The first chapter, then, constitutes a sort of ethnography of signs beyond the human. It undertakes an ethnographic exploration of how humans and nonhumans use signs that are not necessarily symbolic—that is, signs that are not conventional—and demonstrates why these signs cannot be fully circumscribed by the symbolic.
Exploring how such aperture exists despite the very real fact of symbolic closure forces us to rethink our assumptions about a foundational anthropological concept: context. The goal is to defamiliarize the conventional sign by revealing how it is just one of several semiotic modalities and then to explore the very different nonsymbolic properties of those other semiotic forms that are usually occluded by and collapsed into the symbolic in anthropological analysis. An anthropology beyond the human is in large part about learning to appreciate how the human is also the product of that which lies beyond human contexts.
Those concerned with nonhumans have often tried to overcome the familiar Cartesian divide between the symbolic realm of human meanings and the meaningless realm of objects either by mixing the two—terms such as natures-cultures or material-semiotic are indicative of this—or by reducing one of these poles to the other. By contrast, “The Open Whole” aims to show that the recognition of representational processes as something unique to, and in a sense even synonymous with, life allows us to situate distinctively human ways of being in the world as both emergent from and in continuity with a broader living semiotic realm.
If, as I argue, the symbolic is “open,” to what exactly does it open? Opening the symbolic, through this exploration of signs beyond the symbolic, forces us to ponder what we might mean by the “real,” given that the hitherto secure foundations for the real in anthropology—the “objective” and the contextually constructed—are destabilized by the strange and hidden logics of those signs that emerge, grow, and circulate in a world beyond the human.
Chapter 2, “The Living Thought,” considers the implications of the claim, laid out in chapter 1, that all beings, including those that are nonhuman, are constitutively semiotic. All life is semiotic and all semiosis is alive. In important ways, then, life and thought are one and the same: life thinks; thoughts are alive.
This has implications for understanding who “we” are. Wherever there are “living thoughts” there is also a “self.” “Self,” at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. It is the locus—however rudimentary and ephemeral—of a living dynamic by which signs come to represent the world around them to a “someone” who emerges as such as a result of this process. The world is thus “animate.” “We” are not the only kind of we.
The world is also “enchanted.” Thanks to this living semiotic dynamic, mean-ing (i.e., means-ends relations, significance, “aboutness,” telos) is a constitutive feature of the world and not just something we humans impose on it. Appreciating life and thought in this manner changes our understanding of what selves are and how they emerge, dissolve, and also merge into new kinds of we as they interact with the other beings that make the tropical forest their home in that complex web of relations that I call an “ecology of selves.”
The way Runa struggle to comprehend and enter this ecology of selves amplifies and makes apparent the peculiar logic of association by which living thoughts relate. If, as Strathern (1995) has argued, anthropology is at base about “the Relation,” understanding some of the strange logics of association that emerge in this ecology of selves has important implications for our discipline. As we will see, it reveals how indistinction figures as a central aspect of relating. This changes our understandings of relationality; difference no longer sits so easily at the foundation of our conceptual framework, and this changes how we think about the central role that alterity plays in our discipline. A focus on this living semiotic dynamic in which indistinction (not to be confused with intrinsic similarity) operates also helps us see how “kinds” emerge in the world beyond the human. Kinds are not just human mental categories, be these innate or conventional; they result from how beings relate to each other in an ecology of selves in ways that involve a sort of confusion.
Just how to go about relating to those different beings that inhabit this vast ecology of selves poses pragmatic as well as existential challenges. Chapters 3 and 4 examine ethnographically how the Runa deal with such challenges, and these chapters reflect, more generally, on what we can learn from this.
Chapter 3, “Soul Blindness,” is about the general problem of how death is intrinsic to life. Hunting, fishing, and trapping place the Runa in a particular relationship with the many beings that make up the ecology of selves in which they live. These activities force the Runa to assume their points of view, and indeed to recognize that all these creatures that they hunt, as well as the many other creatures with which those hunted animals relate, have points of view. It forces them to recognize that these creatures inhabit a network of relations that is predicated in part on the fact that its constitutive members are living, thinking selves. The Runa enter this ecology of selves as selves. They hold that their ability to enter this web of relations—to be aware of and to relate to other selves—depends on the fact that they share this quality with the other beings that make up this ecology.
Being aware of the selfhood of the many beings that people the cosmos poses particular challenges. The Runa enter the forest’s ecology of selves in order to hunt, which means that they recognize others as selves like themselves in order to turn them into nonselves. Objectification, then, is the flipside of animism, and it is not a straightforward process. Furthermore, one’s ability to destroy other selves rests on and also highlights the fact that one is an ephemeral self—a self that can all too quickly cease being a self. Under the rubric “soul blindness,” this chapter charts moments where this ability to recognize other selves is lost and how this results in a sort of monadic alienation as one is, as a consequence, avulsed from the relational ecology of selves that constitutes the cosmos.
That death is intrinsic to life exemplifies something Cora Diamond (2008) calls a “difficulty of reality.” It is a fundamental contradiction that can overwhelm us with its incomprehensibility. And this difficulty, as she emphasizes, is compounded by another one: such contradictions are at times, and for some, completely unremarkable. The feeling of disjunction that this creates is also part of the difficulty of reality. Hunting in this vast ecology of selves in which one must stand as a self in relation to so many other kinds of selves who one then tries to kill brings such difficulties to the fore; the entire cosmos reverberates with the contradictions intrinsic to life.
This chapter, then, is about the death in life, but it is especially about something Stanley Cavell calls the “little deaths” of “everyday life” (Cavell 2005: 128). There are many kinds and scales of death. There are many ways in which we cease being selves to ourselves and to each other. There are many ways of being pulled out of relation and many occasions where we turn a blind eye to and even kill relation. There are, in short, many modalities of disenchantment. At times the horror of this everyday fact of our existence bursts into our lives, and thus becomes a difficulty of reality. At others it is simply ignored.
Chapter 4, “Trans-Species Pidgins,” is the second of these two chapters concerned with the challenges posed by living in relation to so many kinds of selves in this vast ecology of selves. It focuses on the problem of how to safely and successfully communicate with the many kinds of beings that people the cosmos. How to understand and be understood by beings whose grasp of human language is constantly in question is difficult in its own right. And when successful, communication with these beings can be destabilizing. Communication, to an extent, always involves communion. That is, communicating with others entails some measure of what Haraway (2008) calls “becoming with” these others. Although this promises to widen ways of being, it can also be very threatening to a more distinctly human sense of self that the Runa, despite this eagerness for expansion, also struggle to maintain. Accordingly, people in Ávila find creative strategies to open channels of communication with other beings in ways that also put brakes on these transgressive processes that can otherwise be so generative.
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