how he understands it from the side of the Okaina. At these moments, Wenceslao would remain silent and begin to gesture with his hands. Then he would often utter a succinct response in Mɨnɨka in a slow voice so soft that it is sometimes barely audible. He is known as the Okaina elder, but he speaks mostly Murui-Mɨnɨka in the mambeadero. When he was younger, he spoke Okaina with his grandmother but Murui with the rest of his family.

To his left is Justo's place. Justo is a strong, middle-aged man who comes to the space every afternoon after work, and often goes to bathe in the house before sitting down. For a time, he worked as a butcher in Tabatinga until he left that job to help with a political project the group was involved in. Soon after, he got another job at the port of Leticia, which he left to help build Doki's house in the community of Citacoyd, located at kilometer 23 of the Leticia-Tarapacá highway. Like Wenceslao, who was always by his side, Justo is not a man of many words. He does not talk about projects or politics, but he is considered to be someone who knows how to heal. I often saw him receiving a few spoonfuls of mambe and ambil before sitting with his head bowed for long periods of time in apparent silence with a cigarette, an herb, a nettle flower, or perhaps a glass of water in his hand, blowing on it and uttering jɨra, a healing prayer before giving away the object or substance he had “curado”.

Justo and Wenceslao were often the first to arrive after, or sometimes before, Don Silva took his seat. Many times when we arrived from Sebastián's place at Kilometer Five, where we talked and worked on the construction of his new house and harvested coca, which he needed for his night work at the hotel, it was Justo or Wenceslao who lit the fire behind the mambeadero and roasted the leaves. I burned the yarumo. To the left of them, opposite Don Silve, was Doki's bench, which is made from a hollowed-out horizontal log. His seat was more mobile, but still associated with him. Sometimes other people used it, but they would leave when Doki arrived swapping to another bench, at which point either Doki or the person who was sitting there would pretend to clean it. The only exception was Elicio, Sebastián's uncle, who seemed to have equal or greater rights to sit on this bench. Doki is of Bora descent but grew up around Murui-Mɨnɨka people in La Chorrera,

so he speaks mostly Murui-Mɨnɨka. Of the young people present, he has the longest history with the group. He had a spouse and daughter who would sometimes come to the mambeadero to lie in a hammock and sleep after Doki finishes his classes at SENA or his work at the plant nursery. Sometimes the others bother him for leaving before 10:00 p.m. to fulfill his various personal and work obligations.

To the left of Doki stood the old lemon tree around which the tin roof of the space was built, and which was often hit by lemons falling from the canopy just above. Between the tree and Don Silva's seat was a long plank bench placed against the back wall of the space. There sat a changing group of people, but usually very closely associated with the group, with the seats closest to Don Silva usually reserved for elders. There sits Cristóbal, a father in his thirties who worked days and nights as a security guard at the airport, or as a motorcycle taxi driver in the city. He lived on the same street as Nokaido. The majority of time the men who consider themselves part of this group spend together, is spent sitting, listening, exchanging each other's tobacco and coca, delivering speeches, asking each other questions, and answering them. This is no small part of these men's lives, and became a major part of mine. Every evening at around 7:00 pm, the men begin to arrive at Doña Flor’s house, pass along the side of it and enter the tin-roofed space beyond. They sit down in the coca patio. Usually, they stay seated there until 11:00pm, but some will often stay until 12:00 pm or later. The norm is, that after you sit down on your bench, you do not get up to walk around. People also frown upon shuffling around in your seat. Your feet should remain well planted on the soft earthen floor. People wearing shoes or flip-flops may remove them, but place their feet on top of them as a buffer with the ground.

When it is particularly hot in the mambeadero, most of the men remove their shirts. The bodily practice of removing one's shirt is correlated with two different factors. The first is that the presence of more bodies than usual contributes to a warmer environment. The second is that when you arrive at the space, the norm is for each person to greet each other by exchanging ambil and mambe. This exchange begins with Don Silva, the owner of the space, and other elders that are present. When there are upwards of ten people present, and they all arrive around the same time, it can mean a good deal of movement as each person addresses one another. They say, “ama, be kue yerakɨ (brother, here is my tobacco), or, “abuelo, be kue yerakɨ (grandfather, here is my tobacco); to which you might respond with an excited “Jmm!”. After each person licks one another's tobacco and exchanges spoonfuls of mambe, they return to their benches and

assume the normative seated position. There, they wait for their saliva to wet the fine green powder, and use their tongues to position it into a wad on either side of their mouths. They use their hands to press their cheeks, flattening the wads inside, to avoid the appearance of a rodent. When ambil is exchanged between many different men and consumed in large amounts, it has the effect of heating up your body and causing you to sweat. It is after these exchanges have finished that people begin to remove their shirts, and twirl them around as improvised fans. Taking off one's shirt is associated with the start of the dialogue and comradery. In less lively situations involving fewer people, taking off one's shirt may be accompanied with the phrase, “now I’m going to mambe for real.” Likewise, putting one's shirt back on becomes associated with the end of a dialogue, and is often the first sign that someone is about to leave the space. This is usually followed by them putting their mambe and ambil back in their bags. When others don’t show up consistently, or if they leave early, they are often teased. Whenever I didn't show up for more than two days in a row people became concerned, assuming that I was sick. Or they would joke and tease me saying that I must have been busy with monifue, Murui-Mɨnɨka for “abundance”, but meaning a woman. This was especially “funny” because I was in a long-term, long-distance, monogamous relationship while living in a city with a tenuous internet connection at best. Most of the other men were also in committed relationships and had young children.

As someone's absence grows, the teasing may grow stronger. In one instance I saw the missing individual’s wooden bench placed upside down and on its side in odd places like stacked on other benches. People then took photos of the misplaced bench and sent the images of such displays to the “Cantores de Nokaido” What’s App group chat. Another example was the offering of one’s tobacco paste to the person as they began to leave early, which customarily necessitates further reciprocation. The teasing was often paired with the explicit and genuine concern for the individual's well being. In the worst cases of extended absenteeism, a diagnosis of a spiritual illness might be made. Such an illness may only be cured by literally sitting the afflicted person down, the mixing of fresh tobacco paste with salt, and engaging speech.

1.6 Conclusion

The ethnographic descriptions above are intended to serve as a brief entrance into the field site, day to day activities, and social context upon which the following chapters are based. To a reader unfamiliar with such environments they may appear opaque, or perhaps exotic. I have tried to execute their initial presentation emphasizing the ordinary moments that, however mundane, were the basis and process by which I conducted my research and slowly gained better understandings of the meaningful daily practice of my principal interlocutors, friends, and teachers. In the following chapters I iteratively revisit different aspects of daily practices described above. Each pass includes expanded and deepened ethnographic examples, alongside the development of a theoretical lens in order to slowly tease out the way in which different components are interconnected, coherent, and contradictory. As such, it follows the path by which I came to understand my field work experience in the manner in which I do currently, and the practical and iterative process by which I built relationships in the field. I aim to model a kind of structural process within which people's actions take on and create meaning, call forth different worlds, and reproduce themselves as powerful social actors in relation to one another.

2. The “Principle Word of Life”

2.1 Introduction

In the following section I introduce my hosts and main interlocutors in so as far as they are related to one another and myself in the context of the social group known as Kaɨ komuiya Uai (Principle Word of Life). This group called Kaɨ komuiya Uai is made up primarily of people who identify as People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc and others who have developed strong ties with that identity, though they may not claim it themselves. As seen in the title of this chapter kaɨmakɨ, loosely meaning “our people,” is often used to address the group as a whole including both those who identify as People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc and those with close social ties. The latter do not generally use the phrase themselves without a twinge of awkwardness due to its other more exclusionary ethnic meaning. After providing a brief introduction into the formation

of the group KKU and the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc as they are understood as a socio-cultural complex, I further explore the intricacies of the group’s identity, membership and social dynamics not through the concept of kaɨmakɨ, but, through the strongly related concept of kaɨ komuiya uai (literally “our-life-word”) after which the group is named, and the context within which their daily practices are enacted. In doing so I show the centrality of a constant oscillation between privileging opposition and interrelation in the group’s daily practice.

2.2 The Dance group Kaɨ Komuiya Uai

The physical space of nightly assembly is called Nokaido, however the broader social group is called Kaɨ komuiya Uai (KKU). Nokaido is the Murui word for toucan and refers specifically to the paper maché sculpture of the bird that hangs from the roof above Don Silva’s chair in the mambeadero, while the group KKU translates their name Kaɨ komuiya Uai as “Palabra Principio de Vida''. The group Kaɨ komuiya Uai (Palabra principio de vida) was founded over twenty years ago by Doña Flor as an Indigenous dance group. The group's primary purpose is explicitly stated as promoting the cultural practice and values of the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc. It began with Doña Flor and Don Silva preparing the space informally known as Nokaido (described above) in Leticia for displaced youth from the Putumayo-Caquetá to come together to share in the Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc to which the name Kaɨ komuiya Uai refers. Quickly thereafter after group began to focus their efforts on practicing traditional songs and dances (Memorias del proyecto Ruakɨdo komekɨ jiyode iemo iyazikɨ uiñoga 2018, 7). The group 's slogan is “creencia y resistencia de nuestra cultura y biodiversidad” and their logo hangs in the coca patio behind Don Silva.

(figure 1, https://repositorio.unal.edu.co/handle/unal/87155)

Despite having this long-running formal structure maintained primarily by Doña Flor who is named as the director of the group, it is opaque or even unknown to most people who form its ever-shifting and renewing body. Thus the group in its daily manifestation is ill-defined and fluid. There is no common formal way to join, or leave the group and the people associated with it are in constant flux, night to night, month to month, and year to year. The closest thing to becoming a “member” is beginning to have a spot or bench in the coca patio associated with you, but even this is impermanent and in flux depending whether or not you fulfill your responsibility to keep your bench “warm”, through your continued presence, or let it go “cold.” Other than that, there is the possibility of being added to the “Cantores de Nokaido” WhatsApp group chat. However, many of the most key and consistently present people like the elders Don Silva and Wencelao, and other younger people are not part of the group chat, which itself has an ever changing membership as people’s cell phones are damaged, lost, or stolen, or as they get fed up with the at times bawdy multilingual humor and teasing, and leave only to eventually rejoin. WhatsApp limits the same person to leaving and rejoining the chat to a maximum of three times so there are some people who have been permanently excluded. Beyond the usual faces in Nokaido and those who periodically visit, the chat group also includes people that I have never met and who currently live in other parts of Colombia. The most stable core is primarily made up of people that identify as Murui, Bora, or Okaina. The majority originally from La Chorrera or other nearby towns and communities in the Predio Putumayo indigenous territory/reservation. Their reason for leaving their homes and coming to Leticia are the same as the majority of other people from that region. That is, the desire to continue their studies which is impossible to do in the territory beyond highschool, the desire to find better economic prospects, or be near other family members that have already left. These are the most common and openly cited reasons. However, during the year that I spent with the group Kaɨ komuiya Uai I slowly learnt that the majority of the men have also been personally affected by the armed conflict and the presence of non-state armed groups in the territory in one profound way or another. Some of the men cannot return. Despite coming to Leticia for the security of a better life, many of their lives in the city are characterized by intense precarity. For example, one night on his way home from Nokaido one man was robbed at gunpoint. Another night an elder returned home to find his door kicked in and the wooden boards of his bed stolen by young neighborhood drug addicts, who the week before had robbed him of his cell phone and wallet at knife point. Or when a series of deaths of

young relatives due to sudden illness revealed the lack of funds available in the case of emergencies and required widespread contribution. It is well summed up in the often repeated phrase that “nadie sabe como uno vive (no one knows how one lives).” Thus, even the most stable core of the group Kaɨ Komuiya Uai changes as people start families, begin new studies or jobs, move to other cities in the interior of the country, periodically return to the territory in the Putumayo-Caquetá, or suddenly fall ill and pass away. Far from speaking to the group KKU’'s fragility it really brings to the fore its stability in the face of precarity. While I live directly behind Nokaido, Sebastián returns every night to his house in kilometer five on his motorcycle that for a period of months was continuously breaking down. Even on days when he worked nights at the hotel he stopped by the space between 6:00 pm and 7:30 pm and sometimes even returned to the space at around midnight after work before returning home. Justo, after working all day wrestling and butchering livestock in Tabatinga, walks the more or less four kilometers to Nokaido, and then back home after 10:00 pm. Four months after Sebatián’s brother Luis passed away, their young cousin Roger whom I had never met before began to attend regularly. Thus, despite constant change, twenty years after its founding, the men of Kaɨ Komuiya Uai continue to sit together in Nokaido practicing songs and exchanging coca and tobacco.

To this day, when a malokero (traditional head of a maloka, often with the right execute to ceremonial dances) sends an invitation for a dance, for a week or two the urban coca patio Nokaido fills with all the group’s key members as well as family, friends, and acquaintances eager to learn and prepare songs. Soon after I began my fieldwork the group received an invitation to sing at another maloka in Km7. I was told that I must learn a song and sing. From that point I have continued to learn songs one by one. When people arrive at Nokaido who are totally unfamiliar with the nature of the space and its cultural context --- often tourists seeking “traditional medicine” and healing from Sebastián --- it is explained either by Sebastián, Don Silva, or Doña Flor that here, people learn to sing. They say that everyone present is a singer, even me, the Canadian.

One evening --- over a year after I first sat down in Nokaido and was introduced by Juan Álvaro Echeverri--- three young women from Antioquia came to Nokaido for the first time. The three are visiting Leticia for a week, and two of them are accompanying the third who sought out Sebastián to heal her. When the four of them enter I am sitting the mambeadero with

Don Silva to my right and Wence to my left. Sebastián tells two of the young women to sit on the empty bench to the right of Don Silva, while he and the other girl sit on benches face to face in the opposite corner of the space near the washbasin. Don Silva, happy to receive visitors smiles as he asks the two girls that are seated with us -- where they are from, if they are students or professionals, and so on. One girl works in fashion and the other in business administration. All the while, Sebastián continues consulting quietly with the girl, who later tells us she is a veterinarian. After Don Silva and the two girls introduce themselves, Don Silva asks them if they have any questions, and gives a long, however simple explanation on the space and the use of coca and tobacco. As they talk casually, Wence and I sit firmly, looking forward and downward listening to and deferring to the abuelo's particular way of explaining things. From time to time we exchange ambil.

After Sebastián finishes with the veterinarian and sends her to bathe herself with a cured totuma (gourd) filled with crushed herbs and water behind the coca patio where the fire pit is. While she bathes herself, he takes his seat between Don Silva and I. When the veterinarian returns to sit in a plastic chair to the left, Wence and after a long silent pause Sebastián announces that I am a singer. And says. “a ver Allan, canta.” I get up, with clicking knees and squat by the small table in the center avoiding all eye contact. I pour myself a glass of water, and return to my seat. With my heart pounding I sing the first song I learnt. Afterwards, Sebastián instructs me to sing another, and another, and then another, until I exhaust my repertoire. Despite my imperfect tone that my teachers usually fuss over, no one says a word as I sing song after song. By presenting what a total outsider has been able to learn exclusively by means of the group mentorship, their expertise is demonstrated.

Transmitting traditional songs is the most visible and charismatic aspect of the groups daily practice and is necessary for the role that the group Kaɨ Komuiya Iai plays in the exchange of ritual dances among the malokas built in the different peri-urban communities located around the city of Leticia, as well as the groups other socio-political action. When a formal invitation to a dance is sent to the group it’s because they have the

capacity to fulfill their ritual obligation. That is, to sing from the moment a dance begins at 3:00pm until sunrise the next morning. And that, without the conflict and the excessive drinking that often ruins a dance's atmosphere which is supposed to heal and prevent sickness. However, beyond the ritual exchange within the local system of dances, over the years the group has employed their expertise in dance presentations in regional and national cultural and political events: ie the dance and musical competition of the Colombian amazon: The Pirarucu de Oro, the celebration of the Cofraternidad Amazonica between Brazil, Peru and Colombia and the national ANATO expo in Bogotá; political events such as the numerous visits of Colombia’s various presidents for conferences over the years. Kaɨ komuiya Uai has also executed a number of socio-cultural educational programs developed in partnership with public institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia .

In August of 2023 the group also became directly involved in departmental electoral politics when one of its members ran for office and won a seat in the department of Amazonas’s assembly with the slogan “Con la fuerza de la gente” derived from the Murui phrase “urukɨ mariedo”. The group accepts these avenues of action in so as far as it understands them to contribute to the goal of promoting territorial wellbeing, best understood in the framework of illness and healing that lies at the core of the People's tobacco coca and sweet manioc’s system of dance and is enacted in the everyday practices of the group Kaɨ Komuiya Uai.

As such, these various lines of action as described above are but the outwardly visible periodical effervescence of more stable daily practices from which they emerge. The Invitation to a dance is sent, and for a week or two the urban coca patio of Nokaido fills with all the group’s key members as well as their family, friends, and acquaintances. An election is called, and politicians begin to visit the nightly sessions. On election day the coca patio and Doña Flor’s adjacent house fills to the brim with animated supporters of all ages eating, talking, and waiting anxiously well into the night. A grant is awarded for a cultural project and the space opens up to new apprentices, and students for a time. In the same way that after someone lets loose a song or a passionate or poignant discourse, and those listening exclaim “Jmmm!” all becomes quiet again in the coca patio, and people “refuel / tanquear” by exchanging tobacco and ambil; between these moments of intensified hyper-visible action the group returns to its daily life, and the nightly presence in the coca patio settles back down to its usual 4 to 10 people. It is this continuous practice of coming together in the evenings --- upon which the group was

founded-- that creates the condition that makes other more visible actions possible, be it singing in a dance or presentation, or running for political office. This is the sharing in the Word of Tobacco Coca and Sweet Manioc, understood as a sleepless caring for life, the pursuit of ñue iyano / good existence to which the name of the group Kaɨ komuiya Uai (KKU) (the Principle word of life) refers.

2.3 The People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc

The Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc is the basis for the social conglomeration (locally called an “affinity group”) that is known by a few different names. The name most suitable and commonly used by the group KKU was the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc, and is thus the name I use most often in this thesis. The name Children of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, has been adopted as an official political identity by some groups. The other name used, the People of the Centre is a translation from the auto-deneomination shared and eventually adopted by different subgroups of the social conglomeration, and introduced to academia by Juan Álvaro Echeverri in his 1997 dissertation. I use this final name only in reference to the academic works that employ it because my interlocutors did not use it, unless they too were engaging with such literature, or referring to how other groups autodenominate. Today all of these serve as terms that encompass what are at times considered seven different peoples historically linked to the region between the Putumayo and Caquetá rivers in the Northwest Amazon.

These are the Murui (Witoto), Feenemɨna(Muinane), Bora, Ocaina, Miraña, Nonuya and Andoke peoples and map directly on to differences in language. This explicit conception of an affinity group emerged in the context post rubber-boom genocide social re-construction as a way to deal with the territorial and “demographic catastrophe”(Echeverri 2022, p.73) during which up to ~90% of the indigenous population of the region was extinguished. Based on data produced by Thomas Whiffen in 1915 Echeverri (2022) estimates that in 1908 the population was around 46,000 people (p.69). By 1930 there were only 147 known survivors on the Colombian side of the Putumayo river ( Echeverri 2022, p.73). This loss of life meant the wholesale destruction of 352 of the 568 known autonomous patrilineal clans (Echeverri 2022, p.308, Echeverri 2016, p.87). Survivors experienced widespread displacement from their clans’ traditional territories, for example Murui and Bora were displaced people south to the Ucayali River, and their descendants were the first to resettle along the Tacana River near Leticia. This also meant a

breakdown of previous territorial social structures that governed regional inter-clan relations within and between the seven peoples, and their relationship with the nonhuman world, necessary for their material and social reproduction: the patrilocal exchange of women, and mutual aid in the atypical conditions of scarcity, war, and sickness (spiritual or otherwise). In its most elaborated manifestation this network of inter clan relations takes the form of the exchange of ritual responsibilities in the four shared varieties of ceremonial dances (and their numerous subcategories) managed by select clans, but in which all clans may participate, wherein large quantities of foodstuffs (domestic and wild) and ritual substances are exchanged, and matrimonies can be planned.

2.4 The Socio-linguistic Landscape of Nokaido

While the Castilian-Spanish phrase Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, and the identity of the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc are now used commonly in Leticia, similar concepts are present in the various languages of the Putumayo-Caquetá because they refer to a common long standing practice of managing relations. As I stated above these are commonly listed as: Murui (Witoto), Ocaina, Nonuya from the Witotoan language family, Bora, Miraña, Feémenɨnaa (Muinane) from the Boran language family, and Andoke which is currently considered an isolate. However, within each of these seven languages there exist dialectical variations. In the case of Murui, these are the mutually intelligible Bue, Mɨka, Mɨnɨka, and Nɨpode (Agga, Wojtylak, & Echeverri 2019, p.57). The phrase and name of the group Kaɨ komuiya uai is in the Murui language and literally means “our, life, word.” However, the group translates it as “the principle word of life,” referring to the same concept of the Word of tobacco coca and sweet Manioc. Murui-Mɨnɨka is the most commonly spoken language in the coca patio Nokaido aside from Spanish. Other languages that are spoken with less frequency are Murui-Nɨpode, Bora and Okaina. Those in Nokaido sometimes use the term “dialect” to refer to Mɨnɨka and explicitly express that Bue, Mɨka, Mɨnɨka and Nɨpode, are mutually intelligible but that Nɨpode differs more than the others. However, at the same time they understand these to be distinct languages, something that is common in other native speakers as well (Agga, Wojtylak, Echeverri 2019, p.57). This is the most common conception in metadiscourse about the Mɨnɨka language of the Kaɨ Komuiya Uai group. In my process of learning to speak Murui and inquiries about the language, other finer distinctions emerge in the speech of different clans that have lexical and phonetic variation. People in Nokaido correct me for pronouncing words in Bue while trying to learn

Mɨnɨka. The mixture in my speech is caused by the written sources that I study also being a mixture, and is frowned upon or understood to be “incorrect” by various members of the group KKU. They warn me that I need to be careful with what information I believe regarding the language saying that while they can understand the speech of different academics who have learnt Murui, they often speak a strange mixture of the different varieties. This attempt to maintain the distinction shows their conception as separate languages.Sebastián sometimes corrects me in a lighter manner when I pronounce words in the speech of another clan that is different from his.

In the group KKU, the Mɨnɨka phrase, kaɨ uai (our language) and omoɨ uai (your [plural] language), or, kaɨ uaido (in our language) and omoɨ uaido (in your [plural] language) is used to refer to Murui speech (Bue, Mɨka, Mɨnɨka and Nɨpode) which coincides with what linguists refer to with the exonym Witoto, however, they explained to me that by switching out the first person plural (kaɨ) for the first person singular (kue) in the phrases kue uai (my language) or kue uaido (in my language) to refer to "the language of my clan" and its distinct way of speaking.

While the murui word uai in these different phrases in explicit discussions of linguistic variation may refer to the etic concept of a “language”, depending on the phrase in which it is contained, the word uai also carries with it other meanings. We can see these different meanings in the distinction between the phrase kaɨ uai and kaɨ komuiya uai and the way the first person plural (kaɨ) is translated differently from Murui to Castilian. In the translation of kaɨ uai, it retains both its possessive and plural function and is thus translated as “our language” and serves as a way to distinguish between the unique language (Murui) possessed by the Murui in-group, and any other language including but not limited to the different languages of the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, or the Spanish language spoken by someone in the out group such as myself. In this sense, someone belonging to the in-group that wants to ask, “what is ‘tree’ in our language?” may say “nɨeze ‘tree’ kaɨ uaido.” Whereas, I, a non-native speaker, must use the second person possessive (omo) to say “what is ‘tree’ in your [plural more than two] language? / nɨeze ‘tree’ omoɨ uaido” because I am not considered possessor of the Murui language understood as linguistic code used for communication (uai). This was revealed when a doctoral student from Bogotá posed the question “nɨeze ‘tree’ kaɨ uaido.” but was corrected by Don Silva. He stated firmly that he must use the second person “omo” instead.

2.5 kaɨ komuiya uai - Principle Word of Life

In contrast, the group KKU does not translate kaɨ komuiya uai as “our language of life / Nuestra palabra de vida” but instead as “Palabra principio de vida.” When I inquire about this discrepancy, after much elaboration from Sebastián and Jairo on the murui phrase meaning one of the younger and longer standing members of the group KKU describing its multitude of related meanings in different contexts and specifically within the context of the group’s name, Doki mentions that the translation “…es algo que es más para el lado academico / …is something more for the academic side”. They also emphasized that those who came before them and founded the group KKU with that name had their own deliberation process and own their reasons for selecting the name Kaɨ Komuiya Uai and the specific Spanish translation. In this sense it is useful to understand these processes of translation not as simple failures but as what Viveiros de Castro calls a “method of controlled equivocation”(Holbraad & Pederson 2017, p.185). Equivocation is:

[...] what happens when you try to translate across ‘native’ and ‘anthropological’ conceptual regimes. The word’s connotations are hardly accidental: such translations are certainly equivocal and hesitant [...], turning as they do on the inherent multiplicity of meaning (this being the technical philosophical sense of ‘equivocity’). Add to this the colloquial Romance-language sense of equivocation as ‘error’ and you get the gist of Viveiros de Castro’s conception” (Holbraad & Pederson 2017, p.185).

In examining this act of self-consciousness and emic equivocal translation I argue we can gain a better understanding of the concept's meaning. Not in the sense of understanding the truth of an “other” culture in the sense of one cultural body among a multicultural patchwork by means of “…a ‘synonym’ (a co-referential representation) in our [...] conceptual language for the representations that [natives] use to speak about one and the same thing” (Viveiros de Castro in Holbraad & Pederson 2017, p.186). But instead, in understanding the conceptual difference contained in the equivocation as it contributes to the ever emerging lifeworld of the group KKU.

At first glance when “Kaɨ komuiya uai” is translated as “Palabra principio de vida” all personal possession, be it singular or plural seems to be nullified. However, if this was the desired meaning, one would say in Murui, “komuiya uai” without problem. Kaɨ is

maintained in the Murui phrase because plural first person possession is still implied. But, in the translation it is removed because in the emic understanding of the phrase the first person plural possession kaɨ moves beyond an in-group. It becomes universal, representing all of the human and nonhuman-beings with which one must relate, as opposed to being contrasted with a second, or third person Other. Something that multiple members of the group KKU feel is not communicated in the Spanish possessive “nuestra (our)”, saying that “nuestra, ya es muy humano (our, is very human)”. Due to Murui’s lack of definite and indefinite article the removal of the possessive Ka would render it ambiguous as to whether or not it is one “Word / Uai” of many, or “the” universal kaɨ komuiya uai.

This is because with the addition of the word komuiya, uai no longer refers to its limited use as a linguistic code. Instead it locates the utterance in another linguistic register used in the coca patio. Echeverri (2022) writes that in this other “ceremonial” register:

[where the] game of tricks and metaphors increase, polysemia is the rule, the speaker and target are changing and the uai is not the manifestation of the mind or ideas of a person, but instead it is the manifestation of uai {word] from the substance that they consume. The “object” (or referent) if there is one, of jiibiɨrɨ uai [Word of the coca patio] is always the body (that is to say, processes of life, fecundation, sexuality, growth) for this reason it is also called komuiya uai “word of life) (my translation, p.43)

Thus, uai takes on the meaning of a way of being and becoming. Specifically I argue that in the context of the phrase kaɨ komuiya uai it refers to a way of being in plural co-becoming based on the exchange necessary for the (re)production of life. Here kaɨ encompasses both the first and second person, both the Ego and the Other, however, it does not eliminate either, nor their relationship of alterity. In fact, it points directly at the quality of relationality. Whereas, the first person possessive adjective “nuestra” is understood by the group KKU to collapse multiple possible persons and their perspectives into one.

The relational quality of the murui kaɨ in the concept kaɨ komuiya uai may be further revealed in the common usage in the coca patio’s “ceremonial register” of the phrase “kue uai” literally “my word” and by exploring the polysemic web within which it is

suspended. The uai in the phrase “kue uai” when not used to refer to a specific linguistic code, may refer to two different things. Here I will discuss the first and most common which refers to someone’s coca and ambil within the act of exchanging it. For example, when offering one’s ambil the explicit phrase “be kue yerakɨ / here is my container of ambil'' may just as well be replaced by the more metaphorically charged “be kue uai / here is my Word.” To this effect Echeverri (2022) writes that “ [...] cuando uno produce alimentos o sustancias rituales y las ofrece, estas sustancias son su uai [...]” (p.43). On multiple occasions while sitting in Nokaido Doña Flor asks me “Allan, give me your power” requesting my ambil. Here Doña Flor replaces the murui word uai with the spanish, “poder/power.” “Poder '' here is being used as a translation of the Murui word raa. The word Raa is rarely pronounced as a single word but most commonly uttered in the more elaborated concept of rafue. Rafue combines the roots raa (power or thing) and fue (mouth) or ifue (something said) and refers to, “ni a una ‘palabra’ ni a una ‘cosa’; rafue es la actividad mediante la cual las palabras se transforman en cosas – es el movimiento de lo nombrado a lo real a través del tiempo / neither a ‘word’ nor a thing; rafue is the activity by means which words turn into things - it is the movement of the named to the real through time”(Echeverri 2008, my translation p.28). According to the Murui elder Kɨnɨraɨ the concept of rafue may also be used interchangeably in a general sense with more the specific komuiyáfue, “[...] that is to say ‘Word of life’. It is a word that searches for the growth of the people -- new children, new generations”(Echeverri 2008 my translation, p. 29). Thus, “my (your) power” and “kue (oo) raa” may be used as part of a polysemiotic network/web with kue uai (Word). However, it only becomes an act of rafue, komuiyafue, o kaɨ and when coupled with the exchange of personally possessed substances such as ambil between a first and second person. For this reason a phrase like “be kaɨ uai”, or “be kaɨ raa'' are rarely if ever spoken. I also believe that this is why people habitually consume less coca when it is placed in a gourd bowl on the small table for communal consumption, whereas, when someone hands their coca to another the reception is almost always enthusiastic and dutiful – jmmm! This pattern of behavior is so marked that Sebastián will often say to the group of men seated around a partially filled totuma of mambe, “hay que mambear! Cuando no hay quieren, y cuando hay nadie quiere / You must chew coca! When there is none they want, and when there is nobody wants!.” At the same time of seemingly critiquing this behavior Sebastián also stresses that the proper way to consume tobacco and coca with others is not by handing your two containers to a person and then having

them rotate it around the group communally. He says the proper manner is to hand your coca directly to the target person, receive theirs, and once yours has been returned, commence a new exchange with another person. When Sebastián says this, he gestures with his hand and index finger pointing away from himself and back to space by his feet where his containers of tobacco and coca sit, and contrasts it with the undesirable circular position. One does feel an increased positive energy in a group when this is the method used, however, on most occasions there is a compromise. This is the habit of after receiving another’s substance one always begins to hand it back to the giver. Only when the giver then gestures to rotate it does one pass it to someone at their side. The only people who sometimes break this etiquette are elders who may pass it to another elder at their side without previous consultation, at which point the second elder to whom it was passed will return it. Sebastián says that one to one exchange is the standard because “ my [his] coca is work, it is not for everyone” and that he hands it those with whom he intends to dialogue. In fact some nights Sebastián may not offer his coca to anyone until he is ready to do his ritual discourse in murui that marks the closure of the session. In this way it is the bi-directional exchange of substances and words possessed by a first and second person to which the phrase kaɨ komuiya uai refers.

In cases where uai is not intended to resonate with the dialogic process of rafue or kaɨ komuiya uai and it is not clear that it is referring to a language as linguistic code by means of context, the adjective taɨno (empty) is applied. Taɨno uai means empty words, words without power, and is a rough antonym of rafue. This concept is often glossed in Spanish as “pura palabra” and the phrase may be experienced and thought privately when someone shows up to the coca patio empty handed, exchanges nothing material and begins to speak about things in a surface level manner to which few people connect. While rafue in its most fundamental expression can be understood in such exchanges of words and substances as komuiyafue (Word of life) or yetarafue (Word of council) that form the basis of material and social reproduction of a family unit and all of the labor necessary to render such an exchange possible, its most elaborate and outwardly visible expression is in the exchange of ceremonial dances and its entire process of social coordination and labor that form the basis of wider regional material and social reproduction. For this reason Echeverri (2008) writes that, “if one asks an Indigenous Uitoto [Murui] about the meaning of the term rafue the most probable response is “dance” (p.28, my translation). Therefore the Word, referred to in the name and phrase kaɨ komuiya uai is in principle the very same Word of tobacco, coca and

sweet yuca that forms the basis of the identity of the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc. And as such, more than any specific or stable people, culture, or collective, refers to a characteristic process of interrelationality. However, “kue uai” may also mean something different that is more connected to the concept of the distinct languages of the different clans that I mentioned earlier. In Nokaido this other concept is often discussed in careful philosophical terms, in ways where it is talked about and warned against, and pacified but (usually) not enacted. At times examples of it in action present themselves in subtle ways that I will discuss later. To begin with, I will use a rare and exceptional case to illustrate it.

One evening as I sit in Nokaido I hear banging and yelling outside the wooden door. It swings open and a long time elder of the group enters. He is yelling and pushing his middle aged friend Alex. Alex is visiting Leticia and has for the past month or two been attending nightly in Nokaido. They are both very drunk, but the elder is trying to rein in his friend's behavior. They both sit down. The elder in his usual spot to the right of Don Silva, with Alex on is right. This being earlier on in my research period I am not in my usual spot and am seated directly across from Alex. Sebastián is on his bench to the left of Silva. Alex wears a baseball cap barely floating atop his head, a shiny watch, a large silver necklace bearing a cross, and a blue satchel (fanny pack) across his chest. Sebastián, Silva, and I sit in silence. Alex continues his aggressive drunk ramblings, while the elder smacks him on his shoulder, trying to get him to shut up. Eventually Doña Flor hears the commotion and to my surprise comes and sits down next to Alex. I remain silent looking down before my feet. Now Alex starts to bring up the fact that at the last dance --to which Nokaido was formally invited to sing through Sebastián’s uncle Elicio--- when he requested permission to sing, Elicio did not give him a space. He says “yo tengo conocimiento, yo tengo mi palabra. Ustedes no tienen nada / I have knowledge, I have my word. You (plural) have nothing.” He starts emptying out his blue satchel. With sloppy movements he places three different little bottles/containers on the ground by his feet, letting them fall over. He does not offer them to anyone.

Here we see a very different kind of Word/Palabra. Alex uses a Spanish phrase “yo tengo conocimiento, yo tengo mi Palabra (I have knowledge, I have my Word)” which on the surface is semantically very similar to saying “be kue yerakɨ” or “be kue uai”. He even places these containers ostensibly filled with substances like tobacco before his feet as is the norm, literally and explicitly enacting the phrase “be kue raa” / “here are my things/power.” I say “ostensibly” because I have no way of verifying their contents as he does not offer them for anyone else to try. In all likelihood they do contain “tobacco” but its true nature is unknown. It is common for different people to always carry with them multiple containers of tobacco, some of which are for exchange with other people. The other tobaccos are personal and private and rarely presented in public (thus, largely unknown to others) and almost never placed before one's feet. These private tobaccos are carried and used for specific personal purposes. They may be “curado” or “rezado” and might contain other plant mixtures. An example of this is the tobacco that an elder prepared for Sebastián when he began his study to become a professional in public health. This was mixed with the highly valued and guarded herb of wisdom, nɨmaira and “curado” for the purpose of learning and knowledge retention. Another example of these alternative tobacco-like substances, is the generally taboo “ambil del monte” made with the visionary plant called ukuke or ukujee. Beyond this, a private ambil may also be mixed with specific vegetal salts that serve a variety of specific purposes, be they for hunting, or sorcery such as commanding lightning.

In all the time that Alex spent visiting Nokaido I never exchanged substances directly one to one with him. He only received my tobacco through circular rotation. This is largely due to the posture which he maintained and the impression it gave me. He often sat leaning back against the back wall, with one leg crossed over the other, with his hat almost completely covering his face. Others later described this posture, stating that sitting in that manner is like saying “no me importa nada de lo que ustedes están hablando / I don’t care at all about what you (plural) are talking about.” There is an unwillingness to exchange. In fact I never was offered directly nor received through rotation his tobacco.

Similar to this kind of action and Word, although I never saw it first hand, is another manifestation of Word (way of being) that I discussed hypothetically with Sebastián. This manifestation of Word is the deployment of the plural first person possessive kaɨ uai in a similar fashion in which the singular first person possessive kue uai is expressed in the actions of Alex as described above, albeit in spanish. Sebastián

told me that the phrase kaɨ uai is so rarely used or seen because it is a very strong action. It could be used in the case of inter-clan conflict wherein fission, not exchange, is the desired solution. For example, a territorial dispute where clan A wants to assert and enforce their sole usufructuary rights and access to a specific salt lick. In this case multiple men from clan A may go to visit the maloka / coca patio of clan B seeking to assert their claim, and that the claim is authoritatively based on the unique history and origin of their clan. Here we see a usage of kaɨ uai different from how it is used in the phrase kaɨ komuiya uai. In this instance, kaɨ does not speak of multiple interrelated but separate persons. Instead, kaɨ becomes a true first person possessive pronoun. This use unifies multiple men into a strong and dangerous first person perspective (clan A) that does not leave room for the plurality of another second person (clan B) as agent and possessor.

In an anecdote which Sebastián told on various occasions he described hunting tapir at a salt lick, to which afterwards a member of another clan aggressively claimed sole usufructuary rights. Sebastián says that this claim was unfounded, and in fact it is his clan who has usufructuary rights, not the clan of the other man. Sebastián brought this conflict to the attention of his now deceased father who is described as a well respected school teacher and known as cool-hearted and level-headed. His father recommended Sebastián say nothing to contest the man’s claim and continue his hunting, and refrain from making an authoritative counterclaim. This is because to do so would be to enact or deploy the Word of his clan (kaɨ uai) in opposition and contradiction to that of the other man’s clan which could have lethal consequences.

The telling of this story is interesting because it shows how the two different Words kaɨ komuiya uai and kaɨ uai interact. Kaɨ komuiya uai – as the Word or mode of being in plural interrelationality of different agents who are different possessors of knowledge and loci of action — and kaɨ uai — as the Word of first person possession of knowledge and unidirectional action which negates the subjectivity of the other. In the above example they exist in a dialectical interdependence. In Sebastián’s anecdote he expresses the importance of knowing the true history of his clan and its traditional territory while at the same time expressing that the proper way of treating this knowledge is with extreme discretion in order to maintain peaceful relations. In telling this anecdote he portrays himself as having behaved properly. Thus, he asserts that the moral act of maintaining peaceful relations is only such, insofar as there is the simultaneous consciousness of opposition, and mutually exclusive knowledge and agency and its

apparent denial that permits continued non-violent relations. Had Sebastián not been conscious of his clan’s origin he might have submitted and relinquished rights to hunt at that salt lick and lost access to a significant source of tapir meat to be consumed by him and his family, gifted, or sold.

This very same dynamic is seen in the fact that although the group’s name Kaɨ Komuiya Uai speaks forth the Word of plural interrelationality, it is still spoken in the specific and non-universal Murui language. Their Spanish slogan, “Creencia y resistencia de nuestra cultura y biodiversidad” further demonstrates this duality. It does so by speaking forth the idea that despite the group KKU’s emphasis on plural interrelationality, it is in the service of maintaining and reproducing its own unique and at times oppositional lifeworld in the face of assimilatory and eliminatory social forces. This objective aligns with the wider motivations of the modern social conformation of the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc as expressed in the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc.

2.6 Conclusion

In summary, the group KKU upon which this thesis is centred, cannot be taken as representative of a specific “culture” or “ethnic” group, although the members do understand that they are often forced into that position and at times will reluctantly and carefully take on that role. The truth is that even using the phrase “the group KKU” is purely conventional and the very existence of such a thing involves constant work on behalf of its members. Beyond any kind of stable entity, the group KKU as I use it, refers to a wide network of actors which engage with one another according to a general pattern of daily practice. As such, the group may momentarily grow to encompass many diverse peoples, multi-ethnic and international, and periodically shrink to a few key members. In moments of conflict and tension they may split; with both parts claiming the group’s identity. What is important though is that in the constant oscillation between plural interrelationality and opposition, its members find ways to navigate new situations, face new challenges, call on old identities and reform themselves.

3. The World-Making of the Word of

Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc.

3.1 Introduction

In the previous section I introduced the group KKU in a way that both acknowledges its practical existence as part of its constituent members’ lives and the diverse social fabric of Leticia, while revealing that what defines the group is its “openness”, internal tension and constant construction.Thus, I problematize the group KKU as a stable and coherently structured entity. Yet in the place of a single structure I contradictorily propose in its place a dialectic interaction of two different modes of stable daily practice. The structural characterization of daily practice however is unavoidable for as Alex Chaffee and Charles Lemert (2009) write:

All sciences, including human and cultural sciences, begin with the assumption that the field of objects and events they study is structured. In all fields of empirical study, structure is a formal term stipulating the prior existence of order in the field under investigation. (p.124)

They go on to say that for this reason it is in the most inscrutable fields of study like cultural anthropology that “structuralisms” are most likely to take hold (Chaffee and Lemert 2009, p.124). David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) put it succinctly, writing that:

Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. (p.34)

Here, the risk is what Chaffee and Lemert (2009) call getting stuck in structuralist orthodoxies where the game of make-believe becomes mistaken for reality. It is this “invisible” that I seek to explore. By pinning down and caricaturing certain aspects of our field of study we may draw our attention to something new. Specifically the tensions,

spaces and the unexpected between social structures. Chaffee and Lemert (2009) write that:

[...] no cultural communication communicates if the speaker or the mythmaker tries to bring all of the contents of the structured language into the uttered sentence or articulated myth. (p.135)

That is to say that cultural life is lived, insofar as it is alive and not in the process of dying, in the partiality of structure, its holes, and contradictions. It is the enactment of different partially and multiply structured affordances in always novel configurations, and in response to changing contexts, that allows our actions to take on meaning and effect. In this sense it is fair to say that “Structures are, by their nature, absent. The attempt in the modern West to organize them around a Center is an attempt to tame them, thereby to limit the freedom of communications.”(Chaffee and Lemert 2009, p.135). Thus in a Derridean sense I seek to conceive of the group KKU, its identity, and its manifestation as a socio-political player as something that emerge through the daily practice of subverting one structure or another that held in tension with one another both restrict the absolute “free play”(Chaffee and Lemert 2009, p.133) of agents but simultaneously provide them with cultural tools for creative action. Thus I approach this study from a decidedly poststructuralist perspective. Although in the chapters to follow I devote considerable effort to constructing a structure of daily practice of the group KKU, it is one that is multiple and constantly rearticulating itself through its contradictions. In order to properly position this perspective and the chapters to follow in the anthropological and Amazonianist literature and identify the gaps which it intends to fill in the following chapter I now briefly attend to anthropology's shift from structuralist lenses to poststructuralism. I accomplish this through a brief discussion as to how early anthropological scholarship on double societal structures, though their significance was overlooked at the time, fueled the shift into post structuralist Amazonianist anthropology. I pay specific attention to how contemporary readings of Claude Lévi-Strauss' notions of alterity and double structures in Amazonia have been identified as a nascent poststructuralism by today's most prominent Amazonianists taking “ontological turn”. I thus seek to bridge the gap between dual structuralist anthropology to the 1940s and 1950s with key anarchist works of the 1960s as well as more contemporary work that has further developed these lines of thought.

I then discuss how a more recent scholarship by Juan Alvaro Echeverri returns to the idea of double structure in such a way that is reminiscent of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ pioneering work, however emphasizing its poststructural qualities. The theoretical model in question is what Echeverri terms the “double process of culture in the making” first developed in his 1997 doctoral dissertation The People of the Centre of the World regarding their historical and continual cultural reformation. The peoples to which Echeverri applies this model are the Feémenɨnaa (Muinane), Miraña, Bora, (from which the endonym translated People of the Centre is derived) as well as the Murui, Okaina, Nonuya, and Resigaro peoples. This work was later revised and republished in the form of a monograph in 2022. In this work Echeverri (1997), in lieu of discussing the seasonal double structure addressed by Graeber and Wengrow (2021), emphasises larger historical shifts bringing together political economy and personal biographic narrative. I then argue that double modes of social/asocial engagement which are observed in the daily practice of the group KKU that I introduced in the previous chapter must be taken as a manifestation in daily practice of this same double process of culture in the making. However, instead of it marking wide cultural and societal shifts I put forward the argument that the negotiation of these daily practices (as previewed in the opening vignettes, and the previous chapter of thesis) by self-conscious agents is the source from which wider socio-political action or how fact larger patterns of change are made possible. After showing basic parity between the relational and oppositional qualities of this double process and the daily practice of the group KKU discussed of above I explore it further through the concepts of The Basket of Darkness and Basket of Life/Wisdom emic to The People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc and the group KKU’s particular deployments of them and their ontological and epistemological qualities. Finally I enter into a discussion of their possible interaction through the addition of the potent polysemic concept of bigɨni nagɨni, literally meaning (this world here everything) but often equivalent to a indigenous conception of territory. Here I show bigɨni nagɨni is usefully understood as the process of simultaneous and mutually constitutive personal and cosmological ontogeny. Thus I begin to suggest that the double quality of the group KKU’s daily practice constitutes a process of world-making that simultaneously reproduces socio-ontological structures in a conservative fashion while permitting creative political agency similar to that which Echverri claims to define the People of the Centre and that which Graeber and Wengrow claim to be permitted through dual societal structures.

3.2 A Source of Creative Agency

In this section, I discuss how Juan Alvaro Echverri’s (1997, 2022) concept of “the double process of culture in the making” emerges within the context of previous scholarship on the Amazonian region as well as more contemporary trends in anthropology. I first set the stage with a discussion of two recent re-readings of the classic Amazonianist works of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1940, 1943) and Phillipe Clastres (1980/1994). In the discussion of Lévi-Strauss and Clastres I focus on their basic connections to contemporary poststructuralism of the 1990s (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, Costa and Fausto 2010). After this orientation within the classic literature, I then outline how Echeverri implicitly integrates this body of literature with the anthropological discipline's wider focus in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time the general focus was on historical political economy, in what Sherry Ortner (2016) called “Dark Anthropology” reflecting how all subsuming orthodoxies left many scholars disenchanted. I argue that Echeverri’s unique synthesis of structuralist classics and political economy in reference to the burgeoning work of Viveiros de Castro (1993) produced a model that sidestepped the emerging debate of Amazonianist scholarship on moral economy and ensuing debates, (Overing and Passes, 2000) and implicitly integrated both analytic perspectives. Thus, I believe Echeverri’s theoretical framework of “double process of culture in the making” is particularly useful for two reasons. The first reason is that it is coherent with the modes of daily practice kaɨ komuiya uai and kue uai discussed in the previous chapter. The second reason is that Echeverri’s framework fosters an understanding of the daily practice of the group KKU in all of its multifaceted and changing political, moral, and cosmological realities.

While the post-structuralism of today is often seen as a break from the rigidity of the structuralism of the past, the two are not necessarily diametrically opposed. In the

2010 article “The Return of the Animists”, Luiz Costa and Carlos Fausto trace the lineage

of some of the most influential currents of post-structural Amazonianist anthropology back to the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In the article they discuss how the discipline defining works of Viveiros de Castro and Phillipe Descola fundamentally build on and transform Lévi-Strauss’s work on “alterity, self, and other” dating back to his research conducted with indigenous peoples in Brazil in the 1940s (Costa and Fausto 2010, p.92). David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) argue that this early work by Lévi-Strauss emphasized how agency is a product of social structures. Graeber and Wengrow (2021) claim that Lévi-Strauss’s focus on seasonal variation in Nambikwara societal structure

and hierarchy showed how these oscillating structures fostered the production of chiefs as conscious political actors (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, p.120). In short, by experiencing alternate forms of social organization Graeber and Wengrow argue, people are able to reflexively critique whichever form they are currently living by, and also imagine different possibilities, leaving room for imagining a life lived otherwise. Thus, like Costa and Fausto (2010), Graeber and Wengrow (2021) claim that from the start of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism it contained the germ of a poststructuralism. This idea of a progression towards a post-structuralist “openness” of human agency was not without critique. After discussing Lévi-Strauss’s work, Graeber and Wengrow (2021) then argue that Pierre Clastres continued his line of inquiry into Amazonian political action. Clastres showed that it was not only “chiefs” who possessed this conscious political acumen but all actors of “primitive society.” He argued that political consciousness was the result of a society structured, and actively working, against the emergence of the state(Graeber and Wengrow 2021, p.549). Fausto and Costa (2010) write that thus Clastres“[...] founded a new political anthropology, whose aim was to explain how indigenous peoples had resisted the unifying thrust of the state, which he argued to be dependent on an irreversible division within society”(p.90). In other words, a societal structure was designed to avoid its inherent tendencies to transform into another. Graeber and Wengrow (2021) note that Clastre’s omission of Lévi-Strauss’s work on seasonality and double structure left his theorization vulnerable to a critical question: how were, “[...] stateless societies [...] self-consciously organizing themselves to prevent the emergence of something they’d never actually experienced?”(p.123) Graeber and Wengrow (2021) argue that although Clastres did not address seasonality, the societies he studied would have experienced seasonal shifts in subsistence patterns and societal forms. What is more, they could have been engaged in schismogenic processes of differentiation in relation to other historical societies, such as the Incan Empire, and larger Amazonian polities. These are important historic possibilities to consider. However, perhaps more relevant is the contact indigenous peoples have had with colonial empires and later nation-states. By the time Lévi-Strauss and Clastres did their fieldwork in the 1940s and 1960s respectively, the societal impact of colonial and nation state economies, and their modes of production, were widespread across the South-American continent. The argument is thus that the double structure of seasonality or “culture contact” is the source of political imagination. Graeber and Wengrow argue that the experience with double structures allowed different groups of peoples to

successfully resist inclusion within the state. However, their emphasis on double structure has been critiqued as highly speculative and in some ways contradicted by ethnographic data.

I will now specifically address the critique made by Thomas Widlock (2022) which I believe to be pertinent to the discussion at hand. Widlock (2022) through his work with hunter-gatherer groups in southern Africa provides vital nuance that sheds light on Clastres’s omission of seasonality, and yet shows how Graeber and Wengrow's (2021) theory is still useful. Graeber and Wengrow (2021) argue that Clastres and other scholars abandoned seasonality as a point of inquiry in societal structure simply because of how tricky it is to comprehend, and how diverse the results of seasonal variation among different cultures may be. Widlock (2022) leans into this point showing how its “trickiness” perhaps justifies its omission by many contemporary scholars. He states that not only may seasonality not be conceived of in terms of a duality as it is in the circumpolar regions but also may be hotly contested by different individuals of the same cultural group (p.105). Widlock (2022) argues that among the San, “ [...] in ecological reality and in cultural perception, the seasons shade into one another, and they may do slightly differently in different years. In fact, people may disagree as to whether one season has ‘really’ started yet or not”(Widlock 2022, p.105) What is more, seasonality is not a stable reality that is perceived differently by different individuals, it is performatively achieved through various practices . Widlock (2022) writes that “[...] the other seasons always continue to be present. When talking about seasons and when dealing with the desirable or undesirable aspects of a particular season [...], the other seasons are frequently invoked and can be made present”(p.105) His critique of oscillating double structure goes beyond issues of seasonality as well.

In response to Graeber and Wengrows' (2021) take on culture contact and schismogenesis, Widlock (2022) argues that instead of the more egalitarian San becoming more extreme in their identification in relation to often hostile others, they conceive of difference as an original state. The San deal with this original state of alterity by intentionally working, “to live as children of the same mother,” or if not that, “siblings of a different mother”. Thus Widlock (2022) shows how counter to Graeber and Wengrow's (2021) take on schismogenesis, cultural difference is often actively resisted by groups, and successfully mitigated in order to foster relations. Counter to Graeber and Wengrow's (2021) thesis that non-capitalist and state societies have been historically characterized by radical shifts in structure and possibility, Widlock (2022) argues that at least for

hunter-gatherer societies, although they are characterized by great flexibility and active political maneuvering, it often appears from afar to be highly conservative. Despite the conservative appearance, Widlock (2022) writes that upon closer examination “[...] there is often change which is based on small changes only, and considerable cultural effort can go into maintaining cultural order, efforts that may not be easily visible in historical hindsight”(p.112). Thus, the author emphasizes that constant ‘tinkering' and “piecemeal” change within cultural systems is the means by which cultural continuity is achieved, while simultaneously resisting the attraction of the state.

Widlock’s (2022) thesis aligns with Clastres's definition of “Society against the state” described by Viveiros de Castro in a 2010 introduction to Archaeology of Violence (Clastres 1994). Viveiros de Castro writes that the Society against the state is “[...] a modality of collective life based on the symbolic neutralization of political authority and the structural inhibition of ever-present tendencies to convert power, wealth and prestige into coercion, inequality and exploitation”(Clastres 1994, p.6). Perhaps it was similar ethnographic realities to that of hunter gatherers in southern Africa that prompted Clastres to omit seasonality despite his definite familiarity with the previous literature. In Clastres’ work, he does not describe the periodic revolutionary reversal or ritual dissolution of power, but instead the arduous and continual negotiating of its reality among and between individuals and groups. These everyday practices of negotiation are rife with more or less explicit conflict and tension, and manifest as a gestalt “immunological system” in constant yet largely stable patterns of flux defending against the emergence of the state. Clastres argues that the social system of “primitive societies” was fundamentally built on war. He argues that for primitive societies, war does not prevent the emergence of the state for economic reasons, but instead through the symbolic conservative reproduction of the community, “WE” in relation to the ENEMY. This may appear akin to schismogenesis and thus contradict Widlock’s critique, however, in Amazonian cosmologies the enemy is not understood to be fundamentally different, and is always a potential affine. In this cosmology, the result of actual warfare is usually the adoption or marrying of the enemy. It is this particular dynamic and symbolic economy of alterity (difference) that Viveiros De Castro would go on to elaborate in his own work. Clastres’s work on a nascent political anthropology due to his early death left profound questions unanswered. Here we see how a nascent political anthropology then got picked up by Viveiros de Castro and Descola and transformed into a study of the symbolic economy of personhood.

3.3 Where Symbolic Economy and Moral Community Meet

It is at this point in the development of Amazonanist anthropology that Juan Álvaro Echeverri enters the picture with his 1997 doctoral dissertation The People of the Centre of the World. The work of Juan Alvaro Echeverri (1997) was novel in the way that it implicitly straddles and combines historical theoretical approaches and burgeoning contemporary ones, as well as foreshadowing others to come. Published in 1997 (with the research beginning at least a decade before), The People of the Centre took shape during the time of “dark anthropology’s” dominance in the discipline. The term “dark anthropology” was coined by Sherry Ortner (2016) and refers to a Marxian inspired anthropology that “[...] emphasizes the harsh and brutal dimensions of human experience, and the structural and historical conditions that produce them ”(Ortner 2016, p.49). Ortner (2016) argues that this shift began with the spread of the colonial framework in the 1990s through which “Many social and cultural formations that appeared in earlier anthropological work as “timeless” came to appear in a different light when set against a backdrop of colonial history”(2016, p.51). In the case of Amazonia, and specifically the Putumayo-Caquetá river basins, this meant acknowledging the multiple centuries long impact of contact with colonial economies through long distance trade networks and later a series of local booms in brutal resource extraction. Echeverri (1997) writes that:

This awareness implies the need to “historicize” anthropological models in the context of the process of the conquest of Amazonia. Amazonian groups may appear as “traditional” Amerindian societies, which, although having gone through a dramatic history of political and economic domination, would still possess an autochthonous culture and way of life. Those autochthonous ways may as well be the product of the history of domination. (p.24)

This last affirmation that the “autochthonous” still exists, not in a diminished or oppressed form but as another way of life intimately intertwined with global systems. Thus Echeverri does not end his analysis with the historical colonial encounter and its fallout. Although Echeverri states that he originally sought to document the memory of this history in line with the anthropology of the day; his field experience led him down a different path. Instead of the route of telling intimate stories of suffering and oppression within the

colonial and neoliberal power structures in line with trends in the discipline he tells a different kind of story.

The story that he tells has two aspects that are dialectically related; one aspect is the “Philosophy of the Axe” as a structure expressed broadly across the region and cultural complex of the People of the Centre, while the other is rafue (Echeverri 1997). These two aspects of Echeverri’s work allow it to move past the all-encompassing political economy of Dark Anthropology without in fact losing its critical political edge. On one hand, through “the Philosophy of the Axe” Echeverri seamlessly integrates the new burgeoning work on symbolic economy of Viveiros de Castro before it achieved widespread dominance in Amazonian anthropology with “dark anthropologies” critique. On the other hand, through his analysis of rafue he emphasizes the intimate features of daily life that had become the focus of a group of Amazonianists working through the new lens that Viveiros de Castro called moral economy, what would later coalesce into an “anthropology of the good.” Together they constitute what Echeverri (1997) calls “the double process of culture in the making.” In the paragraphs that follow, I first summarize the Philosophy of the Axe, followed by Echeverri’s conception of rafue (the Word of Life and interrelationality which I introduced in the previous chapter as expressed in the group KKU’s daily practice) inspired by its particular expression by a Murui speaking elder. In doing so, I connect Echeverri’s key theoretical developments to classic lines of inquiry, contemporaneous ideas, and enduring debates in Amazonianist anthropology

3.3.1 The Philosophy of the Axe as a Double Structure

For Echeverri (1997) “the Philosophy of the Axe” is a mythological procedural system of binary opposition, in which social groups are conceived as either closed and endogamic or open and exogamic, and through which the history of the colonial encounter is understood. I argue that it is in the “Philosophy of the Axe’s” system of binary oppositions that we can see the theoretical lineage of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, Clastres’s political anthropology and finally Viveiros de Castro’s symbolic economy. First I will explore how the Philosophy of the Axe builds on and modifies Lévi-Straussian structuralism, and then the significance of its drawing together with the work of Clastres and Viveiros de Castro.

Echeverri does not explicitly define what is meant by his use of the term “process” in his 2022 revised publication, however, in the introduction to his 1997 dissertation in which he initially developed his theory of a “double process of culture in the making”, we

can gain a good picture of what he means. He states that two intersecting trends “[...] have influenced [his] dissertation research in some measure: one, a political economic approach concerned mainly with the articulation of peasant and tribal societies into global systems; the other, an interpretive approach concerned with cultural processes and historical, consciousness”(Echeverri 199, p.17). Thus, we may take his conception of process to be coherent with Robert L. Carneiro's definition of process as “[...] the interaction through time of the elements of a system as the system changes from one state to another [... and where …] a system is ‘a set of structurally and functionally related elements articulated into a working whole’”(Lyman 2007, p.222). Within this theoretical context Echeverri’s approach to cultural process may be taken as the articulation across time and the reproduction of subaltern social structures within wider global structures. The sum of these structural articulations are thus what comprises historic change and gives rise to different historical consciousnesses. As such, Echeverri’s model of a “double cultural process of a culture in the making” of the People of the Centre may be understood as the articulation of a kind of historically situated double structure. It is in this way, that although Echeverri (1997) never explicitly cites the literature, his construction of these Amazonian peoples societies’ of the Putumayo-Caquetá river basin harkens back to Lévi-Strauss’s periodic/seasonal dual structuring in the societies of the Americas and the Nambikwara people of the north-western savannah of Brazil in the 1940s (Graeber & Wengrow 2021 p.109). Like most of the dual temporal structures described in Amazonia, Echeverri describes that the most marked change in the “double process of culture in the making” is the oscillation between a horizontal, homogeneous, and egalitarian world, and a vertical, stratified, and hierarchical world (Echeverri 2022, p.112). Where Echeverri differs from this classic literature is that he moves away from explicit patterns of seasonal shifts in societal structure. Instead, Echeverri (1997) argues that its historical shifts in structure are linked to and heavily influenced by political economy and colonial contact, though it is not totally determined by them. Thus, he moves away from the seasonality of Lévi-Strausses analysis and acknowledges the effects of global power dynamics and historical processes. However, despite their differences, Echeverri also argues that these structural shifts create a historical and political consciousness. With the Philosophy of the Axe, Echeverri (1997) calls these structural shifts “permutations at the centre”(p.111). In doing so, he cites Viveiros de Castro’s 1993 work in an endnote, and thus positions the permutations as consisting of a relationship of alterity between the vertical and horizontal, the internal and the external, or the self and

the other, in a variety of symbolic domains (Echeverri 1997, p.111). By expressing these in terms of “permutations at the centre” connected to political economy and state / non-state interactions of the colonial encounter, Echeverri implicitly articulates the deep connection between Viveiros de Castro’s and Clastres’ work. Specifically, we can see the connection to Viveiros de Castro’s symbolic economy of alterity, and Clastres earlier concepts of centripetal, and centrifugal forces. Clastres conceived of centripetal force as being the force of the state, that “[...] proclaims itself the center of society”, that is, “[...] the active of power of the One, the inclination to refuse the multiple, the fear and horror of difference”(Clastres 1994, p.108). However, this “One” even though it is all encompassing is also internally divided through relationships of domination. On the other hand, centrifugal force produces a “multiplicity of undivided communities”(Clastres 1994, p.276). That is to say, centrifugal forces create internal homogeneity of the self and external diversity among others. These different forces are visible in Andoque social formation where after the rubber genocide and violent colonial envcounter there was a “[...] homogenization and “horizontalization” of a world down here, but also, correlatively, the consolidation of a world in the heights” (Landaburu in Echeverri 1997, p.108). In this way, war and economic exploitation are symbolically exorcised in the form of violent heavenly gods from the “herons”, a supraethnic community including the neighbouring Uitoto (Murui), Andoque and Miraña, but also symbolically extendable to Colombian, Indian (Indigenous), and Brazilian relations respectively.

Like Viveiros de Castro, Echeverri (1997) differs from Clastres by arguing that the symbolic enactment of internal alterity similar to centripetal forces of state are not wholly external to centrifugal “primitive societies”. Thus, Echeverri (1997) posits a single coherent symbolic system where centripetal and centrifugal forces exist together and in tension, while showing how it is formed by historical processes. What Echeverri (1997) shows is not necessarily a “society against the state” in its entirety. Even Clastres saw that the symbolic political systems of “primitive society” could manifest in such a way that powerful and coercive shamans or religious figures could emerge. In Echeverri’s conception The people of the Centre form an autochthonous society in articulation with global state systems that is however not subsumed by it.

3.3.2 Shifting Centres of Moral Community

After outlining the historical context and the double structural model of The People of the Centre’s culture through the Philosophy of the Axe, Echeverri’ work shifts in tone and content towards rafue. Echeverri writes about rafue not as a genre of discourse, but instead as the Word of his primary interlocutor Hipolito Candre Kɨneraɨ. Echeverri (1997) writes that the transcribed and translated “[...] rafue [he] present[s] here is not a collection of texts that are to be analyzed in order to find out some underlying ‘structure’”(p.191), saying that it is neither a mythology nor a history, but instead the Word of Life. Through rafue, the elder Kɨneraɨ speaks of his struggles and successes as a father, a grandfather and husband. He speaks of illness and healing, and his personal wishes for himself and his people. By attending to these outward expressions of personal reflections on the past and desires for the future, Echeverri (1997) learns of “culture in the making”(p.191). Echeverri (1997) shows how historical-economic processes are part and parcel of the double structure, and that in the case of The Philosophy of the Axe they may be inherently contradictory and in constant motion. By bringing in the rafue of Kɨneraɨ we see a close up example of how these material symbolic structures that constitute society shift across time, are reproduced, and are tailored based on the day-to-day circumstances within the intimate spheres of human life. Thus, the Philosophy of the Axe can be understood as a gestalt structural phenomena with regional and historical patterns, yet it is one that only emerges as a lived reality in the unique daily practice of different interconnected individuals, families and communities attempting to live what they personally deem a good life.

Echeverri (1997) writes that the rafue of Kɨneraɨ is a “double process of culture in the making” in that it engages with the doubly structured symbolic economy of the Philosophy of the Axe in order to construct a particular kind of “moral community”. He conceives of “moral community” within the Philosophy of the Axe in terms of an expanding and unified imagined identity of people deserving of moral consideration and care, for example that of The People of the Centre. Echeverri, contrasts “moral community” with ethnic difference and division characterised by otherness and hostility. In this way Kɨneraɨ’s rafue is portrayed as emphasizing thematically one aspect of the double structure of The Philosophy of the Axe over the other. The moral community is constructed by Kɨneraɨ reflecting on and making sense of his past interactions with different persons, and how he and his interlocutors ought to behave in relation to different kinds of people, be they your parents, in-laws, siblings, spouse, or children. His rafue

uses distinctly familial imagery, and often focuses on how to become a proper person in proper familial relation. As Kɨneraɨ speaks his Word of Life he does not only assert himself as a certain kind of person, but asserts an identity constituted in how it relates to others. In this we see Kɨneraɨ express a particular “understanding of self” that influences his actions. Carlos David Londoño (2012) writes that:

Our understandings of ourselves, of our relationships, and of much else in our lives feature more or less articulate distinctions between things we deem more important or more admirable or of greater worth, and things we deem unimportant, despicable, or of lesser or no worth. (p.18)

In his discourse Kɨneraɨ describes an array of persons and the ways in which they relate to one another that are worth maintaining and reproducing. Londoño considers these value judgments to be at the centre of human moral life. That is to say, how we determine “how people ought to live”.

The sphere of life internal to these kinds of intimate “moral communities” are what a subset of Amazonianist scholars, including Echeverri and Londoño, would assert as an essential domain of study with their contributions to the edited volume The Anthropology of Love and Anger: the Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia (Overing and Passes, 2000). This shift away from an emphasis on global structures of political economy and symbolic economy of alterity, towards a “moral economy of intimacy” in Amazonia was part of wider disciplinary movement, that was latter described as the shift away from “dark anthropology” and toward an “anthropology of the good” that gained serious traction in the 2010s. Both the Amazonianist shift and that of the wider discipline must be understood as direct response and counter movement to the dominant trends at the time (Overing and Passes, 2000. Ortner 2016). This reactive beginning, though understandable, left these works open to the critique of having ignored the power dynamics that permeate daily life. However, many of these scholars advocating for an anthropology of the good have responded to the critique and have sought to show how they are in fact integrated (see Overing and Passes, 2000) Ortner cites Veena Das who accordingly argues that we must, “[...]pay attention to the manner in which moral striving shows up in everyday labors of caring for the other, even in contexts where mutual antagonism defines the relation”(Das in Ortner, 2016 p.60).

In Echeverri’s (1997) idea of the dialogic relationship between the structural Philosophy of the Axe and lived rafue, komuiyafue, or the Word of life, we see a theoretical model that in its inception already integrates the analytical perspectives of the symbolic economy of alterity and moral economy of intimacy before the debate between the two took hold in Amazonianist anthropology. Specifically, I argue that a re-reading of Echeverri’s (1997) initial formulation in the context of more recent theoretical developments in both moral and symbolic economy will help make the necessity and possibility of path toward integration more apparent. Echeverri’s model prompts us to examine how emic practices of moral consideration and political agency are features of the lives of People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc that could not exist without a plurality of structures and a historically situated symbolic economy of alterity. I will now argue that it is through critically examining the concept of double structure in light of Graeber and Wengrow's (2021) insights on its role in agency and political thought in relation to moral economy that makes this possible.

As stated earlier, Echeverri considers “moral community” to be firmly part of the horizontal societal structure of true moral human beings, and dialogically related to ethnic division and animality. Echeverri contrasts the moral community constructing rafue of Kɨneraɨ with the divisive ethnic territorial claims of Andoque and Muinane (Féénemɨɨnaa) chiefs of the Medio-Caquetá. The hard line distinction between “moral community” and related “truly human” modes of being, and those of animalistic others is further explored and asserted by Carlos David Londoño (2012, 2017). This distinction is essential to his privileging of morality as an analytic lens when trying to understand the People of the Centre. It is why he states that instead of a radical and relative symbolic economy of alterity that encompasses all beings, “[The People of the Centre’s] perspectival claims seemed to posit an ontological hierarchy that was, first and foremost, a question of morality, with People of the Center’s tobacco-generated morally proper perspective at the top”(Londoño 2017, p.485). Instead of subscribing to the concept of generalized and radical Amazonian perspectivism as a whole, he prefers the idea of the “Amazonian package”, a conservatively reproduced yet variable and loose bundle of cultural features, one element of which is the many different variations on a perspectival ontology. Thus, in the case of the People of the Centre Londoño focuses on what he deemed to be a particularity of theirs, their moral hierarchy of being.

Londoño (2012) and Echeverri (1997) find the construction of “moral community”, and “moral selves/bodies” respectively, to take place in different social milieus. In the

case of the rafue of Kɨneraɨ, Echeverri (1997) finds the construction of moral community in the abstracted “spiritual” and “moral topology” of the center and the forest, the universal cultural home of the family unit and in its inimical relationship to animals and nature. In the case of the Andoque, in the true human-heron beings dispersed horizontally along the river and the hierarchical heavenly gods. Londoño also finds the “moral community” to be situated at the “center”. However, instead of the moral center described by Londoño being situated in various abstract locations that are discursively, and ideologically or philosophically produced by different groups and individuals, Londoño situates the centre in particular material-symbolic substances. This conception of “substance” is touched on by Echeverri (1997) implicitly in that he discusses how the concept of “work”, which for the People of the Centre is the production of vital substances such as ambil, mambe, manicuera, and caguana, is the means by which a moral community, the self and the family is formed (p.201). Londoño’s (2012) more explicit formulation emphasises the materiality involved in the symbolic production of these “moral communities” which he frames as “moral substances” that are shared through consubstantiality among a community of individuals. This formulation allows another entrance into examining the variance of these moral communities that moves beyond formal discourses, formally told life histories, mythologies, and historical economy. Through this new formulation of substances as “moral sources” Londoño opens up the features of mundane daily life to analysis, and gives us an opportunity to see how these social and moral structures are constructed everyday.

Both Echeverri (1997) and Londoño (2012) hold that for the People of the Centre the “moral community” and “moral substance” are firmly distinct from the immoral, and that for the People of the Centre the ability to discern and properly make the distinction between the “properly” human and the animalistic is vital to living a good life. Echeverri discusses this process of discernment in the context of “tobacco hunting”, whereby the elder Kɨneraɨ through the consumption of tobacco is able to discern that the “humans” who come to him in his dreams are in fact nefarious animals in disguise, and thus is able trap and kill the animals in the waking world the following morning (Echeverri 1997, p.154). Londoño (2012) on the other hand discusses the importance of discernment and distinction in the context of monitoring oneself and kin in the waking world. In this context the consumption of tobacco and coca allows one to properly perceive when one's kin’s thoughts, emotions, and bodies have been transformed into those of the animals. One must also monitor one's own body to properly maintain a proper human form and resist

the animal's attempt at transformation. These spurious bodily substances may also be exorcised and killed in animal form through healing practices. Here we see that in both Echeverri, and Londoño’s analysis the clear moral boundaries may at times be hidden or obscured, however, they do exist and are available to be properly known and perceived. For this reason both also acknowledge and describe implicitly and explicitly some shifting frames of reference and negotiation over moral categories. Yet, despite epistemic uncertainty, the true moral center is always definitive and ontologically unchanging from its divine prefiguration.

For example, Echeverri (1997) describes that for the Andoque the “moral community can shift between including Uitoto (Murui), Andoque, Miraña and including Colombians, Indians, and Brazilians. This is unproblematic since the center remains in the same place just as its expansiveness grows. Similarly Londoño (2012) states that:

At one large meeting I witnessed, one man stated that Muinane people today were behaving as if they were strangers, contesting and making enemies of each other, and that this was sad and blind, for was it not the case that as People of the Centre they were all made of the same tobacco, and that therefore their thoughts/emotions had to be the same? This kind of hortatory talk urged everyone to recognize their commonalities, and many responded immediately that he was right. (p.35)

Here the argument that the man puts forward is that the people are behaving as though there are in fact multiple different moral centers, when in fact they are mistaken and the “true” moral centre, substance, and community empasses all of the imagined divisions and transcends them. This is a similar extension to that described by Echeverri. However, contrary to Echeverri’s distinction that “moral community” is antithetical to ethnic division, Londoño (2012) also cites instances where in private contexts, some People of the Centre affirmed that their virtues originated in substances unique to their clans, and that other groups' poor behaviour was due to their clan’s faulty substances. These kinds of moral critiques where what one person claims as virtue is claimed to be vice by another is not uncommon, and even the elder Kɨneraɨ’s expansive moral community is subject to it. Kɨnerai says himself that:

Out of the impossible, / truly now, I obtained this Word, / and today I am relating it this way / And he who does not know says it is not true; / he might say so, but this Word has power, has substance, / has breath— / these are Things of power / And it might seem / that one is a sorcerer, / that one has supernatural abilities; / but this is not sorcery, / these are not supernatural abilities, / it is just the word of the discipline of coca, / the word of the discipline of tobacco. (Echeverri 1997, p.272)

That some people would consider the elder Kɨneraɨ’s Word of Life and construction of a moral community to be sorcery, and associated with secrecy, and ethnic division is not purely rhetorical. Londoño (2013) writes that at the time in fact many people in the Predio Putumayo Territory did consider the elder to be a “powerful brujo (shaman, healer, and witch)”( p.8). Furthermore, although the elder Kɨneraɨ at no time in his rafue speaks of moral ethnic division among humans, animals are portrayed as moral miscreants and treated with violence. As such we see how a moral centre may expand or contract, and be contested though in principle there is only ever one that is valid. This is what lies at the heart of Londoño’s (2017) conception of non-radical moral perspectivism and Echeverri’s (1997) unilateral conception of moral community and within the double structure of the Philosophy of the Axe.

Despite the well founded pattern of definitive, although at times erroneous moral discernment, instances of exception do present themselves in the lives of the People of the Centre. Londoño (2012) briefly acknowledged these exceptions at the end of his section on “Perspectivism and Moral and Ontological Hierarchy” writing that:

Parenthetically, I [Londoño] should temper this rather dark view of animals. Most animals were immoral in some way or another, but this did not preclude the possibility that in other ways they behaved properly and may, indeed, have been paradigms of some desirable behaviours.

[And that…]

People of the Centre thus slipped back and forth between very frequent claims that made use of the point that each faunal species was guilty in

some way or another of villainy or ineptitude, and rarer claims citing rather their desirable traits. (p.59).

Importantly, in my field work experience, it was not uncommon for people to assert that potentially animalistic others possessed valid knowledge and morally upstanding qualities although those qualities may be different from the ones that they possessed. For example, my interlocutors often cited the value of “white” knowledge practices. This perspective was at times posited by the same individuals who would also at other times declare that all good knowledge is of the same origin, and that there is only one true tobacco. For example, the positive aspects of Christian morality and religion were often declared to be the same as the ethics of the Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc. Likewise the very same people could at times shrink the moral community, stating that although other peoples may have other ways of living it is not what the creator prefigured. While each individual I knew in the group KKUai may have leaned more towards one perspective or the other, everyone's perspectives would shift slightly or more drastically from time to time. This is not to discount Londoño and Echeverri’s general account of rigid discernment. My field site in the city of Leticia, and the lives of my primary interlocutors are quite different from those that Londoño’s and Echeverri’ encountered in the Medio-Caquetá region. Londoño (2017) also acknowledges how the stress on a moral hierarchical perspectivism in their version of the “Amazonian package” is not uniform across populations of the People of the Centre:

Amy McLachlan (personal communication) also found that People of the Center [in Leticia] stressed commensality more than they did specially patrilineal, tobacco-centered consubstantiality in accounting for the making of the bodies of community members. (Londoño 2017, p.486)

Here the difference between consubstantiality and commensality must be taken as emphasis on either, the unity, homogeneity, and uniqueness of the moral body, community and centre, and on the other hand, the ability for the moral body, community and centre to be reshaped through the interaction with ontologically equal others. What I do argue is that these changes and variations that are observed in Leticia are not departures from the “Amazonian Package” particular to the People of Centre, but is instead simply a change in emphasis that is made possible through the double structure

modelled by Echeveerri in the philosophy of the Axe and that it is the double structure that allows for variation and change without a break in continuity. In introducing his working definition of morality, Londoño (2012) reviews the literature and shows a pattern of scholars arguing for what I would call bi-modal conceptions of morality and ethics. The bi-modal theorizations account for the embodied limitations on human agency and also its creative potential for reformation, which converge with Amazonian processes of consubstantiality and commensality respectively. I will now discuss how a synthesis of Joel Robbins and Webb Keane’s perspectives on bi-modal morality are particularly useful to the present discussion. Robbins posits a concept of “unreflective morality of reproduction” and a reflexive “morality of choice”(Londoño 2012, p.20). Londoño (2012) states that many of the scholars of morality agree that more reflexive modes of morality emerge from contradiction and issues inherent in the unreflexive modes(p.20). Keane argues that instances of explicit self-conscious moral consideration present themselves in instances of contact and contrast “[...] either from within or from outside competing traditions [...]”(Londoño 2012, p.20). In the contact from “outside” we hear echoes of Graeber and Wengrow's (2021) theorization of the source of political agency and consciousness. In the framework of Londoño we can imagine this contact taking place when moral human substances interact with false animalistic substances, and in the process of discerning them. Londoño’s conception of these substances as material-symbolic-forms that serve as moral sources which are cited and manipulated through daily practice and ritual converges in significant ways with Joel Robbins’ (2018) use of the concept of “moral exemplars. Robbins follows Sheler’s definition of an exemplar as “[...] the coming together of an idea of a value and a person [...]” or a “[...] a mould into which personhood must be fit in order to realize itself as valuable [...]”(p.161). Robbins (2018) argues that because a society may have a conception of living a good life that is composed of mutually contradictory values, the separate values must be made available to experience in some way, in order to then negotiate their interaction. Interestingly the values that he discusses bear striking resemblance to those that we see expressed in the double structure of the Philosophy of the Axe and its overarching gestalt principle, that is of the processual interaction of the two contradictory structures. The example that Robbins (2018) provides is of a Urapmin village in Papua New Guinea where the overarching principle of living a good life is based in relationism, “[...] a value that defines the creation and maintenance of relationships as the most important things people do”(Robbins 2018, p.162)

Relationism, however, consists of two opposing values. Firstly willfulness, based in the desire to form new bonds and relationships, and secondly, lawfulness based in the strict adherence to already existing social responsibilities. To embody exclusively one value or the other is not considered an absolute moral good, thus, people rely on exemplars. These exemplars are rare individuals who fully embody these values. They then serve as moral sources that others may use to negotiate their daily lives. Londoño (2012) also mentions on numerous occasions that the People of the Centre do simultaneously value both cool conviviality and violent predation. However, the fact that one set of convivial values is directed inward toward the centre or moral community, and the predatory values are directed outward towards the other means that they would not necessarily cause issues of contact and contradiction. If we acknowledge that the moral center is in fact multiple, constantly shifting its location, and its substantiality, negotiating issues between these competing values becomes of the utmost importance. A multiplicity of moral sources and examples could help with these processes.

While Robbins (2018) argues that people can serve as exemplars of these contradictory values, they may also be experienced by individuals through institutions, enacted in the form of ritual, and also myth (p.161). In Echeverri’s (1997) “permutation at the centre” that forms the double structure of the Philosophy of the Axe he lays out a series of symbolic domains or as he puts it “instances”. All three forms of Robbins’ exemplars converge with different instances of the double structure of the Philosophy of the Axe (Echeverri 1997, p.111). Most instances feature different kinds of persons and different ways of relating, but also substances and food stuffs are present (Echeverri 1997, p.111). The instance of “Myth” contrasts different deities or peoples. The ritual discourse of Kɨneraɨ contrasts “proper” and “improper women,” but also proper “human” plants and substances with those of animals. In the ritual discourse of rafue these substances are not only referred to, but manipulated and exchanged. However beyond these exemplars of person and substance, there are some that Londoño does not account for; objects and artifacts, like metal and stone axes, musical instruments like flutes and drums, and different classifications of baskets. The objects do not break wholly from the paradigm of substance and person for the objects may both symbolise persons and substance, and be vital to their preparation. However, they do differ in their concrete material forms, allowing them to be cited discursively and physically manipulated as moral and cognitive affordances in unique ways. In the case of The People of the Centre,

Londoño’s focus on substance as moral sources is well justified. However, I argue that the nuances of substances as moral sources, and how they fit into a shifting double structure can be further explored through other emic conceptual objects. Taken all together I believe that these objects form a diverse field of moral sources in constant tension with one another forming a double structure of institutional moral exemplarity. In this double structure different substances, persons and material artifacts can be cited and manipulated as metonymies of either structure, with each specific material symbol emphasising subtle differences in values that comprise the greater structure. It is in this doubly structured diversity of material symbols, which are constantly being altered in the changing material conditions of life, that produces a certain kind of political and moral consciousness with a wide array of possible ways to enact itself, but remains consistent in its dialogic quality. Thus, I believe it is a particular process of moral reflexivity that constitutes the conservation of what Londoño calls the Amazonian Package of The People of the Centre. We can imagine that as these sources, by being put into dialogue and juxtaposed in unique ways, could themselves become changed in their significance, and thus slowly open new ways of creating a “good life” while still conservatively reproducing patterns of processual interaction between greater symbolic structures. It is through considering how these structural contrasts and interactions permeate even the most intimate spaces of social life that we can better integrate theorization of symbolic economy of alterity and the moral economy of intimacy.

3.4 Double Structures of Being

The double structure that permits the shifting meanings of kaɨ between interrelation and opposition that is modeled in Echeverri’s theory of “double process of culture in the making'' is often emically conceived of in terms of two different baskets by the People of the Centre or the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc. In the case of Murui speakers these two baskets may be referred to as nɨmaira kɨrɨgaɨ, the Basket of Wisdom, and jitɨrui kɨrɨgaɨ, the Basket of Darkness respectively (Pereira 2011, p.12). The basket of wisdom, or often referred to locally and by the group KKU as the Basket of Life (Santamaría 2017, p.317), must always remain open in order for the continual process of (re)producing humanity – that is rafue, komuiyafue, and kaɨ komuiya uai – to manifest. On the other hand, there is a moral imperative to keep the lid on the Basket of Darkness which contains the disastrous failures of the first beings, “those who for the immoral behaviour ended up ‘enchanted’ or turned into animals” (Echeverri 2022, p.44, my

translation). People uncover this basket when they (re)enact the kind of oppositional Word of social division that I discussed earlier. This emic conceptual structure of the two baskets provides a strong theoretical bridge between the foundational daily practice of Word within the group KKU, their very self-conception, and Echeverri’s “double process of culture in the making.'' For this reason, exploring the group's own uses of “baskets'' as a conceptual tool will allow the construction of a theoretical framework wherein we may gain a greater understanding of the logics and structures of the everyday life of KKU and the import of particular happenings.

While the group KKU rarely, if ever, uses the precise Murui words; nɨmaira kɨrɨgaɨ, Basket of Wisdom or jitɨrui kɨrɨgaɨ Basket of Darkness, these two baskets are often spoken of in Spanish as the equivocal “Old Testament” and “New Testament” or in Murui with less morally charged words that speak of different historical-narrative spaces. These are jaiagaɨ, jagaɨ, and komɨnɨgaɨ. The less potent nature of these three Murui terms – in comparison to jitɨrui kɨrɨgaɨ and nɨmaira kɨrɨgaɨ – is both reflected in their semantic content as well as their spectral –opposed to binary– structure. Let us begin by unpacking the semantic content of first two, jaiagaɨ and jagaɨ, before tackling the third, komɨnɨgaɨ. Agga, Wojtylak, and Echeverri (2019) define ɨɨgaɨ, jagaɨ, and jaiagaɨ, as synonyms that all refer to the same narrative genre of myths corresponding with jitɨrui kɨrɨgaɨ (The Basket of Darkness) that I mention above (p.7). Echeverri (2023) in another text identifies two other synonyms in the other Murui- Bue, Mɨka, and Bɨnɨka dialects as, jagagɨ, and ɨɨkaɨ, while the term “bakakɨ” and “ikakɨ” may refer to the ritual recitations of these narratives (p.435). According to the literature there seems to be a great deal of variation in terms across dialects. In the diverse context of the group KKU it seems that people draw upon the affordances of this linguistic intra and inter dialectical variation. The group KKU does use the word jaiagaɨ, however, they when members wrote it out for me, they spelt as jayagaɨ, which I believe to be a simple orthographic change of the same word by people who rarely write the language and may not be familiar with how orthography has become standardized in academia. This is is because it is translated by the group KKU as the “basket of the ancients” or the “basket of before” and corresponds semantically with the historical-narrative space of jitɨrui kɨrɨgaɨ (Basket of Darkness) wherein only spiritual beings existed. While jagaɨ is used by the group KKU, they do not use it as a simple synonym for jaiagaɨ as Agga, Wojtylak, and Echeverri (2019) define it. Jagaɨ instead is conceived of as the historical-narrative space of the initial period of hunger and searching that the first proto-human-beings in this world suffered after they emerged from the

Hollow of Humanity (komɨmafo). At times there was no consensus on the meaning of these two words in the group KKU, and different members used them in place of each other but never interchangeably by the same person. Thus, there was clear consensus that they are in fact distinct concepts, and for the purposes of simplification, I will use them as described above. The final of the three terms that the group KKU uses commonly in their conceptual meta-structure of baskets is komɨnɨgaɨ which literally means “basket of humanity” and deals with the history of the events and life of humanity today or in Murui, (birui). Therefore jagaɨ, in relation to komɨnɨgaɨ and jaiagaɨ, may be understood as a kind of historical-narrative bridge.

The specific nature of the bridging of komɨnɨgaɨ and jaiagaɨ is conceivable through an understanding of jagaɨ narrative content as the procedural oscillation between the two. In historical-narrative-space of jagaɨ, the first proto-humans through trial and error and guided by divine inspiration achieve humanization and weave the Basket of Wisdom/Humanity (komɨnɨgaɨ). This is done by means of fabricating, testing, and discerning the improper and corrupted substances that originate in the historical-narrative space of the Basket of Darkness (jitɨrui kɨrɨgaɨ / jaiagaɨ), from the proper substances from which humanity is derived. Micarelli (2015) provides an illustrative example of this process from a Muinane (Feenemɨnaa) story:

Fertilizing the plants, he thought: “how is it that my Grandfather prepared it?” He picked the first leaf at the bottom and chewed it. “No, this is not what my Grandfather gave me to try.” Then he tried mashing the raw leaf. “No, this is not what my Grandfather gave me. How was it?” Then he tried again: he toasted the leaf on a potsherd. He was getting close: he discovered it was toasted. “Now what?” He took a dry leaf of caraná palm, he burned it, he pounded it, he mixed it, and he mambed it. Good! It was mixed with ash! But still, it wasn’t the same. He pondered. (p.78)

This procedural oscillation between failed and successful experimentation, vital to the initial process of humanization, is a constant fact of life. As Micarelli (2015) writes, “[...] for the People of the Center as well, humanity is a fragile construction incessantly prone to disintegration, which needs to be maintained through intentional processes of fabrication” and that it is “[...] a fleeting condition, always threatened by the dangerous encroachments of the Land of Beginning [the Basket of Darkness]”(p.79). For this reason

the process of “self-discovery and self-shaping” through trial and error, is part of the People of the Center’s articulated system of knowledge transmission and according to Micarelli (2015) constitutes a kind of “intuitive science”(p.81). Thus, it is no coincidence that the group KKU will often equivocate the daily activities of making of yera (tobacco paste) or jiibie (mambe) with alchemy and chemistry, and call the Murui language register associated with these cultural processes their “scientific language” and thus emphasize their associated prestige and their role in the attainment of knowledge. The lexicon of this specialized “scientific” language is derived from the historical-narrative-space jitɨrui kɨrɨgaɨ

– ie. Land of Beginning (Micarelli 2015) – and draws its meaning from intertextual

weaving of the two primary baskets. In another example of this equivocation, the nearby community of Km 6-11 called Nɨmaɨra Naimekɨ Ibɨrɨ, (Patio of Sweet Science) translates “Nɨmaira'' in their name as “science.” In this way we can get a glimpse of the procedural interactions between the two primary baskets (jitɨrui kɨrɨgaɨ / nɨmaira kɨrɨgaɨ and how the procedural oscillation is particularly emphasized in the group KKU’s triadic breakdown (jaiagaɨ / jagaɨ / komɨnɨgaɨ).

Interestingly however, this procedural interaction at times seems to be concealed or nullified. For example the sage Hipolito Kɨnɨrai with whom Echeverri conducted his doctoral research tells him that a basket, with “it’s containing and protective figure, with a start, and an end, and well defined limits becomes the most complete image of a person”(Echeverri 2022, p.205 my translation). The group KKU also uses baskets as conceptual tools to think of distinct domains of knowledge, which are preferably not mixed or confused. To this effect Echeverri (2022) writes that:

A ceremonial career is also a basket and the owner of a career is called an ‘owner of a basket’ (we remember that a ceremonial career is also called rafue). When a person completes a training (as healer or master of rituals), it is said that they “closed a basket” (p.204, my translation)

Following this last point, baskets may thus be used to think about the person and their capacity to learn. For example, if a person is considered to be ibigaɨ or a tightly woven basket, it means that they learn quickly and retain teachings well in the same way the basket’s weave lets nothing pass through. This is the kind of student a teacher takes pleasure in teaching. However, if you do not retain what you are taught you may be conceived of as jebogaɨ, a basket with a wide weave pattern often used for carrying large

manioc tubers. This distinction further elucidates the basket as a conceptual artifact that is defined and valued by its ability to seal and contain.

These aspects of a person as well as things like disposition and personality are often considered to be extremely stable throughout their life. An example of this is the story that Sebastián tells of his name Zioredɨkɨrai, meaning “Aroma of the Wild Almond Tree”. Sebastián tells that when his father died, his brothers and uncles came together to decide who would take on his father’s traditional name. Each clan, in this case Ekɨreiaɨ, has a set of proper names that are passed down (Echeverri 2016, p.86). While Sebastián's brother John wanted him to take the name, Sebastián claimed that it was John that should receive their father’s name. Sebastián’s reasoning was that he himself did not share his father’s calm and collected temperament despite his extensive traditional education alongside his brother. When beginning this education, John advised Sebastián that there were two requirements: the first being learning the Murui language; and second, calming his “hot/fiery” nature. Despite learning his language and his post-incarceration mellowing, Sebastián himself acknowledges as well as those around him that he simply does not exhibit the same “coolness of heart” that his brother does, and father did. That being said, Sebastián does not understand his personal “hot” disposition to be out of place within the context of his family. He tells the story of how when his wife first moved into his family's household, she went back home on numerous occasions because her tranquil upbringing clashed with the intensity and “strong words” of Sebastián’s family. The issue was resolved by the two families sitting down together in dialogue and counseling Sebastián's wife regarding the intense nature of his clan and their origin. Thus, we can see how the stability of these personal qualities may extend beyond a lifetime intergenerationally all the way back to the origin of a clan associated with different aspects of the historical-narrative space of jaiagaɨ (basket of the ancients) (Agga, Wojtylak y Echeverri 2017, p.9).

In this way, the person as basket may be understood as a fixed artifact with clearly defined edges and an inside and outside. In the example of Sebastián’s hot disposition linked to his family and clan history and its roots in its origin in jayagaɨ and jagaɨ, we can see how this image is well communicated by the Basket Darkness that is best kept closed and self contained.

Sebastián’s traditional education involved delving into this basket with the risk of “uncovering dangerous spheres of knowledge” (Micarelli 2015, p.80). Hence, his brother John stressed the importance of Sebastián developing a cool disposition. Accordingly,

Micarelli (2015) writes that, “Both teacher and learner share the responsibility of relentlessly guarding against evil, of controlling, and barricading the “paths” from whence evil (disease, conflict, famine, madness, self-interest...) arrives” (p.80). In other words, keeping the Basket of Darkness sealed.

3.5 The Processual Interaction

The emphasis on discrete and stable baskets encompasses and extends beyond domains of knowledge, people, or clans. This is clear in a broad sense with the use of baskets to conceive of the different historical-narrative-spaces discussed above. However, all of these senses are brought together concretely and condensed in an emic concept of territory communicated in the Murui phrase “bigɨni nagɨni”. Echeverri (2000) translates as literally meaning “This ground, this space, this dominion, complete, everything” (p.174, my translation) and goes on to write that, “The expression bigɨni nagɨni can refer simultaneously to the human body, the space of humanity or the entire world” (p.174, my translation). Here, in the first two translations we see a clear overlap with the concept of the Basket, specifically basket as person, and the basket of humanity (komɨnɨgaɨ).

Although on first glance the last translation —that is, “the entire world” — appears to lay beyond the purview of the conceptual framework of baskets, the Murui concept of bigɨni nagɨni naanɨ helps to show its connection. In a discussion of Uitoto [Murui] and People of the Centre’s clan structure and its two key concepts, autonomy and origin, Echeverri (2016) translates the encapsulating phrase bigɨninagɨni naanɨ as meaning “masters of this entire world” (p.87 my translation). Echeverri (2016) goes on to write that:

This concept, that we could translate as ‘sovereignty’, refers to the inalienable right of a patriline to build malocas [and hold] dances, and arises from knowledge of their origin and the possession of private assets and powers that distinguish them from other clans. [...] A leader of a lineage that exercises their autonomy by means of the celebration of dances is thus denominated, rafue naama ‘master of Word’ or ‘master of dance’. ( p.87, my translation)

All of the factors that comprise this sovereignty such as mastery of the different bodies of knowledge derived from the historical-narrative-space of origins that is the Basket of

Darkness, the mastery of different dances, the mastery of Word, and holder of specific “powers” may all be conceived of as the mastery of baskets. Echeverri (2022) writes that the sage Kɨneraɨ told him on repeated occasions that “the basket [...] is power” (p.205). Thus, to master the different baskets is be master of this entire world. With the proper orientation towards the reproduction of life one may master the basket of life (nɨmaira kɨrɨgaɨ) and become nɨmairaama, a man of wisdom.

Applying the concept of a sealed and discreet basket, that is one among many baskets, to such an expansive thing as “the entire world" may seem incredible, however, a close linguistic analysis of the Murui phrase bigɨni nagɨni directs us to an ontological framework within which this is coherent. To understand the combined form it helps to first understand its two component parts. Bigɨni on its own may be used to refer to “this ground” as in this excerpt from Oscar Román-Jitdutjaaño’s discourse “Rafue Taɨnia Uai.” He says, “mooma jaae raɨnade ɨimana / bigɨniri / dujude / jaae mooma jeede (the Father has settled, as a man in this ground he has set, now the Father hardened” (Román-Jitdutjaaño et al. 2020, p.36 my translation). In contrast, the combined phrase bigɨni nagɨni is often translated as “this ground, complete” or “this World” as in the excerpt “i dɨnokoni aiyɨ bigɨni nagɨniri / akɨ jaa ɨairɨ komuiya (In that epoch, in this ground complete, now was born the bush salt”(Román-Jitdutjaaño et al. 2020, p.47. My translation). Bigɨni includes the specific proximal demonstrative bi- indicating closeness to speaker (Wojtylak 2017, p.159). On the other hand, I believe that nagɨni includes the unproductive bound root na- as seen in the words nana and naga meaning “all”, and “every” respectively (Wojtylak 2017, p.162).

In the discourses of Oscar Román-Jitdutjaaño, the same morpheme -gɨnɨ appears to also on rare occasion take the non-perceivable unspecific anaphoric i-, a morpheme used to reference a previously mentioned thing or concept in a discourse, as in igɨni. In Román-Jitdutjaaño’s discourse the only occurrence of igɨni not being used to refer back to previously mentioned bigɨni nagɨni is when it was once translated as “placenta”, thus referring to an independent noun (Román-Jitdutjaaño et al. 2020, p.361). In other cases -gɨnɨ may also take the derivative nɨ- of the interrogative content word nɨɨ, as in nɨgɨni. Similarly to his use of igɨni, on the only occasion that Román-Jitdutjaaño rhetorically asks nɨgɨni (on which earth / layer?), the immediate answer is the same bigɨni nagɨni, “this world here, complete” Román-Jitdutjaaño et al. 2020, p.314). I believe this shows a conspicuous absence of conceptual constructions that use distal nominal demonstratives, morphemes used to indicate distance from speaker, indicating the existence of “other”

worlds, very much in line with the totalizing concept of nagɨnɨ. However, this universality is tempered in that the concept nagɨni exclusively appears in combination with bigɨni. Thus, although they are never mentioned, other worlds must be present even though “this world” is mentioned exclusively. Furthermore the rhetorical question of “on which earth?” also implies a potential plurality present in its conspicuous absence. This plurality is also phenomenologically evident in common daily practice. Bigɨni nagɨni is also used to refer to the human body with the connotation of a personal private space. Thus, in day to day interactions with others, and the social need to respect the basic bodily autonomy would make the plurality of the concept of bigɨni nagɨni experientially evident. This experience of plurality is all the more amplified when we add in the sexual connotations and experience of bigɨni nagɨni. This meaning of bigɨni nagɨni directly implicates the relating and interacting of two separate bodies with conflicting or complementary but always different desires. In the context of Bigɨninagɨni naanɨ as the sovereignty of the clan, and the right for its leader to hold dances the plurality of bigɨni nagɨni is also experientially evident. Firstly, there are a multitude of different clans with similar sovereign status that inevitably interact. Of course in interactions it would be possible for one clan not to acknowledge another clan’s status as truly similar. However, most markedly in the context of ceremonial dances that are key to this principle of total autonomy such denial of parity and plurality would be untenable. This is because during the celebration of the dance, the dance master (rafue naama) is meant to become an embodiment of the Father Creator. He becomes the father of all the people, and for the duration of the dance has ultimate authority within the space of the maloca. This may be ritualistically challenged in the form of songs that include riddles that test the hosts’ authoritative knowledge, or jeering critiques toward the hosts’ hospitality and ability to sustain his people. What this really does is give the host an opportunity to respond, and the ability to conspicuously assert authority through a demonstration of knowledge or providing vital substances such as tobacco paste, mambe, caguana, and food stuffs to the singers. This response to the critiques is the norm and generally the intended outcome as evidenced in naming the hosts’ clan as masters of the dance in the songs that are sung. Thus, most people would have first hand experience of the plurality of the concept of bigɨni nagɨni, and why I find it reasonable to take into consideration the conceptual overlap and structural implications between “this world, this ground complete” and baskets as conceptual discrete entities.

It is important, however, to emphasize that in the above argument I am attempting to build towards drawing a pattern of structural interaction between the wider Murui conceptual framework of baskets and bigɨni nagɨni and not a total structural parity between bigɨni nagɨni and the conceptual form of baskets as discrete entities. In other words, I hope to have shown that baskets as discrete entities are coherent and vital to conceiving of bigɨni nagɨni, although, a one-to-one parity is in fact not possible. While a discrete closed basket in line with the image of the sealed Basket of Darkness may be the “most complete image of a person,” a clan, or as I am suggesting a world, Echeverri (2000) writes that bigɨni nagɨni is not “the person” but instead “the space of the formation of life” within which, and the process by which they are formed and that:

The human being, the organization of people, [and] the world will become as a result of this processing that separates the pure from the impure, the starch from the chaff, the human from the non-human, the toxic from the nourishing. The result of that processing we witness as a person, as a collectivity, as an ordered world. (p.175, my translation)

The process to which Echeverri refers here is the same as the one that I argue characterizes the group KKU’s particular conception of the historical-narrative-space of divinely inspired searching and alchemical experimentation (jagaɨ) that bridges in an oscillatory fashion the two primary baskets, The Basket of Darkness and The Basket of Life/Wisdom. As well as the same procedural oscillation between opposition and relationality that I argued characterizes the group KKU’s daily practice in the coca patio of Nokaido and enacts the Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet manioc, The Principle Word of Life (kaɨ komuiya Uai or komuiyafue) from which the group KKU takes its’ name, and finds it’s most explicit and elaborate expression in rafue; ie the group’s participation in the region’s system of ceremonial dances. Echeverri (2022) writes that “The rafue and the basket are made of the same “thing”: when it is considered a productive process it is rafue. When it is considered a discrete entity it is a basket”(p.205). Therefore, the variable structure of baskets allows us to understand aspects of bigɨni nagɨni that are not explicit and vice versa. By the integration of the two concepts we see that the double process of culture in the making is usefully constructed as a process of cultural development but also one of world-making. That is, a procedural interaction of imperfectly stable structures of

being that permits and produces unceasing re-configuration of moral ontology without rendering its constitutive structures unrecognizable.

3.6 Conclusion

In conclusion I argue that taking into account emic conceptions, the oscillation between relationality and opposition that constitutes the most stable practices of the group KKU must be considered as a double ontological structure in process. Echeverri argues for conceiving of the current and historical social conformation of the The People of the Centre (ie The People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc) as a double process of culture in process with certain dialogic qualities. I discussed how this model emerged during a time of heated debate between Amazonianist anthropologists favouring the intimate moral community, and those favoring the symbolic economy of alterity as analytical lenses. By engaging in a poststructuralist analysis of double structure reminiscent of Lévi-Strauss and Clastres, and inspired by his ethnographic findings Echeverri seemed to have side stepped the debate which he had not explicitly engaged with. It is in this context that in hindsight we can read Echeverri’s “double process of culture in the making” as a dialogic integration of key aspects of intimate moral community and symbolic economy of alterity, as manifested in a series of double symbolic forms. Following Graeber and Wengrow, I have argued that it is the double and contradictory quality of these material symbolic forms that allow for their creative deployment and thus the enactment of agency. I have shown how the Basket of Darkness and the Basket of Wisdom is one of these binaries that is particularly far reaching. Upon closer examination of these historical-narrative-spaces as baskets, in relation to the concept of bigɨni nagɨni, I showed that it is useful to consider these double categories as ontological structures. The group KKU's particular triadic breakdown of the structure of baskets with the addition of historical-narrative-space of divinely inspired experimentation shows how these two binary structures are bridged through processual practices. I believe that this model is useful in two ways. Firstly, as I will show in the chapters to come it is necessary to adequately understand the daily practices and seemingly mundane social interactions with the group KKU as well the ways in which the group KKU manages to maintain and reproduce itself through time. Second is that it is a method by which to bridge various scales and perspectives of Amazonianist anthropological scholarship, and gain a more holistic view of how our interlocutors navigate their daily lives.

4. The Production of Moral Structures of

Being

4.1 Introduction

Having now established that the group KKU’s daily practice is characterized by oscillating between oppositionality and interrelationality and that this shifting within the emic framework of baskets and bigɨni nagɨni suggests a process of worldmaking, I now begin to ask in this section: what are the subtle mechanisms active within the group KKU’s everyday day actions conceived of emically as the Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc that enact/cause the meaningful shifting of structures of being and world? As an analytic starting point I establish some important parity between bigɨni nagɨni as a process of simultaneous personal and cosmological ontogeny and the phenomenological concept of “Lebenswelt” (lifeworld) and more specifically “Umwelt”. I then argue that the particular biosemiotic conception of umwelt is a useful analogue and heuristic tool for controlled equivocation for the present question. Umwelt provides us with a framework with which to begin thinking of personal and cosmological ontogeny in relation to Word, here conceived in terms of semiosis, or meaningful action. The emic theory with which I place this biosemiotic framework into dialogue, is the historical-narrative known as the Hollow of Humanity. I select this historical-narrative because it primarily deals with the personal and bodily ontogeny of the first human beings, the origin of uai or Word, and the first words ever spoken by humanity. Finally, the Hollow of Humanity narrative is particularly poignant for a discussion of the shift between structures because it marks the movement away from the Basket of Darkness and the beginning of the Basket of Life, or the beginning of its formation. After an initial introduction of the thematic convergence between the Hollow of Humanity and the biosemiotic account of being, I discuss Biosemiotic Enactivism’s roots in Peircean metaphysics, and the Peircean contradiction it purports to solve. Rather than discard Peircean metaphysics due to some of its fundamental paradoxes, I propose that the same epistemological and ontological paradoxes lie at the heart of Amazonian daily life and the group KKU’s striving for a ñue iyano, a good existence and moral lifeworld, which I then explore in the section that follows after.

4.2 The Construction of Self and World

In the text Territorialidad Indígena y Ordenamiento en la Amazonia (2000) that I cite in the previous section, Echeverri discusses bigɨni nigɨni as an approximation to the People of Licked Tobacco’s [i.e. People of the Centre’s] understanding of territory, and must be understood in a particular context. This book is an edited memoir of the 1998 symposium of “Territorialidad Indígena y Ordenamiento en la Amazonia” where sixteen different Amazonian indigenous political organizations attended and presented talks relevant to the new opportunities and challenges posed by the contemporary wave of territorial ordering in Colombia based on the recent adoption of the 1991 constitution. Therefore, this approximation of the concept of territory made sense at the time and continues to be valid in 2024 considering ongoing political struggles. While territory as conceived of in terms of the 1991 constitution implies demarcation and division of geographical space, I believe that the simultaneous all-encompassing and plural quality of bigɨni nagɨni and the interconnected conceptual system of baskets is usefully explored in terms of “worldmaking” and phenomenological “lifeworld”. This is because of how the existing scholarship on these two subjects may allow us to discern how exactly the everyday practice in the group KKU contributes to the creation of particular kinds of subaltern worlds, within which particular actions take on import. Anne Buttimer (1976) references Edmund Husserl writing that:

“World” to the phenomenologist is the context within which consciousness is revealed. It is not “a mere world of facts and affairs, but . . . a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world.” It is anchored in a past and directed toward a future; it is a shared horizon, though each individual may construe it in a uniquely personal way. [...] Broadly speaking, lebenswelt [ie. lifeworld] could be defined as the “all encompassing horizon of our individual and collective lives. (p.281)

In this world and lifeworld definition we see many features in common with Echeverri’s (2000) description of bigɨni nagɨni. First there is the importance of historical and current social relationships geared toward imagined futures. Second, in using the image of a horizon we see that these conceptions of lifeworld are all encompassing, however, simultaneously relative and perspectival in quality. Similar to in bigɨni nagɨni, Tim Ingold (2021) states that “In this animic [animistic] ontology [ie lifeworld] beings do not propel

themselves across a ready-made world but rather issue forth through a world-in-formation, along the lines of their relationships”(p.63). Here Ingold stresses the constant becoming of the world, and by stating that this formation occurs “along the lines” of relationships we see a kind multi directional and perspectival becoming. Similarly, Mark W. Brown (2010) writes that in the conception of lifeworld, [...] the world is then not assigned any abstract thing-value but is instead the universal horizon of our everyday activities”(p.6). It is the relational process/dynamic whereby objects and subjects, things and persons come to exist. To say life-world is to specify the horizon, or field of relationality that is of interest to a specific being, the horizon within which a being acts, and through its voluntary actions calls forth a world of morally ordered objects and subjects (Brown 2010).

Echeverri’s (2000) discussion of bigɨni nagɨni as territory, in the context of efforts to make visible indigenous rights to land after the 1991 constitution passed, can be seen as an attempt to shed light on a subaltern processual structuring of a people's relationship to land, and how it practically relates to the national process of re-ordering Colombian territory. By drawing out the implicit links between the concept of bigɨni nagɨni and the Murui conceptual system of baskets and Echeverri’s model of the double process of culture in the making and everyday practice, we can begin to construct a model of a specific process of moral ontological configuration, ie worldmaking. That is to say the negotiation of how the self, other, and world are defined in relation to one another. My preference for approaching this topic from the phenomenologically based concept of lifeworld does not mean a movement away from structure. I argue that the phenomenological approach allows an entry point into understanding of the micro-processes that allow the moving structures of lifeworlds to consistently re-emerge. Specifically, it allows us to see by what mechanisms actors enact agency over its reproduction through imperfect attempts to better align the world with their own self-conception and political projects.

Descola (2017) writes “Structuralism 'works well' in Amazonia because native peoples there appear to be spontaneously structuralist" and that:

It seemed to [them], and it still does, that the propensity of Amerindians to use concrete properties observable in the environment to construct highly intricate conceptual relations did share with structuralist analysis certain of its characteristic features in particular its capacity to render manifest

complex symbolic assemblages out of the encapsulation of secondary qualities gleaned on the surface of phenomena (Descola 2017, p. 27).

I argue that the biosemiotic concept of Umwelt popularized by Jakob von Uexküll can help directly explore the manner in which immediate and inherently evaluative phenomenological experience, and its companion of voluntary action, call forth the symbolic assemblage of lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Before examining the technical biosemiotic usage of the term Umwelt, a short summary of its original literary usage and etymology reveals even more significant qualities that run parallel with bigɨni nagɨni that other later non-objectivist authors (as well as myself) choose to emphasize. Tønnessen et al. (2016) write that, “The term [Umwelt] is made by the preposition ‘um’, ‘around’, and the substantive ‘Welt’, ‘world’. It refers, consequently, to the ‘world around’; and the center around which the Umwelt displays itself is the experiencing subject”(p.138). Here we see similarities with bigɨni nagɨni as Umwelt speaks of the universal world. However, it is a phenomenological world that is always local to the subject. Interestingly, in its first poetic usage the “experiencing subject,” to which the “fate-hell of the poet appears” is itself the personified Umwelt. Thus, like bigɨni nagɨni, Umwelt is both the world and the person at the same time.

Others interpreted its early usage as meaning the “outside-here”(Tønnessen et al. 2016, p.139). The outside-here interpretation was intended to contradict the idea of the world-subject. I believe that the two definitions may be synthesized as a relational entity or dynamic between the Self and the Other that constitutes lived worlds. This aspect is emphasized in the sexual connotations of bigɨni nagɨni, for in the sexual act the Self is phenomenologically confronted by and forced to relate with the Other. This relational quality was further developed in the use of Umwelt as an analytic term bridging psychology, sociology, and biology to speak of the reciprocal relationship between an organism and its environment (Tønnessen et al. 2016, p.140). Thus, taking into account the etymology, literary, and analytic uses of Umwelt, I find it is a useful if equivocal analog for the kind of ontological process that is bigɨni nagɨni. Specifically, with its further development in the field of biosemiotics I will show that it provides a tool with which we may theoretically explore how daily practice within the framework of the Principle Word of Life, Kaɨ Komuiya Uai, by the group KKU enacts this process of worldmaking (bigɨni nagɨni) with enough precision to parse out its double quality and the enactment of a double ontological structure, as well as how actors exert

their agency within and over it. And therefore, we may better understand what the group KKU is and the import of the minutiae of daily life.

In order to understand how the Principle Word of Life, or the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc enact the process of worldmaking (bigɨni nagɨni) in the daily practice of the group KKU, it is useful to first further explore the significance, origin, and emic ontology of uai (word or language) in the oscillatory historical-narrative-space of jagaɨ. A good entry point for this endeavor is the Murui origin story that describes the first words ever spoken in this world by the original beings that would become humanity. The story is referred to in Murui-Mɨnɨka as komɨmafo, The Hollow of Humanity. The story tells of the creation of the first proto-human beings in the world where we live today, their process of humanization, the origin of the human (Murui) languages and then its diversification, and the origin of the different clans. The reason I consider this to be an ideal starting point is because this story occupies a pivotal point in both the hegemonic Murui dual historical-narrative-space as well in the more particular triadic historical-narrative-space described by the group KKU. The beginning of the story and the emergence of the first beings marks a transition from the world “below” of the jitɨrui kɨrɨgaɨ (the basket of darkness) and the beginning of “this world here” and komɨnɨgaɨ (the basket of humanity). In the group KKU’s triadic breakdown the story marks the beginning of the historical-narrative-space of hunger, divinely inspired searching, and alchemical experimentation that they call jagaɨ and that I described as an oscillation between two primary ontological structures. The story is thus a useful prototype of this process. The narrative themes allow the interweaving of seemingly disparate Murui concepts, including the origin of human speech as uai, that are necessary in exploring how the double ontological process of worldmaking (bɨgni nagɨni) manifests itself variably in the daily practice of the Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc by different agents in the group

KKU.

I base my analysis of the story of Komɨmafo on a synthesis of multiple sources. The first is the version told to me by a Murui-Nɨpode elder in the department of Caquetá during my first time sitting in the coca-patio. Secondly, I refer to two published bilingual versions, with clarifications from the group KKU (Agga, Wojtylak, Echeverri 2019), Perreira 2012). As usual there is much diversity in how this story is told according to different individuals and clans so I focus on the aspects held in common. I identify these key themes as the role of desire and suffering in relation to bodily transformation, the construction of the self, and the origin of language / speech. By applying the biosemiotic

concept of Umwelt that I have have shown to be a useful analogy to bɨgnɨ nagɨni as a theoretical starting point for my analysis of the story of Komɨmafo I am able to draw important connections between the key themes of the story.

4.3 The Hollow of Humanity as a Theory of Becoming

First I provide an example of a version of The Hollow of Humanity which was told to me by a Murui-Nɨpode elder, and then excerpts of a longer the version recorded by Agga, Wojtylak and Echeverri (2019) to show how the narrative may vary depending on who is telling it. By doing so I aim to give the reader a sense of how these narratives are experienced and understood emicaly through tellings and retellings, in full and in part, in various contexts, locations and historical moments by diverse actors. It is only through the consistent reencountering with the story that one is able progressively integrate its multiple meanings into a broader system of knowledge and practice. Afterwards I focus my analysis on what the accounts have in common as well as some differences. Here I provide the version recounted to the me the a Murui-Nipode elder and chief Emilio Fiagama in Florencia, Caquetá in 2020:

The Birth of the Uitotos

The Uitoto people proceed from the great Amazon river. They were born near La Chorrera, the cradle of birth. They came out of the birth hole. When they came out they did not have language nor clothing. They were mute and naked. This happened between six in the evening and six in the morning. They were born in a duality of female and male.

Without clothes, without language, without clothes they gathered around the lagoon. In the lagoon they threw their tails and their umbilical cords, and from the lagoon a boa, Agaro Nuio emerged. Agaro Nuio signifies “product of my umbilical cords and tails”.

Around the lagoon there were five groups. Every group exclaimed, “what is it?” They were their first words and each group said it in a different manner. One said “nɨpode?” The other “mɨnɨka?” The other “mɨka?” The other “bue?”

They laid hands on Agaro Nuio and they killed him. They divided Agaro Nuio into five parts and they went to look for leaves. All except one group came back with leaves, they returned with leaves in the form of a snake.They were called the Jayoma, and only had the head of Agaro Nuio. It was only bone, and there was no meat for the Jaioma. They arrived in a cold and foggy climate. At this time the sky and the land came together and they encountered the Andaquíes.

With the Andokias, the Jayoma made a bilateral pact to respect their territories and the jungle. They mambed and made the regulations to conserve the fish, the plants, the birds, and the water. The Andokias wrote the pact into the stone using symbols.

Here I provide important excerpts from the version told by Lucio Agga (Agga, Wojtylak, Echeverri 2019) in Murui-Bue translated into Spanish:

Esta es la historia del lugar de origen.

[...]

En verdad, nuestro Padre Juziñamui creó (lit. hizo nacer) esta tierra.

Y esta tierra es nuestra madre.

Por eso se dice que el cuerpo de nuestra madre es ese hueco, un simple hueco.

Por eso, de ese hueco fue que salimos.

Ya, cuando atardeció, mucha gente surgió de ahí; por ese mismo hueco vinimos, por ahí surgimos.

[...]

En ese sitio también estaba colocado el que llaman Kuegoma. Anteriormente, con cola desde abajo surgimos de ese hueco.

Como los churucos, teníamos cola.

Y fueron cortadas (por Kuegoma).

[...]

En ese momento, aquellos (que surgieron del hueco) nacieron sin idioma. ‘No tenían voz, no tenían ojos, sus ojos no se abrían – jmm. Entonces, desde el lago, loma abajo, una luz resplandeció. A través de sus cuerpos, esa electricidad, como el corrientazo de un temblón, los calentó.

Ahí ya ellos empezaron a abrir los ojos.

‘Habiendo abierto los ojos, nuestro ancestro Jitɨruigɨdo (Muruima) junto con Muinama bajaron la colina y fueron a bañarse. ‘Por eso ellos se fueron (hacia abajo) y llegaron. ‘Muruima (Jitɨruigɨdo) se sentó en la parte de abajo mirando hacía río arriba (al oeste), y Muinama mirando río abajo (al oriente). ‘El Muruima abrió su boca, “naie bue?(¿qué es?)”, dijo. ‘En ese momento nació nuestro idioma, el idioma Murui, el idioma Bue.

[...]

‘El Muinama estaba mirando río abajo.

‘Entonces, “aafe mɨnɨka? (¿qué es?)”, (Muinama) dijo – jmm. ‘En ese momento nació el idioma de ese Muinama, el idioma Mɨnɨka.

[...]

‘Este es el origen de ellos (del pueblo Mɨnɨka) − jmm.

[...]

‘De ahí, la gente se bañó (ordenadamente).

Esa placenta, ese cordón umbilical, esa placenta de nuestra gente, ese cordón umbilical de nuestra gente quedó flotando (en el agua como en forma serpentina).

Por eso, desde ese momento ellos, por largo tiempo, estuvieron luchando por agarrarla, y querían devorarla (a esa figura serpentina Agaro). (Agga, Wojtylak, Echeverri 2019)

I will now begin my analysis by identifying the key themes of the narrative. First, in this version of the story, and others that I have read and heard personally, it begins with beings emerging from a hole in the earth. This hole is commonly understood to be “the mother's intimate part”, that is, her vaginal canal. These beings are born with a bodily form similar to the churuco (a monkey) with their tails, and with their placentas and umbilical cords still connected. They are born naked, mute, blind, and hungry. In the version provided by Perreira (2012) they emerge covered in mud. As they come up (arɨ biteza) into this world the being Kuegoma cuts off their tails. In no version that I have found does it mention cutting the connection of their umbilical cords with The Mother, which is the earth itself. The presence of their umbilical cords implies that at some point before they were born they were materially connected to The Mother. The hunger they feel is also a symptom of severing this connection, though its severing is not made explicit. Thus, very quickly a principle theme (hunger) of the story Komɨmafo and the historical-narrative-space of jagaɨ is established as well as its relation to bodily disconnection.

In his short text “A salty taste”(2010) Echeverri explains the inherent connection between hunger and the disengagement of the fetus from the mother. Echeverri's investigation regarding the Murui use of vegetable salts was met with a confusing narrative combining the formation of the cosmos and then the formation of the embryo. When Echeverri asks “what are we talking about?,” the elder with which Echeverri speaks responds, “We are talking about your body. Salt is what you wish, what we all wish, what every living creature wishes...” (Echeverri 2010, 2). Here we see that salt is being discussed in its role in the ontological process of bigɨni nagɨni (simultaneous cosmogony and personal ontogeny) as desire. In the case of the human being, salt-desire is understood in terms of the ontology of the mammalian organism and its characteristic process of gestation, childbirth and breastfeeding. The elder continues, to say:

We wish to imbibe, to breastfeed. In our mother’s womb we lived suspended inside a salty sea from which we obtained everything we needed. We were thrown out and our link to that sea got severed. We searched for it in her breasts to feed. Again, that link got eventually cut off, and we continued to search for it in this world.” Every step we take goes in that direction [...] (Echeverri 2010, p.2)

In Echeverri's text the elder speaks of what at first glance seem as singular “desire” but the description above may also be considered in terms of what Gasche and Vela call an “ontological need”. These needs are characterized by the necessity of fulfillment, which results in the maintenance and reproduction of the particular type of living being as such, and according to its own self-definition. Alternatively we can see two different kinds of desire present in the elders' elaboration. One is our wish to imbibe, a wish that is now impossible to fulfill in adult life, and on the other hand, we see a worldly search. Brown (2010) writes that “[...] Wishing pertains to the impossible or at least not yet possible, such as wishing to be immortal or being able to fly unaided”(p.13). Specifically, wishing is concerned only with an end goal but not at all with the means to achieve the end (Brown 2010, p.13). Gasche and Vela (2011) frame this as the desire an Amazonian “bosquesino” (forest-dweller) might have a desire for a flat-screen television, a designer watch, or any number of staples of an urban life (2011b, 41). These desires may be fantasized about, but they are usually not practically and committedly pursued through hard work. Thus, their lack bears no serious impact on the individual's life or identity. For example, although I may wish to win the lottery, I do not regret having never purchased a lottery ticket, nor would I be judged negatively by those who know me. Brown (2010) contrasts this kind of desire or wish, with commitments. The key difference for Brown is the presence of direct voluntary action. By searching for the practical means to satisfy a desire or wish, our consecutive action or inaction takes on significance. Here, the emphasis and importance shifts from achieving an end goal to actively pursuing it. In the course of the practical pursuit of commitments within a relational world, we become changed, our goals become altered as well as the state of the world. Brown argues that it is through habitual engagements in certain kinds of volitionary action that one becomes a “moral expert”. Of course, there are many different kinds of moral experts, and thus I would frame it as the development of oneself into a certain kind of moral person, who acts in set ways in relation to others and themselves. It is through the formation of one's self

as a specific kind of moral person that alterations in these patterns of action become significant. Thus when the elder states that “Every step we take goes in that direction”, may be interpreted as every voluntary action we take is the enactment of commitments. These commitments are what form ourselves as a person, just as our commitment to breastfeeding formed us as newborns in relation to our mothers. Being that our desires always involve others, it reforms the moral world we live in.

In the Hollow of Humanity when the first beings’ umbilical cords are cut and they become permanently severed from the mother, we see their means of satisfying their hunger made impossible. Their self-defining commitment to fulfill their need is transformed into an unattainable wish, and as a consequence their lifeworld is at risk of collapse. This transformation of self-defining moral commitments into unattainable wishes and the suffering it constitutes is not just theoretical; desire, and moral commitment can also be deeply affected by historical processes on societal scales. Jonathan Lear (2006) discusses exactly this phenomenon in the case of the Crow people of the North American great plains. By drawing connections between the Crow response to such a state of affairs, and those of the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, we can ground the theme of desire and suffering in a wider historical and symbolic context. Specifically, we will see how it connects desire and suffering to the system of baskets as moral exemplars and the process of bigɨni nagɨni, and prime us for a thicker understanding of the next key theme of the Hollow of Humanity narrative: bodily transformation. Jonathan Lear (2006) theorizes that the Crow people experienced the collapse of a moral and meaningful world when their historical nomadic, bison-hunting warrior life was destroyed by the near extinction of bison and the Crow’s displacement onto reservations. To have stayed committed to hunting buffalo, which no longer existed, would be a life of senseless suffering, both moral and physiological, and would likely result in the extinction of the Crow. The physiological conditions of a living being are always experienced in terms of their significance in relation to the being’s own selfdefinition, and habitus. By habitually committing to the satisfaction of a need or desire through particular means we set ourselves up to suffer when there are interferences. Vela and Gasché (2012a) refer to extended periods of suffering that provoke transformation as a kind of “rupture” saying that:

With the term rupture we refer to the conscious perception of the [forest-dweller] of the contradiction between, on one hand what he knows,

knows how to do, and appreciates; and on the other hand, what he must do to achieve a new objective and the consequences of this change. (p.155 my translation)

We can see this kind of rupture in the moral commitment of the Crow to a system of warfare with neighbouring Sioux. In the same way a buffalo hunt without buffalo would be an act characterized by hunger, suffering, and unfulfilled desire, continuing traditional warfare with the Sioux as though traditional tribal relations still existed would be pointless. To attempt to do so would actually constitute a shameful act. Changing historical circumstances require the reworking of selves, others, and lifeworlds, lest they be characterized by suffering and death and cease to exist. A lifeworld by definition is a world worth living.

We can imagine a similar disintegration of the lifeworlds having occurred with the different clans of the People of Tobaco, Coca and Sweet Manioc of the Putumayo-Caquetá river basin, wherein, their moral commitments slowly became changed into unattainable or self destructive wishes. As the socio-economic conditions and power dynamics of life began to change with the influx of European trade goods, the material consequences of long standing inter-clan conflict would have changed. Echeverri (2022) writes that war prisoners began to be exchanged as slaves for metal tools which allowed greater economic production, and accumulation of power within certain clans. These already exacerbated inter clan relations would have reached a fever pitch with the Peruvian Rubber Company infamously employing and arming enemy clans with Winchester rifles to aid in their enslavement and extermination efforts (Casement [1912] 2012, p.84). Here we see values and virtues, and the commitment to self and clan identity transformed in hindsight into shameful and unspeakable acts by changed material and social conditions of the world. Regarding a renowned Crow Chief, Jonathan Lear (2006) writes:

This is the kind of challenge Plenty Coups faced. If his psychological structure had frozen him in a world in which he had to keep on planting coup-sticks [making war in the traditional Crow sense], he would eventually have become ridiculous. It would have been as though he were

attacking sheep2. In such a horrible scenario it would be precisely Plenty Coups’s internal mechanisms for avoiding shame that led him into this absurd situation. This would have been a tragedy of its own. (p.88)

In the example of the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc this moral absurdity is no laughing matter, and was in fact a matter of life and death, nor was it trivial for the Crow. Lear acknowledges this in stating that an unreflexive martyrdom for one's values is a possible response that would avoid the complete dissolution of the moral self, which paradoxically would also lead to one's death.

Lear, through his biographical focus on the Crow Chief, Plenty Coups, speaks of personal psychological structures and the personal experience of them. He describes how these structures are produced through the individual's lifelong interaction and participation with wider societal structures which then become internalized through their habitual enactment of structured moral commitments. Lear argues that Plenty Coups avoided the worst consequences of the destruction of his moral world, and in his life led his people through the remaking of the moral self and towards the “radical hope” that some good life in Crow terms could be found through such a transformation. The reasoning for Plenty Coups’ commitment was inspired by a dream-vision he had at the age of nine, induced by the ordeal of fasting, and cutting off of his own finger. The dream he had was then interpreted by the elders of his tribe. Lear writes that the Crow believed that visions in special “medicine dreams” gave insight into fundamental structures of the world, and that with this one could foresee the future.

In his dream Plenty Coups is given a glimpse into this structure through the moral exemplar of the Chickadee which bears many commonalities with the moral exemplar of the Arrendajo (Jay) bird cited often by the the group KKU which forms part of a wider structure. In Plenty Coups’ dream-vision he sees a storm blow through a forest and destroy all the trees and lodges of all the birds except one. The only tree left standing is that of the Chickadee. Lear (2006) recounts that a voice tells Plenty Coups:

In that tree is the lodge of the Chickadee. He is least in strength but strongest of mind among his kind. He is willing to work for wisdom. The Chickadee-person is a good listener. Nothing escapes his ears, which he 2 Here Lear (2006) makes reference to Sophocle’s play wherein Athena cast a spell on Ajax that makes him believe he is killing Greek warriors when in reality he is killing sheep. Upon realizing that what he thought was honorable was in fact a shameful act he kills himself (p.87).

has sharpened by constant use. Whenever others are talking together of their successes and failures, there you will find the Chickadee-person listening to their words. But in all his listening he tends to his own business. He never intrudes, never speaks in strange company, and yet never misses a chance to learn from others. (p.70)

The modes of social being, or “virtue” that the Chickadee exemplifies are strikingly similar to one that I heard cited on numerous occasions in the coca patio Nokaido by the group KKU and others. Through a comparison of the Chickadee and the Arrendajo I will explore the concept of self-transformation as a moral way of dealing with the destruction and transformation of one's lifeworld. In the case of the The People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc, and the group KKU we will see how this single moral exemplar is entangled in a web of other exemplars, structures and social practices. The story of the Arrendajo goes as follows.The Arrendajo one day leaves his maloka to find another elder to learn from. When he arrives at another maloka and approaches the coca circle where an elder is speaking with his grandsons, he is spotted, and caught. The elder traps the bird underneath a gourd (totuma). Despite being rejected and trapped the Arrendajo bird continues to listen carefully as the dialogue continues throughout the night. Finally, in the early hours of the morning the elder finishes speaking and asks each of his grandsons what they have learned. All of them are speechless and cannot answer because they did not listen properly. But, from underneath the gourd the elder hears the Arrendajo recite everything that was taught, word for word. I was told that this Arrendajo is not the same one that is often seen living near the city and human settlements, but is smaller, lives deep in the jungle, and is able to mimic the sound of any other bird.

In this brief story of the Arrendajo we see that it shares with the Chickadee, the virtues of “careful listening,” knowledge retention, and willingness to learn from others. There are some remaining virtues of the Chickadee that we do not see expressed in the story of the Arrendajo. They may be explored through the exemplar of the Orphan, of which the Arrendajo is a subtype. These two remaining virtues are “the willingness to work for wisdom” and the more complex fact that “[...]in all his listening he tends to his own business. He never intrudes, never speaks in strange company and yet never misses a chance to learn from others.”(Lear 2006, p.70). The Murui word for Orphan is jaɨénikɨ. Wojtylak (2017) writes that:

In the old days, each maloca consisted of two hierarchical groups of people: the ‘‘masters of the house’ (jofo nanɨ) and the ‘orphans’ (jaɨénikɨ). [...] Jaɨénikɨ consisted of people who had no relation of alliance with the masters and have come to live with them in the course of time. These could be for instance members from other disintegrated clans or prisoners of war who, in the past, would have been ceremonially consumed [...]. The ‘orphans’ were considered to be a socially inferior group. (p.30)

One evening in the coca patio Nokaido, my friend Sebastián said in the group KKU they are jaɨénikɨ, orphans. He said this with some hesitation, and trepidation. He gestured with his hand, turning it over, as if needing to adjust and finely manipulate the concept. The way he quickly followed up his statement seemed to show that he perceived how it could be misinterpreted by those present. Or perhaps he thought that the men present must have understood his original intention, but perceived that they themselves also may have seen how it could be interpreted by someone ignorant to its meaning, by an outsider like myself. He followed up the statement by saying that, that does not mean that they are literally orphans, nor that they do not each have their own clan identities. What he meant was, that for the most part they are not from lineages that have the right to hold their own ceremonial dances, to be rafue naama (master of dance), nor are they in their traditional territory. In the coca patio, Nokaido they do not claim to be bigɨnanagɨni naanɨ, “masters of this entire world”.

However, Sebastián specifies that this does not mean that Jaɨénikɨ may be dismissed. Like the Arrendajo, even though the Orphan finds himself in a strange maloca dominated by powerful others, they are to be respected. While the masters of the house are dialoguing in the coca circle, the orphan is off to the side. While others talk, the orphan is hard at work getting wood, lighting the fire and tending to it. The orphan withstands smoke while he toasts coca leaves and burns yarumo for ash. He sweats as he pounds the coca and yarumo into a fine powder. All the while, the orphan is paying close attention to every word that is spoken, and through his labours, he understands and retains the teachings all the more. Sebastián would say that the Orphan is to be treated with the utmost respect because when the chief falls ill, the orphan that has been “over there,” on the periphery working and listening, will heal him. When all the elders who have knowledge have passed away, the orphan who has kept the wisdom will be asked to

release it again. Thus, we see the virtues similar to those of the chickadee, a willingness to “work for wisdom”, and a patient and quiet humility.

The Arrendajo and the Orphan are two related exemplars of being, and kinds of moral commitments that constitute the (re)production of an expansive field of social relations and moral community that ignores ethnic divisions, and even seemingly the division between the human and non-human worlds. However, as I argued earlier, this morality is perspectival and shifting, although always located at the centre. As such, both the Arrendajo and the Orphan have their structural doubles. In the previous section, I discussed this double structure of being in the double system of Baskets, and how they interact in a double process of worldmaking, bigɨni nagɨni. In other words, I argued that it is a shifting moral centre which allows for the reproduction of the self and the other, and the process of calling forth novel lifeworlds. By understanding how the system of baskets relates to the Arrendajo and the Orphan we can tease out their double nature. The Arrendajo, in its capacity to learn, is itself another permutation of the ideal tightly woven basket, ibigaɨ. The Arrendajo fills its basket with all knowledge and does not discriminate, and so develops wisdom, and continues to remake himself as a person that is ibigaɨ. He is defined in contrast to those others who are jebogaɨ and cannot retain the knowledge necessary for societal reproduction. The Arrendajo is thus able to learn, adapt and transform. The Orphan is able to learn through embodied labour to become other as well. The tight weave of the basket ibigaɨ, does not only imply a capacity to learn but also that nothing is ever forgotten. The orphan is to be respected and feared not only because he learns from his new surroundings, but also because of his silence. We must remember that the Arrendajo finds himself in a strange maloka, only after having left his own home of origin. So too does the Orphan. When the Arrendajo arrives in the strange maloka, he is rejected and covered by a gourd. His original form is concealed and he does not actively participate in the dialogue in the coca circle. He does not speak forth his Word, but instead listens to the others. It is when the dialogue stalls, that having learned from the elder that he speaks and fills the silence. Here we see how the Arrendajo is a particular manifestation and exemplar of how a basket is double in nature. His unique identity and bodily form remains covered and hidden just as the Basket of Darkness should. Yet even though his unique identity is hidden, because of his capacity to retain knowledge, he does not forget his origin. The same silence that keeps this previous knowledge safe is what allows him to also fill his Basket of Wisdom.

In a personal communication with Carlos David Londoño, he shared with me that his Nonuya friend Chio told a story of the Arrendajo as well. Londoño said that according to Chio the Arrendajo “[...]could fake every other bird's song, but nevertheless he had his own: the one he starts with and the one he ends with. Chio tied this to [dances] where you can sing songs of other people, but must start and end with your own.”(personal communication July 2025). The way the Arrendajo is able to shift between the songs of others and his own, shows that what matters is the careful management of knowledge of the self and the other. The Orphan, likewise, is not virtuous just because of his humility and openness to learn, but because he always retains the potential to re-assert his secret clan identity and knowledge of origin. Thus, we can see how the Arrendajo and the Orphan are not monolithic moral exemplars. Instead, each virtue that they exemplify and embody exists in dialogue with contradictory others, and it is only through this shifting dialogue that they come to make sense. In fact, Echeverri lists the images of the Orphan / Chief as one of the “permutations at the centre” and the Philosophy of the Axe. One always implies the other, and they are in constant dialogue.

Here I should note that Lear (2006) in his discussion of Plenty Coups’ dream and the virtue of the Chickadee, suggests that the Chickadee also may have had a secret double. Lear (2006) writes that some sources report that Plenty Coups was also spoken to by the War-Eagles during his dream vision. The eagles offered him their power, whose yellow feather emblem Plenty Coups wore throughout his life as a warrior and as a radical leader. His “radical hope” was not to become unrecognizably different, nor to become “white”. His hope and commitment was to become Crow, anew in a radically different world. Accordingly, Lear (2006) writes that:

Plenty Coups was able to create a psychological world in which the traditional virtues of the war eagle and the new virtues of the chickadee could cohabit. Birds who were not of a feather could nevertheless live together in facing the challenges of a new world. (p.91)

What is important is that after the rubber holocaust, the majority of surviving clans and individuals from the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc find themselves faced with the challenges of a changed world. The members of the group KKU have the choice to embody the ethic of the quiet Orphan or to continue to assert their personal clan identities of Bigɨninagɨni naanɨ meaning “masters of this entire world.” This ethical choice

is continuously made moment to moment, and both options may simultaneously be chosen in different social registers. To enact themselves as Orphans in every situation would mean the elimination of their distinct identities, their definition of a life worth living. To inflexibly assert clan association, ethnic or egotistic identity would lead to constant existential violence, in a lifeworld that had already become fragile. Thus, we see that in the case of the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc the process whereby one's wishes become moral commitments and vice versa is crucial to the process of the construction of self, and lifeworld, especially in the face of moral and ontological rupture. What is more, rupture is not necessarily a consequence of external intervention into a system, but is a structurally incorporated process of re-birth, vital to becoming cemented in the origin and maintenance of the The People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc’s lifeworld. What is perhaps different, are the social instances and the kinds of relationships to which these categories are applied.

Now returning to the story of the Hollow of Humanity (komɨmafo), we can see an example of this kind of primordial suffering and transformation of self, or rupture. When the beings emerge from the hollow in the earth, their connection with the Mother is severed. In Murui-Mɨnɨka the umbilical cord is understood as “the thread of life” (Echeverri 2022, p.204) and now that it has been disconnected, the ontological need and commitment of the beings to nourish themselves is no longer being fulfilled. This is why when they emerge from the hole they are suffering from hunger. Instead of waiting in vain to be reconnected with the original Mother-Earth and suffering until starvation and death like martyrs, the beings go to bathe themselves in the lagoon. In symbolic terms, after these beings exit the vaginal canal of the Mother-Earth and implicitly the “salty sea” of her womb, they search for another body of water to sustain themselves. This displacement is analogous to that of the Arrendajo and the Orphan who enter the space of strange and unknown maloka which itself is symbolic of a mother bent over on the ground in the process of giving birth. In the case of the Hollow of Humanity, the first beings find a freshwater lagoon. There they bathe themselves and wash the mud from their bodies. While the first beings’ bathe themselves their umbilical cords detach from their stomachs and fall into the water. In other versions the beings actively throw their umbilical cords into the lagoon. By removing their umbilical cords and throwing them into the water they are modifying their bodies, the possible means to satisfy the need of hunger, their own metabolic process, and thus how they must relate to their environment. The active removal of their umbilical cords points towards the kind of consciously perceived

contradiction between what the beings previously knew while still in the Mother-Earth’s womb and their previous means of obtaining sustenance; and what they must now do to achieve the new objective in the new world. The process of bathing is indicative of entering a different moral community with different standards of behaviour. During my field work in Leticia, I saw that it is still common practice for People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc to bathe themselves after being out in the hostile jungle, before reentering the cool space of the maloka where a different mode of social relation is expected, lest one cause physiological, social and spiritual illness. This is the conscious act of modifying one's mode of being, in order to construct and maintain different lifeworlds. Out in the jungle the hunter fulfills his needs through hostile predation, while at home the maintenance of the family requires a nurturing conviviality of the truly human. Gasché and Vela write that the process of rupture and adaptation, is a distinctly human self-conscious, and reflexive socio-cultural experience. Here we see another key theme of the prototypical historical-narrative-space of jagaɨ, that is the re-construction of self towards humanization. We can see in the above example of the beings removal of tails and umbilical cords that humanization and the construction of moral community is intimately linked to the theme of material and bodily transformation. What happens next in the story of The Hollow of Humanity (komɨmafo) may be erroneously interpreted as the first beings displaying self-conscious reflection as a distinctly and quintessentially human quality. Importantly, these beings are not yet human even though such reflexive behaviour is crucial to their humanization, and they themselves may not be aware of it. After the first beings’ umbilical cords are either washed off, or thrown into the lagoon, they combine into a serpentine figure and transform into a great boa called Agaro Nuio. Upon seeing Agaro Nuio the first beings utter their first words. Some utter “bue”, others “nipode”, “mɨnɨka”, and “mɨka” In what are now considered the four different dialects of Murui each utterance means “what is it?” What follows is that the first beings, all together attempt to capture and kill the massive boa-fish Agaro Nuio in order to feed themselves. After attempting various methods of attack and petitioning other beings for help, they eventually succeed. The first beings seem to answer their own reflective ontological question, “what is it?, through voluntary and purposeful action. In killing Agaro Nuio their desire or wish to satisfy their hunger becomes a commitment. In doing so they become certain kinds of beings, they make sense of the other (Agaro Nuio), and so call forth a new meaningful and relational lifeworld. The questions the first beings ask themselves are the first words they ever speak. Thus, interwoven into the themes of desire, bodily transformation and

the construction of self, we see another key element. This new element appears to be language. However, the first act of speech cannot be considered in terms of unique human linguistic capacity but instead as something part and parcel of it, yet more fundamental. Even though in the hegemonic Murui dual historical-narrative-space this story does mark the beginning of the Basket of Humanity, the first beings do not receive the true Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc (the Word of Humanity) from the creator until later on in the same story. What they do eventually receive in the narrative of the Hollow of Humanity is not the Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc in its final form, nor as an inalienable possession or right. Agga, Wojtylak, and Echeverri (2019) write:

There our Father Creator came down to them. / He didn’t come empty handed. He brought the ‘cane of care (that is, norms and instructions) for our clans. / He brought instructions, he brought coca seed, he came with tobacco seed. / There, after having given (the gifts), he divided the groups according to (their) languages. / The name of that hill is Bokɨre Idu (‘Hill of division’). / Some went over there, yet others went here, others went downriver, and others went to the south. / “Come for coca! It’s one of a kind, there is no (plant) like coca because the word (of the instruction) lives in (coca) (p.34).

Here we see that the Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc is given and received in the form of seeds and instruction. Thus, although the Murui-Nipode, Murui-Mɨnɨka, Murui-Mɨka and Murui-Bue all received the same singular Word and the same coca and tobacco seeds the different groups do not immediately form a unified moral community as the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc. Instead they are divided “according to their language,” and what would eventually come to be understood as different ethnolinguistic groups. Here it is important to refer to the text in its original Murui-Bue. These different groups are referred to as naɨraɨ, separate “gente” i.e. peoples, or clans that first became differentiated in the process of killing and eating Agaro Nuio and by their different methods. Thus, when in the original Murui-Bue it is said that “jadɨno baie fɨianona, ie jai bote jai uai dɨga (‘There, after having given (the gifts), he divided the groups according to (their) languages)”(Agga, Wojtylak, and Echeverri (2017) and “uai” is

simply translated as “languages” I must refer back to my previous discussion of the dual structure of uai.

Here, uai is referring to the different modes of speech of the different clans. However, because uai is being mentioned in the context of geographic and territorial separation it also carries with it the meaning of the oppositional Word of moral hierarchy and ethnic division. Therefore, although in this moment the first beings are said to have received the singular Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc, the Word needed to reproduce life and the moral community of humanity, the Word (uai) is not yet fully materialized and cannot yet be embodied. Instead, it is merely the initial instruction. It is the seed, or the divine inspiration upon which the searching and humanization process of the historical-narrative space of jagaɨ is based. It is the inspiration and instruction regarding the means whereby the beings wishes may be transformed into fully realized moral commitments. It is the means by which the Basket of Darkness and the Basket of Humanity is processually bridged. It constitutes the process of bigɨni nagɨni and calls forth and maintains a moral lifeworld. As the seed of the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc must always be sown and resown in ever changing soils.

In conclusion, the development of a unique analytic tool may contribute to a better understanding of how the daily practice of the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc by the group KKU enacts the shifting of double structures of being that constitute the world-making process of bigɨni nagɨni. For this tool to be helpful, it must accomplish a few important things. First, it must help further elucidate the connection between speech as uai, desire, suffering, active bodily transformation and the construction of self. Secondly, it must do it in such a way that does not conceive of agency and autonomy, bigɨni nagɨni naanɨ (master of this entire world) necessary for these processes to be the exclusive purview of the privileged moral community. Instead, it must itself operate as a dialectic that allows for a perspectival morality and cosmology. What is more, it must integrate these themes in a way that is coherent with the simultaneously hierarchical and plural qualities of the worldmaking process of bigɨni nagɨni. Finally, the analytical tool must be compatible with other related emic Murui concepts and ethnographic grounding within the group KKU’s daily practice. The tool’s validity should be judged based on its ability to point us towards important aspects of the group KKU daily-practice through controlled equivocation.

4.4 Building an Ontological Heuristic

In this section, I propose that a useful analytic tool for exploring the shifting structures of being involved in bigɨni nagɨni may be constructed in part through Paulo de Jesus’s (2018) ontological model of Biosemiotic Enactivism. I believe its unique semiotic framework with intellectual roots in Peircean biosemiotics, Autopoietic Enactivism, and Amazonianist multinaturalism and animism, makes it a particularly useful tool for exploring how in the context of the daily practice of the group KKU, evaluative moral processes are inextricably linked to processes of symbolic economy. Its roots in Autopoietic Enactivism draw together the ontological and epistemelogical aspects of desire, suffering, active bodily transformation and the construction of self. It converges with Uitoto (Murui) and Muinane (Feenemɨna) pedagogy, knowledge and being, and resonates with bimodal conceptions of morality as embodied and reflexive put forward by Londoño via Joel Robbins and James Faubion's previous work. This is the same sort of multi-accentuality that I explored through comparing Lear’s double moral exemplar of the Chickadee / War Eagle and the Arrendajo-Orphan / Chief. Londoño’s materio-semitotic approach inspired by Webb Keane’s similarly bi-modal take on moral processes ties in with the last theme of the Hollow of Humanity, that is uai, as word, language or symbolic reflective thought.

Where this Keanesian semiotic approach to moral autopoiesis and the formation of the self it is limited, is in its strongly human exceptionalist bent. As I argued earlier, I find Londoño’s assessment of the “Amazonian package” exhibited by the People of the Centre as staunchly hierarchical in its perspectivism is not the whole story. As seen in the story of the Hollow of Humanity the first words, an autopoietic agency is not the exclusive purview of a single unmoving moral community or centre defined as humanity. Eduardo Kohn’s take on Jesper Hoffmeyer’s biosemiotics is useful here. Kohn (2013) theorizes a biosemiotic framework that would permit an anthropology that truly extends beyond the human, and accounts for our suspension within large multispecies semiotic webs. Where Kohn’s work becomes limited is in that he develops it not as a tool with which to engage particular ethnographic data, but instead the reverse. He uses his ethnographic experience as a tool with which to build a new meta conception of multispecies semiotic life. As such, although it goes beyond the human it is still hierarchical in its perspectivism, and claims to, if imperfectly, describe a meta-reality. The usefulness of De Jesus’s synthesis of biosemiotics and autopoietic enactivism is that in taking a radical multinaturalist in line with the Amazonianist “ontological turn” it still is composed of

theoretical pieces which permit the integration of morally and perspectivally hierarchical frameworks.

Biomesemiotic Enactivism intellectual roots in Autopoietic Enactivism draws together the ontological and epistemelogical aspects of desire, suffering, active bodily transformation and the construction of self. Its application as a lens through which to analyse Indigenous Amazonian lifeworlds is not unprecedented. Giovanna Micarelli (2015) has explored its convergence with Uitoto (Murui) and Muinane (Feenemɨna) pedagogy and knowledge practices as expressed through the Origin of the Taste Knowledge. This is an account of events taking place shortly after the first beings emerge from the Hollow of Humanity, taste and receive in seed form the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc, and “work” to materially reproduce prefigured moral selves and worlds. Londoño (2012) does not state it explicitly as such, however autopoiesis is key to his conception of the formation of moral selves as involving habitual action and instances of reflexivity inspired by Charles Taylor, Robbins, Zigon, and Faubion. This is of course similar to Lear’s discussion of Plenty Coup’s, “radical hope”. Micarrelli focuses on the enactive qualities emphasizing that these enactments are always in relation to others, however she does not propose a specific mechanism.

Londoño’s use of Keane’s theorization of morality as a spectrum of embodied and more reflexive and verbal objectifications of morality and the fundamental materiality of signs show that this autopoietic process of the formation of self, “work” can be explored as a semiotic process. Thus we start to see how uai, language or word may be tied in with desire, suffering, active bodily transformation and the construction of self, of autopoietic enactivism. This is especially the case when habitually embodied forms of being run into changing life circumstances that require consideration and creative adaptation as I argued characterize the first words of the first beings. The human exceptionalist limitations of this semiotic approach to moral autopoiesis may be resolved with a concept of radical biosemiotics. De Jesus’s (2018) Biosemiotic Enactivism is a model that takes seriously the insights from the “ontological turn” of key Amazonianist anthropologists like Viveiros de Castro’s multinaturalist perspectivism, and Descola's conception of Animism. Following Eduardo Kohn's 2013 monograph How Forests Think, De Jesus sees the Peircean based biosemiotics of Jesper Hoffmeyer as a productive way of modelling how a symbolic economy of alterity functions to call forth different worlds. Kohn (2013) takes the representation of world to be intrinsic to their ontology as living beings and thus the way they construct himself in

relation to others (Kohn 2013 p.9) Although Kohn relies on theorization of Amazonian animism and perspectivism, and makes his arguments in part based in ethnography of the Amazonian Runa people of Ecuador, his framework is not wholly compatible with what he calls their “worldview”, which is more radically perspectivist. De Jesus is not trying to describe the lives of any people in particular. Like Kohn, he is also trying to describe universal features of the living world. Where De Jesus differs from Kohn is that attempts to theorize biosemiosis as productive of radically real multinatural worlds, more in line with Viveiros de Castro's platonic form of perspectivism. To take the semiotic discussion beyond a question of epistemelogical representation and Peircean naturalism which Kohn defends he synthesises enactivist concepts of autopoiesis with biosemiotics. Specifically he theorizes how biosemiotic processes calls forth multiple perspectival, and yet radically real worlds by means of the integration of the role of Peircean inspired semiotics with enactivist ontology of organism, and basing the discussion in an “Uexküllian phenomenology” of Umwelt.

While neither De Jesus and Kohn are endeavouring to explicitly explore the world or worldview of a limited group of people, I am. I argue there are features of De Jesus’s biosemiotic enactivist model that lends itself to doing so, as well as a more traditional and naturalist Peircean approach. It is the integration of semiosis, which in humans may manifest in symbolic expression or interpretation, biology, or the materiality / corporeality of being, and the construction of worlds that suggest its potential to explore the connection between Uai and bigɨni nagɨni in the context of the The Hollow of Humanity. These connections are necessary to establish and qualify in order to ground an analysis of the role of the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc as a daily practice of worldmaking within the group KKU. I am not arguing that it is an effective analytic tool because it is a flawless model of multinatural reality. However, I believe its semiotic framework is particularly useful for exploring how in the context of the daily practice of the group KKU, evaluative moral processes are inextricably linked to processes of symbolic economy.

As I discussed earlier it appears that the particular manifestation of the “Amazonian package” (Londoño 2017) which the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, and more specifically the group KKU seem to manifest is not strictly radically perspectival due to shifting of moral ontological centre. Its movement is often denied, and the centre is always privileged wherever it may be. To understand how shifting is enacted it is necessary to be theoretically capable of accounting for a radical multinaturalism. In

order to also account for its ever present hierarchical moral qualities in a holistic analysis, the tool must not preclude a naturalist worldview. This the potential in De Jesus’s ontologizing Peircean semiotics. Earlier in this chapter I already established that Umwelt and the idea that “[...] nature is constituted by the intricate relations of all living creatures, which are all subjects of the phenomenal world at large”(Tønesson in Paulo de Jesus 2018, p.876), is a useful analogy for the double process of bigɨni nagɨni worldmaking, and compatible both multinaturalist perspectivism, and morally hierarchical lifeworlds. Having already introduced Umwelt, I will now turn to exploring Enactivism, and afterward return to an in depth discussion of biosemiotics in relation to more traditional Peircean semiotics. The concept of autopoietic enactivism essential to De Jesus’s Biosemiotic Enactivism is not totally novel to Amazonianist anthropology. In fact Giovanna Micarelli (2015) has found it to be a useful analytic framework to conceive of Murui and Muinane (Feenemɨna) epistemologies and pedagogy. She demonstrates how it converges with Muinane (Feenemɨna) and Uitoto (Murui) stories of the Origin of Knowledge which occupy the historical-narrative-space after the first beings emerge from the Hollow of Humanity. The enactivist claim that it is through the fundamental process of auto-individuation that interactional asymmetry and normativity emerges as a fundamental feature of all living beings. Here, auto-individuation is understood in terms of an adaptive autopoietic system that actively pursues its own homeostasis, and is the minimum condition for a system to be considered living and possessing of agency (De Jesus 2018, p.864, Di Paolo 2005, p.7). The enactivist claim is that the responsibility of the self-individuated system’s maintenance is experienced asymmetrically between itself and the environment, and it is the responsibility of the organism to perform intentional and purpose-driven actions which may fail or succeed (De Jesus 2018, p.865). Homeostasis may therefore be understood as being achieved through the voluntary, active, and successful fulfillment of the organism’s ontological needs. It can be exemplified physiologically as the metabolic process, that is the “ […] self-affirming process of constant regeneration of form amidst a flux of matter and energy” (Di Paolo 2005, p.3). This process is what may be phenomenologically experienced as hunger, desire, or need. Enactivists argue that an organism must have a way to monitor its needs and the conditions of viability in a changing and precarious environment, and regulate its action accordingly. In summary, “It is by virtue of having to keep itself in existence, by acting, that both goal-directed and normative, meaningful, valued-laden behaviour, emerges. [...] This distinctive type of agency is what enactivists mean by sense-making” (De Jesus 2018, p.866). Therefore,

enactivists claim that sense-making is also an ontological feature of living systems and that there is a strong “life-mind continuity”(De Jesus 2018, p.887). Giovanna Micarelli argues these kinds of enactivist and autopoietic processes also characterize Muinane (Feenemɨna) and Uitoto (Murui) epistemology, and pedagogy, which do not “articulate in a mind-body dualism”(p.79) In this framework there is no primacy of body nor knowledge and they are co-emergent through agentive, and self-reflective action, conceived of as “work”. Accordingly, Micarelli writes that “In the process of embodiment that makes knowledge manifest, the person plays a fundamental role. More than that, the person becomes a person only through effort” (p.80). This effort is characterized by durable purposeful commitment. Micarelli derives this picture of knowledge and being through a Muinane-Uitoto story of the Origin of the Taste of Knowledge. Here knowledge is conceived as the distinct knowledge of humanity bestowed by the Father Creator upon the Grandson-Orphan, and what is needed to maintain the moral community. After this first instance of divine inspiration the Grandson-Orphan then works tirelessly to re-discover it for himself and reproduce it. Micarelli (2015) writes that:

Differentiation is autopoietic in a similar sense to that proposed by enaction theory, for which living systems are autopoietic when they ‘continuously regenerate the conditions of their own survival and in so doing […] establish the boundary between themselves and the environment, and thus constitute themselves as unities’ (p.82)

I will now argue that the enactivist ontology of living systems consisting of auto-individuation, interactional asymmetry, and normativity is also convergent with the story of The Hollow of Humanity’s emphasis on the themes of desire and suffering in relation to bodily transformation, the construction of the self, and the origin of language / speech. My analysis differs from Micarelli's in that after showing its convergence with the enactivist model I will emphasise how meaning-making or semiosis, as related to speech, is a necessary part of the construction of world. I intend to show how this convergence is not just thematic, but that the biosemiotic theory of being, and that which is found in the Hollow of Humanity in fact share contradictions which are fundamental to their practical workings. Therefore, an exploration of this contradiction in western theories of being will help identify further parallels in the philosophy-practice of the People of Tobacco, Coca,

and Sweet Manioc, and importantly, through controlled equivocation reveal their differences.

As stated, the first requirement for this enactivist process of becoming is auto-differentiation between the organism and its environment that generates an inside (the being), and an outside (the environment), which are asymmetrically coupled (Di Paolo 2005, p.2). Inherent in this binary spatial differentiation is the new possibility of movement, or an exchange or flux of matter and energy across a spatial gradient or field. When the first beings remove their umbilical cords, they are definitively restructuring their coupling with the environment in such a way that an inside and outside is clearly re-defined; the Earth-Mother is no longer already inside them by means of the umbilical connection and they become living systems that are no longer merely mechanically coupled to their environment. This differentiation based on bodily transformation is intimately connected to changes in metabolism and desire, experienced by the beings as hunger and suffering. The beings must then act within and across the emergent spatial field, finding new ways to satisfy their needs. Thus, we observe the presence of interactional asymmetry. When the first beings in the Hollow of Humanity narrative move towards the lagoon and attempt and eventually succeed in the killing and eating of Agaro Nuio, we see an example of what enactivists would call normativity; they regulate and respond to their desire and needs in their new world with purpose-driven action, and as such they enact a meaningful lifeworld.

My interpretation of the thematic convergence between the Hollow of Humanity and enactivist ontology is reinforced by the beings' act of explicit reflection manifested in their first words, “what is it?, whereby they make sense of, and simultaneously call forth a meaningful lifeworld. This sense-making process is grounded in the initial differentiation of the self (inside) from the other/environment (outside) and in interactional asymmetry. We can see this grounding in the relation between perception, movement, and sense-making speech in the Hollow of Humanity. Agga, Wojtylak, and Echeverri (2019) write that “At that time, those (who came out of the hole) were born without language / “They didn’t have a voice, they didn’t have eyes, their eyes didn’t open – hmm.” (p.20), establishing an initial connection between a lack of perception and a lack of speech. This initial description of the beings’ blind and mute state is common to most versions of stories I have encountered, however, in the version told by Agga, Wojtylak, and Echeverri (2019), what follows differs markedly from other versions:

And so, downhill, from the lake below, a light shone out. The electricity, went through their bodies, as if being electrocuted by an electric eel, and heated them up.’ And they soon started opening their eyes. After having opened the eyes, our forefather Jitɨruigɨdo (Muruima) together with Muinama went down the hill to bathe. [...] Muruima (Jitɨruigɨdo), after sitting down in the downriver part, looked upstream (to the west), Muinama looked downstream (to the east).’Muruima opened the mouth, “naie bue” And in that moment, our language was born, our Murui language, the Bue language. [...] Muinama kept looking downriver. Then, “aafe mɨnɨka? (what is this?)”, (Muinama) said – hmm. And in that moment the language of Muinama was born. The Mɨnɨka language (p.20).

Here by narratively pairing the opening of Muruima and Muinama’s eyes and their movement to the lake “below”, we see an immediate co-emergence of perception, spatial differentiation and thus the possibility and reality of locomotion, all as a consequence of bodily transformation. What follows is the sense-making of the new spatial field. The two beings reflect on the significance of spatial differentiation by looking towards two of the cardinal directions and asking “what is this?”. Although this differs from other versions of the narrative wherein these first sense-making words were uttered in relation to Agaro Nuio and in the context of hunger and hunting, in the enactivist framework each version contributes to the understanding of the other. The version that refers to the two cardinal directions stresses the importance of the asymmetric spatial self-individuation in the movement and flux needed for metabolic homeostasis. Further more, it calls attention to the perspectival quality of interactional asymmetry by including two beings gazing in opposite directions. In this way we can start to understand how generalized non-human specific sense-making as manifested in uai is intertwined with the process of bigɨni nagɨni, taken as the process of bodily formation guided by desire and suffering, wherein the more specific concept of bigɨni nagɨni naanɨ points toward the essential ontological agency of embodied beings.

The above analysis begins to address one aspect of the role of uai in the process bigɨni nagɨni, however, it is not sufficient to fully account for it. This is because, as discussed previously, bigɨni nagɨni is the simultaneous formation of both the embodied autonomous self, and the corresponding World, among a plurality of bodies and worlds.

Paulo de Jesus’s critique of the unmodified enactivist model runs parallel to this incomplete understanding of uai, as essential to self becoming. He argues that while enactivism thoroughly outlines an ontology of living organisms and makes the claim that their inherent process of sense-making “brings forth” worlds, it does not explicitly speak to the ontology of said worlds. This is because the enactivist bringing-forth of worlds is dependent upon the unique sensorimotor apparatus of the organism and the corresponding unique interaction between the organism and the environment which is always mediated by said apparatus. The concept of mediation precludes direct interaction with the “real” world and entails a kind of perceiver-dependent epistemological perspectivism that speaks only to the plural ontology of organisms and corresponding epistemological worlds that are always “ontologically separate from the organism” (De Jesus 2018, p.872). However, the bigɨni nagɨni process of personal ontogeny, as explored in the previous chapter through its relationship to the framework of baskets, must also be conceived of as a process of cosmological ontogeny and worldmaking. For an etic theoretical lens to serve as a useful heuristic in revealing the significance of the group KKU’s daily-practice, it must allow self, body, and world to be examined as radically concurrent and synonymous, and deeply connected to embodied speech and meaning-making.

De Jesus’s critique of enactivism is similar to common critiques of the longstanding legacy of the idealism of Saussurean linguistics and semiology grounded in “[...] the distinction between signs and the world, the doctrine of arbitrariness, and the system of differences”(Keane 2003, p.412). This is an analytical framework that, although it does not deny the possible existence of a “world,” does not seek to account for it in any way and is thus idealistic (Keane 2003, p.412). Although enactivism claims to posit the bringing forth of worlds, these are Sausurrian worlds of signification cut off from the “real world(s)” by the organism's sensory apparatus. Thus, like Saussurean semiology it cannot actually speak to the ontological nature of worlds and their materiality, an issue that is particularly relevant to bigɨni nagɨni and analyzing the group KKU’s daily practice. Although also often conflated with idealism, Peircian semiotics reintroduces the world as a vital starting point of a series of interrelated trichotomies, fundamentally based in what he calls ontological “firstness”, “secondness”, and “thirdness” and which permit the emergence of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs (De Jesus 2018, p.876). De Jesus does not reference Peirce by name, but it is fair to assume that it is within a broadly Peircean framework that De Jesus’s bio-semiotic enactivism is conceived. This is

because the key differences between epistemologically perspectivist enactivism and De Jesus’s strongly ontological bio-semiotic enactivism is his inclusion of biosemiotic sociality as an ontological minimal requirement of living systems which involves iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs (p.876). However, De Jesus qualifies this Peircean model by stating that “Signs [iconic, indexical, and symbolic] here are not to be confused with concepts, mental representations or fixed pre given things in the world, but as that which constitutes the relational basis of organismic engagement with their worlds”(De Jesus 2018, p.876). This distinction is important and I will explore it in detail. Peircean semiotics in simple terms deals with systems of signs that compose thought as a constant process of mental representation and interpretation. Although these representations and interpretations are constructed, Peirce argues that they must emerge from the affordances of a fixed but always mediated reality. Enactivism is coherent with such a model, whereas biosemiotic-enactivism is not. Biosemiotic-enactivism does not allow for epistemological processes like representation and interpretation that mediate an ontologically separate world. Instead this theoretical model collapses the two into one worldmaking /biosemiotic process.Thus, the radical implications of biosemiosis are coherent with certain aspects of the ontology laid out in Peircean semiotics, but also diverge in important ways. The point where the models are coherent is in the importance they place on “secondness”, or in other words ontological alterity, in constituting our experience of reality (Aikin 2009, p.77). However, De Jesus diverges from the Peircean idea that consequently, epistemological knowledge of a universal and common reality may theoretically be achieved or at least progressively approached and alterity overcome. This is theoretically accomplished by means of the infinite attunement of a community’s interpretants of higher order signs which infinitely regress toward initiatory firstness experienced in secondness (Keane 2018, p.77).

Biosemiotic enactivism’s use of the Peircean iconic, indexical and symbolic trichotomy and thus its construction within a framework of seeming Peircean ontological-epistemological contradiction is what makes it particularly useful as a heuristic for conceiving uai as a multispecies and doubly structured process of bigɨni nagɨni concurrent constructing of the bodily self and worldmaking as manifested in the group KKUs daily practice of the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc This is because the nature of the contradiction is such that it runs parallel to differences and contradictions in the two component ontological structures of the double structure in process of the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc. Thus, by applying these

models in the analysis of the group KKU’s daily practice we may both simultaneously shed light on otherwise unnoticed imports of specific instances of practice, as well as understand the human implications of such complex and seemingly theoretical problems. In the final section of this chapter that follows I lay out the details of biosemiotic enactivism’s similarities and divergences from Peircean semiotics in a manner that further elucidates key aspects of the metaphysics which they posit. I will draw attention to their contradiction, and argue that their paradoxes must not be resolved, but instead understood in terms of a dialectic interaction between the two conceptual systems. The by showing how this dialectic of being and becoming bears important similarities to the double structures of being enacted in the daily practice of the group KKU. In doing this will allow me to apply concepts from the wide body of literature based in Peircean semiotics and its broad assumption in a modified way so as to render them valid for use in my field site. In this way I use its inherent paradoxes and tensions as a strength as opposed to a weakness By foregrounding the contradictions and tension I also seek to position this work as a bridge between the focus on moral worlds of intimacy and the symbolic economy of alterity, and contribute to the in Amazonianist anthropological theory.

4.5 Epistemological & Ontological tensions

First I will lay out the (mono-)realist ontology of Peircean semiotics and then discuss how Aikin (2009) argues that its corresponding epistemic “impure infinitism” means that although knowledge is based in an infinitely regressing chain of reasons, it is touched and propped up by ontologically grounded truths at different points in the chain (Aikin 2009, p.73). These truths or realities are considered to be ontological in origin and have causal effects on epistemological processes through experience. They are the basis of Peirce’s epistemological stance of scientific realism (Parmantier 1994, p.21). Due to the material foundation of such experiential impurities, I argue that a Peircean scientific realism is also essentially physicalist in nature, based on Horsch et al. (2020) work on “mereosemiotic physicalism.” I then present Webb Keane’s (2018) discussion of how in practical terms human beings may take advantage of these same experiential “impurities” through the development of “interpretive communities.” As an interpretive community they may infinitely approach true knowledge of an ever receding reality. Both of these arguments depend on what is not only a (mono-)realist, but also what I will show to be a physicalist ontology of Peircean semiotic “seconds”. However, if we examine the

physicalist ontological assumptions in Keane’s argument for “interpretive communities” through the lens of De Jesus’s concept of bio-semiotic enactivism we gain a different account of these assumptions. In a bio-semiotic enactivist account, true knowledge of a mono-realist world is incoherent and contradicts the bio-social ontology of living systems upon which Peircean mereological physicalism must be based. This is paralleled by the Murui concept that all knowledge originates in the closed basket of darkness, and is thus the foundation of wisdom through which the basket of life is sustained. Yet simultaneously, the basket of darkness headlessly left open is the origin of all suffering, illness.

Importantly, the doubly structured multinaturalist ontology of bigɨni nagɨni hinges on the same contradiction. I do not argue that biosemiotic enactivism is an adequate heuristic for the analysis of the group KKU’s daily practice based on claims of its metaphysical truth, nor because it is necessarily an accurate translation of emic concepts. Instead, I claim that biosemiotic enactivism is theoretically valuable due to its roots in, and tensions with, the ontology and epistemology of Peircean semiotics that run in parallel to the tensions of the model of a double ontological structure in the process I am constructing. That is not to say that in my theorization, I do not favor the multinaturalist ontology of biosemiotic enactivism over a mono-realist ontology. I am in fact partial to it. My emphasis on multinaturalist ontology is a product of my initial political decisions at the beginning of my research. These decisions deeply affected the conditions of my initial entry into relation with the group KKU, and the basis upon which such a relationship was possible. For it was on the basis of the inter-relational and biosocial Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc that a member of the KKU first accepted my exchange of ambil and mambe in the syncretic “maloka” on the Universidad Nacional campus. I recall a moment of tension early on in my field work when an elder who was seated in Nokaido asked me, “What will you do when you go back to your land? Will you maintain these elements?” I responded with an honest reflection on the legality of coca growing and consumption in Canada, and said that the maintenance of my tobacco would be possible. I felt that my response was not satisfactory, and perhaps exactly what he expected and why he asked me the question. In retrospect, I believe he essentially asked me whether or not I was going to take the ontological turn. Whether I was going to truly engage in the inter-relational worldmaking and reconstruction of self implied in the Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc. He was asking me whether or not I would leave unchanged, and I believe, seeking to establish our terms of engagement as either

oppositional or interrelational. After the fact, in private another member of the group KKU who was present during the exchange commented on the confrontational nature of the question. Perhaps this was due to the fact that it did not presume interrelationality and allowed opposition as a possibility. In light of this, I take my ontological position to be a politically motivated emphasis, dictated by the fieldwork condition which this study is subject to. That being said, this stance is not totalizing. To do so would obfuscate real tensions that emerged during my research, competing desires and intentions, and are part and parcel of any interrelational engagement.

With that aside, let me introduce Peirce. Peircian semiotics is based in a hierarchically structured trichotomous ontology composed of “firstness”, “secondness” and “thirdness” (Parmentier 1994, p.7). It is these three ontological categories that permit the emergence of corresponding and also hierarchically structured iconic, indexical and symbolic signs. These are the basis of all semiosis characterised by the triadic relationship between object, sign, and interpretant. Peircean semiotics differs from Saussurean semiology in that it is not explicitly and intentionally idealist, (though it is often critiqued as being unintentionally idealistic, a point I will explore shortly). It is in Peirce's concept of “firstness,” and the workings of “iconicity” that this difference lies and upon which the rest of his semiotics is based. In Peircean semiotics “firstness” is “something that exists in itself” and is, “[...] the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without any reference to anything else” (Sonesson 2013 p.306). Peirce admits that “firstness” in itself can not be grasped as such. Such “grasping” is a process that already implies relation and “secondness”. For this reason “firstness” is always present, but only as the initiator and determinant of a chain of semiosis (Sonesson 2013 p.307). It can be said that semiotic mediation is based on the principle that:

In every mental act some feature of reality, defined as that which is as it is apart from any and all thought about it, is brought into connection with a chain of mental representations that has the unique power of interpreting reality in ways other than it is in itself (Parmentier [1994] 2016, p.23).

It is in the process by which the relation of object, sign, and interpretant are present in iconicity that we most clearly see the way in which features or qualities of reality are brought into chains of semiotic representation and interpretation. This is because, “An

icon ‘is fitted to be a sign by virtue of possessing in itself certain qualities which it would equally possess if the interpretant and the object did not exist at all’”(Parmentier 1994, p.6). All signs relate to their corresponding object on the basis of a “ground,” which an interpreter must adopt in order to grasp the sign as such.

In the case of an icon, the ground is a “first” (Parmentier 1994, p.7). This is because the sign vehicles of icons must be fashioned from the world. They then only function as icons insofar as their worldly sign vehicle bears “first” qualities of resemblance of one sort or another with their object. This resemblance between the icon’s sign vehicle and the specified qualities of the object exists whether or not they are noted or acknowledged by an interpreter. Due to all other signs either denoting relationships between the qualities which constitute iconic relationships of similarity (as in the case of indexes), or relationships between indexical relationships (as in the case of symbols), the initial “necessity of expression”(Parmentier 1994, p.30) of iconic forms requires that all other signs are thus eventually determined by some qualitative feature of reality. Cognitive beings experience this as what Peirce describes as “…two infinite series extending [from the sign vehicle] toward the interpretant and the object, respectively […]”(Keane 2018, p.77). In theory, one could eventually come to truly know an object that in some way or another is determined by a feature of reality. However this knowledge is practically inaccessible due to what Scott F. Aikin (2009) refers to as the “epistemic infinitism” of Peircean semiotic mediation. Keane (2018) calls our attention to this same potential problem, in terms of “epistemological nihilism”(p.77). The authors in their respective papers argue that Peircean semiotics, when closely examined, does not suffer from either. Aikin approaches the problem in philosophical terms settling on what he calls “impure infinitism.” In contrast Keane settles on the practically experienced finiteness that emerges from an “interpretive community” as a solution.

Scott F. Aikin (2009) argues that in Peirce’s early writing he embraced epistemic infinitism explicitly, i.e “[...] the view that infinite series of inferential relations are necessary for epistemic justification”(p.72) However, later through the development of his triadic ontology and corresponding phenomenology it is best to think of his ontology corresponding instead with an epistemological “impure infinitism” whereby “[...] infinite series of inferences are also supported by non-cognitive input from seconds”(p.72). These nodes of support originate in inconceivable firstness but manifest themselves in seconds. Aikin writes that “Seconds in experience impel us to formulate commitments. These formulations themselves, on what I’d termed the dual role of semiotic

interpretation, with causal and epistemic reasons functioning in tandem, require further inferences, but the impetus itself is not inferential” (p.77). The way in which seconds “impel us to formulate commitments” is due to resistance which is inextricably linked to “effort” (Sonesson p.309). Something may only push back provided there has been an initiatory push. What creates the conditions for a “push” or intentional action by an agent is thirdness with its “fundamental orientation towards the future”( Keane 2003 p.414). This orientation towards the future must be considered in terms of infinite possibilities, which upon their material realisation or enaction, “bump up” against firstness. It is in this manner that Peirce’s impure epistemic infinitism may be considered a kind of scientific realism wherein the investigative process is to “‘make our beliefs represent the realities’ .[Wherein] [r]easoning involves coming to believe true representations of reality” with minimal distortion” (Parmentier 1994, p.20). Parmentier distinguishes this from physicalism or physical realism. Peirce argues that there are not only ontological realities that may be approached epistemologically through the infinite chain of reasoning permeated by empirical experiences, but also, symbolic realities of thirdness. I disagree that even these symbolic realities preclude a physicalist scientific realism. Following Horsch et al. 's (2020) work on “mereosemiotic physicalism” we may say this is because all thirdness (that is symbolic or social reality) is built upon principles of secondness which are definitionally physicalist. This is always in a mereological sense, being that secondness is founded on “spatiotemporal parthood” and relationality. Furthermore, it is often mereological in a strongly materialist sense insofar as thirdness emerges from the “bumping up against” with firstness and the semiotic chain that follows (Horsch et al. 2020, p.2).

Unlike Aikin, Keane addresses the epistemological and ontological problem of Peirce’s apparent infinitism not from a strictly philosophical perspective, but instead from the perspective of an ethnographer. He says, “the ethnographer’s first concern will be with people for whom the world of everyday life is relatively finite, most of the time, because it is, as a practical matter, knowable”(Keane 2018, p.77). By taking a more practical and specifically anthropocentric approach to sorting out Peirce’s potential epistemic infinitism Keane focuses on how the infinite series does not lead to lives characterised, or affected by “epistemic nihilism”. To the contrary he notes that human lives are characterised by quite the opposite. He posits that this is due to the conformation of “interpretive communities” that continuously refine their interpretants (Keane 2018, p.77). Such that:

The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. The very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an infinite increase in knowledge. (“Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” quoted in Ball 2014, 151)

In examining the first sentence of this quote from Peirce, we see all three parts of his triadic ontology and corresponding epistemology at play. By “information and reasoning” he is referring to thirdness. By the “vagaries of you and me” he is referring to secondness and how it mediates firstness based on variations in physically spatio-temporal and mereological positionality. This positionality is exemplified by first and second person pronouns. The truly real may be representationally approached by refining one's interpretants in communion with others whose own semiotic chains of cognition are also influenced by their experiential “bumping up against” firstness. There seems to be a contradiction in this communal infinite approach to reality. This lies in the distinction between community and sociality, and may be seen in Keane’s earlier discussion of naturalization. Keane (2018) defines naturalization as depending on the:

[...] claim that something which is not natural (e.g., race or gender) but instead is— in reality—the product of social history, is, nonetheless, thought to be natural” and is based on semiotic reflexivity whereby the truth value of our perspective on nature may be distinguished to that of another (Keane 2018, p.76).

Keane (2018) goes on to write that, without this semiotic reflexivity born of alterity which is the foundation of human sociality, “[...] the evolution of communication would be at an end. Life would then be an endless interchange of stylized messages, a game with rigid rules, unrelieved by change or humor” (Bateson in Keane 2018, p.76). Here, Keane is talking about the vagaries and fallibility of interpreting the intentions of diverse subjects which of course is dependent first on understanding them as such. In an earlier article Keane (2003) states that “It is a historically specific semiotic ideology that determines what will count for the interpreter and actor as objects and in contrast to what

subjects”(p.423). This seems to be a process that occurs in the realm of symbolic thirdness, and is thus preceded by the secondness of “Iconism and indexicality [which] function by virtue of meta-level semiosis”(423). This is a process whereby:

First, the very existence of a sign as such, for an interpreter, depends on a mode of proto-objectification. That is, before an object of significance can be specified, something must first be specified as a sign. And in the process, its objects must be determined to be objects. (Keane 2003, p.423 my emphasis)

Due to the initiatory or primary quality of this “meta-level semiosis” and “proto-objectification”, I believe that this refers to the opaque process whereby firstness becomes secondness. Keane (2003) is obviously concerned with how a hegemonic metaphysics of world / spirit division continues to deeply affect “cultural studies”. He writes that such disciplines “[that] still often ‘read[]’ such things as ‘representations’ as being about the world in ways that make little of how they may be materially located within it”(p.409). Despite this, he opts for a pragmatic approach that seeks to show the role of objectification in social processes, which opens up the materiality of signs to cultural analysis. In doing so, he creates a valid theoretical tool, in the concept of semiotic ideology, but leaves “[...] the ontology of this infinitely receding reality, a question which [his] less metaphysical purposes do not require [him] to settle [...]” (Keane 2018, p.77), up to his readers. Despite the foundational quality, and now its explicit naming of it as “meta-level semiosis” and “proto-objectification” that is at the crux of the infinite semiotic series and naturalization, this process remains a kind of black box. Here I do not assume to solve this metaphysical question of Peircean semiotics in a definite philosophical sense either, and like Keane (2018), I privilege the practical ethnographic experience. My ethnographic experience suggests that this metaphysical question in its unresolved state is central to daily life. It is for this reason that I find Keane’s epistemological grounding of semiotic social analysis in semiotic ideology’s interplay of sociality and interpretive community simultaneously valid and problematic, and all the more useful to explore. People generally do live their lives as though reality is known, yet this reality appears to shift along moral commitments that are based on it. These tensions and contradictions may be revealed by examining the practical implications of Keane's conception of community and sociality, and their physicalist basis

in secondness, through the lens of biosemiotic enactivism. Having done so, I will refer back to the story of the Hollow humanity to show that these ontological and epistemological tensions and contradictions are not purely esoteric quandaries of western philosophy. To the contrary, they experientially colour daily life and practice in my field site, constituting how speech, desire, suffering, active bodily transformation and the construction of self, manifest in the role of uai in plural world making process of bigɨni nagɨni.

Now I will return to the opaque concept of “meta-level semiosis” and “proto-objectification” that lies in the emergence of secondness from firstness. It is here that we may truly understand biosemiotic enactivism in juxtaposition. Similar to what I described as a Peircean physicalist mono-realism grounded in secondness, the multinatural ontology of biosemiotic enactivism posits the material parthood of a spatiotemporal field, and therefore in the sense of the stable division of parts, rationality. Along with this goes causality, teleology, and finally logic as foundational aspects. The key difference lies in where the infinite series ends. Keane argues that the epistemic infinite series of Peircean semiotics may infinitely approach a non-distorted representation of firstness. In other words, a universal reality can in theory be known through the experiential “bumping up against” secondness by an interpretive community, even though practically it may never occur. In contrast, bio-semiotic enactivism does away with the concept of firstness altogether. It asserts “secondness” or the auto-individuation, interactive asymmetry, and normativity (read, mereology, action, and teleology) as enacted in living systems to be the ontological basis of a multinatural reality, and not a first, in existence prior to its enactment. Here we are tackling in detail something analogous to “proto-objectification”. It is the creation of material ontological objects as concurrent with cognitive semiotic creation, and representation of objects. In biosemiotic enactivism there are no a priori Peircean “things” first, and only ever biosemiotically enacted relational objects. To this effect, De Jesus (2018) writes, “Life is intrinsically social from the very beginning and relationship is thus primary to individuality”(p.878). If we take this to be the case, that means that the “bumping up against” that arguably allows reality to potentially be known, cannot be the “bumping up against” a universal mono-realist ontological firstness. Instead it must be the bi-directional and mutually asymmetric interaction between differently enacted objects, subjects and life-worlds. That is to say, sociality.

De Jesus (2018) in his theory of biosemiotic enactivism uses communication in a different sense than Peircean communication. For De Jesus (2018) communication is the process whereby the “thing,” sociality is enacted. He writes that “In its most primordial manifestations, sociality is simply a dynamically unfolding field of entangled relations, enabled by a viable means of communication, connecting organisms in a multitude of complex ways to each other”(De Jesus 2018, p.877). When De Jesus (2018) does use the term community he speaks of it in terms of “coordination,” “cooperation” and “mutual reciprocity,” whereby diverse organisms enact relational and multinatural worlds (p.877). In contrast, Peirce's concept of communication is antithetical to sociality. According to Parmentier (1994), for Peirce, "Communication [is] an essential feature of all semiosis.” (p.40) It is the process whereby “[...] two minds are brought to be one mind” (p.41). This echoes the previously mentioned destruction of “the vagaries of you and me”(Keane 2018, p.77). Let us recall the different usages of the possessive pronoun ka+, as in ka+ komuiya uai and ka+ uai respectively which I described earlier. One where a social dialogue between a first and second person is being enacted, and the other where multiple persons are collapsed into a single first person possessing subject. Peirce’s conception of communication, and formation of the interpretive community is most similar to this collapse. Communication for Peirce is “isomorphic with the truth”(Parmentier 1994, p.40). Here the truth is the more or less distorted epistemological objectification and representation of a mono-realist world, which is taken to be real within an interpretive community. Interestingly Keane (2018) writes that for this truth to exist, or:

[in other words] For that imagined object to be real for those who imagine it [ie an interpretive community], would require some lack of reflexivity—those who die for the flag must take their community to be something more than imagined, that flag to be something other than an arbitrary pattern on a piece of cloth (p.77)

Earlier in the article, Keane states that it is not simply the passive absence of reflexivity that allows, “For the sacrament to work, something else has to happen first, [that is] the suppression of reflexivity” (Keane 2018, p.71). The product of communication for Peirce is the annihilation of the conditions from which it emerges, that is, reflexivity, alterity, and secondness. Keane as well as Peirce seem to instinctively recognize this issue. Keane (2018) quotes Bateson who writes that, “the paradoxes of abstraction must make their

appearance in all communication more complex than that of mood-signal [which Bateson treats as indexical signs]”(p.76), and thus, Keane identifies these paradoxes as the basis of human sociality. In the source cited, Bateson (1972) further specifies that these paradoxes of abstraction are metacommunicative in nature, involving the conscious or often unconscious cognitive experience of shifting frames (p.184). This process is what creates the possibility of such social dynamics as play, deceit, threat, and histrionics (Bateson 1972, p.187). The shifting process of metacommunication must be taken in a similar sense to the biosemiotic process by which sociality and the coordination of multiple and diverse living systems emerges. By looking at this process as shifting “metacommunicative” frames, we see that for a shift to occur a Peircean kind of communication must also be present. Bateson (1972) refers to this as the “primary process” or “map-territory” equation (p.191). In other words, a primary process of taking one's epistemological perspective to represent mono-reality roughly analogous to Peircean “firstness”. Bateson (1972) goes on to say that it is in “secondary processes” that map and territory are discriminated, and that in the process of play they are both equated and discriminated. I must note however that calling these processes “primary” and “secondary” may be misleading because of Bateson’s claim that reflexivity must in fact be suppressed in order for a person to equate map and territory implies that complex living systems, be they birds, monkeys, or humans foundationally live in social worlds of play and constantly shifting frames.

4.6 Conclusion

In this section I sought to build towards an understanding of the subtle mechanisms active within the group KKU’s everyday day actions, conceived of emically as the Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, that enact the shifting of ontological frames through the concept of uai. As an analytic starting point I established some important parity between bigɨni nagɨni as a process of simultaneous personal and cosmological ontogeny and the phenomenological concept of Lebenswelt and more specifically Umwelt. I then argued that the particular biosemiotic conception of Umwelt is a useful analogue and heuristic tool for controlled equivocation in that it provides a framework with which to begin thinking of personal and cosmological ontogeny in relation to Word, here conceived in terms of semiosis. The emic theory which I placed this biosemiotic framework into dialogue with is the historical-narrative known as the Hollow of Humanity. I selected this historical narrative because it too deals with the personal and

bodily ontogeny of the first human beings, the origin of uai and the first words ever spoken by humanity, and finally because it marks the beginning of the basket of life or the beginning of its formation. After an initial discussion of the two theories’ thematic convergence and potential for fruitful dialogue, I discussed biosemiotic enactivisms roots in Peircean metaphysics. This is a matter that requires further development in the future, however, instead of arguing that Peircean metaphysics be discarded due to some of its fundamental contradictions and paradoxes that biosemiotic enactivism purports to solve, I speculate that the same epistemological and ontological paradoxes lie at the heart of Amazonian daily life and the group KKU’s striving for a ñue iyano, a good existence. This has been a foray into developing a dialectical-semiotic lens of analysis that requires further ethnographic data to determine its validity. The advantage of such a lens would be the possible inclusion of a wide swath of semiotic anthropology into Amazonianist scholarship in such a way that does not ignore the vital contributions that the development of the multinaturalist lens of analysis has lent to the discipline. In the next chapter, I provide an initial ethnographic exploration of how this lens may produce reflections that are useful for engaging with the daily practice of the group KKU, and with potential applicability to other groups of the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc.

5. Navigating Tensions in the

Daily-practice

5.1 Introduction

In this chapter I aim to explore ways in which epistemological and ontological paradoxes analogy to those inherent to the worldmaking process of bigɨni nagɨni manifest themselves in the daily lives of members of the group KKU. I first follow Bateson's (1972) example of “the man who will die for his flag”(p.188) as an indicator that violence is a potential site for seeing the practical consequences of such paradoxes. For this reason, I look at how violence and conflict is lived in the everyday practice of the group KKU. I focus on its rarity and how the majority of conflicts are related to alcohol consumption, drunkenness, and associated behaviours. I thus position these paradoxes revealed in instances of violence within broader discussions of Amazonian sociality and conflict in reference to literature regarding the role alcohol consumption plays in Amazonian aesthetics of conviviality. I then discuss the specifics of the group KKU´s treatment of alcohol and drunkenness as examples of how unmoderated social practices of humour and hostility risk bleeding into one another. More specifically I aim to outline the dialectic relationship between convivial sociality as expressed in humour and ludic behaviour, and hostility as expressed in the affirmation of self and the demeaning of others. In doing so, I also begin to explore the potential epistemological and ontological qualities of such convivial humor and hostile boisterous practices.

Following this ethnographic and theoretical introduction, I seek to delve into the group KKU's emic conceptions of these behaviours. I do this by examining broader Murui conceptions of illnesses with symptoms that consist of humour and ludic behaviour, and hostility as expressed in the affirmation of self and the demeaning of others. Using a ritual discourse by the elder Kɨneraɨ as point of entry, I argue that these sicknesses are conceived of as epistemological disorders, that is “illnesses of knowledge”. I argue that it is through this lens that the specific typology of illness both explicitly stated and enacted within the group KKU in terms of animal cocas and animal tobaccos must be considered.

Following this, I compare the epistemological and ontological qualities of these different emic illnesses to Bateson's (1972) theory of communicative theory of schizophrenia. Bateson (1972) argues that schizophrenia is a pathology that involves a failure to effectively navigate epistemological and ontological paradoxes through metacommunication. At its core, it involves failures to coordinate the interrelationality of different actors' desires and will. I conclude this section with ethnographic examples that show how the daily practice of the group KKU in the coca patio of Nokaido consists of subtle metacommunicative acts that, using controlled humour, play with the vicissitudes of these epistemological and ontological paradoxes. As such, different members of the group KKU actively manage alterity and the shifting of double structures of being by drawing on the embodied semiotic resources of The Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc in a framework of illness and healing.

5.2 A Moral Source of Conviviality and Conflict

I have shown how both Peircean communication and biosemiotic enactivist sociality may be copresent in, and coherent with complex Peircean semiosis, even though they posit different metaphysics. We can begin to understand the practical implication of this plural metaphysics through the lens of Bateson’s (1972) theory of shifting metacommunicative frames. Although Peirce theorizes the epistemological and ontological qualities of communication in terms of Truth, beyond its theoretical reality, he does not speak much to how it plays out in everyday life. Keane’s (2003) more practical approach posits that despite these contradictions, humans do in fact behave as though knowledge of the world is possible and quite ordinary. However, the example that Keane (2003) uses of humans taking their knowledge seriously is revelatory. Keane’s citation of Bateson's discussion of the “the man who will die for the flag” implicitly shows how being absolutely persuaded that the lifeworld constructed with the symbols of an interpretive community is unquestionably real can imply self destruction and death. To enter a discussion of how these seemingly paradoxical metaphysics play out in everyday Amazonian life, I use violence and its habitual association with alcohol as an entry point. Alcohol and drunkenness is particularly useful for this discussion, because of its contra-valent status in Amazonia. Along with violent associations it is also deeply connected with the many joys of Amazonian life. I begin to explore how laughter and conviviality are intimately related to violence and hostility in Amazonian patterns of sociality and their epistemological and ontological implications.

In the first example of “the man who will die for the flag”, we see how an agent who is in communion with an epistemological community refines its interpretants derived from the “secondness” of “bumping up against” to the point where the “bumping up against” begins to be experienced as a mono-realist “firstness” and thus as “truth”. In Bateson’s terms, as this epistemological communion intensifies, we see a suppression of the reflexive metacommunicative frame (or “second processes”) and the privileging of first processes, whereby map and territory (read epistemology and ontology) are equated. Symbolic representations are taken to be related to, and reflect true knowledge of a mono-realist world. The “man who will die for the flag” evokes images of war where we can imagine the man experiencing strong bonds with national brothers (homosocial-communion) and a simultaneous total breakdown of sociality with the enemy nation (hetero-sociality). There are two possible ways in which Bateson's example could show that Peircean communion and biosemiotic enactivist sociality are in fact metaphysically reconcilable. These are, if we consider the interaction that the “man who will die for his flag” has with his national brothers to be communion, but also consider acts of war between enemies a form of sociality.

In reality, no two allied soldiers are totally alike in semiotic ideology, and have many things in common with their enemies. Yet, in dying for their flag they become progressively more unified in both their epistemological experience and their ontology. This progression reaches its finality in death, and may be subjectively experienced as a total integration into the imagined community. Likewise, even what may be considered as violent sociality between enemies vanishes as death approaches. Thus, we see a direct proportional relationship between communion within an imagined community, and the breakdown of intercommunal sociality. The former, perhaps experienced as ideological strength or fervor, and the latter as material suffering and disintegration. As two enemy soldiers kill each other, they would get more and more confident in their national identities while their material suffering increases and moves toward self annihilation. The suppression of epistemological reflexivity, that is consciousness of other ideologies, in its most extreme case, leads to the actual elimination of alterity of being. The elimination of alterity destroys “secondness” as the process by which an interpretive community may approach Truth. This is wholly coherent with biosemiotic enactivism. As the “true” representation of a mono-realist ontology is approached by a community and is strengthened, so too is the destruction of said community and the communicative process from which “truth” is derived, rendering it paradoxical. Therefore, knowledge of a

(however truthful or not) mono-realist ontology seems antithetical to the physicalist conditions of “secondness” within which living systems may sustain themselves. As we figure out what is true through dialogue with others and we become more convinced of the ultimate truth that we approach, the less likely we are to engage with diverse beings and experience. This disengagement in its extreme ends in violent self destruction. The same paradox seems to lie at the centre of Amazonian daily life and social practice. Micarelli (2015) writes that specifically in the case Muinane (Feenemɨna) and Uitoto (Murui) pedagogy, “Knowledge pursuit unlocks this dangerous, warlike world”, posing a risk to all involved, yet at the same time knowledge is highly valued in so far as it is vital to maintaining a general well-being (p.79). Instead of leading to philosophical and ontological paralysis, I argue the paradox permits unique kinds of creative action. If we consider it in black and white terms paradox may seem paralyzing, inevitably bound to result in the breakdown of the living systems. However, in Amazonia, life is often not considered as a biological living-or-dead binary. Life is understood as a constant, fraught, and transformative process of striving towards “the good life.” The good life is conceived of as a “high level of affective contentment” (Overing 2000, p.17) conducive to social reproduction and fecundity. This concept is expressed by Murui speaking people and the group KKU in terms of ñue iyano, literally “good existence,” that exists at one end of a spectrum of Sickness and Healing. Importantly ñue iyano is considered a process of healing, indicating that sickness is not something that mars some ideal original state but instead it lies at the very origin of any moral community. Echeverri (1997) writes that:

The Creator, in the beginnings, suffered all possible illnesses. He spat out each illness and “out there” they took the form of trees, animals, rocks, and so forth. In this manner the natural world took its present shape. When the Creator got healed he sat at the Center. (p.210)

Accordingly it is only through processing illness that the world was first created, and by excising sickness a moral community at the centre is achieved. Similar to the paradox of community strength being proportional with conflict and self destruction, Joanna Overing writes that the “paradox [of amazonian sociality] is that such disruptive cosmic forces are at the same time [...] the original source of life within the human community and its health”(Overing 2000, p.22).

The example of “the man who will die for his flag” is an illustrative but extreme theoretical example, and thus requires ethnographic grounding and contextualization. During my field work in Leticia, I found the coca patio of Nokaido to be in a concrete sense a respite from the conflict and risk of violence experienced elsewhere in the city, neighbourhoods and the peri-urban communities along the Leticia-Tarapacá highway. At the same time the space could be characterized by a certain intensity and tension. At least in my presence discussions of violence were quite rare, but over the course of many months I began to learn of the deep impact of past societal, inter-familial, between friends conflict experienced largely in the home territories but which continued to lay just beneath the surface of people's new lives in Leticia. Here I refer to memories of colonial violence experienced by grandparents, serious childhood fights leaving people maimed, peoples communities being caught in firefights of the armed conflict, people's experiences as soldiers, long experiences of the everyday violence of the prison system as a consequence of others instances of conflict. I do not delve into this kind of violence, but not because they are not unimportant to consider and do not affect the everyday lives of the people I came to know. I do not address them in depth for two reasons. For one because in the process of my field work consent was not given to discuss these things, and true anonymity in such a discussion is not possible. I do not wish to cause any social problems as a researcher to interlocutors and friends. Secondly, I believe that more important than the specifics of serious instances of conflict and violence, is that despite this historical and continuous background the mambeadero of Nokaido felt to me, and to other members of the group KKU as a refuge to be safeguarded. In more intimate dialogues, these troubled histories could be felt. It is in this historic and continual context of a region plagued by violence that small everyday moments of interpersonal conviviality and conflict should be considered, and what makes them even more significant. When it comes to less extreme examples of violence, as a rule, every explicit interpersonal conflict that I saw break out involved alcohol. Thus, I believe examining how alcohol is treated in Amazonia, Leticia, and by the group KKU is helpful in understanding the relationship between conflict, violence and sociality. Gasche and Vela (2011a) discuss how in Amazonian “forest-dweller society” alcohol is strongly associated with, and highly valued for, its role in pleasurable sociality and communal work in “mingas”(p.129). At the same time the authors clearly state that, almost all instances of violence in forest-dweller society involve extreme drunkenness. This is consistent with other authors’ observations that Amazonian peoples greatly value conviviality and “loathe physical violence and

displays of anger” (Overing 2000, p.21). Thus, when in command of their senses and actions, they avoid outright conflict at great lengths, prioritizing self-mastery, personal autonomy, and peaceful conviviality. The interrelation of social behaviour associated with and typified in alcohol consumption (though not limited to it) such as ludic conviviality, play, conflict, and violence are thus good ways to see the everyday consequences of ontological-epistemological shifts.

On a very basic level I find it useful to think of the coca patio of Nokaido as a masculine social space where men can gather in the evening without being subject to the dangers of alcohol and night life in Leticia. People's presence in the evening in the coca patio is often juxtaposed to going out drinking in the bars and “discotecas” of Leticia, or worse, Tabatinga. This juxtaposition became especially palpable at times. Often on a Friday night we would sit in concentrated silence for a long time as the neighbours blared Vallenato music on loud speakers, so loud it made it hard to think and difficult to contain the frustration. This distinction made apparent in such instances, and which is often explicitly stated by different individuals, is not so simple. This is because although alcohol is understood as a vice, it is one that is quite universally enjoyed. Its moderate consumption is associated with animated and happy sociality. These light hearted modes of interaction associated with alcohol but not limited to it, are a desired component of social interaction in the coca patio Nokaido.

Despite alcohol’s ambivalence, alcohol and drunkenness in the coca patio is against the established norms. Only once did I quite shockingly see someone drink a beer while seated in the coca patio. One evening a man who sat drinking a beer pulled out another from his bag and handed it to an elder. The elder received it but quickly put it in his “mochilla,” refusing to open it and enacted the norm against alcohol consumption in the coca patio. Despite this norm, from time to time a former student of the university and friend of the group KKU would come and bring a small bottle of homemade botanic infused cane spirit called “chuchuwasa” and pass the bottle round for everyone to take a sip or two. This was always done somewhat clandestinely, but few men would refuse. This was common enough that when the student would show up, the different men would begin coughing and stroking their throats up and down as though they were sore, followed by cheeky glances. Chuchuwasa is considered a medicine with curative properties, and thus through these gestures they jokingly asked him for a drink, while simultaneously making fun of, and communicating his reputation for breaking the coca patios norms. Another example of alcohol consumption that was not only tolerated but

accepted and normalized was Sebastián’s use of Chuchuwasa. At one time Sebastián made a bottle himself, however his recipe was much more concentrated and strongly infused with the chuchuwasa bark. This made it very bitter and astringent. This he very publicly dolled out as medicine in a little wooden shot cup, which all dutifully received including myself. Alcohol is enjoyed by most members of KKU even if it is considered a vice, and some individuals drink very little and infrequently. At times different key members or those with authority show up to the coca patio drunk but not so drunk that they are entirely ignored or shunned, nor asked to leave. In this case they will often be very social, animated, and in high spirits, and joke around with the other members present. One evening, an elder arrived in a good mood and shared many stories, interspersed with bawdy humour. At the moment I interpreted it as a very positive and stimulating dialogue. However, at the end of the night when I got up to leave with the other elder Wencelao and told him my positive impression, the elder disapprovingly responded, saying that the exuberant man was drunk and his speech was pure “recocha”, messing around. Thus, although someone may come to Nokaido tipsy and behave pleasantly and sociably, some members may still leave or become frustrated. Jocular behaviour is not always caused by alcohol consumption and is in fact an important aspect of social interaction in Nokaido, very much enjoyed and looked forward to. This is the case especially when members or friends who have not appeared in some time. Alternatively, when many people visit at the same time, the process of greeting and initial exchanges of tobacco and coca can be very animated, full of smiles, jokes, and innuendos. Insinuating the drunkenness of clearly sober individuals is itself a source of comic relief and friendly joking. Sebastián, known for his temperance and sobriety, often enters the space of Nokaido wearing or holding his motorcycle helmet with a blank look on his face. As he enters he stumbles and nearly falls into pillars, pretending to be drunk. He then regains his proud upright composure, smiles, and he takes his seat. This is a symbolically rich performance that draws on the oscillation between drunkenness and sobriety, the joys of ludic conviviality, self mastery, stoicism and dangerous hostility and calls forth a very particular kind of world. Sebastián’s performance displays in hyperbole an idealized transition of behaviour. As stated, when a large group of men come together the animated initial exchange of tobacco, coca and greetings quickly melts away to a concentrated and disciplined silence, where then a man may begin a formal speech. This more measured attitude will then only be broken periodically with jokes.

Historically, the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc have not produced any alcoholic fermented beverages for ritual or casual consumption. Today, people who identify with this cultural complex still assert that alcohol is not part of their tradition or culture, attributing their consumption today to their relation with “whites”. According to one elder, this relationship is understood as a kind of dysfunctional but potentially fruitful sexual relationship based on mutual desire, saying that “[...] non-Indians showed the Indians ‘that woman’s vagina’, that is money, alcohol, merchandise, technology, and, in a perfectly symbolic and literal sense ‘their salt’ [desire]”(Echeverri 2000, p. 35). In Leticia however, this exchange of alcohol cannot be taken as a white / indigenous cultural exchange because of the traditional habitation of the Magüta (Tikuna), Yagua, and Cocama peoples along the Amazon river and its tributaries, who historically and today make and consume a fermented manioc drink called “masato” as a cultural practice. Thus in Leticia, alcohol becomes symbolic of inter-group social exchange more generally. One night at around three in the morning during a ceremonial inaugural dance of a maloka, we crouched on thin logs suspended only inches above the muddy ground outside. As we huddled together, taking shelter from the rain under plastic tarps, Sebastián reached into his backpack. After having sung and danced since 5:00pm the previous evening without a drop of alcohol, and with only four hours until sunrise he pulled out a small bottle of rum saying that it was “para animar” (to animate [us]). Sebastián passed it around to the members of KKU. I did not accept it. Perhaps realizing how this ran counter to the very strict warning that we were given not to drink, he proceeded to give me an explanation. He said that some “dueños de baile” “masters of dances” have tried to hold dances that prohibit not only the entrance of alcohol into the maloka but also its consumption by the singers and attendees while they are outside. In these cases they held the leaders of the invited groups responsible for enacting this prohibition. He explained that this kind of prohibition may be a good idea and valid in the “territory” (referring to the Putumayo- Caquetá) but that this can not be done in Leticia. He says that we are not in their territory of origin, and this new territory has its own masters. For this reason the local masters must be asked for permission before conducting the rituals and ceremonies of The People of Tobacco and Sweet Manioc. They thus consult with a local (in this case) Tikuna (Magüta) elder. He goes on to say that the total prohibition of alcohol in their ceremonies around Leticia is not valid because they are in the traditional territory of people who traditionally consume “masato”-- manioc wine---, and thus such a prohibition would offend the territory's spirit masters and invite sickness

and social troubles. Thus, in this instance we can see how alcohol and convivial behaviours associated with its consumption become symbolic of interpersonal and intergroup sociality in general.

In a detailed discursive analysis of “inebriation” within another “masato” consuming group in the north-west amazon known as the Capanahua, Lukasz Krokoszynski describes how exactly conviviality, confrontation, and violence relate to one another. Krokoszynski (2015) accomplishes this through a typology of “drunken speeches” which refer to different patterns of speech that people engage in while drunk. The first type is that of conviviality, wherein it “[...] focuses on the present temporal setting and on the communal dimension. Its central themes are being joyous, peaceful, and creating bonds of friendship.” (Krokoszynski 2015, p.17) This mode is accomplished through affirming the present temporal setting and what is immediately perceivable, thus calling forth a “safe” and “transparent environment” . Krokoszynski provides the following convivial Capanahua greetings and responses as further examples of this mode of speech that is not limited to contexts of drunkenness; greeting: “are you not awake?”, response: I am awake; greeting: “are you not living (in your house?)”; greeting: “are you sitting?”; response: “here I am, sitting”(2015, p.19). They all affirm the immediately apparent situation.

These greetings that Krokoszynski argues feature the same discursive elements of the Capanahua convivial drunken speech bear striking resemblance to the greetings used by the group KKU in the Murui language. These Murui language greetings are privileged over the use of Spanish language greetings, and used during the animated arrival, and initial exchanges of tobacco and coca. In the same way that Sebastián may enter with his “drunken” slapstick, others may enter and loudly say to the group “itɨomoɨ?”(are you [plural] there? / is it you [plural]) or the more exuberant “kaɨmakɨ! itɨomoɨ?” (our people, are you there? / is it you?) to which the groups standard response is, “jɨɨ itɨkaɨ” (yes, we are here / it is us). This greeting may then also be directed individually to different people present with the phrase “oo / ama, itɨo”(you / brother, is it you?). These may alternatively be reformulated using the phrase, “jaa bitɨo”(is it you who arrives now?), when it is the person seated who greets a person who arrives. Interestingly, even after the initial flurry of greetings during arrivals, concentrated silence may also be broken by such exchanges. For example, when someone arrives once the dialogue has already begun, they may take a seat, wait for a lull and break the pensive silence by greeting the other people present individually saying “ama itɨo”. This is quite

impactful in its significance being that the person is asking “brother, is that you/ is that you here?” is asking this of someone who they have just spent possibly over an hour looking at from only a few feet away. This kind of address, if directed to someone who has not yet exchanged tobacco and coca, will likely be followed up with the response “jɨɨ”(yes). At which point the greeter, having affirmed the existence and presence of the other will say, “be kue yerakɨ \ here is my tobacco”, and a very formal exchange will take place where the greeted party will stand up, bring his tobacco and coca with him and go to squat in front of the man who greeted him. The two men will execute the exchange and likely exchange a few more words as well. Sometimes these words will be spoken quietly, but other times more loudly for all to hear in a quasi performative fashion. This kind of interaction may then open up a new line of dialogue. In other cases where the dialogue has died down and silence has settled upon the group, and everyone has already exchanged tobacco and coca with each other, curiously someone may still greet another person by saying “itɨo? Are you there?”. Here, the response may be different, and humorous. Instead of responding with “jɨɨ itɨkue” (yes i am here) the response may be “itɨɨɨɨkue” with an exaggerated and extended vowel. When humour like this is used, tobacco and coca are not typically exchanged.

These Murui greetings bear striking similarity to the convivial Capanahua greetings discussed by Krokoszynski as “affirming what is perceivable.” I believe, the Murui language phrasing moves beyond the merely perceivable. The Murui use the existential root “ite” in their greetings and thus they should be considered as affirmations of ontological relationality. Importantly, this kind of affirming of ontological alterity and relationality is key to humour and joking. Krokoszynski does speak of humour in his text on convivial affirmations but does not explain how the affirmations are related to alcohol and drunkenness. In the case of the group KKU, we can see all three of the aspects of conviviality; humour, affirmation of alterity, and inebriation drawn together in the context of ceremonial dances. Here, greetings take on a more vigorous energy. Throughout the night, the master and hosts of the dance will alternatively call out to the different invited groups to enter the maloka and sing, yelling “Murui! Murui!”, “Bora! Bora!”, or “Muinane! Muinane!” etcetera, depending on whose turn it is to sing. At which point after conferring and deciding who will sing next, someone from the Murui group will stand up and yell Kaɨmakɨ!! Kaɨmakɨ!! Everyone else will respond animatedly with resounding “ju! ju! ju!”, before they rise and march toward the maloka entrance. This call and response is also carried out when a member of the invited group arrives and greets the rest of the group

already there. Such exclamations may also be called out at random intervals throughout the night in order to animate those present throughout the long hours. However taboo or frowned upon as it may be, the increased alcohol consumption during ceremonial dances tie these enthusiastic speech acts together with drunkenness.

The examples above show the convivial qualities of moderated humour, joking, and drunkenness and how they relate to the enactment of alterity of being among equal agents. Excessive alcohol consumption will often cause these convivial dynamics to shift. Krokoszynski (2015) states that a convivial drunken speech may “slip [its] focus from the present to the past, and from group setting and conversation to individual introspection and monologue” (p.20). These monologues often dwelling on the past, feature failures in relationships and conviviality. In other words, they feature the immaterial; what is left in the wake of the ontological present, or the purely epistemological. For example, they may reflect on the passing of a relative or their brother who moved to the city and no longer contacts them. Krokoszynski (2015) discusses how this modality is intimately related to the more confrontational mode of “claiming all that they are”(p.23). In this mode the speaker reasserts themselves in the present, often based on the sad history recounted. This re-affirmation of self often, “[...] also includes self assertive boasting in heightened competitive context” and “in the process[,] other community members are downplayed as less authentic, more backwards, or less knowledgeable” (Krokoszynski 2015, p.26). Imagine two men convivially chopping wood together. One may reflect that he learned to chop wood after his father died, in order to provide for his siblings. The siblings now have moved away and severed their connection. This sad reflection could be brought back to the present by stating that despite these sad challenges he is still an efficient lumberjack. In fact, he knows all of the traditional names of the different species of trees and their specific uses, unlike others in the community. The speaker positions the self as the more capable agent and diminishes the power of the other. It is this ever present, and potentially confrontational and volatile dynamic, that convivial humour, friendliness and drunkenness counters. It is essential to bear in mind that in Amazonian styles of sociality the constant risk of “claiming ‘all that they are” comes from an excess display of a social value, not a vice. That is the value of personal autonomy and independence. As such, excessive jocular or humorous behaviour may surpass balanced conviviality by overemphasizing unanimity, and erase real differences. This erasure may also jeopardize the value of personal autonomy. It is for this reason that the excessively convivial person may rapidly shift in modalities of speech, in order to reassert difference. For this reason

excessive jocular behaviour and friendliness may cause other people to distance themselves, in order to avoid this possible dangerous shift. They may also distance themselves so as to avoid the flattening of difference while still avoiding conflict. The shift from moderated and valued conviviality to excessive conviviality, and finally to confrontation, or distancing, was made clear in instances of extreme drunkenness that I witnessed while in Leticia. Cases of extreme drunkenness in the context of the coca patio usually presented themselves as individuals speaking incoherently for extended periods of time, interrupting others, or excessive joking bordering on insult. The standard response of sober members was to ignore them in silence, and attempt to carry on without letting them affect the dynamic. One time in a coca patio, I saw a group of four men calmly listen to another man ramble drunken nonsense for upwards of an hour before the master of the space quietly and politely asked him to let others speak, telling him that he had spoken enough. Members of the group KKU react similarly. There is some variation depending on the offender, and less patience with younger men who violate the norms.

After seeing an individual from the wider community arrive utterly drunk and incoherent, I asked Sebastián why is it that he comes to Nokaido in such a state to disturb us, knowing that he will be ignored, embarrass himself, and eventually be asked to leave. The elder and master of the space, Don Silva, responded to the question. He said that he himself had asked the man who only ever showed up when drunk, just that same question one day when he was sober. The habitually drunk man’s response was that for some reason when he is deep in his drunkenness the desire to go to the coca patio and dialogue comes to him. Let us also recall now the elder who spent months in Nokaido in silence, never offering his tobacco. Similarly, the only time he truly engaged socially was one evening when he was truly drunk. This time he had much to say, and for the first time presented his “tobacco” and explicitly “claimed all that he is”. The elder that entered with him and desperately tried to get him to be quiet was also often critiqued. It was said to me that the elder is extremely knowledgeable about medicinal herbs and healing, however, when he shows up to Nokaido sober he sits in silence and only speaks when he is drunk. From these examples, we can see this desire for social interaction and the breakdown of interpersonal boundaries being associated with alcohol consumption, but that it is not always benign and can often lead to conflict. At one of the ceremonial dances that I attended around Leticia and the peri-urban communities, I witnessed an instance of violence. After a long night of dancing at around

one in the morning and when the number of people in the maloka had dwindled, I was sitting with a man to the left of the entrance on a log bench. He may have been slightly drunk and was telling me about himself. He explained that he was a proficient wood carver and that people commissioned him to make large impressive statues out of Amazonian woods like the red Palo Sangre. He showed me a couple images on his phone of life sized human figures in different stages of carving. He then told me that he was from the Medio-Caquetá, and had recently come to live in Leticia. I shared with him that I had spent four months in the capital city Florencia a few years prior. He said that in the Medio-Caquetá the “indios” were killed by “white” people who had guns, and because the “indios” did not. He gestured with both his hands, miming the holding of a long-arm. It was unclear to me whether he was speaking of the more distant colonial history, or the recent continued history of armed conflict in the region. Perhaps he wouldn't have differentiated the two periods. He followed this by saying that today, “there the indios, now they have guns” and gestured as though he was holding a pistol. He assured me that for this reason, I was welcome in the space, and safe, and that nobody here would harm me. At that exact moment, his discourse was interrupted by a man who came flying towards us. As I quickly moved away to a safer place, two men fell back over the bench we were sitting on. A stern young man dressed in black, wearing the green, red and yellow bandana of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) and typical of the Guardia Indigena (Indigenous Guard) entered the maloka and wrestled the instigator outside, while women yelled “amérrelo!” (tie him up!). The irony of the situation was immediately apparent to me, and I interpreted the altercation as an extension of the tension I was beginning to feel, despite being explicitly assured of my safety. Later, I saw the young Indigenous Guard sitting sullenly outside in the dark with a bloodied face. I decided it was time for me to leave, and sought to organize transportation with a group of six other anthropologists that I had met at the dance. They had just arrived in the region to work on a project in public health. As we got ready to leave, a young Murui man that we had gotten to know expressed how it made him extremely sad that the altercation made us want to leave. I tried to assure him that it was okay and that things like this happen. He seemed to be holding back tears.

If we reflect on the words of the wood-carver from the Medio-Caquetá before the fight broke out, we can see another example of how conviviality and hostility become mingled with alcohol and sociality. In his words, he shifted between an account of his origin, his displacement and past ruptures in the territory, to his proficiency and skill as a

carver, and from victimhood to an assertion of power. He seemed to be speaking about a balancing of power between capable and hostile agents. All of this was in the context of him reaching out to me, a total outsider alone at the dance. From there he tried to establish an environment of safety and conviviality. The sudden outbreak of conflict seems to show how such sociality is fraught with tension, and how true social engagement among diverse autonomous agents is risky. Alcohol, a substance People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc have a strong ambivalence about, appears as a simultaneous resource for both conviviality and hostility.

5.3 Illnesses of Knowledge and Being

To recap, I used Bateson’s (1972) example of “the man who will die for his flag” as a theoretical example of how Peircean communion within a mono-realist world can present itself in daily life in instances of violence, and that there is always social engagement present before ending with death. Through the above description of the social treatment of alcohol and drunkenness in the Amazonian context of Leticia and the group KKU, I showed how violence is intimately linked to sociality. Specifically, I aimed to outline the dialectic relationship between ludic convivial sociality and the hostile affirmation of self and demeaning of others. It is through a discussion of Murui language greetings as convivial speech acts that I began to explore the epistemological and ontological underpinning of such practices. Now having provided some ethnographic material with which to think, I seek to explore the epistemological and ontological dialectic of daily practice as it pertains to the emic Word of Tobacco Coca and Sweet Manioc. I will use the brief, yet profound rafue discourse of the Murui elder Hipolito Candre Kɨnɨrai, transcribed and translated by Juan Álvaro Echverri as a point of entry. In his 1992 rafue titled “Dɨona jíibina dɨga ima iáiyɨnoɨ iemo rɨngoza farékatofe (The Tobacco and the Coca are Men, and the Sweet Manioc is a Woman)” Kɨneraɨ makes explicit the logics within which the group KKU’s treatment of alcohol makes sense.

In this discourse the elder Kɨneraɨ briefly introduces these key elements (tobacco, coca, and sweet manioc) and proverbial men and woman and then goes on to explain how they function in the process of the Word of Tobacco Coca and Sweet Manioc. Although he arguably speaks more in the vein of yetarafue or the Word of Council as he focuses in on tobacco, leaving coca and sweet manioc as contextual background:

So it is / therefore / this here / does not function / with laughter / is this [tobacco] a laughing matter? / is it messing around? / for us to be kidding around? / For someone who has knowledge [power] / it is well / but for someone who has nothing, it is not well / Thus, this / woman who speaks foolishness / that we call woman of confusion, woman of prostitution / woman of craziness / she does not become accustomed / with this Word / she leaves / She / has her space / there where the juveniles / are laughing / there she is seated / there / she / is watching

[...]

Well this word [ knowledge] is difficult, / if you / want / to know / you must diet / women / you must diet laughter / you must diet rage / only so this / word / a person will understand / they are / these / things / that / impede us from knowing / in our / thought [ heart] / there is nothing / we are thinking about one thing, then another thing, another thing… / But if a person who knows / looks at us / they will say / that we are thinking / in vain / [I am not] / telling / what another told me / only / what i / have experienced / the things / that one experiences are the [things] that one knows / But what another tells / one does not know / For this reason / what I / learned as a youth / when I mambed coca / is what I / took out [retrieved] / what my father / told me / I do not draw / from the basket of another / what belongs to others , I do not know / only from my works do i know / so it is. (Candre 1992, my translation from Spanish)

In order to understand the import of what is being said we must first see the relationship between laughter, teasing, “the woman of confusion”, “the woman of prostitution” and the “woman of craziness” that is mentioned in the first excerpt. These references to “women” are ways of naming specific kinds of illnesses or failures in moral behaviour, though in practical terms they may involve the mishandling of heterosexual relationships and thus involve women in a more than metaphorical sense. For the members of the group KKU these kinds of sicknesses are strongly associated with nightlife in Leticia, alcohol and adultery. For that reason when someone gets up to leave from the coca patio early they are advised by those who stay to go directly home to their spouse, and not to stop at a

bar. These illnesses may also be the diagnosis of a young man or woman who has gone crazy with love, perhaps becoming obsessive, abandoning their spouse for another partner or for another lover, or becoming suicidal in the face of rejection. All of these illnesses are associated with youthful ignorance and manifest as uncontrolled sociality and desire. As the elder says, in the coca patio these illnesses often present themselves in the form of fleeting thoughts and poor concentration. Fast speech that jumps from one topic to another may be accepted for a brief period during convivial greetings, however, when someone continues to bring up one serious topic of discussion after another, without ever closing the dialogue for each it causes uneasiness, and distress in the other people present.

The elder Kɨneraɨ says that when we speak like this, those who do have knowledge will see that we think in vain, “taaɨno uibidɨomoɨ.” The Murui word “taaɨno” composed of the root “taaɨ-” and the classifier-like marker “-no (specific place)” is used to mean “empty” or “empty space” (Wojtylak 2017, p.224). Thus, constructions like “taaɨno uai” can mean “empty speech” or “empty word”, while other constructions using the root taaɨ- are employed to mean trick or lie. The illness represented by the elder in terms of “the woman who speaks foolishness” or in the original Murui “ebena uurite ringo” may also be expressed using the root “taaɨ-”, as in “taaɨdɨ rɨngo ebena ua-uade (a vain woman who speaks for the sake of speaking)”(Román-Jitdutjaaño 2020, citation p.63) Thus, connected to the meanings of emptiness and deception, is also the sense of vanity or lack of purpose. As such, we can see a gradient that goes from friendly and convivial speech, to vain and useless speech, finally arriving at lies and trickery. This gradient is paralleled in the second excerpt where we see the elder Kɨneraiɨ prescribe a diet from women, laughter, and rage. Here dieting, or refraining from engaging sexually with women can be taken as a metaphor for moderating one's necessary sociality akin to convivial and friendly speech, while moderating one's laughter is akin to vain and useless speech. I argue that moderating one's rage is related to lies and trickery in a less immediately apparent way.

Rage is connected to the others because it is how an ignorant youth may respond to accusations of vanity or trickery from a more knowledgeable person. In fact it was often said in Nokaido that when someone knowledgeable states things “as they are”, those present who do not behave accordingly may feel as though the words were directed at them, even though the speaker intended no accusation. Kɨneraɨ also expresses this when he says that “she [the woman who speaks foolishness] does not become accustomed /

with this Word [of tobacco] / she leaves”. The statement could mean two things: either the illness leaves the afflicted, or the afflicted person leaves the space. Alternatively, if the affliction does not leave but attempts to affirm itself as the truth, it can take the form of combative rage. Therefore, rage can be analogous to the simultaneously defensive and combative drunken speech wherein one “claims all that they are” making boisterous claims that others may deem falsehoods but that the speaker affirms as truth. The linking of rage to illnesses of unmoderated conviviality, laughter and socio-sexual desire shows how conflict and violence are emically conceived as part of a complex of illnesses intimately related to sociality, and begins to suggest an epistemological grounding. It is the deployment of the concept of taaɨno that renders such social practices clearly epistemological. This is made more explicit when the elder Kɨneraɨ places these illnesses in direct opposition to attainment of knowledge, which he also associates with power. Later in the discourse he alludes to these in the conceptual idiom of a basket, akin to the image of the corporeal self as a discreet, closed basket. He states that unlike a sick ignorant youth he does not draw from the basket of another. As such the image of a full personal basket is juxtaposed to that of emptiness. Members of the group KKU referred to this concept in terms of being jebogaɨ, a large loosely woven basket that fails to retain finer substances such as coca leaves or knowledge. They contrasted jebogaɨ with the tightly woven ibigaɨ basket that lets nothing slip away. Accordingly “emptiness” may also be spoken of in the sense of lacking material productivity, the fruits of which in historical Murui society would be collected in one's basket.

This unproductive emptiness is expressed with the word “faɨfikuirona” which Román-Jitdutjaaño (2020) translates as being “left empty handed”( At the same time the concept may also be used to speak of an “illness of knowledge” that leads to a failure of one's capacities for action. When the epistemological emptiness of “taaɨno uai” is expressed in the idiom of baskets, earlier described as structures of being, it also takes on an ontological meaning. As such, we can see how unmitigated convivial sociality is conceived as antithetical to coherent selfhood, effective agential power. In Peircean terms, if the self is unstable, and the interpretive community is never consistently defined, a stable mono-realist ontology becomes untenable . Thus we must consider these as epistemological and ontological illnesses, that is sickness of knowledge and being, indicative of an unsustainable lifeworld.

The above interpretation of the elder Kɨneraɨ’s discourses may give the impression of a distinctly realist epistemology based in a mono-realist ontology. However, just as

alcohol, drunkenness, conviviality, and humour are in practice not always shunned in Amazonian society and the group KKU, and are often explicitly embraced, paradoxically so too is a multinatural ontology akin to that posited by a biosemiotic enactivist theorization of sociality by the elder Kinerai. Kɨnɨrai states that “[laughter,] For someone who has knowledge [power] / it is well”. This apparent contradiction near the beginning of the speech of council is not the only one in the discourse. While the main body does have clear and well articulated position regarding a mono-realist epistemology Kɨnɨrai’s (1992) concluding words seem to be one contradiction immediately after another:

[I am not] / telling / what another told me / only / what I / have experienced / the things / that one experiences are the [things] that one knows / But what another tells / one does not know / For this reason / what I / learned as a youth / when I mambed coca / is what I / took out [retrieved] / what my father / told me / I do not draw / from the basket of another / what belongs to others, i do not know / only from my works do i know / so it is. (my translation from Spanish)

Thus it seems that the elder Kɨneraɨ claims the validity and truth of his knowledge because it is derived from what he has personally experienced, and that he does not know from the telling of another but only what he learned when he was young when he mambed coca. At the same time his knowledge originates from what his father told him. He then apparently reverses this once again saying that he only knows from his own “work”.

The key to making sense of these apparent semantic contradictions lies in the implicit juxtaposition of the central deployment of tobacco, and the peripheral semiotic use of coca and their relation to “obras” or work, translated from the original Murui word fɨnoka. In addition the wider communicative context must be taken into account. I find the process of fɨnode is better captured in its emic Letician Spanish translations than a direct translation into English. It is simultaneously the “elaboración” of things, Murui raa , and the “formación” or preparation of the self and its capacities or powers, also raa. Thus, the process of fɨnode can be understood as a combination of making (divinely inspired and modelled creativity) and becoming. The differing emphasis between tobacco and coca as semiotic resources in regard to becoming (fɨnode) must also be considered in its wider communicative context. It is being discussed in a dialogic context and directed at two

different subjects, one being a man who possesses knowledge, and one who does not. In the final words of the discourse we see Kɨneraɨ name himself as the knowledgeable subject and is thus contrasted with a youth who lacks knowledge. In this final puzzling excerpt neither tobacco nor coca is mentioned by name in the original Murui, nor are they referenced in their mundane plant forms. Instead, they are mentioned in their role of pulling together a wide range of interconnected concepts and the ways in which they are enacted in daily practice. Due to the lack of explicit reference to coca as plant or substance I will first explain how it is symbolically present and how it relates to wider themes in the discourse. These are its role in youth, its complex gendered status, and its relation to the previously mentioned epistemological and ontological illnesses.I ground these relations in concrete examples of a four-fold typology of illness caused by animal cocas, and their manifestation as disordered embodied practice and unmoderated sociality. After this, I will explore tobacco's role in the final line of his discourse through a contrast between “True tobacco” and “ambil del monte”. Now to begin, what I translate as “mambed coca” is expressed in the original Murui, with the single verb “duute”. This verb concretely refers to putting coca powder, jiibie, into your mouth. It almost always implies the ritual consumption of coca and the related practices of ritual dialogue with other men in the coca patio (jiibibɨrɨ). Even though I did hear this verb used on many occasions, it was mostly by those who were more fluent in Murui, and in general speech. Because of my limited understanding and auditory comprehension of the language, it is hard for me to speak to its manner of usage in most cases.

There is another related but more commonly used and accessible word that is used by the group KKU. In Nokaido members of the group KKU after receiving another person's coca container or before taking a spoonful out of the communal gourd on the short table may enthusiastically exclaim “duaji!, voy a mambear”. Often this phrase would break the pensive silence, breathing an air of conviviality into the space, and marking a new exchange or transition into a new dialogue. When I asked what duaji meant, I was told that the proper word was duute or duua, but that duaji was a kind of nokaidismo, i.e. a word only used by people that frequent that specific coca patio and likely would not be understood by many outsiders. Another example of a common nokaidismo (although I did hear from others as well) was the word “dache” meaning alcohol, or to drink alcohol and sometimes used comedically while reaching for the communal bottle of ice water, or pot of caghuana.

Likewise, Kɨneraɨ refers to when he mambed coca when he was young. Here it is important to consider that in the rest of his discourse, youth is associated with potentially dangerous conviviality, and the feminine illnesses of “the woman of confusion”, “the woman of prostitution” and the “woman of craziness.” This is further evidence of the symbolic connection between coca and the frivolity or vanity of youth. Regarding this association, Londoño (2000) writes that “in theory though in [his] experience rarely in practice a young man’s initiation into mambe is a highly ritualised affair”(p.119). Just as was explained to Londoño twenty five years ago in the Medio-Caquetá, my interlocutors consistently detailed this formal process, while at the same time admitting that this was not how they first consumed coca. One member of the group KKU explained that in his home territory of the Predio Putumayo he had never consumed coca, and instead it was upon arrival in Leticia that he first tried it. Shortly after arriving in Leticia, while in the “Parque Santander,” he encountered the group KKU preparing for a public demonstration of their dances. It was when they asked him to join in the presentation that he first consumed mambe. This was contrary to the formalized year-long process of first clearing a personal jungle garden, planting one's own personal coca from a cutting given by a male relative, and learning to produce the substance yourself. This was the experience of many men I met, as well as for myself. While I first licked ambil with an elder in Florencia Caquetá, I did not consume mambe until it was offered to me by an ex-graduate student from Bogotá that I met in Leticia. Londoño (2000) writes that these stories of informal initiation were “[...] an almost standardised self-portrayal, part of what seems to [him] to be a common narrative frame where youths are presented as ignorant, and the speaker in his present stage as more knowledgeable and discerning”(p.119). He says that the men he met often expressed their first act of consumption in terms of “out of whim” or “going behind my fathers back”. I encountered this phrasing as well, it now conjures images of me sitting in Sebastián’s house while his young son grinning at me with a guilty smile slyly takes a small spoonful of mambe from his fathers container without him seeing. His son had not yet been intentionally initiated into the consumption of coca and had no reason to have his own container. On the contrary Sebastian's son did have his own small container of ambil. I believe it is fair to categorize this kind of purposeless behaviour as related to the illness of the “woman of confusion,” whose confusion is derived from lack of purpose and who speaks simply “for the sake of speaking.” The elder Kɨneraɨ clearly established both coca and tobacco as “men” and sweet manioc as a “woman”. Tobacco and coca are universally considered to be masculine

substances by the different People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, and according to norms, the women do not consume coca. However, it is also very prevalent for the coca plant to be spoken of in terms of a woman. In a young man's idealized initiation into mambe he must treat his first coca plants as his spouse. He must tend to them, and care for them. When it comes time to harvest, he must be gentle and only one by one, take the leaves that have fully matured and become dark green. The technique of “raspar” that literally means scraping, whereby one strips entire branches of the coca plant of its leaves in one motion is highly stigmatized and considered abusive. This technique damages the more delicate branches of the Amazonian coca variety, thus diminishing its future productivity. “Raspar” is standard practice in the industrial cultivation of the more robust Andean variety that seems not to be adversely affected. This sort of industrial cultivation and mass harvesting of coca leaf for cocaine production is likened to prostitution. Sebastián often spoke in these terms, but clarified that this did not mean that the coca plant is literally a woman.

Sebastián specified that although coca is not a woman, it is jealous like one. He advised that once one becomes a man and begins to mambe, it is his duty to “maintain this woman”, meaning that one must always be working, caring for one’s coca plants, harvesting and processing the leaves in order to have mambe to consume during the evening. To instead go out drinking is akin to infidelity to one’s wife -- the substances, practices, knowledge, and values associated with the coca patio -- and after committing it, one's coca will no longer be effective and will lead to illness. These illnesses are sometimes spoken of in terms of the manner in which different animals habitually consume coca. Sebastián’s discourse on four different improper animal cocas was repeated so frequently and with such formal consistency that one evening, when two other master students came to visit Nokaido, one of them explicitly called out Sebastián on his repetitiveness having already heard the very same speech on multiple occasions. In private discussions with these two students, we all expressed occasional exasperation at the seeming repetitiveness of our Amazonian interlocutors' discourses, and agreed that different men often had a particular speech that they would repeat on numerous occasions. For these reasons my colleagues stated that breaks from the mambeadero (coca patio) were necessary. Perhaps ironically, this very impatience exhibited by the student is a potential symptom of “the woman who speaks for the sake of speaking” and cannot bear to hear the Word of Tobacco. Thus, the students' interruption was the same subject and purpose of Sebastián’s animal coca discourse.

The first animal coca is the most clearly related. This is the coca of the Bebeleches (Saguinus mystax). These are little brown-black monkeys that have white patches of fur on their mouths. Often on a Sunday, when I was working alone on the university campus, I would see and hear large groups noisily scurrying about in the trees. In the coca patio, the way to identify if someone is mambeing coca of the Bebeleche is that they will constantly chatter, whisper, and even touch those sitting by their sides. They will continue this disruptive behaviour even if someone else is in the middle of a formal speech. What makes this animal coca improper is its association with unmoderated conviviality, but not conviviality in general. While unmoderated chatter is sanctioned in the coca patio, people who came and consumed coca without ever speaking, were also critiqued.

The next animal coca is diagnosed in how the person makes their mambe, and is the coca of the green tree frog. After toasting coca leaves, pounding them into a powder and mixing in ash from yarumo leaves, this mixture must be filtered through a tightly woven cloth sack to ensure its fineness. This is done by rhythmically shaking the pouch full of powder, releasing small puffs of fine coca dust into a semi-sealed bucket. In the process, this dust rises through the air and accumulates not only on the inner walls of the bucket but also one's hand and forearm. In my experience, the dust stuck to and coated the hairs on my hand and forearm making it impossible to simply shake off like my less hairy interlocutors did. The rate of this tedious process that can involve more than an hour of continuous shaking, depends on the tightness of the weave of the fabric used, the force with which one shakes it, and the speed of the person shaking it. Every factor that increases its speed also increases the amount of coca dust that will not be trapped in the container but will instead rise up into the air. The faster one works the more one will be covered in green dust, looking more and more like the green frog. This is principally an illness of impatience. We can also see how it is connected to unrestrained sociality and desire in its similarity to the impatient stripping of leaves off the coca plant. The next animal coca is that of the agouti and centers on manners of consumption and uncontrolled desire. When one places a spoonful of mambe in one's mouth, one must hold the powder on the tongue for a short time in order to wet it enough for it to become a manipulable mass, that is wet on the outside but still dry on the inside. This mass is then moved inside one's cheeks. You can tell that someone is mambeing the rodents coca because their cheeks are round and bulging to the point of being shiny. It is also associated with having just one bulge on only one side of the mouth. While this is

definitely related to over consumption, and elders like Don Silva assert that they now mambe a very little amount, “just a little on the tongue,” young men during their “formation” must mambe a lot. The sickness is thus more intimately tied to the way in which the coca mass is packed into the cheeks. Sebastián says that even though he may be “bien mambeado”, you cannot tell because he packs his cheeks evenly all around his mouth and flattens the masses “para que se ve bien”, “so that it looks good”. Though he does admit that at times he makes the error of favouring one side over the other. Thus, this illness or animal coca is one of unmoderated consumption in manner, but not over consumption in terms of quantity. With the coca plant being conceived of as a woman, it also speaks to unmoderated consumption of the social other.

Finally there is the coca of the dragonfly who can not stay still. As I mentioned earlier the norm of the coca patio is that once one sits down, one does not stand up until the end of the session, which could last many hours. What is more, even shifting in one’s seat, or stretching out one's legs would invite Sebastián to say “ua raiɨde” literally “truly sit” but more practically “sit properly.” He would often say this without looking at the person who moved. Because of this norm, when people arrived in Nokaido it was common for them not to sit down immediately. Sebastián would enter the space and speak with Doña Flor or greet other women present before formally taking a seat. He would also at times also lay down in a hammock and check his phone. Another man, Justo, who often came walking directly from work in a slaughterhouse in Tabatinga, would go inside the house to shower first before sitting down in the coca patio. Men that understand this norm attend to their other business before they commit to the dialogue in the coca patio. Instead of taking care of other needs before they take their seat, someone who is mambeing coca of the dragonfly will sit, have some coca then immediately need to get up and pee, get water, or get up to check their phone. Here we see, the flightiness of the dragonfly, is contrasted with the ideal of the firmly planted man. However, just like the rodent’s coca is focused mainly on the manner of consumption, the sanction on movement is not total either. In fact, especially for a young man, being extremely active is highly valued when it pertains to certain kinds of labour in the coca patio. For example, it is expected that a young man upon noticing a necessary task that needs completing will immediately get up and execute it. I was often praised for my willingness to get up and burn yarumo leaves. Other men like Justo and Wencelao, who were skilled at toasting coca would often be hard at work while others sat still, in dialogue. Cristobol gladly stood up to pound the toasted coca leaves. This is a particularly technical

and physically demanding task requiring strength, in which one repeatedly lifts a heavy, carved branch that is thrown downward into the hollow of an upright log to crush the toasted coca leaves. When pounding the leaves, one must be careful not to cause the powder to fly out of the hollowed log, all the while listening carefully for the tell-tale sound of having reached the point where the leaves will no longer macerate anymore. When I was handed toasted leaves to pound, I often blistered and peeled the skin off my palms due to my poor technique. Despite the suffering associated with this task, the biting ants hiding in yaruma leaves, the smoke of the fire while toasting the coca leaves, and the exertion of pounding them, men were often glad to do such labours. At times men would jump at the chance to pound coca saying, “I’m going to do some exercise,” and remove their shirt, and even interrupt and take over for someone who had been already working at it for a time. All of these activities are considered necessary for the attainment of knowledge. The sounds and smells of these activities are part and parcel of the coca patio. After I gave an early draft of my thesis to a member of KKU to read, he stated in front of all present in the coca patio that it was exactly these kinds of labours from which I learned, although it spoke of spiritual matters.

The evenings during which I felt the greatest sense of well-being (ñue iyano) were those when many men came together, each bringing the primary materials with which to make more substances. One man would bring a basket or plastic bag of coca leaves that he had picked earlier in the day. Another would come with a satchel of yarumo leaves, and another would bring firewood. They would give these materials to others who would promptly get to work. As younger men like myself would sweat in their labour, the elder Don Silva would periodically call them over, saying “venga a mambear,” to receive his coca and tobacco, before going back to work. I often saw Sebastián give Justo two large spoonfuls of mambe before he would dutifully go to toast leaves. There is a consistent rhythm to the work that slows down as the end of the process is approached, and culminates when all the leaves have been macerated and the pilón used to pound them, stops sounding. Then Sebastián, who sits silently, methodically filtering coca, pauses to hand out a spoonful to each person present, refueling the dialogue. An aesthetic rhythm of purposeful movement and vigilant rootedness is enacted. It is analogous to the ebbs and flow of conviviality and are the kind of embodied processes that the elder Kɨneraɨ (1992) refers to when he says:

the things / that one experiences are the [things] that one knows / But what another tells / one does not know / For this reason / what I / learned as a youth / when I mambed coca / is what I / took out [retrieved]. (my translation from Spanish)

Here, we see how conviviality, social interaction, friendliness and humour are both considered to be potential illnesses when unmoderated but also an essential step in the formation of knowledge, here conceived as agential power. By contrasting the experiential and embodied conviviality of the “mambeo” with “what another tells” we see a brief privileging of biosemiotic enactivist ontological sociality, over a Peircean refinement of epistemology through communication. In other words in the “mambeo” you form who you are and your body of knowledge through social interaction, social work, and dialogue with others. Simultaneously, once formed, the self and one's knowledge is secured by not drawing from that of another. Everyone interacts together but constructs their own identity and basket of knowledge. One cannot draw from the world of another, but only co-construct the self in relation to the other. This dynamic can be further explored through an understanding of tobacco.

In the very next line, after emphasizing the role of experiential sociality of the mambeo, the elder shifts into privileging epistemic communion and mono-realism in what appears to be a dizzying series of contradictions. The elder concludes his discourse by reframing these things that he knows through the “mambeo” as “what [his] father told [him],” which then seems to be immediately reversed by saying that “[he does not] draw / from the basket of another / what belongs to others , I do not know / only from my works do i know / so it is /.” This quote must be understood in two parts. One which is only a surface level contradiction, which evaporates with a closer understanding of how the Murui concepts at play of “father” and “basket” relate to the concept of tobacco and thus privilege mono-realist truth and affirmation of self. The second part where he refers to what “belongs to others” and his “works” does not refer back to the kind of convivial social labour described above, but particularly to the paradoxical mutual constitution of multi-naturalist and mono-realist ontologies and how it creates agential power. I do not believe this is an overly close reading, nor that these contradictions can be taken as errors or simple misspeaking on the part of the elder. Kɨneraɨ, through his discourse speaks in a very slow and methodical manner, explicitly claiming the veracity of his words in contrast to the words of hasty youth. In the section of the discourse that we

are currently examining, he speaks only forty-four words per minute and in a genre of speech notorious for its polysemiosis, double entendre, and riddles. Thus, I believe they merit careful consideration.

The key to understanding how Kɨneraɨ, “knows what his father told him” but at the same time “does not draw from the basket of another”, is tobacco. Londoño (2000) writes that one of his Muinane (Feenemɨna) interlocutors explained to him that, “the members of one’s patriline and clan are one’s body; they are made with the same tobacco with which one is made [...]”(p100). Insofar as “his father” and himself are understood to be co-substantial, it is not a contradiction to say that he does not draw from another basket. Just as his body is made from the same tobacco as his father, so are their bodily and epistemological baskets. Here, although it is spoken in the idiom of patrilineality, it is better understood in gendered terms of self and other. This is because the idiom of shared tobacco may at times be extended to other clans, other peoples of the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, all Indigenous peoples, or even all of humanity. In the discourse, due to its contrast with the feminine illnesses of unmoderated sociality, we see a contrast between heterosexual sociality, and homosocial communion. The former is associated with the risky business of building new relationships beyond one's moral community by which one may grow and reproduce. The latter is more associated with self preservation.The exact epistemological and ontological contrast between these substantial modalities can be further explored through the concept of animal tobaccos and the nature of the illnesses with which they are associated. In my time with the group KKU, the topic of animal tobaccos was more taboo, discussed less often, and in more general terms than those of animal cocas. I believe this reflects the diversity of the group and its composition of members of different clans, different People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, and other indigenous and non-indigenous people. For this reason, any contrasting of true tobacco in relation to false ones could be risky and exclusionary. As stated earlier, I also refrained from trying to elicit any information on the topic, knowing its sensitive nature. Despite this, animal tobacco did come up as the topic of discussion on a few occasions. In the instances where it did, it was always in the very general and extreme example of what is called “ambil del monte”. Although this may have alienated those from cultures that used substances like yagé commonly, it would not alienate any People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, in so far as they prioritized this aspect of their identity over theirs based in patrilineal descent. Londoño (2000) writes that for Muinane (Feenemɨna) people:

Some of the tabacos rejected relate negatively to awareness and knowledge, much as the True Tobacco relates to them positively [...] Others bring about dizzy intoxications that do not benefit the consumer or his or her kin and cause people to lie, hate, and destructively attack other people with their bodies, their Speeches, or , in the worst cases, with sorcery”(p.84).

The one instance where Sebastián spoke explicitly about ambil del monte was in distinctly epistemological terms and connected to acts of extreme violence. Sebastián explained in what instance one may decide to use ambil del monte, why it is a bad choice, and why the True tobacco is all that is needed. The example that he uses is if one's child is extremely sick and all attempts to cure the illness have failed, one may determine that the illness is caused by sorcery. He says that some people will use the intoxication of ambil del monte, and the visions it causes, to reveal who the person is that is responsible for the sorcery. The purpose of identifying the person responsible is to “return” the sorcery with deadly effect. He says that the intoxication and vision will work and tell you that someone is responsible. However, it will not be true, and means that an innocent may fall victim to supposedly righteous vengeance. To the contrary, by sitting and entering into extreme intoxication by simply licking True Tobacco, the Father Creator will show you in a vision who is truly responsible.

This is coherent with the frequently repeated phrases “tobacco does not sleep,” and “you must not sleep”. Sebastián’s uncle often would recite this phrase and follow it up with the humorous story of his first time mambeing after his initiation and also hearing this phrase from his grandfather. Upon finishing the dialogue in the coca patio, all the young initiates went to their hammocks to sleep. After a long while, the elder went to check on the young men, shining a flashlight into their hammocks. One by one, he made sure that they were all asleep. When he got to Sebastián’s uncle's hammock and shined the light on his face, he saw that his eyes were wide open. The elder asked Sebastián's uncle,“ why are you not sleeping?” to which he replied “you said that you must not sleep”. The humour in this story lies in the teaching that once a man begins to lick tobacco he must remain constantly discerning and ready to act. Sebastián’s uncle concludes the story by saying the “tobacco does not sleep, but I do,” a phrase that he would often use to communicate that it was time to end the dialogue for the night. This is strongly related to

the practice of tobacco hunting, whereby licking tobacco before going to sleep allows you to identify hostile animals, spirits, and persons that come to you in your dreams in disguise, attempting to cause harm. Upon properly identifying them one must reject them within the dream. The proper identification of their true and hostile identity ideally results in some lethal accident befalling the attacker the following day, in the waking world. This is the same process referred to by the deceptive visions of ambil del monte and the revelatory visions of True tobacco. The image of sleep is powerful because it captures the connection between epistemological awareness and agential power. As such, we can see how True discerning knowledge is intimately related to lethal and righteous violence, and can see that the epistemological underpinning is similar to the example of the “man that dies for his flag.” Violent and lethal retaliation is considered wholly righteous in so far as it is based on True knowledge of reality. Through the images of the Father, the basket, and tobacco, we learn that this true knowledge is the purview of the most intimate interpretive and moral community, that is, of the patrilineal clan. This knowledge is so refined that the possessors of it are no longer others to one another, but instead are one. They are of the same True tobacco and the agential subject par excellence. They possess the capacity to objectify the other and the world based on their undisputable esoteric knowledge of origin. They are bigɨninagɨni naanɨ “masters of this entire world.”

When Kɨneraɨ says, “I do not draw / from the basket of another / what belongs to others, I do not know / only from my works do I know,” we see that knowledge and epistemology is tied to a kind of possession, coherent with the basket as a container. In this very same image we see two important aspects. Firstly, the importance of sociality and the material relation with the other. Secondly, how it is through this moderated sociality that both subjects and objects may be called forth into existence. This is because a man first learns to weave a basket in order to begin a sexually and economically productive relationship with a woman. The “work” (fɨnode) is this process of taking dangerous sociality with agential others, and from it, reproducing the self as a powerful subject in possession of the objects through which the moral community is sustained. Thus Echeverri (2000) speaking of the creator writes that:

In this manner he obtains the perfect substance of humanity. This process is comparable to the separation of the starch from the pulp of the manioc. The starch is going to be humanity, the pulp, the rest of nature. What is

obtained from this process is a name, a power for humanity, symbolised in several ways, a salt rock, enlightenment, power, emblem. The processing leads to a goal: the reproduction of human life. (p.40)

Thus the social substance and heterosexual image of coca and the “mambeo”, and the homosocial and patrilineal substance of tobacco become productively unified in the form of the basket, specifically the Basket of knowledge and life. The sociality of coca is moderated by the True knowledge of tobacco. The lethal epistemological and patrilineal communion of tobacco is made productive only through the embodied relationality of coca.

In summary, Kɨneraɨ’s discourse extols the merits of True knowledge and stresses the risks of unmoderated sociality conceived of as feminine illnesses. However, in both the elder’s discourse and the daily practice of the group KKU, convivial sociality is valued but cautioned against, because of its downstream connection to conflictive violence. The elder Kɨneraɨ names this as rage, conceived of in terms of Tobacco and the unmitigated agency and assertion of the self, which implies lethal violence. This understanding of the risks of sociality is paralleled in the group KKU’s treatment of alcohol and humour, which although are generally appreciated, are also sanctioned because of their potential to devolve into uncontrolled conflict. Batseon’s example of “the man who will die for his flag” is a useful analogy for understanding the foundational epistemological and ontological consequences at stake in extreme situations like inter-clan conflict. As stated earlier, the example lacks the subtlety necessary to further understand how people navigate the world on a daily basis. This navigation involves cycling continuously between dialogic practices. On the one hand, we have those that enact social relation to others necessary for production, like in the convivial labours associated with the preparation of mambe. On the other hand, the practices whereby the self, one's interpretive community, and the mono-realist world upon which it is based, is affirmed through the solemnity and weight of cooking tobacco, visionary introspection, and lethal action. I believe it is that through sociality that one may produce, and through hostility one may preserve, but it is only through the cycling between the two that one may re-produce.

5.4 How Words Heal

In this section, I further explore the practical implications of the tensions between Peircean semiotics and De Jesus’s biosemiotic enactivism. In doing so, I continue to

develop their dialectic interplay as an analytic heuristic to reveal the importance of daily practice in the group KKU. I do this through a deeper discussion of Bateson’s (1972) conception of the paradoxes at the root of the suppression of epistemological reflexivity (Keane 2003). Specifically, I further explore how these paradoxes may render life incompatible with the pursuit of “true” knowledge of the world, and how this incompatibility presents itself in the everyday experience of human beings. The example of the “man who will die for his flag” provides an extreme example of their practical manifestations, that is in lethal violence (Bateson 1972, Keane 2003). However, as I showed in the previous section, this kind of violent conflict is only a final moment in an unmoderated shift between conviviality and hostility, conceived of as illnesses of being and knowledge. Bateson (1972) conceives of the practical manifestation of these metaphysical paradoxes in terms of schizophrenia type pathologies (p.204). The pathological articulation of these paradoxes bear striking similarity to those theorized by the group KKU and the People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc, in the false animal cocas and tobaccos, and the women of confusion, prostitution and craziness. They are similar not only in their basic symptomatology, but also in their epistemological and ontological qualities. By placing these two typologies of illness (knowledge and being / schizophrenia) into dialogue, I seek to show through following their parallels, where they diverge in daily life. Through this controlled equivocation, I aim to explore the way emic structures are enacted, and the possible mechanisms of their management. The group KKU understands these to be key in avoiding violent conflict, suffering and death, and promoting the reproduction of life and a good existence (ñue iyano). I intend to show the way in which both mono-realist and multinaturalist ontologies are enacted through the daily practice of metacommunicative illness and healing that constitutes the Word of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc. The mechanism that Bateson identifies as playing a key role in the management of these epistemological and ontological paradoxes is that of metacommunication. He argues that these paradoxes are metacommunicative in nature, tied to the shifting of communicative frames, and not objective. Furthermore, Bateson (1951) argues that the majority of human communication is metacommunicative in nature and that the joking around of youth and even “[...] stylized conversations of adults are only occasionally concerned with the giving and receiving of objective information; mostly, the conversations of leisure hours exist because people need to know that they are in touch with one another”(p.213). To this argument I would add that at least in the Amazonian context and that of the group KKU, such metacommunicative acts also enact specific

relations to one another in order to maintain and reproduce certain kinds of selves and worlds. Bateson’s theorization of metacommunication shows it to be necessary for human social life and provides examples of the consequences of its prolonged failure, specifically of metacommunicative reflexivity.

Bateson uses the example of schizophrenia conceived as a complex of metacommunicative pathologies to show how the same epistemic-ontological dynamics that lead to a “man who will die for his flag” may manifest in subtler ways. Here, pathology must be considered in terms of that which if sustained, may cause the disintegration of the living system as such. At the root of a metacommunicative pathology is the inability to reflexively interpret metacommunicative messages, thus, preventing effective coordination with other living systems. This pathology is the same absence of reflexivity that causes a man to take the flag seriously. At times, and by different actors, such a suppression of reflexivity may be desirable, for example in the case of self defense. Although if the suppression is maintained in the long run, it is incompatible with life. The specific ways in which Bateson argues that metacommunicative reflexivity may fail or be suppressed, and the symptoms of its absence, bear striking resemblance to the symptoms and illnesses of a “mambeador” discussed in the previous section. In comparing the group KKU’s typology of illnesses to that laid out by Bateson, I aim to accomplish two things: One is to identify volition and avolition as the fundamental qualities of these emic epistemological and ontological illnesses; and secondly, to show how the daily practice of the group KKU and the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc is a technique for managing these pathologies by means of metacommunicative acts. Doing so will allow the explicit detailing of what these metacommunicative acts look like in terms of their materiality, and linguistics qualities in the sections to come. Bateson breaks these metacommunicative failures down into a schizophrenic spectrum of three different syndromes. These are characteristic of hebephrenia, paranoia, and withdrawal. Bateson (1972) writes:

At one end of the classification of those, there will be more or less hebephrenic individuals for whom no message is of any particular definite type but who live in a sort of chronic shaggy-dog story. At the other end are those who try to overidentify, to make an overly rigid identification of what sort of a message every message is. This will give a much more paranoid type of picture. Withdrawal is another possibility. (p.204)

According to Bateson (1951) these messages are always “ [...] propositions about codification and the propositions about interpersonal relationship”(p.214), perhaps emphasizing one or the other, but always involving both. Here interpersonal relationships should be considered in terms of the relation between two agents, and thus constituted by relations of volition. Bateson (1972) argues that all humans experience this pathological trouble to higher or lower degrees at different times. Bateson argues that a good example of this metacommunicative confusion is that of “not getting” a joke. While “getting” the joke involves experiencing and interpreting multi-layered metacommunicative messages, we may also consider the ability or lack thereof to make jokes that others get, to be the other side of this coin. Humour or lack thereof, shows a mastery or not in creating interpretable multi-layered metacommunicative messages.

Humour modulates propositions both about codification and about interpersonal relationships, because each communicates information about the other. Accordingly, Bateson (citation) writes that humour “[...] seems to be a method of exploring the implicit themes in thought or in a relationship” (citation) and that:

A discovery, for example, occurs when it suddenly becomes plain that a message was not only metaphoric but also more literal, or vice versa. That is to say, the explosive moment in humor is the moment when the labeling of the mode undergoes a dissolution and resynthesis. Commonly, the punch line compels a re-evaluation of earlier signals which ascribed to certain messages a particular mode (e.g., literalness or fantasy). (p.207) Humour requires an ability to shift between an epistemological and ontological looseness wherein messages are not limited to a specific type. In this looseness, a message may be seen to pertain to multiple worlds simultaneously in such a way that allows one to shift between different identifications of the type of message. The result of this process is that when one resettles into a more serious frame, it is left altered but still distinct. I argue that this conception of humour, in terms of metacommunication, is a useful model because of the way it converges with wider native Amazonian patterns, and specific practices of the group KKU. Amazonian style joking seems to fundamentally involve the careful management of volatile interpersonal relationships between fundamentally unique, yet equal beings. “Equality” here is their similar aptitude for moral

consideration, and potential for agentive action. Their uniqueness is based on their divergent needs, desires and commitments. Similar to Bateson, Amazonians may use humour to convivially navigate diverse perspectives and lifeworlds to achieve the social coordination necessary for reproduction. Failure to moderate humour is conceived of as pathological as well.

In reply to the question: what do Indians [native Amazonians] laugh at? Viveiros De Castro (2012) writes that “The response is, in principle (and only ever in principle...), simple: they laugh at and fear the same things, the same ones indicated by Clastres: things such as jaguars, shamans, whites and spirits—that is, beings defined by their radical alterity”(p.29). All these sources of humour and fear can collapse into the archetype of the “[...] affine [that] has come to stand for irreducible alterity”(Harris 2008, p.290). In the context of the masculine space of the coca patio, patrilineality and virilocal marriage traditions, the “other” may also be gendered as feminine, which we see manifested in the feminine coded illnesses of sociality. As such, similar to Bateson’s theorization, Amazonian humour and joking is intimately linked to alterity, and establishing and re-establishing the ontological nature of relationships between different agents. The fear of the other is due to the existential danger of a powerful agent whose will and desire differs from one's own. This is intuitively apparent in the predatory relationship between humans and jaguars, the power dynamics of the colonial encounter with whites, and the very definition of hetero-sexual desire. There is an asymmetrical need or desire of the other.

I believe the role of fear and humour in responding to alterity is well exemplified in the humorous play on words that I saw produced with the word antropólogo (anthropologist). In Colombia, I saw it to be fairly common for young academics, and some older ones, to throw around the term antropó-loco, as a way to joke about the crazy, unique or eccentric characters that often find themselves in the anthropological discipline. Perhaps this tendency towards eccentricity is grounded in practitioners' necessity to blur boundaries and be open to diverse norms and ways of life. This term has also been picked up, if not coined independently, by indigenous interlocutors in Amazonia who have had their fair share of experiences with the oddities of the anthropologist. Through their simultaneous occupation of the academic and indigenous worlds, anthropologists are often a walking contradiction. I don't think that these contradictions are alien or incomprehensible to our interlocutors, who themselves may be

even more acutely aware than we are of what is at stake in the very fraught anthropological endeavour. We see these stakes more clearly in the deeply emic play on words between “antropólogo”, and “antropófago” (anthropophage or cannibal). From time to time, when I would introduce myself as an anthropologist to someone new for the first time, my friends in the coca patio of the group KKU would jokingly correct me, saying that what I was, was in fact an antropófago, to which we would all smile and laugh. This is a clear play on positionality and the perspectival quality of being that calls upon the historical-narrative-space of the Basket of Darkness as well as pre-colonial, colonial, and more contemporary history as a semiotic resource. In doing so, this one pun simultaneously communicates the fear and humour of all the images that Viveiros de Castro and Clastres cite, whites, jaguars, and shamans. To begin with, this pun could be taken as a direct translation of the Murui word for white person, rɨaɨima, which I heard used by some members of the group KKU on occasion. This term is composed of rɨaɨ- and ima, meaning “to eat flesh” and “man” respectively, and carries the implication of cannibalism, a man who eat flesh, that is “antropofagía” . That is to say, people who eat the flesh of humanity, komɨnɨ, as opposed to the flesh of animals. This term has been used to refer to war mongering figures from the Basket of Darkness, the Carijona people who were the pre-colonial enemies of the Murui people, and most recently to refer to white people. The use of the term in reference to white people can be interpreted as a “strong word” that emphasizes difference. Alternatively, rɨaɨima, could be interpreted as a more direct translation of the word antropólogo. An anthropologist may be someone who studies the origin or secret workings of human society in pursuit of truth, and from this profession they earn their livelihood and sustain themselves. Because for Murui people the pursuit of “true scientific knowledge” may be inherently connected to a capacity for lethal agency, and considering the objectifying and extractivist colonial history of anthropology, perhaps “cannibal” is all too good of a translation. Anthropologists to one extent or another create objects from people (ethnographies, books, articles), and through these they feed themselves. I believe, the undeniable humour of this play on words is that the double meaning exists in the context of generally friendly relationships that are mutually beneficial despite their important imbalances. I can be a white anthropologist with some degree of cultural fluency and proximity, and yet be a radical and dangerous other at the same time. This kind of humour calls into view these tensions and contradictions and lets them be

consciously navigated. Such a joke is simultaneously lighthearted and deadly serious. To take the joke solely as one or the other, and respond with either unmoderated laughter or fear, would make genuine relationships and creative change impossible. This joke not only draws on the alterity of indigeneity and whiteness, but instead speaks to the alterity of desire and moral commitment in general. This can be explored through the different exonyms of the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc. The exonym, Witoto or Uitoto, is believed to have been borrowed by white rubber traders from the Carijona, and was the word they used to refer to their Murui enemies. The name Witoto/Uitoto bears similarities to the Murui word for whites, with a similar connotation of cannibalism. Although the hispanicized Uitoto is used as an ethnic and political identifier in La Chorrera, as well by individuals living in other regions, I was told by people who identify as Murui that all those who identify politically as Uitoto would also be able to say that according to their origin and history their proper name is Murui. When I asked certain members of the group KKU, they offered two different explanations as to the origin of the name Uitoto. One was that it was a mispronunciation of the murui word uidodo which they defined as a “carnivorous ant”. Wojtlak (2017) glosses uidodo as meaning mosquito (2017, p.23). Whether this difference is due to dialectical, or ideolectical variation, what is important is that both refer to insects that consume human flesh or blood. The other local explanation is that it is derived from a Carijona word meaning enemy or cannibal. Wojtylak (2017) demonstrates that although this is its likely linguistic origin, it did not necessarily mean cannibal or enemy but instead meant something closer to a spirit in human form.

The Murui are not the only People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc who received similar exonyms. For example the Ocaina people, received their name from Murui speakers’ word for animal, okaina. In Murui, okaina is not a simple biological term, but instead a moral judgment. Someone who violates the norm of the moral community may be called okaina, for example, if they commit incest with a sibling or are otherwise deemed a severe moral miscreant. It is interesting that there does not seem to be much of an effort for Ocaina people to resist this exonym, even though they are definitely aware of its Murui meaning. Many Ocaina people were raised in Murui speaking households, including the Ocaina elder in the group KKU. Could this be because hostile intergroup social relations are presumed, and radical alterity is a basic cosmological reality?

Perhaps it is that one is always simultaneously an anthropologist and an anthrophage, Murui and Uitoto, Okaina and the endonyms Uvóóhsa and Dyo'xaiya. The images that Viveiros de Castro and Clastres cite as prime sources of humour and fear, such as jaguars (predatory animals), whites, and spirits are all called upon in the play on words between antropólogo and antropófago. The image of the shaman may appear to be absent, however this is not a matter of content but semantics. The word shaman is unfit for Murui conceptions that speak more of brujería and sorcery, or the ability to counter sorcery through wisdom and healing. Both attack and defense involve deep knowledge of the Basket of Darkness, and origins of animals and spirit beings. Later I will discuss all these emic concepts in greater detail, as well as the role of Predation in structuring metacommunicative acts of illness and healing. Now, I will explore in greater detail how the key dialectic between laughter and fear is analogous to Bateson's conception of hebephrenia and paranoia, and the group KKU’s contrast between laughter and rage. Rage here is simply a downstream reaction to feelings like fear and paranoia. By exploring the three heuristically we can better understand their principal elements, before a deeper dive into their unique emic manifestations.

The metacommunicative pathologies that Bateson refers to in terms of schizophrenia all consist of the inability to resolve epistemological confusion. In other words, the pathological inability to make sense of the meaning contained in semantic messages. Bateson (1972) provides an example of a patient experiencing this inability: For example, a patient comes into the hospital canteen and the girl behind the counter says, "What can I do for you?" The patient is in doubt as to what sort of a message this is—is it a message about doing him in? Is it an indication that she wants him to go to bed with her? Or is it an offer of a cup of coffee? He hears the message and does not know what sort or order of a message it is. (p.199)

The way in which the symptomatology may differ is based on the way in which the person responds to this confusion. Hebephrenia is the result of the confusion remaining unresolved, and thus manifests itself in seemingly incomprehensible communicative output, or what is sometimes called “word salad”(Bateson 1972, p.196). Bateson, as with the literature at the time of his writing, considered catatonia or “withdrawal” to be a

different kind of syndrome, however more recently they have been strongly linked to one another. In the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), symptoms associated with both hebephrenia and catatonia are grouped together in the two categories of “disorganized speech” and “grossly disorganized or abnormal motor behaviour” (DSM-5 2013, p.102). Perhaps more importantly to the discussion at hand, we see that hebephrenic-like and catatonic-like symptoms are also connected in the group KKU’s and Murui conception of illnesses of knowledge based in unmoderated sociality, or illnesses of uncontrolled laughter.

Hebephrenia is analogous to the feminine illnesses of unmoderated sociality. When it comes to speech patterns we may compare it to the illness of the “woman who speaks for the sake of speaking”, one who incoherently shifts from one topic to another, and also one who laughs inappropriately and in an uncontrolled fashion. In bodily behaviour, we may compare it with the behaviour caused by the coca of the dragonfly and one who cannot regulate their movement. These hebephrenic symptoms are not a misdirection of will or action but instead discussed in terms of “negative symptoms”. In the DSM-5 these “negative symptoms” are fundamentally caused by “avolition [, the] decrease in motivated self-initiated purposeful activities”(DSM-5 2013, p.103). Undirected purposeless action and speech can be understood in terms of a lack of will or agency. In my earlier example of the elder who would only speak while drunk, vainly and without purpose, yet would sit in silence while sober, we see how catatonia, “alogia, [or] diminished speech output” and “diminished emotional expression” are related to unmoderated sociality, in that they indicate an emptiness of focused will. In this sense the concept of taaɨno uai does not only apply to one whose words are empty, but also to one who is empty of words, indicating an epistemological illness whose consequence is the failure of agential power. The capacity to sustain oneself through socially enacted autonomy and purposeful action seems to be at the heart of both these pathologies. In so far as these pathologies are all encompassing, involving a complete lack of volition and purposeful action, they are incompatible with a biosemiotic enactivist ontology of living systems and worlds. For this same reason, the expected prognosis of an extended absolute catatonia or absolute behavioural disorganization is terminal without treatment. In theory, such a patient could be kept alive through a totalizing intervention (ie, physical restraints and intravenous feeding and medicating), but in the case of such intervention, the status of the patient as an auto-individualizing agent and autonomous living being could be questioned. They may survive, but would it be a life worth living? The patient as

a functioning living system would endure, avoiding the suffering of the disintegration of body and self (ie, pain), but we could also expect total “Anhedonia [, or] the decreased ability to experience pleasure”(DSM-V p.104) as another possible negative symptom. To put this into intuitive and evocative Murui terms, often brought up in sentiments regarding a friend or family member sick in the hospital; intravenous nutrition is not savoury (kaɨmerede), and to be kept “alive” in such a way is not a good existence (ñue iyano) and incompatible with an Amazonian definition of life. For this reason, it is said that many indigenous patients become increasingly ill when they are stuck in the hospital. To avoid this, family members will go to great lengths to provide traditional food stuffs like cassava. Similarly, it was often said that an elder that lives alone in a maloka may slowly fade away. His grandson may go to visit and find him in his hammock, close to death. Upon hearing his grandson address him, "grandfather, have some water. Have some tobacco and coca,” the elder will suddenly come back to life, regain his strength and begin sharing his wisdom. It is not that the elder cannot obtain the bare necessities for life, it is the inability to assert himself as a moral person, that is, a person of value, vis-a-vis others due to their absence that leads to his fading. It is not the grandchild that brings him back to life, the elder revives himself. The offering of tobacco and coca is not a gift of charity, but a request for the elder to enact his power of Word in social exchange. Often when I would offer my tobacco and coca to members of the group KKU in the coca patio the response would be “what do you want to know?”, or “what question do you have?”. The exchange gives the receiver of the substances the opportunity to assert themself as a knowledgeable and capable person, as well as to educate and take part in the formation of the younger person. The elder may not have his own ambil and mambe to exchange materially, or it may be old, burnt, or poorly filtered and full of husk, but, it was often said that at that age an elder has “already become the plant”. He has become tobacco, and he has become coca. It is through lifelong commitments that an elder becomes a kind of moral expert, who through the act of social exchange is acknowledged and given the opportunity to be enacted.

All of these negative symptoms are strongly associated with the additional negative symptom of asociality. Asociality seems to be a secondary gestalt product of the other symptoms. Here we see the constellation of the themes in the story of the Hollow of Humanity inverted; that is, desire, bodily transformation, and speech become avolition, catatonia, and alogia. In their absence, the minimum requirements for a biosemiotic

enactive sociality, living systems and worldmaking are lacking. If the pathologies are left unaddressed, they present a high risk of social, cognitive, and finally bodily disintegration. Thus we see that the illnesses of knowledge, like uncontrolled laughter or speech that appear to have social aspects, in their unmoderated condition, contradict the requirements for continued sociality. In the reality of the daily life of the group KKU, such extreme examples of illnesses were not present. Even in the case of a short and bent elder who I saw begin to frequent Nokaido near the end of my stay, and who I never once heard utter a word, his lack of “speech” was not total. Every time he sat down in the coca patio he placed his little container of ambil at his feet. Whenever Don Silva would address him and offer his tobacco the elder would silently reciprocate. People in the coca patio would address him from time to time and he would smile. When a particularly difficult question would be asked and everyone else would fall silent, or if there was a lull in the dialogue, Sebastián would humorously direct the question to him, knowing that he would remain silent. One evening after the silent elder left, Sebastián said to those still present that, he in fact does have knowledge although he does not speak. When there are fewer people around he will speak. Despite his silence this was not interpreted as toxic or pathological. The elder still upheld the other norms of sociality by showing up, arriving at the proper time, taking his seat, paying attention and exchanging substances. People who truly suffer from severe illnesses of being and knowledge manifest their pathologies in the form of bodily absence or as rage. As the elder Kɨneraɨ states, “these women do not grow accustomed to this word.” That is to say, the extremes of the feminine illnesses of sociality cannot withstand the healing practices of the coca patio dialogue. One either does not come, is healed, or reacts with rage.

The dynamic between healing and illness is revealed by the members of the group KKU’s witticisms regarding people's absences in general. One instance of this is particularly revelatory of the subtle relationship between unmoderated sociality, absence and rage. One week, months into my field work with the group KKU I did not visit the coca patio Nokaido for a few days in a row because I was sick with diarrhea and a fever. I spent most of the week lying in bed drinking Pedialyte and eating crackers. One of the nights that I was ill, there was an intense thunder and lightning storm. It was an impressive display. Lightning touched down nearby within the neighborhood of Noakido and my apartment. When I finally did recover and returned to Nokaido, the men present expressed great concern for my health, and frustration, saying that if I was ill I should have told them. I responded by saying that I was now okay and that I had in fact

messaged Sebastián. They then told me that during the lightning storm a bolt had touched down just behind the coca patio. It hit so close that Don Silva and other people beside him felt the electric shock through the corrugated metal wall. I was told that they thought that it must have been me, “the elder Hirchberg casting lightning bolts” from my nearby balcony. This differed from the more usual suspicion and accusation, that if I was absent, I was out dancing with women. I will show how both their joking theories are intimately connected through dialogic reversal. In order to grasp the logic behind these explanations of my absence and the work that these humorous and mildly accusatory diagnoses accomplish, it is helpful to understand Bateson's conception of paranoid schizophrenia and its relation to rage and sport.

Beyond the hebephrenic and catatonic symptoms of avolition, the other response to metacommunicative confusion that Bateson (1972) discusses is that of the paranoid schizophrenic. The way in which the paranoid response differs from hebephrenia and catatonia in its relation to sociality are brought to light in the DSM-V as fundamentally involving volition. Instead of a negative emptiness, of will and meaning, we see an overabundance. The symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking (speech). Unlike the negative symptoms and catatonia just discussed, the DSM-5 states that these “positive” symptoms present significant challenges in diagnosis in cross cultural contexts, suggestive of their perspectival quality. One of the most common aspects of pathological paranoia is that of delusion. The DSM-V states that:

Delusions are fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence. Their content may include a variety of themes (e.g., persecutory, referential, somatic, religious, grandiose). Persecutory delusions (i.e., belief that one is going to be harmed, harassed, and so forth by an individual, organization, or other group) are most common. (DSM-V 2013, p.102)

Persecutory delusions specifically are a key aspect of paranoia and distinct from “grossly disorganized or abnormal motor behaviour” in that they are relational in nature and indicate volition, and more specifically a conflict of volition. In judging the actions of another to be harmful there is an implied volition, “will” or desire that these actions do not come to pass and the fear of other powerful agents, similar to the fears of Indigenous Amazonians described by Viveiros de Castro (2012). If this paranoia is combined with a

somatic delusion, we see the fear of one's body being acted upon and altered or poisoned by powerful others. At its core, we have the relationality of actors and competing wills. Delusions of grandeur in combination with persecutory delusion reveal how paranoia may also be laden with power dynamics and hierarchy. These power dynamics are in fact determinate as to whether or not a belief is even considered delusion. Ethnic and cultural minorities are disproportionately diagnosed(DSM-5 2013, p.citation ).The DSM-5 (2013) states that:

The distinction between a delusion and a strongly held idea is sometimes difficult to determine and depends in part on the degree of conviction with which the belief is held despite clear or reasonable contradictory evidence regarding its veracity. Assessing delusions in individuals from a variety of cultural backgrounds can be difficult. (p.102)

Here we see two things at play: “degree of conviction” and “cultural context.” Degree of conviction may be understood as the degree to which a certain interpretation is held to be “true” as well as how “amenable to change” it is. When combined with the factor of “cultural context” we must understand that a delusion emerges from the inability to shift between ontological frames and suppression or failure of epistemic reflexivity, in the face of a more powerful other.

In this psychological diagnostic environment firmly based in a scientific epistemology similar to Peirce’s, there is a kind of sliding scale parallel to the Peircean infinite approach to undistorted representation of true reality. If an individual's firmly held belief is being evaluated by someone outside their interpretive community and the belief contradicts a widely held belief of the outside evaluator, the evaluated may be considered delusional. The different interpretive communities involved can be of any size and fractally nestled like Russian Matryoshka dolls.

This nestled and relative quality of epistemology is what we also observe in the use of tobacco as a substance of true knowledge and true humanity, in relation to its animalistic counterfeits. The image of the patrilineal clan may be extended to be progressively more inclusive. The concept of “my father” or “my uncle” may be extended to “mooma buinaima” which is the father of all the peoples of Tobacco of Coca, and Sweet Manioc, and all of humanity. This more universal conception can be extended further through the Spanish or English rendition of the “father creator”. The members of

the group KKU and other People of Tobacco, Coca and Sweet Manioc would often state that their “father creator” is the exact same Christian god, and that therefore Whites and Indigenous people share the same belief and morality. Despite the true tobacco/father’s nearly universal scalability, it is always in contrast to counterfeit or delusional others, often conceived of as animals. These “okaina,” are in possession of, and made from, nefarious and false tobaccos such as the delusion inducing “ambil del monte”. The contrasting of true tobacco with its white impostor, cannabis, is an example wherein the substance of tobacco exists as the source of true knowledge of the interpretive community of the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc, or Indigenous peoples in general, but is made to exclude White others. In this context cannabis is often described as White people's tobacco. Claims to true knowledge are always inherently hostile to excluded and “delusional” others, even though the possessors of truth may be considered to be extensive.

Early on in my stay in Leticia, while discussing the troubled history of the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc, a member of the group KKU mentioned that each individual has a specific history that they must contend with. He went on to say that his people, perhaps specifically his clan, were warriors. For them, war meant the total annihilation of enemy people. This individual said that it is his responsibility to manage this quality and history. Interestingly this individual was one of the more motivated to participate in intercultural exchange. He was key to welcoming me into the group's dynamic and initial rounds of consent for developing this research project. He was someone who declared his people's inherent ethnocidal tendencies and also was the most open to cross cultural collaboration. Unfortunately, he went on to struggle with overconsumption of alcohol, an illness of unmoderated sociality. A paranoid “delusion” may simply become a widely held semiotic ideology or worldview. Hostility to those who would oppose it may become a desired and “non-pathological” attitude in a community at war with another. In this sense, paranoia brought on by a commitment to a certain interpretive community's epistemological stance implies a hostile sociality between the Self and Other. Through the analogous “man who will die for the flag” previously explored, we see how such a state can progress to the eventual total end of sociality. For an individual paranoid schizophrenic, this could present as escalating reciprocal hostility ending in extreme social isolation, or violence. In war one must reflect on the enemy's worldview. One must try to understand it, and coordinate one’s behaviour accordingly, ultimately understanding the enemy’s worldview as false.

This is not intended to be a never ending process. In the context of wars of elimination, this reflexive understanding should in theory end in the annihilation of the enemy and their worldview, thus rendering that reflexivity unnecessary.

Thus the elder Kɨneraɨ in his discourse also advises that a young man must “diet rage” in order to become knowledgeable. Here we see what seems to be a contradiction. Knowledge is dangerous and can lead to ideologically motivated violence, but in order to be attained, one must control these tendencies. Similar to the way in which it is okay for a man with knowledge to laugh, a man with knowledge is also expected to attack and defend. This violence, however, cannot be unmitigated. It should be conceived of in the frame of sport. The humorous accusation, “grandfather Hirchberg is casting lightning,” works within this dynamic.

When I was ill, the group preferred to interpret my absence in a very particular way. I believe this had most to do with the fact that my absence was extended, not just a single night and due to physical illness, and thus required more attention. When missing a single night the members of the group KKU would normally just jokingly insinuate that I was out drinking and dancing with strange women. However, in this case of an extended absence, especially one where I was truly ill, the interpretation changed and took advantage of the semiotic resources of the lightning storm. What ensues is a deeply contingent metacommunicative act, framing my relationship to the group KKU. Through a deadpan delivery of this “joke,” referring to me as "Abuelo Hirchberg, " they treated me with respect, and with a healthy amount of irony. They insinuated that I was knowledgeable and powerful enough to cast lightning. This was a humorous and not truly hostile accusation. Although misunderstandings and small disputes were frequent enough, at no point did I have any outright conflicts, nor show any violent tendencies. In accusing me of casting lightning at them, the group KKU claimed to be knowledgeable by asserting their ability to discern the true source of the lightning as coming from me. Thus, they were able to defend themselves from the bolt, and were not lethally struck. What is more, by claiming that I was casting lighting at them from the neighbouring house shows how, even in absence, we were connecting and engaging socially with one another. I was in their thoughts, and they were in mine. The accusation asserts that we are different in terms of epistemology and ontology, while seriously engaging with and understanding one another. Finally, the joke took a disempowering illness like my diarrhea and fever that strained social relationships through my absence, and restructured it as presence and engagement between equally powerful agents in contest. Through the humorous, incisive

and borderline conflictive wit of the joke, my asocial catatonic or otherwise hebephrenic diarrhea was healed by reframing it in terms of sporty paranoia. Avolition was transformed into healthy volition.

We see this similar connection expressed in the sayings of another long time member of the group KKU who for work reasons, as well as living in a community quite far away frequented the coca patio only at sporadic intervals. Upon sitting down in the coca patio, he would take out his container of ambil and say aloud phrases like, “Now we will connect”, “Now we will fly”, or even, “Now to do sorcery" .The phrase “Now we will fly” was commonly used by others. While the phrase, “Now we will do sorcery”, was unique to him and taboo for its violent implications, people accepted it within its particular context. These sayings all fit into the general idea that was made explicit in the commonly used phrase, “Even though I'm not here, I am present (Aunque no estoy, estoy)” These phrases were only uttered while licking one's own tobacco, and not while exchanging it. These phrases work on many different levels. Firstly, the phrase “Now, to do sorcery” plays on the fact that as a rule most people in the group KKU consider themselves to be devoutly Christian or Catholic and that historically the different churches have prohibited the consumption of ambil as being satanic, demonic, and part of sorcery. The phrase also attaches itself to the small grain of truth, that is, the truth of tobacco serving as a substance of violent agency. The phrases, “Now let us connect,” and “Now let us fly” can be better understood in juxtaposition. They are examples of the multiple meanings at play in the phrase “Now to do sorcery”. The phrase, “Now let us connect” can be taken as setting the frame of communion within an interpretive community. When one licks ambil, one connects directly to the Father Creator. It could also be taken to mean, to connect to one's ancestors, or even just to plug into oneself and one's knowledge. “Now let us fly,” is different in that some members would pair the statement by explicitly stating that their tobacco was their “helicopter” or “airplane” and by that means they had traveled all over Colombia and could even travel to my country, saying, “Now let us go to Canada”. Again this plays on White versus Indigenous technologies, humorously acknowledging power dynamics and subverting them. It is impossible to say whether the explicit stating of tobacco as a helicopter or an airplane was something only done in my presence. However, I do know that knowledge of complex and above all mechanical technologies and thus possession of the power associated with their use, was a distinct point of pride.

While collaborating and spending time with my friend Sebastián at his house in Kilometer 5, our conversation while picking coca leaves often strayed to the violence that was mounting in Palestine-Israel, Gaza and the West-Bank which he heard about through the news, and social media. Knowing that I had family living in Jerusalem and that I was more familiar with the conflict, he would ask me questions about it. Seeing how Sebastián had served in the Colombian military and grew up in a region with guerrilla activity, we would relate our discussion back to the armed conflict in Colombia. Sebastián would ask me how the Israeli military worked, who served, and what weapons they used, stating with quiet dignity that he had trained on every kind of weapon that the Colombian military used at the time of his service. During the time we spent working on the construction of his new house, while spending long hours sitting and fixing, and tweaking the chain of the large chainsaw he had borrowed to cut beams from a fallen tree, he told me about his expertise with other machinery. He said on multiple occasions with pride, that he knows how to operate all classes of vehicle or machinery, and would say, “the only machine that I'm missing is flying a helicopter”.

For multiple members of the group KKU, travel, the opportunity to see different parts of Colombia, as well as their more thorough interaction with hegemonic “white” Colombian society and diverse fields of technological knowledge is tied to their service in the military or national police force. In general, before they serve in the military/police service or travel many people from the Predio Putumayo are already well versed in the use and repair of boat motors, motorcycles, mechanical construction tools like chainsaws, firearms used for hunting, on top of a wide array of manual tools and devices. Here we see the connection between knowledge, power and physical movement, social interaction and alterity. The phrase “Now to do sorcery, ” calls attention to their dangerous and risky aspects. The more all encompassing concept of “Even though I’m not here, I am present", sums up a commitment to constant social engagement despite temporary absences while also subtly calling attention to the dangers involved. The phrase is simultaneously an assurance and a light warning along the lines of saying “I am watching,” directed at both those present and at those who would wish to harm the group.

Here bodily absence is a serious danger. Someone may be suffering from an illness of knowledge or being, a person's metacommunicative capacities may be impaired or dysfunctional, however, through the patient’s presence and their exposure to continuous material metacommunicative acts, the healing of their illness is possible. It is said that when one is truly ill, especially with those illnesses described as feminine

dysfunctions of sociality or has been consuming inhuman coca and alcohol, the only true way to cure them is to sit them down in the coca patio and give them tobacco. Coca will always be present, but it is the substance and Word of Tobacco that is emphasized. This kind of healing dialogue is a variation of yetarafue, constructed from the Murui-Mɨnɨka word, yera meaning tobacco paste. Yetarafue is simultaneously hostile and an attempt at communion. To attack and excise inhuman ways of being and reform the person as human and kin. Echeverri (2010) writes that:

Your healing power is at the tip of your mouth, in a very literal sense. Saliva—imugu—that salty fluid under your tongue; with that tongue, you can greet: brother, sister, grandfather, granddaughter, welcome, drink a glass of water. [...] This is the beginning of healing, the first necessary step. For the rest, of course, sorcery and sorcery and sorcery, but that is a game: the sport of the elders. (A Salty Taste)

Importantly, throughout all of this humour any reference to conflict, sorcery or lightning casting is purely fictive and speaks more to the difficulties and fraughtness of even very positive and friendly social relations between actors that possess diverse and at times contrary desires and wills. This of course is what gives life its aesthetic value, the artful balance, intertwining, and coupling of different worlds. A member of the group KKU told me that despite the difficulties of forming and maintaining relationships, and the occasional need to sit alone and consume mambe and lick tobacco in solitude, this does not have the same savoury flavour as sitting with companions in dialogue. This is why the group KKU is important. Viveiros de Castro (2012) writes regarding the aesthetic balance of laughter and fear that “In order to live according to desire—to ―lead a good lifeǁ(vivir bien) as it is said that Indians like to say—it is first necessary to enjoy living on the edge.”(p.29) All of these jokes and phrases surrounding alterity and potential conflict are accompanied by material practices of exchanging vital substances, and as Echeverri writes, the enactment of relationships of kinship that transform the self and the other.

5.5 Conclusion

In this final chapter I aimed to explore ways in which epistemological and ontological paradoxes analogous to those inherent to the worldmaking process of bigɨni nagɨni manifest themselves in the daily lives of members of the group KKU. First I

established rare moments of drunken violence and conflict as a site the group KKU's treatment of alcohol and drunkenness as examples wherein unmoderated social practices of humour and hostility risk bleeding into one another. In my analysis of alcohol as a double source of conviviality and conflict I outlined the dialectic relationship in humour and ludic behaviour, and hostility as expressed in the affirmation of self and the demeaning of others. Through the emic conception of this dialect as a process of Healing and Illness I explore the potential epistemological and ontological qualities of such practices. By then comparing this emic account of illness with Bateson's theory of communicative theory of schizophrenia, I show that at its core these emic illnesses involve failures to coordinate the interrelationality of different actors' desires and will. I conclude this section with ethnographic examples that show how the daily practice of the group KKU in the coca patio of Nokaido consists of subtle metacommunicative acts that using controlled humour, play with the vicissitudes of these epistemological and ontological paradoxes. As such, different members of the group KKU actively manage alterity and the shifting of double structures of being by drawing on the embodied semiotic resources of The Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc in a framework of illness and healing.

In conclusion, I argued that the group KKU’s daily practice of The Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc constitutes the constant management of the everyday real consequences of epistemological and ontological paradoxes. I believe that the kind of embodied metacommunication described above is the primary mechanism by which the oscillation of the double ontological structure is enacted. The emic conception of this metacommunicative framework is one that takes general attitudes of conviviality and hostility, their epistemological and ontological qualities, and manifests them in a framework of Illness and Healing.

Conclusions This thesis has focused on a “thick description” and analytic exploration of the intricacies of ritual life that persist and flourish in the city of Leticia through the daily practice of the group Ka+ Komuiya Uai. I explored how a small group of men engage with one another and outsiders within the framework of the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc to maintain and reproduce their relationships within the group Kaɨ Komuiya Uai, and so strive to live good lives. The “good life”, ñue iyano is not some idyllic state to be reached at the end of history, but a constant process of working through, healing, and transforming the ails of existence into new life and new worlds. In order to understand this process I explored the intricacies of the group’s identity, membership, and social dynamics. I conducted this exploration through the concept of kaɨ komuiya uai (literally “our-life-word”) after which the group is named, and the context within which the group KKU’s daily practices are enacted. In doing so, I determined the centrality of a constant shifting between opposition and interrelation in the group’s daily practice. By re-reading Echeverri’s model of the “double process of culture in process” as a dialogic integration of key aspects of intimate moral community and symbolic economy of alterity, I showed how these double structures of being manifest in a series of double symbolic forms that allow for their creative deployment and thus the enactment of agency. I then asked: how might the workings of the group KKU’s everyday actions enact the meaningful shifting of structures of being and world? By placing emic theory in the form of the Hollow of Humanity narrative into dialogue with both naturalist and multinaturalist semiotic accounts of knowledge and being, I proposed that the same paradoxes of knowledge and being that lie at the heart of etic accounts converge in important ways to those of present Amazonian daily life and the group KKU’s striving for ñue iyano, a “good existence”. Finally, I connected these contradictions of daily life to the existing literature on conviviality and hostility, using the ambivalence around alcohol and related ludic and conflictive behaviors. I showed how the group KKU conceived of these modes of being - when unmoderated - in terms of illnesses of knowledge and being. I concluded this last chapter with ethnographic examples that show how the daily practice of the group KKU in the coca patio of Nokaido consists of subtle metacommunicative acts, that using controlled humour, play with the vicissitudes of these epistemological and ontological paradoxes. I argued that this is how different members of the group KKU actively manage alterity and the shifting of double

structures of being by drawing on the embodied semiotic resources of the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc in a framework of illness and healing. The kind of sociality alternatively characterized as convivial or hostile by different theorists, and which the metacommunicative practices described above seem to help manage, has been at the heart of Amazonianist anthropology for decades. This debate has also been central to the ontological turn that now extends beyond the regional focuses and across the entire anthropological discipline. At its core, the ontological turn involves exploring the implications of multinaturalism, alternatively called perspectivism, first fully formulated by Viveiros de Castro. These theoretical developments attempt to address the particular relationship between objects, subjects, and world, and consequently social agency and power dynamics as expressed in Amerindian societies through a particular kind of “symbolic economy”. That is, a “[...] complex system in which transactions aim at assigning and transferring symbolic values (e.g. values of acts, roles, or even other signs) through a co-emerging semiotic medium” (Lessegue et al. 2004, p.76). Although the unique regional constellation of these relationships has been constructed as etic multinaturalism or perspectivist ontology, the relationships between objects, subjects, and world is often emically expressed by Amazonian peoples in variations on the idiom of Predation. Here the idiom of Predation can be understood as a widespread cultural model that is a “[...] coherent organization[] of human experience shared by people” (Kovecses 2005, p.193). However, vital to this particular “cultural model” is its radically ontological quality, and thus it goes beyond a subjective experience and forms instead a coherent organization of being that collapses the separation between knowledge and praxis (Costa and Fausto 2010, p.94). While it is unclear whether the widespread idiom of Predation originates in the domain of hunting, it is partially structured by the material practice and extends into diverse domains of life. These may include domains as far reaching as war, horticultural, adoption, ritual, marriage, and day-to-day sociality.

Viveiros de Castro has focused on the hostile inter-group qualities of this ontology in such a way that aligns with the “western” conception of violent predation. On the other hand, Overing and other scholars who have instead sought to carry out an anthropology of the “mundane” and everyday, have come to a different conclusion. They have argued that although the dangerous, violent, and hostile aspects of Amazonian sociality and Predation are important realities, much of the time their native interlocutors do not choose to emphasize them in their emic self-expression. For this reason, the idiom of Predation is

not always adequate. They argue that the more prevalent emic conception of Amazonian sociality is in terms of a moral economy of intimacy and love, and perhaps anger when this love is frustrated. These qualities are what I have foregrounded in the previous section with a focus on humour and playful sport. I have not denied key aspects of hostility, but have shown how conviviality and hostility are present as a constant dialectic that co-constitute practices that in isolation may strike us as either one or the other. This more nuanced take on Amazonian sociality was codified in the volume The Anthropology of Love and Anger edited by Joanna Overing and Alan Passes. My dialectic stance is best understood in terms of a synthesis between Peter Riviere’s and Santos-Granero’s discussion of the relationship between symbolic economy and moral community that conclude the volume. Peter Riviere (2000) states that moral economy, political economy, and the symbolic economy of Predation form a gradient of conviviality and hostility, with Predation encompassing the others (Peter Riviere 2000). Thus, an analytical focus on each allows for specific insights on a “coherent whole”( Riviere 2000, 265). Fernando Santos-Granero (2000) in an argument based on patterns of community formation and fission also argues for an interrelated theorization of convivial moral economy and the symbolic economy of Predation. Instead of arguing that it is a matter of synchronic focus within a coherent whole, he argues for the consideration of a diachronic temporal dimension. This is conceived of in terms of a cyclical process whereby “Native Amazonians are engaged in constant pursuit of the ideal of perfect conviviality. [And that] It is a doomed struggle from the beginning, for conviviality begins to wear out as soon as it is achieved” (Santos-Granero 2000, p.284). When a breaking point is reached a community fissions and begins to grow anew from new centres.

In Overing’s (2000) introduction to the edited volume, she stresses that each Amazonian group differs in its precise conception of sociality and their respective emphasis on hostility or conviviality. In Londoño’s (2017) terms, the different features of the “Amazonian package” may manifest themselves to different degrees, or not at all. These are attempts to argue for broad regional-societal patterns despite widespread diversity between groups. I believe that it is also important to note that in zooming one’s focus in and out it becomes apparent that the different groups, sub-groups, and individuals may themselves stress one aspect or another of sociality differently across time, contexts, and changes in political economy. I believe it is the synchronic co-constitution of conviviality and hostility proposed by Riviere (2000) that allows for the temporal cycling described by Santos-Granero (2000). For example, there may be

historical and political factors that deeply affect a group's expression in general, or simply its expression in a particular historical moment as a form of adaptation or resistance. Echeverri’s work on the double process of culture in the making seems to speak to the way The People of the Centre have historically emphasized these features of Amazonian sociality. His theorization of the social reformation of the diverse peoples living in the Putumayo-Caquetá region as the People of the Centre seems to identify a diachronic and historical process similar to that described by Santos-Granero (2000), although at a regional scale. Social relations that devolved into unmitigated hostility and predatory abjectification during the colonial violence of the rubber boom, was followed by the reformation of a new moral community. Due to near total demographic collapse, the new moral community(ies) could not be formed through further fission as Santos-Granero (2000) describes as occurring when the population of a moral community grows beyond its ability to maintain cohesive and convivial cooperation. Instead, the new moral community of The People of the Centre had to be formed through the coming together of already splintered and hostile groups, not as new clans and patrilines, but as something different. The group KKU does not reassert a patrilineal identity or specific ethnic identity, but instead cautiously understands itself to be a group constituted of Orphans (jaɨenɨkɨ), that aim to call forth a good existence by means of the Word of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc, although its double in The Basket of Darkness is always dialogically present.

In accordance with Riviere’s (2000) conception of a synchronic relationship between moral economy and symbolic economy, Echeverri’s model postulates that while an individual or group may emphasize moral community over hostile symbolic economy, the two are always in conversation with one another. Where Echeverri differs, is that in the case of The People of the Center he shows that while structures of moral community and symbolic economy form a whole it is not a “coherent” whole, and is instead characterized by dialogic tension. I have argued that it is precisely this process's paradoxical incoherence that allows for its reproduction across time and changing worlds. Through the diverse examples of the elder Kɨneraɨ, Muinane (Feenemɨna) chiefs and patrilines living in their traditional territory, and the multi-ethnolinguistic group KKU, we can see that not only is it a synchronic relationship between moral community and symbolic economy within which an ethnographer may direct their focus, but that also our interlocutors belonging to the People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc themselves synchronically shift the location and centre of moral community.

Is it possible that the double quality and metacomunicative techniques of shifting allows the maintenance of these moral communities when unidirectional fission is untenable due to demographics, new settlement patterns of communities, and broader political interests? On a historical and regional scale we can see a diachronic shift in emphasis from a symbolic economy of alterity characterized by widespread hostility and small exclusive moral communities, to expansive conviviality and the construction of a broad moral community. Simultaneously, we see in the minutia of daily-life constant cycling, and synchronic shifting of loci of moral community and symbolic economy of alterity amongst individuals, friends, families, and social groups. This need not take place on a grand scale, as for example, the process of post-rubber genocide social reformation of the People of Tobaco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc, nor over the course of generations as a community grows toward a point of fission. These shifts may also manifest according to the desires and life-plan of different individual actors, and may shift moment to moment based on social context and political will. Insofar as the material conditions, desires, and political will of different actors or groups align, we may see general patterns emerge and change across time. I believe it is possible that the daily practice of enacting the shift between a double structure of being of Sickness and Healing is what allows for constant reattunement and maintenance of wider political projects of moral community construction, such as the reformation of the different peoples and clans of the Putumayo-Caquetá into the The People of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Manioc, or The People of the Centre. This is a broad and far-reaching claim and I do not purport to have substantiated it, however, I do suggest that these are the social dynamics that foster the continuous reproduction of the group Kaɨ Komuiya Uai, in such a way that allows the group to persist in the face of changing life circumstances, and continue to manifest itself as an important political agent in Leticia. I leave it for future research to determine if this analysis would be usefully applied to other groups in the region, and then whether or not it could be used to understand broader historical processes.

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