and telos altogether—since these are seen, at best, as exclusively human mental affairs.
This alignment is also evident in attempts in science and technology studies (STS), especially those associated with Bruno Latour, to equalize the imbalance between unfeeling matter and desiring humans by depriving humans of a bit of their intentionality and symbolic omnipotence at the same time that they confer on things a bit more agency. In his image of “speech impediments,” for example, Latour attempts to find an idiom that might bridge the analytical gap between speaking scientists and their supposedly silent objects of study. “Better to have marbles in one’s mouth, when speaking about scientists,” he writes, “then to slip absent-mindedly from mute things to the indisputable word of the expert” (2004: 67). Because Latour conflates representation and human language his only hope to get humans and nonhumans in the same frame is to literally mix language and things—to speak with marbles in his mouth. But this solution perpetuates Cartesian dualism because the atomic elements remain either human mind or unfeeling matter, despite the fact that these are more thoroughly mixed than Descartes would have ever dreamed, and even if one claims that their mixture precedes their realization. This analytic of mixture creates little homunculi at all levels. The hyphen in Latour’s (1993: 106) “natures-cultures” is the new pineal gland in the little Cartesian heads that this analytic unwittingly engenders at all scales. An anthropology beyond the human seeks to find ways to move beyond this analytic of mixture.
Erasing the divide between the human mind and the rest of the world, or, alternatively, striving for some symmetrical mixing between mind and matter, only encourages this gap to emerge again elsewhere. An important claim I make in this chapter, and an important foundation for the arguments to be developed in this book, is that the most productive way to overcome this dualism is not to do away with representation (and by extension telos, intentionality, “aboutness,” and selfhood), or simply project human kinds of representation elsewhere, but to radically rethink what it is that we take representation to be. To do this, we need first to provincialize language. We need, in Viveiros de Castro’s words, to “decolonize thought,” in order to see that thinking is not necessarily circumscribed by language, the symbolic, or the human.
This involves reconsidering who in this world represents, as well as what it is that counts as representation. It also involves understanding how different kinds of representation work and how these different kinds of representation variously interact with each other. What sort of life does semiosis take beyond the trappings of internal human minds, beyond specifically human propensities, such as the ability to use language, and beyond those specifically human concerns that those propensities engender? An anthropology beyond the human encourages us to explore what signs look like beyond the human.
Is such an exploration possible? Or do the all-too-human contexts in which we live bar us from such an endeavor? Are we forever trapped inside our linguistically and culturally mediated ways of thinking? My answer is no: a more complete understanding of representation, which can account for the ways in which that exceptionally human kind of semiosis grows out of and is constantly in interplay with other kinds of more widely distributed representational modalities, can show us a more productive and analytically robust way out of this persistent dualism.
We humans are not the only ones who do things for the sake of a future by re-presenting it in the present. All living selves do this in some way or another. Representation, purpose, and future are in the world—and not just in that part of the world that we delimit as human mind. This is why it is appropriate to say that there is agency in the living world that extends beyond the human. And yet reducing agency to cause and effect—to “affect”—side steps the fact that it is human and nonhuman ways of “thinking” that confer agency. Reducing agency to some sort of generic propensity shared by humans and nonhumans (which in such approaches includes objects) thanks to the fact that these entities can all equally be represented (or that they can confound these representations), and that they then participate by virtue of this in some sort of very humanlike narrative, trivializes this thinking by failing to distinguish among ways of thinking and by indiscriminately applying distinctively human ways of thinking (based on symbolic representation) to any entity.
The challenge is to defamiliarize the arbitrary sign whose peculiar properties are so natural to us because they seem to pervade everything that is in any way human and anything else about which humans can hope to know. That you can feel tsupu without knowing Quichua makes language appear strange. It reveals that not all the signs with which we traffic are symbols and that those nonsymbolic signs can in important ways break out of bounded symbolic contexts like language. This explains not only why we can come to feel tsupu without speaking Quichua but also why Hilario can communicate with a nonsymbolic being. Indeed, the startled monkey’s jump, and the entire ecosystem that sustains her, constitutes a web of semiosis of which the distinctive semiosis of her human hunters is just one particular kind of thread.
To summarize: signs are not exclusively human affairs. All living beings sign. We humans are therefore at home with the multitude of semiotic life. Our exceptional status is not the walled compound we thought we once inhabited. An anthropology that focuses on the relations we humans have with nonhuman beings forces us to step beyond the human. In the process it makes what we’ve taken to be the human condition—namely, the paradoxical, and “provincialized,” fact that our nature is to live immersed in the “unnatural” worlds we construct—appear a little strange. Learning how to appreciate this is an important goal of an anthropology beyond the human.
THE FEELING OF RADICAL SEPARATION
The Amazon’s many layers of life amplify and make apparent these greater than human webs of semiosis. Allowing its forests to think their ways through us can help us appreciate how we too are always, in some way or another, embedded in such webs and how we might do conceptual work with this fact. This is what draws me to this place. But I’ve also learned something from attending to those times when I’ve felt cut off from these broader semiotic webs that extend beyond the symbolic. Here I reflect on such an experience that I had on one of the many bus trips I made from Quito to the Amazon region. I relay the feeling of what happened on this trip, not as a personal indulgence, but because I think it reveals a specific quality of symbolic modes of thinking—the propensity that symbolic thought has to jump out of the broader semiotic field from which it emerges, separating us, in the process, from the world around us. As such, this experience can also teach us something about how to understand the relation that symbolic thought has to the other kinds of thought in the world with which it is continuous and from which it emerges. In this sense, this reflection on my experience is also part of a broader critique, developed in the following two sections, of the dualistic assumptions at the base of so many of our analytical frameworks. I explore this experience of becoming dual, of feeling ripped out of a broader semiotic environment, that I had on a trip down to el Oriente, Ecuador’s Amazonian region east of the Andes, by means of a narrative detour. Apart from serving as a bit of a respite from the conceptual work done in this chapter, I hope it will give some sense of the way in which Ávila itself is embedded in a landscape with a history. For this trip traces the trajectories of many other trips, and all of these catch this place up in so many kinds of webs.
The past few days had been unusually rainy on the eastern slopes of the Andes, and the main road leading down to the lowlands had been intermittently washed out. Joined by my cousin Vanessa, who was in Ecuador visiting relatives, I boarded a bus headed for the Oriente. With the exception of a group of Spanish tourists occupying the back rows, the bus was filled with locals who lived along the route or in Tena, the capital of Napo Province and the bus’s final destination. This was a trip I had made many times by now, and it was our plan to take this bus along its route over the high cordillera east of Quito that divides the Amazonian watershed from the inter-Andean valley and then to follow this down through the village of Papallacta, the site of a pre-Hispanic cloud forest settlement situated along one of the major trade routes through which highland and lowland products flowed (I refer you to figure 1 on page 4). Today Papallacta is an important pumping station for Amazonian resources such as crude oil, which since the 1970s has transformed
