RAI More on Honour and Shame Author(s): Gideon M. Kressel and Unni Wikan Source: Man, Mar., 1988, New Series, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 167-170 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2803039 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Man JSTOR This content downloaded from 130.133.8.114 on Mon, 16 Nov 2020 14:03:49 UTC 11
CORRESPONDENCE 167 More on Amazonian politics Dr Santos Granero has been kind enough to send me his reply to my comments, and I am pleased to find that his and my point of view are not as different as they first seemed (Note). Obviously, we both refuse to advocate either exclusive attention to infrastructure nor its con- verse, blind insistence on superstructure, be- cause the former leads to vulgar materialism, the latter to what could be labelled shamanistic solipsism. We thus both agree that the problem of precedence of either the ideological or the pragmatical dimensions of economics is irrel- evant (and ethnocentric) here: Amerindian leadership is indeed a complex matter irredu- cible to any one variable. In fact, this is exactly what I intended to stress in my original comments, so I am glad to note the author's insistence on the interrelationship between ritual knowledge and productive prac- tices, instead of main focus on the monopoly of mystical means of production. Yet, in spite of this, Santos Granero's reply still tends to over- emphasize-perhaps for the sake of polemics -the role of life-giving techniques, to the ex- tent of making them appear as the basis for political power rather than just one of several components. Thus, in his discussion of the Cashinahua chiri rituals, if Santos Granero correctly indicates that shamans and leaders coexist in a kind of sym- biotic relationship, he also less convincingly suggests that the latter 'are the ones who control the symbolic and ceremonial aspects of the re- production of the social and natural orders'. Indeed, Girard's old (1957), laconic (2 pages) and third-hand description of the ritual does make it seem as if it were above all a fertility rite from which leaders derive their legitimacy. But this is above all a consequence of Girard's mesoamericanist bias. More reliable sources provide a different picture, describing chidin as 'the headman's ceremony, a ritual for restoring unity to the village when dissent and factional- ism threaten the social fabric (Kensinger, ms.), whereas fertility is asserted to be essentially ensured by the kacha nawa ritual, explicitly re- ferred to as 'the Cashinahua fertility ceremony' (Kensinger