does not mean that they also necessarily exist in some separate domain inside (human) minds and cut off from the entities they stand for. As I will show, they are not just about the world. They are also in important ways in it.
Consider the following. Toward the end of a day spent walking in the forest, Hilario, his son Lucio, and I came upon a troop of woolly monkeys moving through the canopy. Lucio shot and killed one, and the rest of the troop dispersed. One young monkey, however, became separated from the troop. Finding herself alone she hid in the branches of an enormous red-trunked tree that poked out of the forest canopy high above.5
In the hope of startling the monkey into moving to a more visible perch so that his son could shoot it Hilario decided to fell a nearby palm tree:
look out!
ta ta
I’ll make it go pu oh
watch out!6
Ta ta and pu oh, like tsupu, are images that sound like what they mean. Ta ta is an image of chopping: tap tap. Pu oh captures the process by which a tree falls. The snap that initiates its toppling, the swish of the crown free-falling through layers of forest canopy, and the crash and its echoes as it hits the ground are all enfolded in this sonic image.
Hilario then went and did what he said. He walked off a little way and with his machete began chopping rhythmically at a palm tree. The tapping of steel against trunk is clearly audible on the recording I made in the forest that afternoon (ta ta ta ta . . . )—as was the palm crashing down (pu oh).
Lowland Quichua has hundreds of “words” like ta ta, pu oh, and tsupu that mean by virtue of the ways in which they sonically convey an image of how an action unfolds in the world. They are ubiquitous in speech, especially in forest talk. A testament to their importance to Runa ways of being in the world is that the linguistic anthropologist Janis Nuckolls (1996) has written an entire book—titled, appropriately, Sounds Like Life—about them.
A “word” such as tsupu is like the entity it represents thanks to the ways in which the differences between the “sign vehicle” (i.e., the entity that is taken as a sign, in this case the sonic quality of tsupu)7 and the object (in this case the plunging-into-water that this “word” simulates) are ignored.8 Peirce called these kinds of signs of likeness “icons.” They conform to the first of his three broad classes of signs.
As Hilario had anticipated, the sound of the palm tree crashing frightened the monkey from her perch. This event itself, and not just its before-the-fact imitation, can also be taken as a kind of sign. It is a sign in the sense that it too came to be “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.” In this case the “somebody” to whom this sign stands is not human. The palm crashing down stands for something to the monkey. Significance is not the exclusive province of humans because we are not the only ones who interpret signs. That other kinds of beings use signs is one example of the ways in which representation exists in the world beyond human minds and human systems of meaning.
The palm crashing down becomes significant in a way that differs from its imitation pu oh.9 Pu oh is iconic in the sense that it, in itself, is in some respect like its object. That is, it functions as an image when we fail to notice the differences between it and the event that it represents. It means due to a certain kind of absence of attention to difference. By ignoring the myriad characteristics that make any entity unique, a very restricted set of characteristics is amplified, here by virtue of the fact that the sound that simulates the action also happens to share these characteristics.
The crashing palm itself comes to signify something for the monkey in another capacity. The crash, as sign, is not a likeness of the object it represents. Instead, it points to something else. Peirce calls this sort of sign an “index.” Indices constitute his second broad class of signs.
Before exploring indices further, I want to briefly introduce the “symbol”—Peirce’s third kind of sign. Unlike iconic and indexical modes of reference, which form the bases for all representation in the living world, symbolic reference is, on this planet at least, a form of representation that is unique to humans. Accordingly, as anthropologists of the human we are most familiar with its distinctive properties. Symbols refer, not simply through the similarity of icons, or solely through the pointing of indices. Rather, as with the word causanguichu, they refer to their object indirectly by virtue of the ways in which they relate systemically to other such symbols. Symbols involve convention. This is why causanguichu only means—and comes to feel meaningful—by virtue of the established system of relationships it has with other words in Quichua.
The palm that Hilario sent crashing down that afternoon startled the monkey. As an index it forced her to notice that something just happened, even though what just happened remained unclear.10 Whereas icons involve not noticing, indices focus the attention. If icons are what they are “in themselves” regardless of the existence of the entity they represent, indices involve facts “themselves.” Whether or not someone was there to hear it, whether or not the monkey, or anyone else for that matter, took this occurrence to be significant, the palm, itself, still came crashing down.
Unlike icons, which represent by virtue of the resemblances they share with objects, indices represent “by virtue of real connections to them” (Peirce 1998c: 461; see also CP 2.248). Tugging on the stems of woody vines, or lianas, that extend up into the canopy is another strategy to scare monkeys out of their hidden perches (see frontispiece, this chapter). To the extent that such an action can startle a monkey it is because of a chain of “real connections” among disparate things: the hunter’s tug is transmitted, via the liana, high up to the tangled mat of epiphytes, lianas, moss, and detritus that accumulates to form the perch atop which the hiding monkey sits.
Although one might say that the hunter’s tug, propagated through the liana and mat, literally shakes the monkey out of her sense of security, how this monkey comes to take this tug as a sign cannot be reduced to a deterministic chain of causes and effects. The monkey need not necessarily perceive the shaking perch to be a sign of anything. And in the event that she does, her reaction will be something other than the effect of the force of the tug propagated up the length of the liana.
Indices involve something more than mechanical efficiency. That something more is, paradoxically, something less. It is an absence. That is, to the extent that indices are noticed they impel their interpreters to make connections between some event and another potential one that has not yet occurred. A monkey takes the moving perch, as sign, to be connected to something else, for which it stands. It is connected to something dangerously different from her present sense of security. Maybe the branch she is perched on is going to break off. Maybe a jaguar is climbing up the tree . . . Something is about to happen, and she had better do something about it. Indices provide information about such absent futures. They encourage us to make a connection between what is happening and what might potentially happen.
LIVING SIGNS
Asking whether signs involve sound images like tsupu, or whether they come to mean through events like a palm crashing down, or whether their sense emerges in some more systemic and distributed manner, like the interrelated network of words printed on the pages that make up this book, might encourage us to think about signs in terms of the differences in their tangible qualities. But signs are more than things. They don’t squarely reside in sounds, events, or words. Nor are they exactly in bodies or even minds. They can’t be precisely located in this way because they are ongoing relational processes. Their sensuous qualities are only one part of the dynamic through which they come to be, to grow, and to have effects in the world.
In other words signs are alive. A crashing palm
