Tristes tropiques by Lévi-Strauss Claude & Translated by John Russell

Author:Lévi-Strauss, Claude & Translated by John Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York : Criterion Books

The Living and the Dead 221

long nails and rain pouring from their eyes, nostrils, and hair; one-legged creatures with huge bellies and the soft and downy body of a bat.

The ban is asocial. By reason of his personal links with one or more spirits, he is a privileged being: when he goes out hunting by him self, for instance, supernatural help is forthcoming; he can turn himself into an animal at will; he has the gift of prophecy and knows the secrets of disease. Neither an animal killed in the chase, nor the first fruits of a garden, can be eaten till he has had his share. This last is the mori owed by the living to the spirits of the dead. Its role in the system is, therefore, symmetrical with, and the obverse of, that of the funerary hunt which I have described.

But the ban is also under the dominion of one or more guardian

spirits. They make use of him for their own incarnation; at soch times the fcori, with the spirit, as it were, in the saddle above him, is subject to trances and convulsions. In return for his guardianship the spirit watches the bans every movement; he is the true proprietor, not merely of the sorcerer's possessions, but of his very body. For every broken arrow, every broken pot, every fingernail, or lock of hair not accounted for, the sorcerer is answerable to the spirit, As none of these things may be destroyed or thrown away, the ban drags along behind him the debris of all his past existence. The old adage about the quick and the dead here takes on an unexpected and terrible significance; for, between the spirit and the sorcerer, the bond is of so jealous a nature that one can never be quite sure which of the two partners is, in the end, the master, and which the servant.

Clearly, therefore, for the Bororo the physical universe consists in a complex hierarchy of individualized powers. Their personal nature is directly manifested; but this is not the case with their other attributes,

Ceremonial ear rings made of pieces of motfaer-o&pearl fastened to strips of bark, and trimmed with feathers and

for these powers are at once beings and things, living and dead. In Society, tie sorcerer is the intermediary between mankind and the equivocal universe of evil spirits who are at one and the same time persons and objects.

The sociological universe has characteristics quite different from those of the physical universe. The spirits of ordinary men (those, I mean, who are not sorcerers) do not identify themselves with the forces of Nature, but form a society, as it were, of their own; but, conversely, they lose their personal identity and merge in that collective being, the aroe, a term which, like the ancient Bretons' anaon, should doubtless be translated as 'the souls* society'. This society is, in point of fact, twofold, since the souls are divided after the funeral ceremonies into two villages, of which one is in the east and the other in the west.

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