Yleinen keskustelu :: Re: Ymmärtävätkö uusnatsit ja äärioikeisto olevansa uskovaisia ...

I was rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I turned to Kóhoi, my principal language teacher, and asked, "What's up?" He was standing to my right, his strong, brown, lean body tensed from what he was looking at.

"Don't you see him over there?" he asked impatiently. "Xigagaí, one of the beings that live above the clouds, is standing on the beach yelling at us, telling us he will kill us if we go to the jungle."

"Where?" I asked. "I don't see him."

"Right there!" Kóhoi snapped, looking intently toward the middle of the apparently empty beach.

"In the jungle behind the beach?"

"No! There on the beach. Look!" he replied with exasperation.

In the jungle with the Pirahãs I regularly failed to see wildlife they saw. My inexperienced eyes just weren't able to see as theirs did.

But this was different. Even I could tell that there was nothing on that white, sandy beach no more than one hundred yards away. And yet as certain as I was about this, the Pirahãs were equally certain that there was something there. Maybe there had been something there that I just missed seeing, but they insisted that what they were seeing, Xigagaí, was still there.

Everyone continued to look toward the beach. I head Kristene, my six-year-old daughted, at my side.

"What are they looking at, Daddy?"

"I don't know. I can't see anything."

Kris stood on her toes and peered across the river. Then at me. Then at the Pirahãs. She was as puzzled as I was.

Kristene and I left the Pirahãs and walked back into our house. What had I just witnessed? Over the more than two decades since that summer morning, I have tried to come to grips with the significance of how two cultures, my European-based culture and the Pirahãs' culture, could see reality so differently. I could never have proved to the Pirahãs that the beach was empty. Nor could they have convinced me that there was anything, much less a sprit, on it.

As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another's views more readily. But as I learned from the Pirahãs, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally.

...

Pirahãs see sprits in their minds, literally. They talk to spirits, literally. Whatever anyone else might think of these claims, all Pirahãs will say that they experience spirits. For this reason, Pirahã spirits exemplify the immediacy of experience principle. And the myths of any other culture must also obey this constraint or there is no appropriate way to talk about them in the Pirahã language.

One might legitimately ask whether something that is not true to Western minds can be experienced. There is reason to believe that it can. When the Pirahãs claim to exprience a spirit they have experienced something, and they label this something a spirit. They attribute properties to this experience, as well as the label spirit. Are all the properties, such as existence and lack of blood, correct? I am sure that they are not. But I am equally sure that we attribute properties to many experiences in our daily lives that are incorrect. ...

But if all Pirahã myths must exemplify immediacy of experience, then the scriptures of many world religions, such as the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, and so on, could not be translated or discussed among the Pirahãs, because they involve stories for which there is no living eyewitness. This is the main reason that no missionary for nearly three hundred years has had any impact on the Pirahãs' religion.

(Daniel Everette: Don't Sleep, There are Snakes, xvi–xvii, 141–142.)

Writing of Koyukon hunters of Alaska, Nelson remarks that, for them, ‘the conceptual distance between humanity and nature is narrow’ (1983: 240). On the evidence of his own account, and many others, it would be more true to say that there is no conceptual distance at all, or rather that what we distinguish as humanity and nature merge, for them, into a single field of relationships. And indeed, we find nothing corresponding to the Western concept of nature in hunter-gatherer representations, for they see no essential difference between the ways one relates to humans and to non-human constituents of the environment. We have seen how both sharing (among humans) and hunting (of animals by humans) rest on the same principle of trust, and how the sense in which hunters claim to know and care for animals is identical to the sense in which they know and care for other human beings. One could make the same argument for pastoralism: I have shown elsewhere, in the case of northern Eurasian reindeer herdsmen, how the transition from hunting to pastoralism led to the emergence, in place of egalitarian relations of sharing, of relations of dominance and subordination between herding leaders and their assistants (Ingold 1980: 165–9). Evidently a transition in the quality of relationship, from trust to
domination, affects relations not only between humans and non-human animals, but also, and equally, among human beings themselves. Hallowell’s observation that in the world of the Ojibwa, ‘vital social relations transcend those which are maintained with human beings’ (1960: 43) could apply just as well to other hunting peoples, and indeed to pastoralists as well.

This observation, however, plays havoc with the established Western dichotomies between animals and society, or nature and humanity. The distinction between the human and the non-human no longer marks the outer limits of the social world, as against that of nature, but rather maps a domain within it whose boundary is both permeable and easily crossed. It comes as no surprise, then, that anthropology, as an intellectual product of the Western tradition, has sought to contain the damage by relativising the indigenous view and thereby neutralising the challenge it presents to our own suppositions. Thus we are told that the hunter-gatherer view is just another cultural construction of reality. When hunters use terms drawn from the domain of human interaction to describe their relations with animals, they are said to be indulging in metaphor (Bird-David 1992a). But to claim that what is literally true of relations among humans (for example, that they share), is only figuratively true of relations with animals, is to reproduce the very dichotomy between animals and society that the indigenous view purports to reject. We tell ourselves reassuringly that this view the hunters have, of sharing with animals as they would with people, however appealing it might be, does not correspond with what actually happens.
For nature, we say, does not really share with man.9 When hunters assert the contrary it is because the image of sharing is so deeply ingrained in their thought that they can no longer tell the metaphor from the reality. But we can, and we insist – on these grounds – that the hunters have got it wrong.

This strikes me as profoundly arrogant. It is to accord priority to the Western metaphysics of the alienation of humanity from nature, and to use our disengagement as the standard against which to judge their engagement. Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority.

(Tim Ingold: From trust to domination. An alternative history of human-animal relations. Kirjassa Perception of Environment – Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, s. 76.)