COPERNICUS IN THE AMAZON: ONTOLOGICAL TURNINGS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF AMERINDIAN ETHNOLOGIES

INTRODUCTION: THE ANTHROPOCENE AND THE AMERINDIANS This article originates from a paper presented at the Boas Seminar at Columbia University, New York, in May of 2016. The circumstances in which the argument was presented are so intrinsically bound up with how I address the recent debates concerning the intellectual trend in anthropology that is known as ‘the ontological turn’, that I have decided to preserve, in this published version, those signposts that situate the author and her audience. It was the challenge of presenting a line of thought with which, in my view, my very specialized audience of eminent anthropologists was relatively unfamiliar, that demanded this exercise in conceptual archaeology. Had I approached the debate from the standpoint of Amerindian ethnology, many of the presuppositions made explicit in this article would have remained implicit. When teaching about the topic in Brazil, I came to realise that contextualising the history of a concept in this way can be useful for students as well, especially for those unfamiliar with Amerindian ethnology. A conversation with Marilyn Ivy1 on the role of Amerindian ethnology in contemporary anthropological debates prompted an invitation to tackle this topic from my perspective, which is that of a European doing anthropology in Brazil with Amerindian peoples. Once I began to think seriously about it, I realised that this was not at all an obvious task. I had to tackle a complex question, riddled with diplomatic risks. First, everything about the phenomenon is open

copernicus in the amazon: ontological turnings from the perspective of amerindian ethnologies sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.08.01: 133 -167, jan.-apr., 2018 to discussion: from the term 'ontological' itself, through the differential uses and theoretical filiations it invokes, to the matter of whether we are dealing with a singular turn or several turnings, and the relation of this turn to previous theoretical turnings in the discipline. Quite a lot has been written and said about the topic over the past ten years. 2 In the United States, for example, the ontological turn gained academic visibility during the 2013 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Chicago, with a panel on the topic and its relation to politics proposed by Martin Holbraad, Axel Pedersen and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Elizabeth Povinelli 3 was among the invited discussants.
We are all undeniably enmeshed in the same vast web of Late Capitalism that infiltrates the most remote areas and aspects of our lives with its commodities, toxic substances, viruses, mosquitos and epidemics, and its implacable logic of exploitation of the seas, the soil, the territory. In reaction to this recklessness, a passive Nature suddenly became Gaia, a 'living being', 'unpredictable and indifferent' as Stengers (2010) would have it. All this affects, most of all, the minorities and 'the otherwise' (Povinelli, 2016), who become resignified as the poor in need of commodities and assistance. These same people, however, have the practical -but above all relational -knowledge of living otherwise, and can show us lines of flight out of the vicious circle of blind developmentalism.
The environmental crisis is now so evident and pressing that the problems caused by the anthropocene -the era in history when humanity began to dominate, rather than coexist with, the so-called 'natural world' (Sayre, 2012: 58) -demand an urgent and comprehensive rethinking of our categories and the relations between nature and culture, thought and being, human and world.
The recent interest in Amerindian ontologies in the fields of the Arts and Sciences should be seen in light of this. 4 By co-evolving with, rather than destroying, the animated environment of other beings that surround and inhabit them, these collectives reveal different ways of 'being-with', just as their praxis exhibits proof of eminently relational worlds and ontologies.
The substitution of relational ontologies by the opposition between 'subject' and 'object' enabled the Modernist and Capitalist enterprise to invent its world-conquering machinery, trapping in its gears even the most resilient minorities surviving at its margins. The ontologies of these minorities speak a language that resonates with what contemporary philosophers of science are looking for. Thus, in her videoconference for the "Thousand Names of Gaia" Colloquium, Donna Haraway argued for a renewed awareness of how all beings, including humans, are composed of other beings and enmeshed in a dense web of becoming-along-with. Instead of inter-relationality, we are dealing with an intra-relationality; we are entities composed of relations, cut across by other agencies and inhabited by different subjectivities. 5 We are multiple and dividual rather than individual (Strathern, 1988); we are fractals (Wagner, 1991; article | els lagrou Kelly, 2001). What these new ideas can teach us are not all that different from what we can learn from native Amerindian philosophies.
Haraway argues that "we need to look for allies also in unlikely places, look for alignments in dreadful zones […] we are inhabiting the belly of the monster the way the Amerindians inhabit the belly of the monster and form unlikely alliances and become someone they had no intention of becoming". This situation calls for strategies of guerrilla warfare. "The notion of an entity plus an environment is what we can't think anymore... We have what biologists call holobionts, the collection of entities taken together in their relationality that construct a good enough one to get through the day". We need to learn from the Japanese how to use the force of the other to win, she argues. This is certainly an art Brazilians are very good at, from the afro-Brazilian capoeira to the xondaro of the Guarani (Bregalda, 2017).
The hubris of Modernist ontology needs to be corrected by taking conscience of the processes of sympoiesis, of our creative becoming in symbiosis with other species. Our origin myth of the world also needs to be revised, argues Haraway (2014), since the world as we know it today is the failed outcome of a cosmic act of mutual cannibalism: two bacteria trying to devour each other could not digest one another, and as a result we have the contemporary cell, more complex than the original one.
The ontogeny of the Piaroa, a people of the Venezuelan rainforest, rehearses a similar story about the origin of the world as the result of a cannibalistic battle between two antagonistic forces, brothers-in-law that fight until they devour each other. In this way, all of the differences in the world gained form during a mythic time of cumulative history and extreme creativity. This extremely creative power, however, poisoned the life of the senses of the beings on earth. To make life on earth possible, the Piaroa adopted an ethics and aesthetics of conservation instead of accumulation, a history that works to keep things in place and avoid the return of uncontrolled creative forces and their autodestructive and poisonous potential (Overing, 1986b(Overing, , 1989(Overing, , 1990.
The origin myth of the Yanomami similarly meditates on the dangers of uncontrolled productive desires that give rise to people with 'minds planted in merchandise'. Minerals were planted by Omama, the creator god. Like the bones of a skeleton, they sustain the earth. The peccary people, as the Yanomami call the gold miners and their digging equipment, put this delicate geological construction in danger, releasing the lethal smoke of metal that carries the deadly epidemics that afflict the inhabitants of the forest and their shamans.
Through their songs and dances, shamans keep the xapiri image-beings that animate the forest alive. When the last shaman dies, the xapiri will become enraged and cause the sky to fall upon the earth (Kopenawa & Albert, 2010). Davi Kopenawa's story about the dangers of the end of the world is a good example of what Elizabeth Povinelli calls a 'geontology' and the cosmopo-136 copernicus in the amazon: ontological turnings from the perspective of amerindian ethnologies sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.08.01: 133 -167, jan.-apr., 2018 litical agencies necessary to keep geological formations in place. Different geontologies think differently the relation between life and nonlife, such as rocks, stones, creeks, and the desert. By emphasising nonlife, Povinelli points toward the limits of an evident vitalist tendency in the literature on different relational ontologies, which ponder life in terms of a constant process of engendering, being born, growing and dying. "For the animist everything has life", says Povinelli in her interview. But, for the Aborigines, the landscape of the Australian desert is the outcome of events and acts that happened to the ancestors in the past; though it is nonlife or landscape, it nonetheless needs a relational network of reflection and intentional actions, of strategies that enable the rocks or creeks to continue to exist. "I am the analytic subject asking, 'how, in the world I am in, do I keep myself in place?' and that is absolutely not the typical anthropological concept of the other" (Povinelli, 2014).
As an alternative, Povinelli proposes the concept of the 'otherwise'. "The otherwise is that which is within something and causes that thing to shake and the whole system to turn into something else" (Povinelli, 2014). Instead of the 'other as other' in opposition to a 'we', framing the otherwise as being internal to an 'us' enables minorities to act within majorities and to thereby transform them.
This idea comes surprisingly close to the Amerindian definition of otherness, whereby 'self' and 'other' are intrinsically intertwined and traversed by processes of other-self-becoming or becoming-otherwise (Lagrou, 1998). Every person is the result of a complex bricolage of different agencies acting together, in such a way that a collectivity of beings or their habitat can remain in continuity with what it was before, without thus negating the incidence of forces that change it. 'Nature' for Amerindians is constant variation; to be alive is to improvise with the means at hand in the creative invention of everyday life (Wagner, 1975).
An eloquent example of this mode of being are the Pirahã, who always experiment, producing miniatures that seek to emulate or look like other things and beings. They thereby follow the example of Igagai, the creator, who produced the animals, moulding them from mud and improvising in the process, working through resemblances and differences. The world is not only composed of successful experiments, but also of predatory events, failed cannibalizations. New human bodies, for instance, are conceived by a fright caused in a woman by an unsuccessful predatory act. And a new image-being 6 , 'spirit' or 'god', abaisi, is born when a human body suffers an accident caused by another agent and liberates a double as a result. The world is in a constant process of creating forms and images in interaction with and reaction to each other (Gonçalves, 2001).

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF A CONCEPT
Until recently, for my ethnologist colleagues in Brazil and I, the ontological turn had been the given Ground against which we have been shaping our Figures.
Each one of us has been searching for an idiom that comes as close as possible to 137 article | els lagrou how native collectives conceive their relations to the world and its beings in a constant process of becoming. We have been exploring all of these possible transformations as if following the chromatic variations of Amerindian mythologies and socialities themselves. 7 Born of the theoretical efforts of pioneers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres, Amerindian ethnology has always had a vocation for changing the course of the discipline and how we think about humanity. When they chose the Americas as the destiny of their travels, Lévi-Strauss and Clastres were already familiar with the writings of the first chroniclers and the critical reflections they provoked in La Boétie 8 and Montaigne. It should hence come as no surprise that their anthropology was profoundly affected by the way Amerindian collectives themselves think and act. Some say Lévi-Strauss' (1991) structuralism, and his theory of 'dualism in a state of perpetual disequilibrium', would have been impossible if not for his immersion in indigenous thought as evident in the Mythologiques (Taylor, 2011).
In the 1970s, in his important book Society against the State, Clastres made explicit his ambition to provoke a 'Copernican revolution' in the political thought of the metropolis: instead of thinking of the native peoples of the Americas along with the sixteenth century chroniclers, who saw them as peoples 'without faith, without law, and without king' -that is as people who lacked political organization, or society tout court, since they were not organized through the State -Clastres sought to turn political philosophy on its head. We know the influence that this idea had on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1987): A Copernican revolution is at stake, in the sense that in some respects, ethnology until now has let primitive cultures revolve around Western civilization in a centripetal motion, so to speak. Political anthropology appears to have made it abundantly clear that a complete reversal of perspectives is necessary. Political anthropolog y encounters a limit that is not so much a property of primitive societies as it is something carried within anthropology itself, the limitation of the West itself, whose seal is still engraved upon it. In order to escape the attraction of its native earth […] ref lection on power must effect a 'heliocentric' conversion: it will then perhaps succeed in better understanding the world of others, and consequently our own.
The path of its conversio'n is shown, moreover, by a contemporary mind that has been able to take seriously that of Savages: the work of Claude Levi-Strauss [...] It is time to change suns, time to move on (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 25-26) Almost ten years ago, in a comparative essay on Amerindian arts and artefacts, inspired by Gell's Art and agency, by Clastres' and Lévi-Strauss's contributions to a non-representationalist approach to images and artefacts, by Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism, as well as by the writings of Joanna Overing, I wrote on art as a way of giving form to thought, of producing life and bodies. Motivated by the image of the inversion of perspectives, I followed Clastres in his use of the Copernican metaphor: 138 copernicus in the amazon: ontological turnings from the perspective of amerindian ethnologies sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.08.01: 133 -167, jan.-apr., 2018 In this book we explored the theoretical consequences of an ethnological perspective on Amerindian arts. The specificity of this perspective resides in not taking as a point of reference any of the previously available definitions of art, be these aesthetic, interpretive or institutional. We thus envisage a Copernican revolution for art, equivalent to the one effected by Pierre Clastres for politics […] By looking at our own society with Amerindian collectives as a reference point, the criteria of evaluation necessarily change.
[…] If we look at art as an art of building worlds, and no longer as a phenomenon to be distinguished from the artefact -as a sphere of practice associated with the extraordinary, that needs to be kept apart from the everyday in order to keep its sacredness -the cognitive relation is inverted. This figure and ground reversal reveals a new figure, a new ground. Nothing in the form, or sense or context of things predisposes them to be classified as art or not art. In this way, works of art can be human bodies sculpted by ritual intervention, through ritual song and medicinal baths, dieting and a more properly physical moulding (which may consist of different techniques of producing a body/person deemed 'beautiful'; aesthetics is ethical uprightness).
The result is that the body becomes a conceptual artefact and the artefact an almost-body, and that the trajectories of bodies and artefacts increasingly converge. Another result is that functionality and contemplation become inseparable; aesthetic efficacy results from the capacity of an image to act upon and thus create and transform the world. If art, our own and that of others, continues to fascinate, it is because we can never cease to dream up the possibility of creating new worlds. This possibility of coexistence and superimposition of different worlds which are not mutually exclusive is a lesson we have yet to learn from Amerindian art (Lagrou, 2014:104-105).
Copernicus again emerges as a powerful image in the work of Martin Holbraad, who, along with the co-editors of the volume Thinking through things, is generally taken to have been among the first anthropologists to use the label 'the ontological turn' for what they then called 'a quiet revolution [going on] in anthropology'. Among the anthropologists who influenced the turn, they mention "not only Latour, but also Alfred Gell, Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Roy Wagner" (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell, 2007: 8 proposes that the turn's ambition must be to "invert, turn, the relation between ethnographic materials and analytical resources on its head. Ethnography thus becomes the source of our concepts, not the object" (Holbraad, 2016).
The decolonization of anthropology had been on the agenda of Amerindian ethnology for some time. As early as 1977, Joanna Overing called on par-139 article | els lagrou ticipants of a symposium on Amazonia to think with the natives in order to discover concepts that would permit us to come closer to the way they think, thereby avoiding concepts imported from other ethnographic regions. Overing's papers during the 1980s frequently use as a subtitle the idea of taking seriously the existence and creation of 'multiple worlds' (Overing, 1990). 9 Viveiros de Castro's article, "The relative native", written a few years after his important article on perspectivism, is a powerful formulation of this political project that takes native thought seriously, so far as our conceptual language permits. The article thus functions as a sort of methodological manual for the new anthropology envisioned. This is also why the concept of controlled equivocation is crucial here. Viveiros de Castro (2004 talks of anthropology as comparative ontography, the true point of view being that of immanence. After the 'linguistic turn', the 'interpretive turn', the 'reflexive turn', and the 'epistemological turn', all of which have affected anthropology as critical reflections on our method of inquiry and the language we use to talk about others, we now have an 'ontological turn', or turnings, that has as its most characteristic mission the attempt to eschew the problems of representation. I cite It thus appears to me that one of the effects of the so-called ontological turn is that this discreet isolation of specialists writing about collectives living at the margins of late capitalism, in Amazonia, Melanesia, New Guinea and Australia, has come to an end. For me, personally, being invited to speak on the ontological turn to a broad audience presented me with the challenge of turning the Ground against which 'we' (Brazilian ethnologists as a collective) traditionally invent our figures into the Figure of reflection itself, and to thereby make the Ground explicit. This can only be done from my own point of view, as someone engaged in the Amazonian ethnological debate; but also from an anchoring in the non-representationalist debate in the anthropology of art -a debate that has been going on, one could say, since the publication of Boas' Primitive art, and in which Lévi-Strauss, in dialogue with his surrealist friends in New York, played an important part (Clifford, 1981(Clifford, , 1988. We ethnologists know fully well that our Northern colleagues, as well as our non-ethnologist colleagues at home, used to think that the ethnological style of doing anthropology was 'traditional', and that this ambition of getting close to the conceptual skin of the natives (in the Malinowskian sense) was long due a thorough deconstruction. But it appears to me that the ontological turn is a different answer to the same problem of the crisis of representation in anthropology, and that this new conceptual construct would have been impossible had the field not been cleared by the deconstruction of the vices of representation. Before the invention of the label 'ontological turn', some called this movement 'post-structuralism'; others called it 'post-post-modernism', although we know, to quote Latour, that "we have never been modern" anyway (Latour, 1991). Those who had until recently been labelled as traditional and/or Though it perceives itself as human, the capuchin monkey is an animal for the Yudjá. The night monkey, in contrast, is more spirit than animal. The difference between to be and to have a spirit or soul is crucial for the Yudjá, as indeed it is for the Huni Kuin (Cashinahua). But the Yudjá go one step further: in the diffuse or contiguous zone of animals that can be human, and humans and animals that can be spirits, the humans possess the moral privilege of reflexivity. Only humans know that the world is characterized by the duplicity of all beings, so that the subject never knows its double. This is an interesting psychological theory, and the Yudjá theory of subjectification contains an important asymmetry: Human wisdom consists of what we call ref lexivity: those who are alive know that the dead consider tucunaré fish to be corpses; but the dead do not know that this is known with respect to them, nor do they know that those who are alive consider tucunaré fish as such. This relative unreason, that is, this incapacity to put themselves in perspective, characterizes the existence of animals as well as our own onirical existence […] This is the sort of moral relation the Yudjá have with the animals (Lima, 1999a: 10; translation by the author).
This 'non-reciprocity of perspectives', as Gonçalves (2001) called it when referring to a similar phenomenon among the Pirahã, differs from the more widespread character of perspectivism, where the symmetrically inverse quality of the relations between the human and nonhuman point of view is emphasized. An example of this last logic can be found among the Wari described by Vilaça (1992) and Conklin (2001). Here, when a subject, the hunter, imposes his point of view upon another, the point of view of the Other disappears: as game, the Other becomes the object of the action of a Subject, in an agent/patient inversion similar to that proposed by Alfred Gell for the agency of objects in his Art and agency. Accordingly, the self-designation of the Wari means 'predator'.
The non-reciprocity of perspectives is not absent from the comparative model proposed by Viveiros de Castro. He mentions it in the context of encoun-142 copernicus in the amazon: ontological turnings from the perspective of amerindian ethnologies sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.08.01: 133 -167, jan.-apr., 2018 ters with spirit beings, dangerous encounters in which to be addressed as 'human' by a nonhuman triggers processes of metamorphosis. However, its detailed ethnographic description -as I will show below -traces interesting lines of flight. The non-reciprocity of perspectives is, precisely, the characteristic chosen by Descola (2013: 140) in order to frame perspectivism as a particular and restricted case of Animism, as he explains in his book Beyond nature and culture.
In 'standard' animism, humans maintain that nonhumans perceive themselves as humans because, despite their different forms, they all possess similar interiorities (souls, subjectivities, intentionalities, enunciative positions). To this, perspectivism appends an additional clause: humans claim that nonhumans see humans not as humans but as nonhumans (animal predators or spirits) […] But this crossed inversion of the two points of view, which is the defining characteristic of perspectivism, is by no means attested by all animist systems.

Viveiros de Castro credits Lima with stressing that 'a point of view' for the
Yudjá is not to be confounded with our classical western cultural relativism. 12 This was an important step in the direction of solving a recurring problem with expressions such as 'perspectival quality ' and 'perspectival relativity', used by Kaj Århem (1990) and Andrew Gray (1996), respectively, to draw attention to this very common phenomenon in Amerindian conceptualisations of human/animal relations. "'Culture' would be the auto-anthropological schema […] of the first-person pronouns 'I' or 'me'" (Viveiros de Castro, 2012: 106). In this sense, the widespread use of self-designations meaning 'people' by Amerindians is crucial to Viveiros de Castro's argument. It proves that Amerindian anthropomorphism should not be confused with anthropocentrism. Thus, the Cashinahua (an originally pejorative name meaning 'bat people' given to them by their neighbours, 143 article | els lagrou who used to be their enemies), refer to themselves as huni kuin, 'real people'; or, in a more accurate translation, 'people properly speaking', or 'people like us'.
Instead of a substantive quality, these self-designations share a pronominal unity. Thus huni kuin means 'we', displaying all of the contextual amplitude of similar pronominal categories. In its more restricted acceptation, it can be applied to those speaking the same language and living together; in its wider sense, it can refer to 'all indigenous people living in the forest'. The Cashinahua are thus no different from their neighbours, the Ashaninka/Campa and Piro/Yine. By declaring that they want to be called huni kuin by others (as they indeed do, in the newly defined political context of inter-ethnic relations), they insist on having these others call them: 'we, the people' (Viveiros de Castro, 2012, cites Gow, 2001 for the Piro).
What differs (and difference is crucial here) for the Amerindian ontologies under discussion, is the body "as an assemblage of affects or ways of being that constitute a habitus" (Viveiros de Castro, 2012: 113). The fact that different beings possess different bodies, with different affects, inclinations and capacities, accounts for the difference of perspectives when species meet. Multinaturalism is therefore not so much a theory that postulates 'a variety of natures' but rather one that considers 'variation as nature' (Viveiros de Castro, 2014: 74;Ochoa Gautier, 2016: 109). To use the most well known example, referred to time and again in the literature: when a human encounters a jaguar devouring his game, the blood he sees is seen by the jaguar as maize beer.
The mismatch of perspectives is also characteristic of relations between the living and the dead, since they too have different bodies. For the Huni Kuin, the dead become Inka cannibal gods. In order to conceal one's humanity when visiting the village of the dead, one has to behave like they do. This involves eating the lice in the hair of their Inka hosts. But the lice look like big beetles to the living.
When the female visitor expresses her repugnance at eating beetles, the Inka realize that she is human. They kill and eat her. It is what you do rather than what you look like that reveals who you are; that is, to which collective your body belongs. indians think (Overing, 1977). In the 1970s and 1980s, American ethnologists such as Joanna Overing and Christopher Crocker criticized Lévi-Strauss for over-stressing the metaphorical and totemic logic of indigenous thought. They drew attention to the need to take into account the metonymical aspects of enunciations such as the renowned Bororo claim that "my brother is a parrot" (Crocker, 1977).
Feminist thought also had an impact on the nature/culture debate, as evident in Overing's critique of Lévi-Strauss's association of women with nature and her demonstration of the fact that nothing in Amerindian thought about procreation can be considered given or thoughtless; for the Piaroa of Venezuela, conception and gestation, for example, are products of women's thoughts (Overing, 1986a).

Based on extended fieldwork among the Achuar that resulted in his book
La nature domestique (1986), Descola has sought to overcome the limits of the opposition between Nature and Culture inherited from Lévi-Strauss. The first article in which he reintroduces the concept of animism was published in 1992.
In this article, Descola opposes two schemes for the objectification of nature that he, at the time, termed 'animistic' and 'totemic'. In his next article on the topic, Descola (1996)  terms, we are dealing with deictic and pronominal, rather than substantivist notions of nature and culture. That is why, according to Viveiros de Castro (1998: 474), both opponents and defenders of the nature/culture binary were wrong: Ingold (1991;  These four 'modes of identification', linked to modes of relating and conceptualizing the world, configure the four different ontologies that Descola calls 'naturalism', 'animism', 'totemism' and 'analogism'. Starting from the fact that some kind of distinction between interiority and physicality, body and soul, can be found in all thought traditions, Descola uses this opposition as dimensions or axes along which humans may see themselves in continuity or discontinuity regarding nonhumans: if the interiority of nonhumans is similar to those of humans, but their physicality is not, we have animism; the inverse case gives us naturalism as similar physicalities combined with dissimilar interiorities; if the interiority and physicality of nonhumans are identical to those of humans, we have totemism; its inverse case is analogism, with dissimilar interiorities and dissimilar physicalities all the way down (Coelho de Souza, 2014).
These modes of identification are polyvalent, universal dispositions that "come to have a public existence in the form of ontologies that favour one or another of them as the principle according to which the regime of existing beings is organized" (Descola, 2013: 247).
Despite this initial overlap of thought processes, the differences between Descola and Viveiros de Castro gradually became more evident. In his review of a debate between the two at the Collège de France in 2006, Latour typified 146 copernicus in the amazon: ontological turnings from the perspective of amerindian ethnologies sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.08.01: 133 -167, jan.-apr., 2018 these differences as a distinction between the 'type' and the 'bomb' (Latour, 2009  The need to think nature differently, as Gaia, a living being that has begun to react against its destruction by the anthropocene, brought together traditions with very different affiliations that have all been labelled as belonging to the 'ontological turn'. As Foucault once said, "perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian" (Foucault, 1970). Perhaps Deleuze's approach is in fact the only one able to produce an encounter between all these different lines of flight motivated by the otherwise, producing planes of contact between new materialism and structuralism, between post-humanism, object oriented theories and conceptual theories of immanence. There seems to be no clear definition of the ontological turn and hence no need to judge or decide who does and does not belong to it; all we have is this flight towards the future, situating us in-between the acknowledged equivocation of thought traditions of the otherwise and our own thought traditions, as these try to become open to the torsions and turnings made possible by the radicalization of an intellectual attitude that allows itself to become contaminated by Otherness, thus partially becoming other. 14 It is my conviction that the only way to do this is by using the appropriate poetics, the appropriate aesthetics, because it is through aesthetics, song and 'twisted images' that the natives themselves deal with nonhumans. Equivocation is as crucial to the theory of knowledge professed by Amerindians as it is for anthropologists. One has to consider the space left uncovered by our efforts at translation, which remains open to experimentation. Once we enter the domain of aesthetics it is clear that the famous Batesonian framing of play and poetry becomes central: the play of suggesting without revealing, of equivocal images, visual puns (Bateson, 1955(Bateson, , 1972. This is the mind-set surrealist artists recognized in Amerindian art (Carpenter, 1970;Gamboni, 2013;Lagrou, 2008). And Amerindians certainly do not confuse different states of being, since, as we will see, it would be fatal to perceive an image-being as an animal who takes the human himself to be the animal. 147 article | els lagrou

THE POETICS AND AESTHETICS OF OTHER BECOMING
The Huni Kuin provide yet another turning to the symmetrical inversion of perspectives. As the Yudjá discussed above, they recognize a difference between having and being a spirit. Some animals are humans from their own point of view, which means that they have a 'soul', yuxin. But some animals are yuxin, 'spirit beings.' Yuxin are beings or perceptual phenomena marked by an ambiguity deriving from their capacity to transform. Encountered at dusk, always when the victim is alone, these yuxin announce their presence by mimicking the sound of animals. The hunter thinks he is following his prey, but he is actually becoming prey of an image-being, master of the transformation of form. An encounter with a yuxin is thus confirmed after the fact by its effects. The hunter feels very weak, faints or falls ill, barely managing to return home. In the worst case scenario, he does not return at all, and slowly starts to adopt the point of view, affects and physicality of the yuxin being who captured him. Yuxin do not need these perception shifters, for they control the forms to be seen.
The master of all yuxin is Yube, the anaconda. He is the owner of the potent ayahuasca brew, considered to be his blood. Visionary experiences under the effects of the brew are important cosmopolitical events and can be described as real aesthetic battlefields where yuxin beings throw images, ornaments and designs onto the eye-soul of humans who enter their realm. The ritual singer responds through powerful 'song lines' that become lines of vision to be followed by the eye-souls of those who are in trouble. People take the brew in order to see. The following extract of a song shows the eye soul being covered in Yube's cloths: To see and to be seen depends on an eminently relational quality that is never given. What the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa has said of the xapiri spirit-helpers also holds true for Yube, the anaconda spirit of the Huni Kuin, and his revelation of his world of image-beings: to see these image-beings it is necessary to first be seen by them. They look at you and thus become visible for you (Kopenawa & Albert, 2010). To see xapiri one needs to become one of them and see with their eyes. In the same way, to see Yube and his transfor- The song, in other words, traces paths to be followed by the lost eye-soul of the person suffering. The eye-soul has to follow the design of the song as it unfolds before his eyes in order to be able to come back, to come close to the body of the one who sings, and hence to return to his own body. This is the reason why the master of song will lean against the shivering body of the one lost in the world of images, and sing in the plural voice of Yube, anaconda spirit, that we, I, you miss your body.
The vine connects the people by means of the song. It is in you who knows, (you) know where he goes, he knows that you know, because he has already swallowed you. (It is he who is singing in you with you). Goes to the other, it can be that (this one) is afraid. The path of the vine is also to walk between people. If I know how to sing, everybody will feel the way I sing. If the vine is my friend or my wife, I won't feel the effect strongly, but the other will scream (Sebidua, May 2015). We are dealing with an aesthetic battlefield where the roles of prey and predator have been inverted in venatic and also in sexual terms. My teachers explained to me that in 'vine language' you never call the animal spirit or his owner by his everyday name. What we see is ing for the duration of the experience. 16 We are here in the same shamanic universe where, as Taussig (1993) learned, to see and to know is to partially 'become other'. To my knowledge, Taussig was one of the first authors to associate vision with processes of otherbecoming, relying more on Walter Benjamin's optical unconscious and mimetic capacity than on the Deleuzian concept of becoming. The idea that the point of view is located in the body implies that vision is a tactile engagement withseeing and being seen. The eye touches and is encompassed by the surfaces it explores. To know and to see involve a far-reaching process of other-becoming (Taussig, 1993).
Marilyn Strathern (2013)  pi say that a shaman is connected to his auxiliary spirits by means of invisible lines (Gallois, 1988). For the Huni Kuin, the lines that compose their designs are pathways to be followed by the eye-soul; they are the lines of song that form a soundscape, and one elderly lady told me that their design system, kene, is the language of the Yuxin beings (kene yuxinin hantxaki). The network of lines transmits waves and potencies, and is composed of paths to be followed by image-beings familiar to and perceived by those who are prepared for it. Similarly, for the Yudjá patterns on the skin are paths that connect the living to the dead, and this is the reason why one should not use design when mourning (Lima, 1996). In the subsequent section, I undertook a highly situated archaeology of the key concepts of the ontological turn and of how this discussion turns on the crucial question of the relation between the twin concepts of 'nature' and 'culture', and of how to overcome or redefine both relation and terms.
In the last section, I showed how our theories can be further refined and developed through very specific and precise ethnographic exegeses that takes native philosophical language seriously. As is well known to specialists, Amer-155 article | els lagrou indian ontologies do not reveal themselves as systematized philosophical treaties. They are hidden, instead, behind the twisted images in the lyrics of their song, frequently considered to be the language of non-human beings, a language only comprehensible to specialists generally called 'shamans' or 'masters of song'. As Leach (2000) (Goldman, 2015(Goldman, , 2016. 12 Stolze Lima (1999a: 637) remembers she came up with the idea of 'point of view' because it offered an alternative, enabling her "to take a certain distance with respect to the ethnological problem of predation that was so important at the time for my colleagues and supervisor". "But", she concludes, "the notion that the ground is war, cannibalism, death and power, never abandoned me". For the importance of this encompassing ground of cosmological predation for article | els lagrou the delineation of a precarious figure of freedom and peace conquered by human collectives, see Overing (1986b).
13 See Strathern (1999) for an elaboration on the similarities and differences between her use of the concept of perspective in the Melanesian context and the concept of perspectivism proposed by Viveiros de Castro for Amerindian thought.
14 For an attempt to do exactly this, to distinguish the different theoretical currents gathered under the name ontological turn, see Holbraad & Pedersen (2016).

Abstract
In this article I explore the ontological turn in anthropological theory through three interconnected approaches. Anthropocene; relational aesthetics.