The Culture of Invention in the Americas takes the theoretical contribution

of one of anthropology’s most radical thinkers, Roy Wagner, as a basis for The Culture of Invention
conceptual improvisation. It uses Wagner’s most synthetic and complex
insights – developed in Melanesia and captured in the title of his most famous
book, The Invention of Culture – as a springboard for an exploration of other
in the Americas
anthropological and societal imaginaries. What do the inherent reflexivity,
recursiveness and limits of all and any peoples’ anthropologies render for
us to write and think about, and live within? Who is doing anthropology Anthropological
about whom? Which are the best ways to convey our partial grasp of these
conundrums: theory, poetry, jokes? No claim is made to resolve what should experiments with Roy Wagner
not be seen as a problem. Instead, inspired by Roy Wagner’s study and use
of metaphor, this book explores analogical variations of these riddles.
The chapters bring together ethnographic regions rarely investigated
together: indigenous peoples of Mexico and Lowland South America;
and Afro-American peoples of Brazil and Cuba. The ‘partial connections’
highlighted by the authors’ analytic conjunctions – Ifá divination practices
and Yanomami shamanism, Kĩsedjê (Amazonia) and Huichol (Mexico)
anthropology of Whites, and Meso-American and Afro-American practices
of sacrifice – show the inspirational potential of such rapprochements.
As the first book to acknowledge the full range of Wagner’s
anthropological contributions, and an initial joint exploration of Native
American and Afro-American ethnographies, this experimental work
honours Wagner’s vision of a multiplicity of peoples’ anthropologies through
and of each other. It concludes with a remarkable dialogue created by Roy
Wagner’s responses to each author’s work.
We don’t have to imagine what Wagner might have made of this
inspired collection: his concluding commentary on each of these
extraordinary chapters is in effect a collection in itself. The sparks
they together ignite make this an editorial and publishing triumph.
Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge
If Roy Wagner famously ‘invented’ culture, the contributors
to this volume ‘counter-invent’ Wagner, at once engaging
comprehensively and didactically with his thought, and
exteriorizing it onto novel conceptual and geographical territories.
A book from ‘tomorrow’s yesterday’ (Wagner), The Culture of
Invention in the Americas anticipates for us the anthropology
to come – playful, experimental, and deeply ethnographic.
Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Spanish National Research Council

Pedro Pitarch &

José Antonio Kelly
 First published in 2018 by
Sean Kingston Publishing
www.seankingston.co.uk
Canon Pyon

Editorial selection, introduction © 2018 Pedro Pitarch and José Antonio Kelly

Individual chapters © 2018 Marcio Goldman, Martin Holbraad,

Marianna Keisalo, José Antonio Kelly, Sergio Lopez, Roger Magazine,
Chloe Nahum-Claudel, Johannes Neurath, Pedro Pitarch, Alessandro Questa,
Lydia Rodriguez, Marcela Coelho de Souza and Roy Wagner

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means
without the written permission of Sean Kingston Publishing.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

Cover image by ‘Nyla’, Cristina Cedillo Ruiz, and inspired by Roy Wagner’s
‘cat/no cat’.

Printed by Lightning Source

ISBN 978-1-912385-02-7
The Culture of Invention in the Americas
!

Anthropological Experiments with Roy Wagner

EDITED BY PEDRO PITARCH & JOSÉ ANTONIO KELLY

Sean Kingston Publishing

www.seankingston.co.uk
Canon Pyon
This book is a celebration of Roy Wagner’s life work. We know he was very
eager to see the final results, but unfortunately this was not meant to be. Roy
passed away on the 10th of September 2018, a little before publication. Given
the now posthumous character of this commemorative volume, we sincerely
hope the chapters here collected serve as a tribute to Roy's intellectual
brilliance and stamina, and above all, generosity, which all of those who knew
him found so special. Roy was one of our discipline's most innovative and
inspiring thinkers, and his combination of academic rigour with humour
and poetic flare gave him a style all of his own. May the legacy of this
anthropological shaman live on.
 Contents

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix

Introduction 1
JOSÉ ANTONIO KELLY AND PEDRO PITARCH

CHAPTER 1 Blood, initiation, and participation 31

What is given and what is made in Afro-Brazilian religions
MARCIO GOLDMAN

CHAPTER 2 How myths make men in Afro-Cuban divination 53

MARTIN HOLBRAAD

CHAPTER 3 The domestication of the abstract soul 73

PEDRO PITARCH

CHAPTER 4 Invented gifts, given exchange 91

The recursive anthropology of Huichol modernity
JOHANNES NEURATH

CHAPTER 5 Child-snatchers and head-choppers 107

A highland Meso-American reverse anthropology
ROGER MAGAZINE

CHAPTER 6 Invention, convention and clowning 121

Symbolic obviation and dialectical mediation in
the Yaqui Easter ritual
MARIANNA KEISALO

CHAPTER 7 Visible dancers and invisible hunters 139

Divination and masking among Masewal people,
in the northern highlands of Puebla, Mexico
ALESSANDRO QUESTA

CHAPTER 8 The crossroads of time 159

LYDIA RODRÍGUEZ AND SERGIO LÓPEZ
vi

CHAPTER 9 Cross-twins and outcestous marriages 187

How kinship (under)determines humanity for the
Kĩsêdjê of central Brazil
MARCELA COELHO DE SOUZA

CHAPTER 10 The curse of Souw among the Amazonian 211

Enawenê-nawê
CHLOE NAHUM-CLAUDEL

CHAPTER 11 Figure–ground dialectics in Yanomami, Yekuana 233

and Piaroa myth and shamanism
JOSÉ ANTONIO KELLY

CHAPTER 12 Commentary 253

ROY WAGNER
 CON TRIBU TORS

Marcio Goldman is Professor at the Postgraduate Program in Social

Anthropology, National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro;
researcher for the Brazilian National Council of Research (CNPq); and a
funded scholar at the Rio de Janeiro Foundation of Support for Research
(Faperj) and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education
Personnel (CAPES). Recent books include Some Anthropology (1999); and
How Democracy Works: An Ethnographic Theory of Politics (Sean Kingston
Publishing, 2013) and Some More Anthropology (2016).

Martin Holbraad is Professor of Social Anthropology at UCL. His main

field research is in Cuba, where he focuses on Afro-Cuban religions and
revolutionary politics. At present he directs a 5-year ERC-funded research
project on the anthropology of revolutionary politics. Recent books include
Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (2012),
Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds (2014) and The Ontological
Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (co-author, 2016).

Marianna Keisalo has worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at Aarhus

University and as a University Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology
at the University of Helsinki. Her work is focused on the semiotics of comedic
performance. She has conducted field work in Sonora, Mexico studying Yaqui
ritual clowning and in Finland studying stand-up comedy.

José Antonio Kelly is Assistant Professor at the Univeridade Federal de Santa

Catarina (Brazil). He has done fieldwork among the Yanomami people in
Venezuela since 2000, focusing on the political anthropology of health, and
published State Healthcare and Yanomami Transformations: A Symmetrical
Ethnography (2011).

Sergio Lopez is Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at

Potsdam. He is the President of the Network of Iberoamerican Anthropologists,
and managing director of AIBR, Journal of Iberoamerican Anthropology. He
has conducted fieldwork in Chol Mayan indigenous communities since 2006,
and in international corporations since 2004. Recent publications include
Antropología de la Empresa (2016).
viii Contributors

Roger Magazine is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universidad

Iberoamericana in Mexico City.  He was a student of Roy Wagner as an
undergraduate at the University of Virginia in the late 1980s.  His work has
focused on football supporters and street children in urban areas and on local
notions of personhood, sociality and ethnicity in rural Mexico.

Chloe Nahum-Claudel is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the

London School of Economics. Between 2006 and 2013 she conducted
fieldwork with the Enawenê-nawê in Brazil’s Mato Grosso State. Since 2015
she has been pursuing a project on witchcraft in rural Simbu Province,
Papua New Guinea. Recent publications include Vital Diplomacy: The Ritual
Everyday on a Dammed River in Amazonia (2018).

Johannes Neurath is a researcher at the Museo Nacional de Antropología

and Lecturer at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico. He has done
fieldwork among the Huichol and Cora peoples since 1992. His most recent
book is La vida de las imágenes: Arte Huichol (2013).

Pedro Pitarch is Professor of Anthropology at the Universidad Complutense

of Madrid. For the last 30 years he has carried out research among the Maya of
Chiapas, Mexico, focused on cosmology, personhood and shamanism. Recent
publications include The Jaguar and the Priest. An Ethnography of Tzeltal
Souls, with a foreword by Roy Wagner (2010).

Alessandro Questa is Professor in Social Anthropology at Universidad

Iberoamericana in Mexico City. He recently received his PhD from the
University of Virginia under the supervision of Roy Wagner. He has studied
different indigenous communities in Mexico for over two decades. In recent
years, he has been interested in the relations between ritual and environmental
concerns among Masewal people in the highlands of Puebla, Mexico.

Lydia Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the

State University of New York at Potsdam. She worked with Roy Wagner at the
University of Virginia for five years. She has conducted research with speakers
of Chol Mayan in Chiapas, Mexico, since 2006.

Marcela Coelho de Souza is Lecturer of Social Anthropology at the

Universidade de Brasilia (Brazil). She has worked extensively among Gê
indigenous peoples in central Brazil on a variety of subjects including
kinship, indigenous knowledge systems, intangible cultural heritage and
Contributors ix

intellectual property. She is co-author of Conhecimento e Cultura: práticas de

transformação no mundo indígena (2010).

Roy Wagner was a professor in the Anthropology Department at the

University of Virginia for the last forty years. His ethnographic work with
Daribi and Barok peoples in Papua New Guinea and New Ireland, respectively,
forms the base for his vast body of publications, comprising nine books, as
well as many articles, on topics ranging from kinship and mythology to post-
structural anthropology, ethnographic methodology and trickery, and fiction.
Some of this work serves as the inspiration and guiding line of enquiry for this
book.
 CHAPTER 

Invented gifts, given exchange

The recursive anthropology of Huichol modernity
!
JOHANNES NEURATH

Never pre-modern
The Huichol or Wixaritari (singular Wixarika) are a well-known indigenous
people numbering about 45,000 speakers, living in the states of Jalisco,
Nayarit and Durango, Mexico. They practise ‘shamanism’ involving use of the
hallucinogenic peyote cactus (hikuri, Lophophora williamsii). They produce
psychedelic art, colourful crafts and popular music. They are famous for –
allegedly – not having been conquered and having eluded evangelization.
They are protagonists of political movements in Mexico in favour of
indigenous autonomy and the defence of territories and sacred geographies.
They have been subject to an enormous amount of attention in mainstream
and alternative media.
When I first worked with the Huichol I thought my obligation as an
anthropologist was combating stereotypes and to criticize misrepresentations
of the Huichol (Neurath 2002). I contextualized the ritual use of peyote
(Neurath 2006), and I refuted the idea the Huichol were something like a
cultural fossil on the brink of extinction, inevitably ruined by technological
progress. I documented their complex social organization, and I showed
that they are successful global players in a phase of demographic, cultural
and territorial expansion. But to what degree have they now become a
phenomenon of mass media? Certainly they have, but they are somehow able
to handle the culture industry, too.
In this context it seems inevitable that one rethinks the common question
about the compatibility of global modernity and local traditions. Maybe
the Huichol have been ahead of us, in something that is not just about
the ‘indigenization’ of modernity. If they have not adapted to our modern
92 Johannes Neurath

civilization, the whole question of indigenousness and tradition has to be

reconsidered.
Studying the Huichol concept of personhood (Neurath 2013) I draw on
theoretical tools developed by Roy Wagner (1991) and many other scholars
directly or indirectly inspired by him.1 In its paradoxical complexity, the
Huichol person is totally unlike most Western models. Following Latour
(1993) and other critics of the discourse of modernity, one can affirm that
simple but rational concepts of personhood like the Cartesian subject or the
bourgeois citizen of classical liberalism do not to fit too well with the hybrid,
often contradictory complexities of the actually existing contemporary world.
Without doubt, Westerners have had problems coping with modernity and
still struggle with it. But it seems to be quite erroneous attributing those
problems to people like the Huichol. Rather, one has to recognize that the
Huichol concept of the person has an affinity with avant-garde concepts of
decentred personhood, and this is why they are much better prepared to deal
with complexity. In that sense they never have been pre-modern.
The advantage Amerindian people like the Huichol have in the
contemporary world can be traced to their anthropology: an openness to the
‘other’ implies an extraordinary capacity to understand others, may they be
enemies or not, and to be able to deal with them in a successful way. Their
decentred personhood allows them to transform themselves and to take the
point of view of the other, even their enemy, with relative ease. Furthermore, as
we shall see, in addition to the study of ontology and the concept of the person,
it is the study of ritual complexity that offers clues as to how Amerindians like
the Huichol are able to interact with potentially adverse, dominant cultures
and societies. Relational ambiguity in ritual and in daily life is a necessity when
trying to make a living in the contemporary economy.

Reverse anthropology
Here I wish to undertake a study of indigenous and non-indigenous modernity
as part of reverse Huichol anthropology. The ‘anthropologists’ I am studying
are called Wixaritari, and they are very interested in ‘us’, that is the people
they call the teiwarixi, the ‘different ones’; teiwarixi can also be translated as
‘mestizos’ or ‘neighbours’, but refers to all humans and deities who are not
‘people’ or ‘upright walking people’ (tewi).

1 Here I am thinking of Wagner’s idea of the ‘fractal person’ (Wagner 1991), along
with the concepts of ‘dividuality’ (Strathern 1988; Viveiros de Castro 2008), the
‘distributed person’ (Gell 1998), the ‘instability of the soul’ (Pitarch 2003; Viveiros
de Castro 1993), ‘constituent alterity’ (Erikson 1986; Galinier 2004) and the ‘ritual
accumulation of contradictory identities’ (Severi 1996, 2002, 2004).
Invented gifts, given exchange 93

My aim is to go beyond a study of modernity according to indigenous

ideas and concepts. Their theory of tradition and modernity offers an
explanation why we are still a rather pre-modern bunch of people, but they
are not, and presumably never have been. According to Wagner (1981),
Viveiros de Castro (2009) and Holbraad (2012), today, the only possible
anthropology is a recursive one. This seems to be a radical idea, but since
the beginning of our discipline, many important concepts were originally of
indigenous origin. What would anthropology look like without terms like
tabu, mana and hau? Some anthropologists did not like the idea of using
indigenous concepts as scientific theories (Lévi-Strauss 1987), but there is no
‘epistemological Switzerland’, and using our theories (concepts of Western
science) to explain others is not less arbitrary then using anybody else’s
theory to explain whatever. And why should we be the only ones interested in
others? Anthropology actually shows it is not so, and, as James Boon said, it
is fascinating ‘how cultures flirt with their own “alternities”, gain critical self-
distance, formulate complex (rather than simply reactionary) perspectives on
others’ (quoted in Strathern 1987:266).
Reverse anthropology is a logical consequence of what anthropology has
always been. It is the anthropology of others: not just a science about others,
but the study of the theories of man produced by others. We will never
answer the universalist question ‘what is mankind?’ However, we may find
out what is the implicit theory of our informants, their concepts of humanity,
history, time, space and the like. In this case I am particularly interested in
understanding modernity, as understood and practised by the Huichol, who,
as already explained, should be understood as a truly modern people.
Huichol anthropology is of course a complex matter. Apparently, theory
(discourse) and praxis do not always coincide, and attitudes of ‘people’
towards ‘different ones’ can change quite unexpectedly. As we shall see, these
inconsistencies in Huichol anthropology are actually the key to understand
Huichol modernity.
Like animals, we, the ‘different ones’, were once ‘people’, but we lost the
tracks of the ancestors (yeiyari): some of us got drunk, some fell asleep, some
suffered from dizziness, some just could not orient themselves. However,
potentially, animals and mestizos, we are still Wixarika.
On the other hand, most Huichol deities associated with darkness, the
night, the underworld and the rainy-season are actually considered to be
mestizos. Also the deities who created money, banks, cattle, cars, aeroplanes
and the like, as well as Catholic ‘saints’, belong to the category of non-
indigenous Wixarika deities.
Wixarika ancestors (one might say Wixarika Wixarika deities – those
Wixarika ancestors who are not or never became mestizos) belong to a realm
94 Johannes Neurath

pretty much opposed to everything associated with mestizos: light, sunrise

and sky. They still walk on the trail of the ancestors that leads to a place in
the eastern desert where they collect peyote. This place is called Wirikuta by
the Huichols, and it is close to the mining town Real de Catorce, San Luis
Potosí. Walking on this trail of initiation, the peyote-seekers leave behind
everything associated with darkness, night, the underworld and the rainy
season. As far as possible, they abstain from eating salt, from extramarital sex
and, most importantly, from sleep. ‘Following the tracks of the ancestors’ (see
Kantor 2012), they eventually have a vision (nierika) of sunrise, and so the
sun rises. Nierika refers to a transformative vision. During that experience,
vision questers become the things they envision: the sun, peyote, rain. In
Roy Wagner’s terms, one may say that the ordered world of the indigenous
ancestors is ‘invented’ (Wagner 1981). And, in a process one might call time
reversal (Gell 1992), people become their own ancestors. What is normally
understood as the ‘mythic past’ is here envisioned and created by people of
the present.
However, it would be erroneous to believe Huichol ritual is only about
rejecting the (hegemonic) world of mestizos and/or creating a world apart
which is the mythic realm of indigenous ancestors. Knowing mestizos is
important, and that means, according to Huichol knowledge practices, that
when necessary, one has to be able to become one. As with all transformations,
the crucial thing is maintaining control over the process. One can become a
mestizo so long as this transformation does not turn out to be permanent, and
one loses the possibility of returning to what one was previously. To a great
extent, Huichol ritual is about temporary, controlled transformations, into all
kinds of others, ancestors as well as mestizos. The alternative is not to be an
Indian or a mestizo, but to be an Indian and mestizo, or a just a mestizo.
While urban folk and rural mestizos used to have fairly distorted images
of the Huichol, as shaman-artists, witchdoctors, were-wolves and the like,
Wixaritari know pretty well what being a mestizo is about. Even anthropology
has its place in Huichol mythology. A blood-red American anthropologist
(teiwari xure) took photos of the Huichol sky deity, Our Young Eagle-Woman
(Wierika Wimari), sitting on the nopal cactus devouring a serpent, and
founded Mexico City. His photograph, obviously taken without a permit, was
used to produce peso coins, the Mexican coat-of-arms and the Mexican flag
(Liffman 2011, 2012).

Dividual cosmology
In line with Houseman and Severi in their theory of ‘ritual condensation’
(Houseman and Severi 1998), in my study of the main public rituals of
the Huichol ceremonial centre (tukipa) I found all kinds of contradictory
Invented gifts, given exchange 95

relations and intentions, often existing simultaneously. The solar world of the
ancestors is created through peyote visions, but shortly after it is destroyed
again. Hierarchies are reaffirmed and questioned. Relations with mestizos are
rejected as well as celebrated. In order to understand Huichol anthropology,
one has to dig into these relational complexities. In terms of ritual relations,
the tension between reciprocity (exchange, alliance) and free gifts (sacrifice,
filiation) seems to be the clue to Huichol ‘shifting ontologies’ (Neurath 2013).
In previous work I might have overstated the difference between the
luminous realm of the Huichol ancestors and the dark mestizo underworld.
What I actually tried to explain was this: both worlds are very much imbricated
but, in ontological terms, there is a gap that separates them. There is no single
Huichol world view. Maybe it would be too much to talk about a ‘multiverse’,
‘polyontology’ or something of that kind. The important thing is not to
underestimate the lack of homogeneity and equilibrium. Models of cosmo-
sociological wholes are not useful, but maybe we can appeal to holistic models
that take into account the lack of holism in Huichol culture (Holbraad 2010).
There is an important geographical contrast between the pre-existing
world of mestizos below and the envisioned world of ancestors above. But
one world is not just the inversion of the other. It is not a symmetrical dualist
system. The landscape of the world above is the semi-desert of the Mexican
central highlands. It only exists due to vision quests. The fertile coastal plain
and the Pacific Ocean are pre-existent or prior to creation. The territories of
Huichol communities in the Sierra Madre Occidental are not really a middle
ground. The pine-covered mesetas belong to the world above, the deep
canyons with their tropical climate are entrances to the underworld.
One way to understand the whole situation is by expanding the Huichol
notion of dividuality to the cosmological level. As in other Meso-American
cultures there is body/cosmos isomorphism (Galinier 2004; López Austin
1980; Monaghan 1995:98). Wirikuta corresponds to being awake and to the
head, the coastal plains belong to sleep, unconsciousness and the sexual
organs, while the navel of the world can be located in a canyon near the
Huichol village of Santa Catarina. Wirikuta corresponds to the dry season, and
the coastal plain to the rainy season. Autumn is the sunrise, the dry season is
midday, and rainy season is night. Waterways are veins, water is blood, and
clouds and rain, or cloud snakes, are the breath of the world, its vital soul
(iyari). The human body is not so much a microcosm; it is rather the world
that is a ‘macrobody’.
This sophisticated system of analogies has important asymmetries. Only
night always existed. Daylight has to be found in the vision quest. Initiation
is the search for this elusive place in space-time. Participants are xukuri’ikate
or jicareros, ‘gourd persons’, people in the process of being born from their
96 Johannes Neurath

mothers. In a second phase they turn into hikuritamete or peyoteros, ‘peyote

persons’; and, finally, they may become irikate, ‘arrow persons’, their own
ancestors. Peyote is like a deer and gives itself to the hunters, but only when
they are worthy of it. Finding peyote and encountering deer is like obtaining
a transformative vision (nierika). Identifying with the deer, hunters turn into
peyote, and daylight is an effect of this experience. It should be quite clear
that deer, peyote and daylight could not exist without ritual actions and
experiences.
The same type of asymmetry can be seen in the architecture of the
ceremonial centre. All buildings, including the big, circular, semi-subterranean
temple tuki and the smaller, rectangular, elevated shrines called xirikite, have
to be renovated every five years, but only the steep grass roofs are rebuilt. The
walls remain the same. Again, the roofs correspond to Wirikuta, the mountain
Reu’unari, ‘where it was burnt’, or Paritekia, ‘mountain below sunrise’, and to
the diurnal sky; the dark interior of the buildings corresponds to the ocean.
Ritual campfires are the navels of the world identified with the ceremonial
centre of Te’akata, ‘the place of the earth oven’.
In sum, only one part of the Huichol cosmos, kiekari, is what we would
call ‘naturally given’. The more prestigious half is artificial, dreamt and created
by humans. As Roy Wagner has shown, in non-Western societies it is not
uncommon for artificial things to be of higher status than naturally given ones
(Wagner 1977, 1981).
Not unlike that which can be seen in sci-fi and cyber-punk, paleo-
ontology is merged with futuristic urban modernity. Similar to the situation
found among other Meso-American peoples (e.g. Pitarch 2010, 2012; Questa
Rebolledo 2010; Romero López 2010), the underworld is a mega-city
inhabited by cannibal giants, sea monsters, prehistoric megafauna, vampires,
goatsuckers and skeletonized dead people. They are the original inhabitants of
the world. The Huichol are the ‘younger brothers’ and came much later. They
had to conquer their territory, taking it away from the mestizos’ ancestors.
They also stole ritual paraphernalia like gourds and arrows from them. Usually
the Huichol do not define themselves as an indigenous people; rather, they
consider themselves more advanced, at least in terms of social evolution.
Technology is a thing of the mestizo underworld. The brute beings of the
underworld are rude and not very bright, but they are rich and they own
advanced technology. Mestizos inherited their lack of social skills from their
primitive monster ancestors. Once even mestizos had ‘custom’ (yeiyari), but
they (or their ancestors) were too lazy or too stupid to follow the tracks of the
Huichol ancestors. The only ones who are able to accomplish initiation and to
become ancestors are Huichol mara’akate, ‘the ones who know how to dream’
– that is, initiated persons who are usually ritual specialists and are frequently
Invented gifts, given exchange 97

called ‘shamans’. But the world of Huichol ancestors is actually out of reach.
In order to get there one has to suffer a sacrificial death. In theory, only dead
people can finish initiation. So the initiation of a living person is something
like an infinitesimal approximation to sacrificial death.

The peyote dance and Namawita Neixa

According to Huichol implicit anthropology, human life is syncopated because
it takes place on the fault lines between two different but imbricated worlds.
During some of the most relevant phases of Huichol ritual, the worlds actually
collide. A good example is the peyote dance, Hikuli Neixa, the main event of
the Huichol ritual year, held at communal ceremonial centres (tukite) towards
the end of the dry season.2 This dance goes on for several days and nights and
culminates in the appearance of a feathered ‘cloud serpent’ (haiku) descending
from Paritek+a, the ‘mountain of sunrise’, located in the east. At this moment,
peyote seekers’ rituals of gift and sacrifice come to an end, and the general
emphasis switches to ritualized exchange.
The Huichol are famous for their ritual use of peyote. However, the peyote
cult is not just about ingesting the hallucinogenic plant, as many studies
uncritically assume; rather, it is about processes of ritual identification with
peyote and the transformation of peyote-seekers into it. A peyote pilgrim
consuming the hallucinogenic plant becomes peyote or a ‘peyote person’.3
Circles of white turkey feathers attached to the hats of the peyoteros are
‘peyote flowers’, so the homecoming pilgrims are flowering peyotes.
Travelling to Wirikuta and becoming deities is comparatively a relatively
easy procedure. The most complicated and time-consuming part of initiation
is coming back in order to be an ancestor among ordinary people. The peyote
dance is the culmination of this process. Peyote persons collectively transform
into Haiku, the ‘cloud snake’, now using the white feathers as part of their cloud
attire. Composed of twenty-five to thirty-five homecoming peyote pilgrims,
Haiku shows up at the dance ground: it is the arrival of the first rains.
Each member of the group personifies a specific ancestral deity, making
the cloud snake a composite being containing ‘all’ of the assembled ancestors.
Due to the fact that all deified ancestors may be conceived of as deer, during
certain parts of the choreography the peyote persons jump around in imitation
of deer and mimic other forms of the animal’s behaviour. Throughout the

2 For a detailed ethnography of the rituals held at Huichol ceremonial centres, see
Neurath (2002).
3 See Déléage (2009) on the Sharanahua’s identification of the anaconda with
ayahuasca, and Sharanahua shamans transforming into anacondas when using
ayahuasca.
98 Johannes Neurath

dance, they also frequently assemble in order to form a giant snake that attacks
unsuspecting bystanders. At the same time, the peyote persons give out great
amounts of peyote, as well as corn and calabash seeds to members of the
community. They attack and give away.
The peyote dance is the last of a series of rituals that normally start several
months earlier. After weeks of hardship, featuring pilgrimages to faraway
places (like the semi-desert of Wirikuta in the state of San Luis Potosí), deer
hunting, vision quests, many nightlong ceremonies, fasting, seclusion, sexual
abstinence, the daily ingestion of peyote and also hard work in cornfields,
dancers experience their return to the ceremonial centre as a triumph.
Because they are deities, and not yet reintegrated into the community of
ordinary people, they are dangerous like rattlesnakes.
Having gone through very intense ritual experiences and having obtained
the visionary ability of mara’akate (shamans) they are now the ancestral
deities, initiated persons. Just as ancestral deities create the upper half of the
world through self-sacrifice, the initiates have managed to obtain visions and
transform themselves into the objects of their visions: peyote and deer, rain
snakes and sunlight. Giving out peyote and seeds during the final peyote dance
is part of this generous giving away of themselves.
However, things are not as neat as, for instance, Maurice Bloch’s theory of
initiation rituals (Bloch 1992) would suggest. The peyoteros, now turned into
ancestors, do not simply reconquer the community they had left as ordinary
human beings. The people of the village, those who remained at home and
did not transform into peyote persons, deny the free gifts of homecoming
pilgrims. Instead of treating them with respect, they mock them. One part
of the dance consists of non-peyote persons hunting peyote pilgrims like
deer. The deer paradigmatically gives itself to the shamanic hunter, but in
this instance not much respect is shown for the captured deer gods. Even as
the peyoteros actually become the ancestors, they are treated as impostors, as
ordinary people pretending to be something special. Non-peyoteros receive
the returning pilgrims’ gifts, but force them in turn to accept tiny tamales (a
kind of snack) or cigarettes as ‘payment’. They do so in part to neutralize the
peyoteros’ dangerousness, and partly because initiated people tend to get all
too powerful in their communities. Religious and political power has to be
brought under communal control.
Free gifting is here creating the solar cosmos: many important beings
and things, knowledge and time only exist because of the initiates’ visionary
experience. However, shamanic power has to be limited to avoid the formation
of centralized forms of traditional government, such as cazicazgos or
chiefdoms of the sort that prevailed into the colonial period.
Invented gifts, given exchange 99

I used to be puzzled by the way in which the peyoteros’ ethos of free gifts
clashes with the layperson’s insistence on reciprocal exchange. Knut Rio’s
study of Ambrym (Rio 2007) offered me a key to make sense of this unusual
situation by exploring rituals emphasizing non-reciprocity, clashing with more
conventional Maussian forms of ritual exchange.
I had already understood why shamans tend to look down on lay people:
the latter perform their exchanges and ask the deities for all kinds of favours,
because as non-initiated people they are not able to transform into deities
and to create things and beings. On the other hand, it is also important to
understand why non-initiated people tend to express themselves negatively
about shamans: the things or beings that initiates create in their visions are
dangerous. Whenever those beings are neglected or not treated correctly in
rituals, they can turn into agents provoking sickness. As Laidlaw says, ‘a free
gift makes no friends’ (Laidlaw 2000). The gifts of the shamans have to be
tamed, incorporated into a framework of analogical ordering and ritualized
exchange.
The non-initiated people’s criticism of initiated people and shamans has,
of course, political implications. As the creators of everything important, they
have the potential to accumulate great amounts of power. Rituals that deny and
neutralize the dangerous powers of the gifts distributed by the gods and the
shamans are an important aspect of community politics. In Pierre Clastres’s
terms, Huichol communities are against the state, and they are opposed to any
type of privilege (Clastres 1987). They do not tolerate their own deities.
On the other hand, this perpetual shifting between an emphasis on the
free gift and one on exchange is related to the ambiguity of the Huichol
attitude towards mestizos. During most of the year, Huichol discourse and
ritual practice is rather anti-mestizo: non-Indians are somehow less developed
human beings. This discourse can be quite chauvinist. However, during
one particular time of the year, an alliance with mestizos is celebrated. In
this context, the devaluation of the non-envisioned, pre-existing mestizo
underworld/modernity is relativized.
This particular event is known as Namawita Neixa, the ‘dance of the
covering of rain’.4 Celebrated only a couple of weeks after Hikuli Neixa, it is
the festival of sowing understood as a sexual relation between planter and
soil. As it has to be celebrated when the rainy season starts, it is related to the
summer solstice. Sun Father arrives at the northern extreme of his annual trip
and decides to rest. A pretty girl seduces him and then devours him with her
vagina dentata. Sun Father dies and transforms into the female monster that

4 Etymologically, Namawita Neixa derives from neixa (‘dance’), wita(ri) (‘rain’),

nama (‘coverings’), similar to itarite (‘beds’) (Lumholtz 1986:193).
100 Johannes Neurath

devoured him. He becomes his own nemesis and enemy alter ego: the goddess
Takutsi Nakawe, the primordial female monster.
Takutsi Nakawe appears as a masked dancer during Namawita Neixa. This
event is actually a return. She was once the original shaman of the Huichol, but
because she was abusive, always drunk and cannibalistic, her government was
overthrown in a revolt guided by Xurawe Temai, the Morning Star. However,
during the rainy season, Takutsi regains her power. It is a dark season, without
sun, and without solar, paternal authority. Nobody can be arrested, rules
of ritual austerity can be neglected and no sacrifice is celebrated. Instead,
planters marry the five corn maidens and an alliance between humans and
the beings of darkness and the underworld is celebrated. This is not just a
ritual inversion, because during Namawita Neixa women and corn are actually
treated as they should always be treated. Corn, identified with women, is
prepared without the addition of lime, without salt, and it is not cooked on a
comal (hearth), but in an earth-oven. So it is not “burned”. At the same time,
women are prohibited to work, and encouraged to rest. On this day even
cooking and sweeping are men’s tasks.
As we have seen, in Huichol anthropology it is quite clear what is an
ancestor and what is a mestizo. However humanity, the category tewi, has
a ‘doubtful existence’, as Foucault or Deleuze (2002) would say. It refers to a
status quo somewhere between non-Indians and deified ancestors. Humanity
is plan ‘B’, resulting from a second creation, from after the flood. It is about
simple things: agriculture, family, exchange and commerce with non-Indians,
as well as with Indians. Humanity is based on a peaceful alliance between
people and the mestizo lords of the underworld.

Ambivalent figuration in art

The peculiar style of Huichol art expresses the tension between gift and
exchange, between the worlds of initiated people and ordinary ones.
Contemplating a yarn painting like The Vision of Tatutsi Xuweri
Timaiweme by José Benítez Sánchez (see Neurath 2013:80–1), the viewer
can go back and forth between one form of knowledge and another, and
between one form of viewing and another. As in many traditions of the South
American lowlands (Cesarino 2011; Lagrou 2012), ambivalent figuration in
art, like figure–ground reversals, or contrasts between the figurative and the
non-figurative, ornamental or abstract, is related to the imbrication between
different aspects of reality. Those traditions are not so much interested in
establishing what might be the difference between one world and the other.
Rather, they focus on the transition from the realm of humans and the realm
of spirits. In this sense, Huichol aesthetics actively seeks to express what
happens during the process of initiation. Yarn paintings, as well as Huichol
Invented gifts, given exchange 101

ritual music, have a jazz-like quality, expressing aesthetically the complexity

of living simultaneously according to more than one ontological principle and
permanently transiting between them (Neurath 2013).
In a typical yarn painting, a synthesis of cosmogonic mythology is
offered: the emergence of the ancestors from the primordial underworld, the
vision quest of ancestors, the first deer hunt, the origin of rain, the origin of
maize agriculture. These stories are depicted in a figurative, narrative style.
Some myths are just indicated with one or two figures. Other stories are
represented through sequences of images criss-crossing the whole painting,
from one extreme to the other. Apparently, all this is difficult to ‘decipher’, but
actually this is the exoteric level of the yarn painting. The exoteric just looks
complicated.
On the esoteric level, the whole composition is a yellow face painting of
an initiate, like the ones panted with uxa during the pilgrimage to Wirikuta
and during peyote ceremonies. Now Tatutsi is looking at the spectator and
the whole painting is a reflection of Tatutsi’s initiatory vision. On this level,
style is rather ‘psychedelic’ and images are generative: contemplating the
composition, each spectator may discover or invent images for themselves.
The idea is that Tatutsi Xuweri, in the moment of his initiatory experience,
actually dreams and creates a plethora of beings and things.
The yarn painting’s ambiguity in figuration is highly relevant, as it can
be understood as a reflection on the inherent complexities of traditional
knowledge practice. The artwork refers to before and after initiation,
contrasting two types of religious experience, which may be related to
Whitehouse’s semantic and episodic types (Whitehouse 2004). But here
it is not a question of either/or. The main problem is the articulation, and
simultaneity, of contrasting forms of experience.
It is this ambivalent figuration that makes this particular yarn painting
such an excellent expression of nierika. First, it refers to the ordering of the
world according to a geometric pattern. However, at the truly shamanic level,
visions are actually not as structured. Shamanic visionary experience means
going (back) to the origin, and bringing things into existence.
The imaginary force mobilized by nierika may be partially explained in
terms of what in epistemology is called ‘symbolic pregnancy’ (see Cassirer
1954:222–37). Obviously, the use of a hallucinogen (in this case peyote) is
helpful for this. But the geometric patterns arising from the spontaneous
ordering of sensual perceptions are just the first phase. The process of creating
analogies and fractalization tends to be excessive, and inevitably leads to a
revelation of the futility of ordering. Nierika is about classification and the
crisis of classification.
102 Johannes Neurath

Another expression of this peculiar aesthetic is found in Huichol ritual

music. The songs (or rather sones) for voice, xaweri (a small violin) and kanari
(a small guitar), played by peyoteros, feature improvised texts, rhythmic
syncopations and micro-tonalities.

Ontological syncopations
As I have argued elsewhere, the Huichol seem to be an interesting case
combining animist and analogist tendencies (see Descola 2005, 2010).
According to my approach, it would not be useful to declare analogism the
dominant ontology of the Huichol, and animism just a secondary tendency.
Rather, my project is to elucidate the ontological implications of complex ritual
processes. In terms of ‘schemes of practice’, there is a central contradiction
between the free gift and reciprocity, so any analysis should begin by asking
how those schemes of practice actually coexist.
Following Descola (2005), animism can be related to rituals of self-sacrifice
and the free gift, as rituals enabling the personification of ancestral deities.
Analogism is based on reciprocal exchange connecting all kinds of beings
related through an elaborate system of analogies and oppositions. Whatever
one may think about Descola’s grand schemes, for me it is important to insist
that these are not mutually compatible principles of existence; rather, they
coexist within the play of the exoteric and the esoteric, ritualized and everyday,
forms of sociality.
Reciprocity celebrates alliances with all kind of deities, even the ones
associated with enemies and non-indigenous populations, Christianity and
urban modernity. Kieri, for example, identified with the plant Solandra
brevicalyx, is the Black Cowboy (el Charro Negro) of mestizo folklore, and he
is also Tamatsi Teiwari Yuawi, Our Elder Brother, the Blue Mestizo, a Huichol
deity considered to be a non-Indian xaturi (santo, or ‘saint’). By contrast,
cosmogonic self-sacrifice is considered a practice known only to the true,
initiated Huichol. Initiation means to consciously withdraw from everything
associated with non-indigenous people, as well as with female, spontaneous
fertility (‘nocturnal life’, t+kari). Only accessible to Huichol shamans, true,
solar life (tukari) is born of the ancestors’ visionary experience, which is
achieved when initiates become or transform into the ancestors themselves.
There is a seasonal limitation to this clash of ontological principles, given
that the vision quest and initiation are only (or mainly) practised during the dry
season. At the beginning of the rainy season (the festival of Namawita Neixa),
the solar cosmos created by the initiated collapses, as the pillars that sustain
the sky are brought down and people go back to the less differentiated state
and time of primordial origins. Traditional government is then suspended, the
god of fire is ritually killed and the primordial female earth monster Takutsi
Invented gifts, given exchange 103

Nakawe is re-established. At the end of the rainy season, the creation of a

cosmos based on sacrifice and transformation is taken up again. However, the
reign of Takutsi during the rainy season is not just an ‘original chaos’, it is a
world with its own non-transcendental (and rather unreflexive) logic based on
peaceful alliance with the ‘others’.
In rituals, gift and exchange almost always coexist. Common ritual
deposits of gourd bowls, arrows and other ceremonial objects are examples
of ritual condensation in which ritual actions of reciprocal exchange and free
gifts actually coincide. When votive gourds are given to deities, this is done in
order to oblige them to reciprocate with abundant water and life. In contrast,
so called votive arrows are actually projectiles. They are not given, but shot
at deities. However, because the deities are identified with prey animals who
voluntarily offer themselves to hunters they receive the arrows as gifts (see
Neurath 2013).
During all major rituals, emphasis shifts from reciprocity to the free
gift and back again. Ceremonies start with the preparation of items for
reciprocal exchange with the deities, but singing shamans inevitably enter
into the dynamics of cosmogonic self-sacrifice. Any ritual killing of animals
(deer, cattle, goats, sheep, cockerels) requires the consent of the animal,
which normally only the singing shaman is able to obtain through a ritual
transformation into the victim. Sacrificial blood is a free gift. But once the
animal is dead, and its blood sprinkled over the offerings, ritual dynamics
switch back to the existential principles dominated by values of reciprocity.
Sacrificial blood is traded for rain, life and the like.
When considering the annual ritual cycle, a similar shift can be observed.
Ceremonies of the rainy season emphasize reciprocity (alliance), whereas
rituals of the dry season focus on the free gift, sacrifice and predation.
It is important to note, however, that conflicting ontological principles,
as well as the difference between reciprocal exchange and the free gift are not
simply a matter of seasonal transition, or of a ritual inversion of the cosmos
resulting from a single ontological frame. The fault lines between reciprocity
and the free gift can be observed in many Huichol rituals, even in rather
simple ones; the point is the coexistence of contrasting, even incompatible
existential conditions and principles.
The transition from reciprocity to the free gift and back to exchange is
always a problematic process. There is no easy complementarity between the
two. Huichol ontology and cosmology appear to be unstable, based always on
shifting foundations. Huichol ritual practice may therefore be said to produce
‘ontological syncopations’.
Whoever practices a ritual following one of the two possible ritual
dynamics tends to criticize those who, at that particular moment, follow the
104 Johannes Neurath

other dynamic. This does not mean that anybody practising anything can be
confident about what he or she is doing; the only thing that is clear is that the
others are always wrong. Huichol ritual reflexivity arises from not agreeing
with either gift or exchange.
Consequently, Huichol ritual and aesthetics is full of mockery and irony.
Ontological clashes are not actually conceived of as such, but there is a reflexive
(or critical) praxis where no consensus about the meaning of a determined set
of ritual actions can be attained. Participants in one ritual celebrate together,
but are immersed in ontologically differentiated ritual dynamics. While some
are practising free gifts, others practise reciprocal exchange.
But why is it so relevant to talk about ontological complexity, and not just
about the interaction between different types of ritual practice? I believe the
answer lies in the radical nature of the contrast between ritual reciprocity,
aimed at managing the given world, and transformation based on the free
gift and invention. Talking about polyontology or multiple regimes of being
may be an exaggeration. However, if there is any general structure in Huichol
ritual, it is one based on this tension of reciprocal exchange and the free gift
as mutually incompatible schemes of practice. One regime of being is not
just the ‘inversion’ of a normal one. Extending the notion of dividuality, one
needs to consider the existence of a non-unitary world, and the occurrence of
‘ontological shifts’. Aesthetically, Huichol contemporary art expresses just this,
and can be seen as a reflection of traditional knowledge practice and initiation.

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