was “I”? Was I even alive? Thinking like this, my thoughts ran wild.
This feeling of radical doubt, the feeling of being cut off from my body and a world whose existence I no longer trusted, didn’t go away when several hours later the landslides were cleared and we were able to get through. Nor did it subside when we finally got to Tena (it was too late to make it to Loreto that night). Not even in the relative comfort of my old haunt the hotel El Dorado did I manage to feel much better. This simple but cozy family-run inn used to be my stopping point when I was doing research in Runa communities on the Napo River.18 It was owned by don Salazar, a veteran—with the scar to prove it—of Ecuador’s short war with Peru in which Ecuador lost a third of its territory and access to the Amazon River. The hotel’s name, El Dorado, appropriately marks this loss by paying homage to that never quite attainable City of Gold that lies somewhere deep in the Amazon (see Slater 2002; see also chapters 5 and 6).
The next morning after a fitful night I was still out of sorts. I couldn’t stop imagining different dangerous scenarios, and I still felt cut off from my body and from those around me. Of course I pretended I wasn’t feeling any of this. Trying at least to act normal, and in the process compounding my private anxiety by failing to give it a social existence, I took my cousin for a short walk along the banks of the Misahuallí River, which cuts the town of Tena in half. Within a few minutes I spotted a tanager feeding in the shrubs at the scruffy edges of town where molding cinder blocks meet polished river cobbles. I had brought along my binoculars and managed, after some searching, to locate the bird. I rolled the focusing knob and the moment that bird’s thick black beak became sharp I experienced a sudden shift. My sense of separation simply dissolved. And, like the tanager coming into focus, I snapped back into the world of life.
There is a name for what I felt on that trip to the Oriente: anxiety. After reading Constructing Panic (1995), a remarkable account, written by the late psychologist Lisa Capps and the linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs, of one woman’s lifelong struggles with anxiety, I’ve come to an understanding of this condition as revealing something important about the specific qualities of symbolic thought. Here is how Meg, the woman they write about, experiences the suffocating weight of all of the future possibles opened up by the symbolic imagination.
Sometimes I get to the end of the day and feel exhausted by all of the “what if that had happened” and “what if this happens.” And then I realize that I’ve been sitting on the sofa—that it’s just me and my own thoughts driving me crazy. (Capps and Ochs 1995: 25)
Capps and Ochs describe Meg as “desperate” to “experience the reality that she attributes to normal people” (25). Meg feels “severed from an awareness of herself and her environment as familiar and knowable” (31). She senses that her experience does not fit with what, according to others, “happened” (24), and she thus has no one with whom to share a common image of the world, or a set of assumptions about how it works. Furthermore, she can’t seem to ground herself in any specific place. Meg often uses the construction, “here I am,” to express her existential predicament, but a crucial element is missing: “she is telling her interlocutors that she exists, but not where in particular she is located” (64).
The title Constructing Panic is intended by the authors to refer to how Meg discursively constructs her experience of panic—their assumption being that “the stories people tell construct who they are and how they view the world” (8). But I think the title reveals something deeper about panic. It is precisely the constructive quality of symbolic thought, the fact that symbolic thought can create so many virtual worlds, that makes anxiety possible. It is not just that Meg constructs her experience of panic linguistically, socially, culturally, in other words, symbolically, rather that panic itself is a symptom of symbolic construction run wild.
Reading Capps and Ochs’s discussion of Meg’s experience of panic, and thinking about it semiotically, I think I have come to an understanding of what happened on that trip to the Oriente, the factors that produced panic in me, and those that led to its dissipation. As with Meg, who locates her first experiences of anxiety in situations in which her legitimate fears were not socially recognized (31), my anxiety emerged as I was confronted with the disconnect between my well-founded fear and the carefree attitudes of the tourists on the bus.
Symbolic thought run wild can create minds radically separate from the indexical grounding their bodies might otherwise provide. Our bodies, like all of life, are the products of semiosis. Our sensory experiences, even our most basic cellular and metabolic processes, are mediated by representational—though not necessarily symbolic—relations (see chapter 2). But symbolic thought run wild can make us experience “ourselves” as set apart from everything: our social contexts, the environments in which we live, and ultimately even our desires and dreams. We become displaced to such an extent that we come to question the indexical ties that would otherwise ground this special kind of symbolic thinking in “our” bodies, bodies that are themselves indexically grounded in the worlds beyond them: I think therefore I doubt that I am.
How is this possible? And why is it that we don’t all live in a constant state of skeptical panic? That my sense of anxious alienation dissipated the moment the bird came into sharp focus provides some insights into the conditions under which symbolic thought can become so radically separate from the world, as well as those under which it can fall back into place. I do not, by any means, wish to romanticize tropical nature or privilege anyone’s connection to it. This sort of regrounding can happen anywhere. Nonetheless, sighting that tanager in the bush at the messy edge of town taught me something about how immersion in this particularly dense ecology amplifies and makes visible a larger semiotic field beyond that which is exceptionally human, one in which we are all—usually—emplaced. Seeing that tanager made me sane by allowing me to situate the feeling of radical separation within something broader. It resituated me in a larger world “beyond” the human. My mind could return to being part of a larger mind. My thoughts about the world could once again become part of the thoughts of the world. An anthropology beyond the human strives to grasp the importance of these sorts of connections while appreciating why we humans are so apt to lose sight of them.
NOVELTY OUT OF CONTINUITY
Thinking about panic in this way has led me to question more broadly how best to theorize the separation that symbolic thought creates. We tend to assume that because something like the symbolic is exceptionally human and thus novel (at least as far as earthly life is concerned) it must also be radically separate from that from which it comes. This is the Durkheimian legacy we inherit: social facts have their own kind of novel reality, which can only be understood in terms of other such social facts and not in terms of anything—be it psychological, biological, or physical—prior to them (see Durkheim 1972: 69–73). But the sense of radical separation that I experienced is psychically untenable—even life negating in some sense. And this leads me to suspect that there is something the matter with any analytical approach that would take such a separation as its starting point.
If, as I claim, our distinctively human thoughts stand in continuity with the forest’s thoughts insofar as both are in some way or other the products of the semiosis that is intrinsic to life (see chapter 2), then an anthropology beyond the human must find a way to account for the distinctive qualities of human thought without losing sight of its relation to these more pervasive semiotic logics. Accounting conceptually for the relation this novel dynamic has to that from which it comes can help us better understand the relationship between what we take to be distinctively human and that which lies beyond us. In this regard I want to think here about what panic, and especially its resolution, has taught me. To do so I draw on a series of Amazonian examples to trace the ways in which iconic, indexical, and symbolic processes are nested within each other. Symbols depend on indices for their being and indices depend on icons. This allows us to appreciate what makes each of these unique without losing sight of how they also stand in a relation of continuity with each other.
Following Deacon (1997), I begin with a counterintuitive
