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Animal Skins/Human Souls: Figurations of the Jaguar in Contemporary Brazilian and Spanish American Literature
Odile Cisneros
The jaguar (
Panthera onca) once
roamed the Americas, from the Grand Canyon to Patagonia. It is now a vulnerable species due to overhunting.
1 For a recent study of the density of jaguar populations in Sierra Madre del Sur in the central-western state of Michoacán, see Charre-Medellín et al. 2023: 47–60. Because of its widespread habitat and its role as a large, powerful top-feeder, this feline historically occupied a unique cultural place. In many Amerindian and Latin American contexts, from pre-Columbian to contemporary times, the jaguar was revered as a magical, mythical animal. Traditional Indigenous stories in the Amazon often tell of shamans who don jaguar pelts to transform into the animal. Other tales explain how the body, under the semblance of a jaguar, contains a human soul.
Such figurations have also made their way into written, non-Indigenous literary texts, and their representations reveal the presence of Amerindian beliefs regarding this animal as mythical and significant for understanding the connection between humans and nature. In this chapter, I draw on Amerindian approaches to the human/animal divide to read modern and contemporary jaguar-themed texts from Spanish America and Brazil from an ecocritical perspective. I consider pre-Columbian beliefs in tonalli (animal souls) and naguales (companion animals) as notions that illuminate the connections between humans, animals, and destiny in Mesoamerican thought. Akin to tonalismo and nagualismo in the southern hemisphere, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro discusses “perspectivism” as an Amazonian notion that unsettles Western definitions of a “fixed” human nature. My chapter draws attention to the parallels and differences between these two sets of Indigenous beliefs that question the traditional Western divide between humans and nature and then deploys those notions to examine the theme of the jaguar. Because of its prominence as the largest feline in the Americas and the prevalence of its representations as a mythical animal, the jaguar must be viewed as both a real and mythical animal whose literal and literary habitats unify the Americas. I discuss how this animal figures and is figured in works by Spanish-American authors such as Horacio Quiroga, Humberto Ak’abal, Homero Aridjis, and Pablo Antonio Cuadra, as well as by Brazilian writers such as João Guimarães Rosa and Sérgio Medeiros.
Before engaging in a discussion of animal souls as they relate to jaguar narratives, it is important to acknowledge the many Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources describing a worldview rooted in connections between the human and nonhuman worlds. In the recent volume, Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies, the editors point out that many Indigenous voices negotiate dichotomies such as “man/woman, reason/emotion, body/spirit, Indigenous/non-Indigenous, and academic writing/storytelling,” as well as “reclaim Indigenous tongues and poetics from which they identify reciprocal poetic-cognitive strategies;” thus, strategies derived from Zoque, Maya languages, Mapudungun, and Quechua, among other languages, can be instrumental “to reorganize the body and our relationships with humans and nonhuman beings, and to reconnect with the territory” (Chacón, Beck, and Sánchez Martínez 2024: 10).
These voices also stress the central importance of being-to-being relations, which differ from Western notions that compartmentalize a sense of being. Many authors in that volume point out that such relationality cuts across many Indigenous cultures and contexts. Miguel Rojas-Sotelo, for instance, notes the contrast between Western and Indigenous visions of “earthing:”
The modern/colonial, north/south axis has defined power relations during modernity and established forms of relating to the land and its resources. Most Indigenous peoples in rural (but also in urban) settings preserve an earth/cosmos form of existence, establishing networks of relations within the earth, the human, nonhuman, the beyond human, and the cosmos. (Rojas-Sotelo 2024: 23)
Nathan C. Henne, for his part, argues that the Western notion of nature:
inherently based on a clear human/non-human binary separation – does not exist, either in the world or in traditional Indigenous ecologies. K’iche’ ecologies imagine/construct the sum total of the relationships among all the realms of ecosystems very differently as a basis for cosmovision. (Henne 2024: 118)
These notions have not remained circumscribed to Amerindian communities and cultures. Miguel Rochas Vivas develops the idea of how Indigenous literatures “migrate” toward letters; he examines how Brazilian Modernist authors such as Mário de Andrade employ “…elementos de la mitología indígena amazónica para reflejar el carácter, o nenhum caráter, del brasilero,” thus resulting in a “viraje en la atención a la expresión nacional, y cierta mirada de vuelta a los orígenes nativos pre-brasileños” (Rochas Vivas 2024: 261).
What these authors underscore is not only the gap between Western and Indigenous views of nature, in addition to Indigenous emphasis on mutuality and relationality, but also how these views can, and indeed have, influenced both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers and artists in Latin America.