Animal Souls and Perspectivism
The aforementioned authors emphasize relationality in Amerindian notions governing relationships between humans and the more-than-human world, and the impact of such notions on traditional Indigenous communities, cultures, and literatures, and beyond. In his article “Animal Souls, Co-essences, and Human Destiny in Mesoamerica,” the American anthropologist Gary Gossen (b. 1942) delves deeper into the ancestral and spiritual notions still present in today’s Indigenous communities. Gossen argues that more than 15 million Indigenous people in Mexico and Central America “have a private spiritual world of the self that is expressed through the concept of animal souls or other extra somatic causal forces that influence their destiny […] A key node in Indian cosmologies and beliefs about health and general well-being;” this is because animal souls are “fragile essences that link individuals to the forces of the earth, the cosmos, and the divine,” which “originate or reside outside the body of their human, counterpart, often in the bodies of animals” (Gossen 1996: 81). This belief establishes a network between humans, animals, and other beings that exists not only on a spiritual but also on a physical level.
Among the concepts that Gossen discusses, tonalismo links the individual human to an individual animal in ways that closely tie their fixed destinies. The term nagualismo, in turn, refers to the ability of shamans and other powerful sorcerers and witches to change into their power animals at will. This identification of a particular animal, indeed a particular species, with a social class, generates a classification of souls that corresponds to various levels of human society, from the rich and powerful to the ordinary and humble. Moreover, certain species, such as the jaguar, ocelot, coyote, fox, and weasel, belong to a higher order. They are followed by rabbits, skunks, racoons, opossums, and squirrels. And below them in this hierarchy are cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys, wild birds, and insects. Shamans possess one of the higher-order animal souls, plus one of the lower spirits that serves as intermediary animal.
There is evidence of these beliefs in pre-Columbian inscriptions, colonial historical accounts such as Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex and Thomas Gage’s 1648 Travels in the New World (Gossen 1996: 87–90). They also appear in contemporary ethnographic reports and contemporary Chamula narrative folklore and “are related to the reluctance of the Chamula to kill any of these animals, for they might thereby be killing themselves or a relative” (96). Though these ideas have a strong social motivation, a link can clearly be established between them and contemporary thinking about ecology, where relationality, and specifically the codependency and mutuality of species, is emphasized.
Moving south to the Amazon, I turn now to the work of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (b. 1951). In his essay, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Viveiros de Castro explores two concepts that he deems characteristic of Amerindian thought, “perspectivism” and “multinaturalism.” For Viveiros de Castro, perspectivism is “the conception […] according to which the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view” (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 469). Multinaturalism, a corollary of perspectivism, implies a unity of spirit and a diversity of bodies (477). Viveiros de Castro came to the notion of perspectivism through the many references in Amazonian ethnography to an Indigenous concept whereby “the way humans perceive animals and other subjectivities that inhabit the world – gods, spirits, the dead, inhabitants of other cosmic levels, meteorological phenomena, plants, occasionally even objects and artefacts – differs profoundly from the way in which these beings see humans and they see themselves” (470). Humans see themselves as humans and animals as animals. Predatory animals and spirits, in turn, see humans as prey animals, and prey animals see humans as spirits or as predatory animals.
Viveiros de Castro’s notion of perspectivism is truly relational, as it defines personhood or humanity (the quality of being human) entirely from the point of view of the subject and not in reference to an abstract notion: “[Thus] animals and spirits see themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages and they experience their own habits [… as … ] culture – they see their food as human food: jaguars see blood as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish” (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 470). Animals, in a way, are people or see themselves as people. The bodies specific to each species are a kind of covering, packaging, or clothing that hides a human form only visible to members of the same species or to transspecies beings such as shamans. Such internal form is “the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of the animal: an intentionality or subjectivity formally identical to human consciousness” (471). In other words, there is an anthropomorphic spiritual essence and variable bodily appearances, or a fixed spirit and “garments” that can be changed or discarded. Shamanistic transformation, spirits, and dead people assuming animal forms would be examples of this type of metamorphosis.
Although in his essay Viveiros de Castro does not directly link his ideas on perspectivism and multinaturalism to current debates on ecology and literature, the terms some ecocritics employ suggest an extensive connection. In perspectivism and multinaturalism, there is not a single nature apprehended by a privileged human perspective, but rather a multiplicity of perspectives and natures. Likewise, transformation and transmutation, which are often a focus of ecology, are emphasized as well in perspectivism. And though perspectivism does not reverse or abolish hierarchies – animals see humans as animals and themselves as human – the label “human,” rather than an inherent and unsurpassable category, instead becomes relational, which raises the importance of positionality alongside a permanent flux of outward appearance with the underlying spirit remaining constant.
Both sets of Amerindian notions (Mesoamerican animal souls and Amazonian perspectivism) support questioning and reimagining Western beliefs about the human and non- or more-than-human worlds, particularly anthropocentrism and speciesism, and the privileging of humans overall and as a species. In both contexts, the “insuperable line” between humans and the rest of the world is more tenuous and less definitive, or as the ecocritic Greg Garrard puts it, it becomes difficult to anthropocentrically distinguish “beings that count from those that do not” (2012: 146). In the case of tonalismo, people and animals are connected in an individual in a personal way that determines their shared destinies. Injury or loss of the co-essences can affect the corresponding entity. From an environmental perspective, this suggests that as humans, our being and wellbeing are linked to that of the beings surrounding us. Through tonalismo and nagualismo, however, destinies are determined, unlike our Western notion of free will, yet some balance may be actively sought. To restore equilibrium, shamans can transform at will into their power or intermediary animals.
Perspectivism, for its part, questions the human-nature divide by turning it not on its head, but rather into a game of musical chairs: hierarchies persist, but the structure of being is what differs. The status accorded to humans is no longer intrinsic to being, but rather positional or deictic. There is a unity of spirit and diversity of bodies. Akin to tonalismo’s “animal souls,” Amazonian perspectivism posits an unchanging “spirit of the animal” identical to human consciousness, clothed in variable bodily garments. As in Mesoamerican thought, shamanistic transformations occur as a constant phenomenon in Amazonian thought. Perhaps the more radical notion here is perspectivism because it allows us, as humans, to think of ourselves as occupying various positions in nature. At times, we may be the top feeders, while at other moments, we may be the prey, as in the case of natural disasters and other phenomena beyond our control. The Mesoamerican concept of animal souls draws attention to the important link between our destiny, that of other beings, and elements of the planet.
With these notions in mind, I turn now to the figure of the jaguar in several contemporary texts from Latin American literature. This choice is motivated by this animal’s uniqueness and ubiquity in the Americas. About 15,000 jaguars (Panthera onca) currently inhabit territories from northern Mexico all the way to Brazil. Though now extinct in some northern regions, the largest, most powerful feline in the Americas also lived in parts of the southwestern United States. Present in pre-Columbian cultures across the Americas, the jaguar continues to fascinate poets and writers. The corpus examined in this chapter includes texts from Uruguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Brazil, seen through the lens of nagualismo, tonalismo, and perspectivism. They collectively demonstrate how these Amerindian concepts lie at the core of these writings and teach us important lessons about human coexistence, not only with these endangered felines, but also with the nonhuman or more-than-human world.