Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America

Abstract

The ten essays in Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America, edited by Suzanne Oakdale and Magnus Course, present the tense relation between cultural forces and personal agency, between individual particularities and cultural diversity or the universality of human sociability. But this is not an abstract discussion. In line with one of the most valuable aspects of the anthropological tradition, the contributors consider this question with reference to ethnographic materials, collected in this case in different parts of lowland South America (Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile), and with attention to native voices. The intensive use of autobiographical narratives (in some essays more than others) makes the book germane to those interested in discourse as a social practice both situated and at the same time linked to multiple aspects of social life in every group.One essay examines the biography of a Waorani leader with a porous identity into which other individuals are incorporated and for which victimization is a marker of personhood and sociability. The topics of other essays include family stories of the Asháninka, a group whose members conceive of the person as an active seeker of external resources; Piro (Yine) narratives of “exemplary personal experience” that are special cases of simultaneous self-singularization and multiplicity; the meaning of the multiple persons of a young Marubo shaman; paradoxical models of Mapuche personhood as described in song and ritual; speech-centered stories about encounters between Kalapalo enemies; the “lascivious” autobiography of a Tukano leader; the logic of assemblage in the autobiographical narrative of a Kawaiwete “captain”; the stressful life of a Xavante leader who has lived between two worlds; and the story of a Kuikuro leader. Together, they illustrate the complex and variable relations of personal exchange that characterize anthropological research.The collection's interest in narrative practices illustrates the centrality of language as a privileged symbolic expression of the categories of self, individual, and person, including how they overlap and how they differ. The essays point to autobiographies as re-creations of personal experience and communicative bridges between social worlds. There are questions as to whether these categories are particular or transcultural, and if so, in what sense. Are there multiple experiences of self? If so, are they comprehensible to us? How are they related to the long and complex history of contact between lowland South American Amerindian societies and colonizers? Are these narratives history or myth? Does that distinction help us to understand them? What is the role of the person who elicits or records the story, and what is the legacy of the relationship between researcher and research subject? What is the role of narratives in the construction of personal and ethnic identities not based on the well-known opposition between tradition and modernity, identities that are hybrid and open to participation? The narratives discussed in this collection are presented in light of all these questions and as ways to structure experience and to understand traumatic events and historical context. They problematize the use of history and myth, as well as the autobiographical form, as evidence for concepts of self and person and as mechanisms for constructing social relations inside and outside the community.The example of the Asháninka of Peru's central Amazon region, Selva Central, which is examined in Hanne Veber's essay “Memories of the Ucayali: The Asháninka Story Line,” illustrates the value of focusing on a narrative's manner of presentation, on the model of a person that it depicts, on the ways in which conceptions of time are entangled with what it means to be a person, and on the interethnic context within which it is presented rather than on narrative as an account of “what really happened” (p. 109). Collective memories are not mechanical copies of reality but constructions that emerge from social interactions in which personal, historical, and political consciousness are formed. Asháninka narratives contrast with stories told by missionaries and other outsiders on one crucial point: the former's stories about the rubber boom do not recount individual victimization and heroism. They model family rather than collective identities. While they recount a series of events that made for a difficult journey, they differ radically from myth. The Asháninka regard outsiders as potentially dangerous, but they consider contact necessary in order to obtain resources. They think of themselves not as victims but as seekers of resources who assume necessary risks — including but not limited to colonial contact — and thus confront danger and loss. In this sense, their narratives are more than simple retrospectives. They are structured and retold in order to organize their vision of a world not fully or exclusively imposed by bosses and gringos but open to the influence of their own actions as well (p. 113).