Paper short abstract:

This paper focus on the question about how to talk about a soul without reducing it to a mere image that represents the human body. In order to do so, this paper returns the ethnographic data of Bororo, Araweté and Yanomami and to the classic discussions that play an important part in current amerindian ethnology studies, through the texts of Bruno Latour, Tânia Stolze Lima e Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. In doing so, this paper proposes a reflection on different ways of thinking the notion of ‘soul’,stressing the ways it offers resistance to the stabilization, representation and condensation into a single image that stands for a body.

Paper long abstract:

The reading of a variety of ethnographies about lowland South-American societies and their cosmological systems reveals an interesting homology relation between the notions of "soul" and "image", treating the former as an "image" of the human body endowed with agentive capacity to relate with the "image" from the body of certain animals and with a specific class of supernatural beings, inhabitants of other cosmological levels. Relations with either those non-human images or with the class of supernatural beings (whose I will name for now on "spirits") may always be harmful, due to the risks of this image of the human body being captured, aggressed or even killed by those forms of alterity. The effects of those predatory activities will show up as diseases on the human physical body, or even its death resulting from the killing of its image/soul. In view of this ethnographic horizon, my aim in this paper is to amplify the comprehension on how this homology relation between "soul" and "image" gains its meaning in Amerindian ontologies. Furthermore, I also intend to face here the challenge of demonstrating that the effects of the strained cosmopolitical relations between those "images" of humans and the "images" of non-human alterity forms can resonate in the human body, thereby conceiving a chiasm between the "cosmopolitical" and the "imagetical", determining an image mode non-reducible to a mere representation of the physical human body.