Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumAction and seduction Comment on Fausto, Carlos. 2020. Art effects: Image, agency, and ritual in Amazonia. Translated by David Rodgers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Pedro PitarchPedro PitarchUniversidad Complutense de Madrid Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMy commentary will be a little eccentric, partly because I am not an art specialist, but also because my ethnographic area of specialization, which is Mesoamerica, is in many aspects far from Amazonia, the main area dealt with by Art effects. And yet a number of aspects that are analyzed in the book reflect Mesoamerican art and ritual. Three of them come to mind above all: 1) indigenous “art” as an essentially bodily domain; 2) the indigenous image as a technique of vision, and vision as a play of uncertainties; and 3) “ritual art” as a series of topological operations.Saying that the human body represents the main object of indigenous attention has become a truism in current Amerindian studies. Since the publication in 1979 of “The construction of the person in indigenous Brazilian societies” (Seeger, Da Matta, and Viveiros de Castro [1979] 2019; see also Costa 2019), and the article by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism” (1998), it is now well accepted that the body is the main field where indigenous culture concentrates its efforts and responsibility. Obviously, objects such as baskets, ceramics, totem poles, and stone stelae exist, which are to a certain extent separated from the body. Even so, the preference, at times almost exclusive, for techniques and objects applied directly to the body is striking: painting, feathers, adornments, textiles, etc. Its bodily character makes it an ephemeral art. This perhaps contrasts with artistic traditions in other parts of the world, where objects appear to be capable of existing without the support of the human body and are therefore capable of becoming something collectable.Each of the chapters of Art effects shows this focus on the body. The first is dedicated to what Fausto calls “the living body,” basically dances and songs, as well as some trophies. But the remaining chapters also deal with what could be called “corporeal objects”: extensions, externalizations, wrappings. The second is given over to wind instruments, the sacred flutes which are thought of as an externalization of the internal tubes of the human body. The third deals with masks: masks as another body that wraps around the first body. And the final two chapters analyze the ritual anthropomorphic effigies, images of the deceased, an enemy, or another identity. In this case, the effigy points not to the presence but the absence of the human body, in a similar way perhaps to how footprints refer to the body that produced them. In the final instance, what Art effects shows in this respect is the contiguity between bodies and ritual objects, as, from an indigenous point of view, ritual objects are thought of as forming part of the body itself.Continuing with this idea, it is noteworthy that in areas such as the Andes or Mesoamerica, where textiles constitute a privileged artistic material, textile art is basically dedicated to wrapping the human body. Among the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Guatemala, dressing means putting on a “second skin.” Clothes do not cover or hide the body, but rather form part of it; and in fact, the human body is always imaged as clothed. As is the case with skin in other parts of the Americas, textile makes surfaces visible and the surface is what must be seen. It is true that currently, as a result of the demand for “artisan products,” indigenous women also weave tablecloths, curtains, cushion covers, and other objects for sale to tourists. But I have to admit that there is something really strange in seeing an indigenous textile reconverted into an object of domestic decoration: it almost appears an act of flaying,Digressing, despite this central role of the body, it is curious that Amerindian anthropology has not developed more the study of what Marcel Mauss ([1934] 1973) called “techniques of the body” and the Latins called gestus (Schmitt 1991). And yet, at least among the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, the attention to body movements and the economy of gestures is extraordinary. The way of sitting and standing, hand movements, facial gestures, the voice—everything must transmit serenity and self-control. The maintenance of a vertical stance and corporal symmetry is a constant concern. Walking is characteristically regular, graceful, solemn. In addition, these gestures appear to change very slowly over time. The position of the fingers when talking in public is precisely the same among the present indigenous peasants of Chiapas as it was in Maya ceramic images a thousand years ago. Perhaps we could talk here of an “art of gestures,” an everyday art where indigenous culture concentrates its ethical and aesthetic efforts (Pitarch 2000). In this case, it would be a different form of art than that with which Art effects occupies itself, where aesthetics and ethics do not appear as defining criteria.What is an image from an indigenous point of view? We probably still lack a comprehensive theory of Amerindian images, and above all we need a greater number of in-depth ethnographic studies. In any event, it is clear that the indigenous idea of the image does not coincide with the European one. From an indigenous point of view, European images of a more “representational” nature are not considered authentic images (they are simple pictures, passive subjects without spontaneity or free will), while indigenous images have properties that it would be difficult for European art to accept. In the Maya-Tzeltal language, the same term is used for an object-image (a statue of a national hero, the image of a saint in a church, a revealing painting, the spots of the jaguar, writing) and for a lucid vision or a lived dream. An image is something, or rather someone, that provides a vision or revelation, in the sense of showing something hidden to knowledge and perception.Often they are subjectively active images, a presence that appropriates the observer’s vision, in a classic inversion of figure/background. It could be said to be an ergative image, in which the object adopts the active form while the spectator becomes passive. In the words of Roy Wagner, the image “borrows your own eyes, but then turns them against you, to see a kind of human imago that could never exist on this earth” (2010: xii). The ritual domain of this figure/background inversion bestows a great power of intervention. But in these circumstances, the image may become so powerful that part of the ritual task consists of controlling it, or at least limiting its unexpected effects.This type of image produces a labyrinthine game of multiple realities and improbable juxtapositions. Fausto’s argument in relation to the ritual images is that they tend to be the most complex and paradoxical possible, because their aim is to figure transformation. Thus, “images are ambiguous and possess multiple referents, nesting within each other and replicating themselves to infinity, producing an equivocal topology and a dynamic figure-ground oscillation” (p. 271). This perspective essentially coincides with the interpretation by Neurath (2013) of Huichol images in Mexico. The viewer’s attention is first focused on certain aspects of the image, but then many other details emerge that suggest new visions and transformations; transformations that are potentially unlimited and often of an idiosyncratic nature. In Mesoamerica, mirrors, which function as an instrument for vision, tend to be fragmented like a mosaic, so the human image is divided and multiplies in a fractal scale. Far from searching for unity and identity, indigenous images systematically multiply and alter.Even more so, both in Brazil and Mexico (or as happens with masks in the Northwest Coast), the images play systematically with deception, artifice, and surprise. The image mocks the viewer. In turn, deception, as Fausto shows, is related to the creative and transformative capacity associated with the Trickster. (In myths, the indigenous gods, in particular the sun, make things and new beings appear by deception and lies.) And as Neurath (2020) observes, this deception, which is a type of ontological uncertainty, is also associated with doubt and ambiguity (an image that reveals and conceals at the same time). Doubt and contradiction are what lead to reflection on the ritual activity itself.Amerindian “verbal art” is an art of images as well. They are images that, like visual images, play with a plurality of meanings, with artifice, with doubt, in which things are also said and hidden, insinuated without explicitly making a statement. And it is also a corporeal art. The enormous importance of words resides not so much in their communicative capacity as in their physical properties of action and seduction: the tone, the timbre, the rate of breathing, the gestures that accompany them, the formal eloquence. In fact, a verbal image is perceived not only by hearing, but also by smell (and, in certain conditions, by touch). The Tzeltal consider shamanic songs to be “fragrant” words because the spirits to which they are addressed do not hear them but smell them (Pitarch 2012). The spirits smell the humans, the humans hear the spirits, and on exceptional occasions, spirits and humans see each other reciprocally. We could therefore talk about “ontological synaesthesia.” Classes of distinct beings perceive, not only from different points of view, but through different senses. Depending on the class being involved, the images automatically activate a sensorial channel to the detriment of the rest.The interest of ritual Amerindian art in the surfaces once more suggests a form of topological imagination. The topology implies an interplay of spaces that are not altered by continuous, reversible transformations. These surfaces can be folded, unfolded, stretched out, contracted, or deformed without losing their continuity, without separating what is joined, nor uniting what is separated. In topology, neither distance nor measure is needed since the topology is not dependent on quantities but relationships.In Art effects, this topology is insinuated in a number of aspects of ritual, among them the sounds of sacred flutes. “During the performance the flute inside the spirit is outside (as a visible flute) but also and simultaneously inside (as breath). The topology evokes the Klein bottle referred to by Lévi-Strauss in The jealous potter (1985: 216): a tube internal to the body appears as an external tube, which contains the inner breath, exteriorized as organized sound beyond-the-human” (p. 109). In “Thinking through tubes” (2019), Stephen Hugh-Jones proposes a sort of Amerindian transformational morphology, that is, a penchant for the interplay of forms, such as the tubes, in which these reappear transformed in different domains of the world.Thus, Amerindian ritual appears to offer a particularly productive field for understanding this indigenous interest in the surfaces of the world and of beings. It is a form of imagination and action particularly concerned with specific positions: not only inside-outside positions, but an ample repertoire of positions that include relations of contact, connection, accumulation, immersion. Perhaps rather than positions, we could talk of pre-positions: with, against, within, outside of, in, between, next to, and so on.In addition, it is a morphology based on technical, routine, often domestic, processes, a material and sensible topology. In Mesoamerica one of the best models of this indigenous topology is textiles. Textile inflections serve as a coextensive form of expressing relationships of opposition, inversion, mediation, or interchange. The cosmos is considered a textile with an obverse side, lived in by humans and other solar beings, and a reverse, lived in by spirits, the dead, and others; the relation and transition between the two sides is produced by the successive folds of this textile (Pitarch 2021). The transformations are not precisely symbolic transformations, but positions, a topology in place of a semiotics, as Gell suggested (1998; see also Lagrou 2003).In all these senses, Art effects admirably shows how the study of ritual art and its objects results in a speculative field that is key for understanding Amerindian cosmology and ontology. But perhaps in an even more instructive way it also shows the difficulties themselves and the challenges arising from this study. As happens with its images, ritual art is a difficult field to set and delimit, probably because it is designed to play with invention. It extends in unpredictable directions and relates to multiple realities. It portrays a plurality and simultaneity of perspectives and voices. It plays unceasingly with ambiguity and uncertainty. And at times, despite having been produced by the participants themselves, it acquires such autonomy and power that it is capable of converting them into its victims. Seen in this way, indigenous ritual art could represent an example of method for its anthropology as well.ReferencesCosta, Luiz. 2019. “Introduction: The place of ‘The construction of the person in indigenous Brazilian societies’ in Amazonian anthropology.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9 (3): 687–93.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarGell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency: An anthropological theory. 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For the past thirty years he has carried out research among the Highland Maya of Mexico, focused on cosmology, personhood, shamanism, and ritual language.Pedro Pitarch[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 11, Number 3Winter 2021 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717488 © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.