Cubeo Hehénewa Religious Thought

By Irving Goldman

The societies of the Vaupés region are now among the most documented indigenous cultures of the New World, in part because they are thought to resemble earlier civilizations lost during initial colonial conflict. Here at last is the eagerly awaited publication of a posthumous work by the man widely regarded as the preeminent authority on Vaupés Amazonian societies. Cubeo Hehénewa Religious Thought will be the definitive account of the religious worldview of a significant Amazonian culture. Cubeo religious thought incorporates ideas about the nature of the cosmos, society, and human life; the individual's orientation to the world; the use of hallucinogenic substances; and a New World metaphysics. This volume was substantially completed before Irving Goldman’s death, but Peter Wilson has edited it for publication, providing a thorough introduction to Goldman’s work. Stephen Hugh-Jones has contributed an afterword, setting the work in the context of contemporary Vaupés ethnography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2004
• ISBN: 9780231503617

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EDITOR’S PREFACE

This book is a happy ending, of a sort, to a long story. It was completed and submitted to a publisher in 1988, when Irving Goldman was seventy-seven years old. It was recommended in the strongest terms for publication, and the reviewer appended a number of helpful suggestions and minor corrections, mostly concerning vocabulary. The publisher expressed some reservations about the length, and hence expense, of publishing the work. Goldman was taken aback by the number of suggestions for alterations and the publisher’s hesitation, for he considered, and rightly, that this was his best work. From a man who had already written one of the first and finest ethnographic monographs in English about an Amazonian tribe—his earlier work, The Cubeo; a monumental comparative study of Polynesian societies that will forever remain a classic—and a painstaking rethinking of Kwakiutl religion, his was an opinion to be reckoned with. He was his own sternest critic. There is no question, in my mind, that Irving Goldman misread the reviewer’s intentions and, possibly, judged his review by the number of the suggestions rather than by the substance of the recommendation. Be that as it may, he felt he had to rewrite the book. The version presented here is his rewritten version, for he was not willing to just amend the earlier draft. Though the earlier version exists, that was not what he wanted published, and I have abided by his wishes.

After his initial reaction and disappointment, Goldman began rewriting, but he was well over eighty years old. Though mentally as sharp and creative as ever, he found the physical task of typing tiring (he did not use a word processor), and work slowed to a trickle as illness beset him until, finally, the manuscript was put away. This is where I came in.

I had known Irving Goldman for more than forty years. I met my wife, Joan, while she was working as his research assistant for his Polynesian book. His summer place near Sutton, New Hampshire, was close to my wife’s family’s summer place at Sunapee, so, of course, we visited regularly and enjoyed good old gloves-off discussions about anthropology (and anthropologists). On my last visit, in 2000, he was ninety-two and a very sick man. This did not stop him from engaging in our customary spirited discussions. At lunch, Sonya, his delightful partner and most ardent champion, brought up the subject of the book. My wife, still as enthusiastic about her former teacher as ever, backed up Sonya, who suggested he go up and fetch it. Professing at first not to know where it was after all this time, he eventually went upstairs, brought it down and showed it to us. I had seen it before and read some pages, and I did so again. So did my wife. We were enthusiastic.

Seated on the sofa, the back of his head resting on his hand, as it often did when he was thinking and collecting his thoughts to make a point, Irving asked me whether I would try and get it published for him as he was too old and sick. Sonya seconded this, with an evangelical enthusiasm, telling us that it was her book, meaning it was to be dedicated to her and that nothing would make her prouder. Who could resist? But I would have offered anyway.

The major difficulty I have faced in editing this work is that I am not a Vaupésiologist. It is one thing to have read basic works by the likes of Reichel-Dolmatoff, the Hugh-Joneses, Jean Jackson, and Koch-Grünberg, as well as Goldman himself, and quite another thing to know enough about the Cubeo language and culture to be able to spot errors. Goldman had not accented any Cubeo terms in this, his revised version, and had given variant spellings of Cubeo words. I had no means of knowing which was correct, other than the few words that overlapped with his earlier monograph. For example, the hallucinogenic drink used by Cubeo was randomly spelt "miji or mihi. As Goldman used the spelling mihi" in his earlier book, I have used it here. Thanks to the good side of electronic communication, I was fortunate enough to to enlist the help of Stephen Hugh-Jones, of Cambridge University, who has willingly, and in the spirit of collegiality that makes academia worthwhile, given of his time and knowledge. There is no doubt that Goldman knew the Cubeo language well; I bore in mind that during his rewriting on an old typewriter, his attention to accents and diacritics might have been left until later. So to achieve consistency I have relied on Stephen’s recommendations. Whatever remains inaccurate is no fault of his but entirely my own for missing terms while editing. I have a suspicion that he may have used different spellings from different correspondents in his book, so these variants may reflect the way literate Cubeo write their language. But as far as possible I have standardized them, following Dr. Hugh-Jones’s recommendations.

As for the matter of editing, my main alterations have been to break up what were long chapters into parts, sections, and subjects, and to break up one chapter. Originally there were nine chapters; now there are ten. This means the table of contents can be used to achieve some sort of overview, and the logic of Goldman’s organization of text is made clearer. Goldman was too good a field-worker, and too fine an intellect, not to have had a definite purpose in presenting the book in the order that he did. Again, to assist the reader I have added some diagrams, which serve to summarize and put into a pattern parts of a very detailed text. On one occasion I have written a brief summary paragraph to link together discussions that are some distance apart. I have also added a few cross-references. Also for the reader’s convenience, I have inserted a few footnotes. These refer the reader to contrasting or comparable situations among other tribes in the Vaupés or clarify a debatable point. Goldman’s prose flows so well and is so economical that I have found little need to alter any of it. I have cut some paragraphs that seemed to repeat what had already been written, but this amounts to no more than 10,000 words and includes word lists given in Cubeo and the Lingua General without an English translation (which I could not obtain by other means). Finally I have prepared the glossary and bibliography from his references in the text.

Goldman wrote no conclusion. It was suggested that he should, but, having read the manuscript more times than I care to count and feeling confident that he knew full well what he was doing, I have come to see that the final chapter, on gender, is in fact a distillation of the problem of Cubeo religious thought. It is a resolution of the ambiguity that gnaws at the intellectual logic of the Cubeo religious pattern. How can the intellectual exclusion of women from the tribal history of the origin and presence of the Cubeo, which is their religion, be reconciled with their physical presence and their biological necessity for procreation?

This book was completed fifteen years ago. As it indicates, the winds of change are blowing strong in the Vaupés; Stephen Hugh-Jones was approached and generously agreed to write a postscript about the Cubeo in the twenty-first century. As there are many reasons why publication of this book is important, I include a short essay on Goldman’s work to provide a wider setting for this study of Cubeo religious thought.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

IRVING GOLDMAN AND THE SPIRIT OF FRANZ BOAS

Peter J. Wilson

There is an historical importance attached to the publication of this ethnographic work. Irving Goldman was the last surviving student of Franz Boas, and he was, for a time, his research assistant. Boas is commonly regarded as the founder of anthropology in America. Being a last survivor is, of course, a factor of Irving Goldman’s genes and good living. What is far more important is that this book represents, as do his other major works, an implementation of many of Boas’s ideas about anthropology, in particular about ethnography, and the methods by which it should be pursued. Boas himself refused to theorize or prescribe a method for ethnography or for anthropology in general, and Goldman himself never attempted to write about theory as something apart from the ethnographic work he pursued. Nor has he commented on how one should do fieldwork. But, taken altogether, his major works are, in themselves theoretical statements. Within each of his four major books, Goldman’s thoughts about method and theory are sometimes forcefully expressed, sometimes more subtly indicated. What can be extracted is a modern but faithful version of the theoretical ideas that implicitly guided Boas’s own work, but which he did not express. Though Boas refused to theorize or generalize about his material or admit that there were theoretical assumptions that guided his work, not even fieldwork on the scale carried out by Boas and his assistant George Hunt can avoid the matter of selection. You simply cannot record everything you see, nor can you suppose that informants have told you everything they know or can remember. You have to select, and to select you have to have criteria, whether you know it or not. So, as Karl Popper affirmed, all data is theory impregnated. There is a sense in which Goldman, when making known his own assumptions, extracted and elaborated the theoretical assumptions made by Boas.

In 1986 or 1987, Irving Goldman gave an interview to Dr. Enid Schildkrout, a former student of his at Sarah Lawrence College, where he taught for thirty-three years (the interview was submitted for publication and accepted in 1987). It is the only place in print where Goldman offers any comments in general on anthropological theory. He had, in fact just finished writing the original version of the present work. Though he steers clear of too many direct references to this work, after all Dr. Schildkrout would not have not read it yet, it seems clear that the views he expressed about anthropology, Boas, and his own work in that paper had been crystallized through writing Cubeo Hehénewa Religious Thought. For one who professed not to elaborate a general anthropology, Goldman expresses some very precise theoretical views. For example: Religion is not a separate branch of culture, distinct from social organization, economy and government. It is commonly the rationale, the metaphysics, and the science, the organized knowledge of primitive societies.¹ This was said in relation to Ancient Polynesian Society, but it receives its apotheosis in the present work on the real world, the inner world of the Hehénewa. What Goldman meant by religion was the system of explanation of the world that had been arrived at by preliterate peoples. He believed, as did Boas, that these should be studied on their own terms and definitely not in terms of a general theory devised from the rationality of the anthropologist’s own structure. Such indigenous systems were to be respected, not judged or shoehorned into preexisting categories of evolutionary development, structural-functionalism, or symbolic anthropology.

What I propose to do in this introduction is to examine the four major books, including the present one, as witnesses to the development of Goldman’s thought or, maybe more strongly, his deliberate as well as unconscious appropriation of the theoretical ideas that Boas let slip into his writings—how the ancestral spirit of Boas was reproduced in bodily form in these works. Although Goldman himself considered his major influence to be Boas, there is also good reason to think, after a close reading of his works, that the mother figure of the department at Columbia, Ruth Benedict, also had a key influence. This, in spite of the fact that when faced with the question: What is ‘Boasian’ anthropology? Benedict would answer with a beautiful and enigmatic Mona Lisa–like smile that suggested oceanic meanings but no answers.²

Most historians of anthropology are aware of Boas’s stance against eugenics, which he argued mostly from the point of view that the social environment, or culture, contributes more to the individual’s make up than biology, for every person is born a blank slate and indoctrinated or socialized from birth into a culture. Boas went further than assertion. He showed that culture could be responsible for biological change. He measured the stature and weight of immigrants from the Mediterranean and compared these with measurements of people from the same region who were first-and second-generation descendants living in the United States. He found an increase in height and weight. For many years the work of Margaret Mead on Samoan adolescence seemed to confirm Boas’s theory that nurture not nature had most influence on the individual. Recently, Derek Freeman has discredited Mead’s Samoan work though his evaluation has faced a formidable opposition.³

That is all I shall have to say about this very public aspect of Boasian theory. It was a point of view he felt morally and politically obliged to further in the face of racial prejudice and the proposed eugenics programs of the times. Nevertheless, Boas used the term evolution quite often when referring to culture. What he meant by this was that the stages of development of a culture resulted in changes, or its slow modification as a system. One was likely to find a set of customs in one society, which had their variant counterparts in a region that could be defined geographically or linguistically, or both. By investigating the history of this defined region, one could understand the variants as more or less evolved versions of the system. Boas never suggested a relativist position, that one system was more evolved than another. But his opponents could twist his words into relativism.

Goldman’s first book, First Men, which he wrote with his wife Hannah, was about human evolution, primarily from a paleoanthropological perspective. Though written more for high school students and the layman, there is a serious thread running through it: How did these ancestors live? or, What was their culture? Implicitly Goldman is hinting that if we want to know more about human evolution we need to know more about Paleolithic culture, as this influences evolution itself. This early work aside, Goldman took the other Boasian direction made famous by another of Boas’s well-known students—Ruth Benedict. Boas had suggested throughout many of his writings that any culture’s customs had to operate systematically. Ruth Benedict, who was Goldman’s advisor, brought this to the fore in her best-selling book, Patterns of Culture. There she wrote: No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.⁴ She went on to widen the scope: In culture too we must imagine a great arc on which are ranged the possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the environment or by man’s various activities. And then having defined the scope and the variations of culture she comes to the main point:

[Culture] tends also to be integrated. A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. Within each culture there comes into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society…. Taken up by a well-integrated culture, the most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its peculiar goals, often by the most unlikely metamorphoses. The form that these acts take we can understand only by understanding first the emotional and intellectual mainsprings of that society. Such patterning of culture cannot be ignored as if it were an unimportant detail.⁵

What interested Goldman was the intellectual mainspring of the pattern inherent in a culture. But whereas Benedict felt that patterns of culture revolved around the ideal of a psychological type, a Nietzschean personification of the values of existence, Goldman was interested in the nuts and bolts that held together and defined a people, a society, or a culturally homogenous region.

Goldman’s first book on the Cubeo argues against environmental determinism and for the suitability of a contrived cultural pattern worked out within the limits of the environment:

In the case of the Cubeo the simplicity of the economy, and the corresponding simplicity of the culture as a whole, would seem to be far more a product of its fundamental patterns and principles of organization than of external nature. If this conclusion is correct, it would suggest that the simple horticultural societies, as a type, are not mere victims of inhospitable environments but rather that they constitute a range of cultural systems with characteristic modes of equilibrium and adaptation that do not readily foster economic expansion and higher levels of social and political integration.⁶

Patterns, principles, systems, and characteristic modes are part of the vocabulary of the Benedictine version of Boas’s anthropology, though they can also be traced to the British school of structuralism, deriving from the theoretical and comparative work of the French scholar Émile Durkheim. In the final chapter of his first work on the Cubeo, called, appropriately, Principles and Patterns, Goldman isolates and sums up the working of these fundamental principles—we have notions such as linkage and autonomy, lateral and hierarchical relationships, fissility, periodicity, polarity-complementarity, and so forth. Readers will note, from Goldman’s introduction to the present work, that he felt he had adopted too narrow a focus in the first work. He had not properly realized that some Cubeo are not typical of all Cubeo, specifically he had studied the Bahúkiwa sib, which ranked low in the overall organization of the Cubeo tribe. He knew of higher-ranking sibs at the time, such as the Hehénewa, but did not realize how differently they saw the world of the Cubeo from their exalted position. So, whereas religion or religious thought is not even mentioned in the index to the first book, it is the subject of the present work. In The Cubeo, Goldman had recorded how much of Cubeo life seemed to be left to the freedom of emotions rather the discipline of organization, an observation that has a distinct Benedictine resonance:

The Cubeo … expect a rather high degree of emotional spontnaneity…. In secular affairs the spontaneity of correspondence between emotion and action is much greater than in ritual. In ritual the effort is made to establish the correspondence between feeling and the concept of the sacred. Ritual in primitive society generally expresses in a symbolic or highly compressed form the fundamental cultural themes of a society.⁷

This was also a reasonably conventional theoretical stance toward ritual at a time when thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz emphasized the compressive qualities of the symbol and its use in ritual. However, the vocabulary is neither Lévi-Straussian nor that used by Geertz. It is Boasian, or a milder version of Benedict’s, particularly in relation to the idea of pattern.

Goldman’s next major work appears, at first sight, to be a major departure from The Cubeo. It was based on library research rather than fieldwork, and it was a study of an entire cultural region, Polynesia, where Goldman had never done, and would never do, fieldwork. In his preface, Goldman refers to Boas as being among the first to see the advantages of close study of limited geographic areas. As early as 1896, Boas had written about a better method of finding and studying the processes by which certain stages of culture had developed. First, a detailed study of customs in their bearing to the total culture of the tribe practicing them, then an investigation of their geographical distribution among neighboring tribes. This better affords us a means of determining with considerable accuracy the historical causes that led to the formation of the customs in question.⁸ It was the idea, as Goldman stated, of controlled comparison. This, in turn, focused on the variability of common institutions—Benedict’s great arc or variations on a theme. Boas had articulated in many places his opposition to the idea that customs or institutions served psychological or mental processes or that they could be understood as the outcome of such processes. Customs and institutions were the outcome of history. They had developed in historical circumstances and varied because of historical circumstances. They were anonymous in their origin and their developments had to be understood as components of a pattern that was observed by a culture and its neighbors. Continental cultural regions are hard to define because their borders are fuzzy and overlap with others, but Polynesia is geographically and linguistically triangulated. Imagine a more or less equilateral triangle lying on its right side. The apex is Easter Island, the north consists of the Hawaiian Islands, and the south is New Zealand. The boundaries of the separate societies are absolutely clear, and the boundary of the region quite precise. The order of presentation of societies in the book is from New Zealand in the south, eastward to Easter Island, then straight across to take in the islands of Eastern Polynesia. Having done that, Goldman moves north to Hawaii and then south and west to take in Samoa, Tonga, and outliers such as Tikopia and Ontong Java. The conditions for a cultural region are fully satisfied. But what is the outcome?

The terminology has moved from principles and patterns to themes. The overriding theme is aristocracy, a theme which, in part, Goldman was looking to study and, in part, he found expressed in extremis, and with considerable variability, in Polynesia. Goldman chose aristocracy because it has "the advantage of being rooted in the deepest sources of sentiment—lineage and religion (my emphasis). This is an interesting choice, because aristocracy is a specialized feature of the more general institution of hierarchy, and hierarchies are not always rooted in religion. They may be based on relative age, generation, or gender, for example. Sentiment is generally a feeling toward rather than a rational thought about" so one can guess that Goldman’s conclusion, that religion and aristocracy are inextricable, might have already been presumed. He then makes a distinction between the utilitarian style of leadership and the aristocratic. It is the latter that is crucial to understanding not only Goldman’s study of Polynesia but also of his study of Kwakiutl religion and of the present work on Cubeo religious thought.

Aristocratic leadership draws its authority from religious interests, which transcend the tests of ordinary events, so that its influence has continuity unless challenged by some major crisis with which it cannot contend. Even then it has the advantage of religious authority. Moreover, aristocratic leadership is not individual but includes, in fact, a cadre of persons from the same or related pedigrees. A particular person may fail in leadership and the cadre will replace him.⁹

Goldman has every right to choose what theme he will study, but one must question the assumption made as a generalization here, that religion and aristocratic leadership ride hand in hand. My own study of a Malayo-Polynesian people, Tsimihety of Madagascar, revealed to me that though, like all Malagasy they had an ancestor cult, unlike most other Malagasy they were staunchly egalitarian.¹⁰ However, it is usually the case that an author writes his introduction last of all, in which case Goldman would have based his assertion on his findings. Whatever may have been the case, and we argued over many a lunch about this very point, Goldman had, first, successfully isolated the region within which he could study, and, second, he had pinpointed the institution, what he called the theme, around which everything else pivoted. This is very much a Benedictine conclusion. It could be called Zeusian in the sense that the Pueblo people are Apollonian. Referring to Nietzsche, Benedict contrasts them with the Dionysian as being people who keep to the middle road, stay within the known map, ‘remains what he is,’ and retains his civic name.¹¹ Having identified aristocracy in Polynesia as the dominant cultural theme, Goldman could then proceed to examine the variations upon this theme by comparative study. This was the Boasian program. Variations are not only related to a spatial environment, they occur through time. From this point of view they are changes or modifications, not necessarily of an original set-up, but of themselves as adaptations to changing circumstances. Controlled comparison is the study of historical change, or evolution of an identifiable social system.

Ancient Polynesian Society was published in 1970. The English language publication of Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship occurred in 1969. It was a book whose title deliberately echoed Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. George Peter Murdock’s Social Structure (1949), analyzing and classifying kinship systems of the world, had had time to establish an influence, and Goldman adopted Murdock’s kin-system terminology. Goldman’s notion of aristocracy was that it was rooted, as I noted above, in the deep human sentiments of lineage and religion. Though as far as I know Goldman’s book has never been reckoned together with these systematizing books on kinship, there seems to me a good case to be made that Goldman’s treatment of kinship in this volume stands alongside and should be considered with these defining books in the history of anthropology.

If Elementary Structures of Kinship and Social Structure are about the atoms of kinship and the way they interact to form a kinship system, then Ancient Polynesian Society is about descent theory, which includes kinship. Kinship is socially determined by lineage, and lineage is only conceivable through marriage, which provides the basis for alternatives and choice. Goldman argues, via the data he provides in his book, that the links between particular individuals per se are less structurally and socially important than the value assigned to particular links by the mother or father. These kinship links go back into the past, as lineages, so therefore lineages incorporate the history of all who have been, are, and will be linked—a record of their doings, their thoughts, their values. The other feature deeply rooted in human sentiment is religion, according to Goldman. Goldman, wisely, does not define religion. But the union of religion and pedigree is given life in the lineage, and, correspondingly, individuals take their position in society from this union. The question is how?

Goldman considers the then-current terminology for lineage societies—unilinear, multilinear, nonunilinear, and ramage—but rejects them all, though he agrees they may well signify significant lineage types. But they do not fit the Polynesian situation. He therefore identifies the significant form of lineage in Polynesia as the status lineage.

There is every reason to believe that all Polynesian descent groups belong to one common system. If we are to deal realistically with evolving systems, taking account of their variability, then classification must establish first the underlying and common principles of organization of all Polynesian descent groups. That this organization depends on principles of status has been demonstrated in every instance.¹²

Although status lineages, like any other lineage, are created through marriage and the production of heirs, the emphasis on which parental side a child might owe allegiance to varies depending on circumstances. An individual may be allied to a maternal or paternal lineage or even both. Lineal rigidity and ascendancy is variable because the point of having lineages is religious; that is, what defines the salience of an aristocratic lineage in any place, as well as in history, is honor. Honor (mana) is the focus of aristocratic as opposed to utilitarian economics. The highest form of honor can only be inherited from the line of ancestors, the first of whom are the mythical or sacred beings who gave life. Hence honor is at the center of what is considered sacred. The ancestors gained their honor or mana by the (mythical) deeds they performed, and one inherits this prestige along with the obligation to respect such achievements. The association of honor with deed gives the living a chance to gain honor or mana in a lifetime, but this is subsidiary to the huge mass of honor owned by a status lineage. After death the mana achieved will, as it were, go into the pool. Honor, therefore, is the ladder of an individual’s life, the straight and narrow path to follow—a man or woman has, as the goal of life, to achieve respect, and the way to earn respect is to inherit honor.

Honor is a vague term in and of itself, and it is reminiscent of the classical theme of Mediterranean honor and shame. But it materializes in daily behavior as respect and deference and in economic life as donations to and gifts from those honored. In the society as a whole, descent establishes two different but related orders:

One is by tradition basically religious, the other is preeminently social…. The two orders are totally interdependent, because a descent line without its active kin group is like a religion without a congregation. The descent line is the vital center of the kin group, and the kin group gives concrete substance to the promise of the descent line.¹³

There is a sense in which this is true of any society of people who are organized according to principle. But the point I wish to make is that whereas in Polynesia the aristocratic lineage and the utilitarian lineage may sometimes assemble for different functions, when they assemble for the same function that function is religious and political. It realizes status, which is marked by honor. The same can be said of such an egalitarian society as the Tallensi. Of course, it is quite a different version of descent from that of Polynesia. It is emphatically agnatic. But agnatic kinship is the principle of recruitment, not the meaning behind the recruitment.

By automatically making him a member of maximal lineage and clan, his agnatic descent fits the individual into the constituted framework of Tale society. It is this that gives him his political status in the society. It gives him also a special field of defined relations with clear contours.¹⁴

Precisely the same can be said of Polynesian individuals—their place in descent or lineage groups gives them political status. It also confers religious and economic status. Goldman’s implicit but general argument, illustrated by his specific study of Polynesia, is that the elementary structure of the kinship system is the descent system. At the time, when kinship was a major focus of anthropological theory, this argument was a major challenge to the likes of Lévi-Strauss, Murdock, Fortes, and Edmund Leach. However, it was never recognized as such. The descent system may include natural links, but that is not always sufficient. First, there is variation from which selections can be made, and at least one principle of descent, status, is not biologically inherited. Second, all kinship systems, whatever their terminology, take descent as their path of reckoning or classification, but they have chosen one or more paths. This, too, is a cultural decision or choice. One can sense Boas seeping through. A cross-cousin, for example, is a father’s sister’s son/daughter or a mother’s brother’s son/daughter. This may be recognized as a differential or ignored, as it is in Polynesia. You ascend up and descend down to work out the kin relation or class, that is, via kinship and via descent. In other words, there is no elementary structure of kinship in and of itself, but there is descent, which is taken up in different ways to organize kinship systems.

What I need to underline is that in Ancient Polynesian Society, Goldman has taken up Boas’s suggestion that

laws exist which govern the growth of culture, and it is our endeavor to discover these laws. The object of our investigation is to find the processes by which certain stages of culture have developed. The customs and beliefs are not the ultimate objects of research. We desire to learn the reasons why such customs and beliefs exist—in other words we wish to discover the history of their development.

A detailed study of customs in their bearing on the total culture of the tribe practicing them, and in connection with an investigation of their geographical distribution among neighboring tribes affords us almost always a means of determining with considerable accuracy the historical causes that led to the formation of the customs in question and to the psychological processes that were at work in their development.¹⁵

This describes exactly the methodology of Ancient Polynesian Society, so it can be said that Boas’s suggested methodology for finding the historical causes of contemporary customs works. The different island histories and/or myths speak of conflicts, especially over land, of invasions, of great men securing followers, and of origin. The provision made by the environment for gaining a living is also dissolved into history. Where resources were plentiful there was scope for large scale competitive feasting, which either bestowed or subtracted honor. In eastern Polynesia (or the extreme northernmost and southernmost lands), the Maori of New Zealand built monumental platforms to display food, perform rituals, and earn mana. In Hawaii the emphasis was on the balance between display and utility. There were differences in the display of productivity. In Manihiki-Rakahanga, Mangaia, Mangareva, Easter Island, and Tahiti, the fattening of women especially was prominent. But it was absent among the Maori and in Tongareva, Marquesas, and Hawaii.¹⁶ These variations both control and are controlled by the theme, or principle, of aristocracy, and it is the varying ideas and practice of the status system that guided the evolution of Polynesian societies as a whole.

All the evidence leads to the conclusion that direction was introduced into Polynesian social and cultural variations by the action of the status system. The status system exercised a powerful control over all major social relations by acting as the medium of organization and the guide for social morality. In a more general vein it can be said that the principles of aristocracy were the constant measure of all social relations that deeply concerned the Polynesians.¹⁷

All very Boasian. Then, in the very next paragraph, Goldman pulls the rug from underneath the scientific claims of the Boasians—of Boas, of Mead, and of Benedict.

What the evidence has revealed is not status system as cause, but status system as constantly involved in change as well as in conservation. A status system is, however, no independent apparatus that changes itself and in so doing changes its society…. It is difficult to imagine to what of significance status systems are not responsive. What seems to give constancy to all the interaction between status and society is the characteristic function of a status system to assert and preserve fixed rules of conduct insofar as these affect honor and worth.¹⁸

Ancient Polynesian Society is the first and only attempt to carry out Boas’s comparative and historical methodology. It is not a crosscultural study in the sense advocated by Murdock and his Ethnographic Atlas and most frequently carried out under the auspices of the Human Relations Area Files. There is no statistical treatment, no correlation of variables, no accounting of frequencies of occurrence, or the like. Ancient Polynesian Society is also a sobering of the Benedictine notion of a pattern of culture. To generalize its findings, one may expect to find in a society a principle or a set of principles upon which all other concerns are hung. In Polynesia this is status, particularly in the form of aristocracy. But aristocracy is a compound of lineage and religion. And these are deep, maybe the deepest of human sentiments. Or so Goldman suspects.

It is not surprising, then, that his next major work was a study of Kwakiutl religion, for, as he reasserts about what he had uncovered in Polynesia, in tribal societies religion has no competitors. Goldman’s book is only based partly on fieldwork among Northwest Coast Indians, but this gave him enough familiarity with Kwakiutl language and culture so that he could critically read Boas’s and especially George Hunt’s texts and their translations. George Hunt, who Boas trained as his assistant, was half Tlingit and half Scottish and was born and raised in the Kwakiutl village of Fort Rupert.

With this book Goldman’s debt and allegiance to Boas is specific and so, too, is his motive—to reveal to the literate world the precise character of Kwakiutl life and thought.¹⁹ This was easier said than done, and Goldman notes that Boas’s published monograph did not elucidate the principles of Kwakiutl life but rather gave a description that was so richly detailed that one is seized by the extraordinary and special character of the Indians.²⁰ If this was the case, then Goldman’s task, following his notion of themes in his study of Polynesia, was to try and elucidate the principles that Boas could or would not. The methodological question was: How to go about this? As for Polynesia, so for the Kwakiutl—the answer lies in history:

Like the Polynesian, the Kwakiutl family histories are regarded by the Indians as authentic genealogical records…. It is not unusual for a culture to go underground in the memories of its survivors, at least for some time…. Boas’s fieldwork… tapped the memory veins of the past.²¹

Goldman was to find a similar situation among the Hehénewa Cubeo, as he makes clear in the book that follows. As among Polynesian societies, the Kwakiutl emphasized ranking. A tribe occupied a village, and each tribe has a founding ancestor. In pristine conditions (before the arrival of Europeans),

it is not difficult to imagine when tribes were maximal lineages affiliated mainly by patrilineal descent. The lineages are ranked, and the chief of the first lineage having ritual precedence and authority is recognized as chief of the tribe.²²

In Ancient Polynesian Society we were told that lineage and religion were deep human sentiments and the axes around which the book revolved were variations in lineage or descent and aristocratic authority, which stemmed from religious and ritual honor. The beginning of the exposition of Kwakiutl religious thought proposes exactly the same axes (themes, pattern, or interests):

Two great interests dominate Kwakiutl social thought and guide the organization of the social community. They are lineage and rank, closely related, and, indeed, fully interdependent ideas. The idea of lineage is perhaps foremost, for it expresses essential religious convictions about the nature of connections between contemporary communities and their mythological founders…. They are the transmission lines that convey the original ancestral properties down the generations…. These are spiritual goods, representing essential spiritual qualities of founders and ultimately of all ancestors … they are the fundamental supernatural powers.²³

There is another sense in which rank is a religious identity, as it is in Polynesia. The Kwakiutl term for a Chief’s seat within the Ritual Congregation is "tlaqwe, which also means to stand as well as strong. This is the opposite of lying down, which people do when shamed, but is a prelude to a series of adventures, which will bring them salvation through the gift of supernatural powers." In other words, honor or mana: hence, rank is a socioreligious representation of the vital state of being, and in this respect alone Kwakiutl and Oceania share a common view.²⁴ The major departure from Polynesia is that Kwakiutl chiefs, while not themselves shamans, are viewed through a shamanistic prism. The shamanic model defines the inner quality of the chief. Chiefs are also patrons of shamans, and according to the graded seat or title occupied by a chief, he imputes supernatural powers to himself rather than claiming them by inheritance, unlike the Polynesian case. Kwakiutl ranks are defined not only by ancestral primacy and order, which is unchangeable and reaches into the supernatural, but also by subsuming the human to the natural. Rank order is a counterpart to the order of the animal world. The family tradition usually begins with an ancestor coming down to earth, taking off his animal mask, and becoming human. The mask then becomes the emblem or crest of the lineage.²⁵ The crest that represents the mask that represents the ancestor is named and has distinct qualities assigned to it, and, at birth, such qualities are lodged in a person. The same applies to the house, which accommodates the lineage both as people and as spirit beings. It is the largest representation of a universal and fundamental religious belief that all forms of life and vital force occupy a house or a container of some sort.

By means of his documentary research about ancient Polynesia, Goldman was led to identify a social and religious feature that had not hitherto been recognized, the status lineage. The waxing and waning fortunes of this socioreligious unit depended on success or failure in rivalrous display and/or consumption of food. The Kwakiutl have been made famous in the literature for their potlatch, a term that has entered common parlance. The general impression conveyed by the vernacular use of the word in an English language conversation is of extreme and irrational misuse of property. It is not even conspicuous consumption, because goods were destroyed. Goldman makes one of his rare forays into critical discussion of theory when he talks about the Kwakiutl potlatch. He credits Marcel Mauss’s Essay on the Gift and an article by Raymond Lenoir, Sur l’institution du potlatch for recognizing the religious aspect of the potlatch, but neither of them went far enough.²⁶ Others who have written explaining the potlatch Goldman dismisses as having missed the point entirely.

Kwakiutl do not use the term potlatch. Using Boas’s and especially Hunt’s texts, Goldman indicates the use of four terms: "walasila, meaning to do a great thing; pasa, to flatten; yaxwede, and maxwede, both meaning giving away. Goldman discusses various terms and then refers us back to pre-European times. That is, he looks at history. In modern times, the Hudson’s Bay blanket reduced exchange to a single unit"—consequently many were used and this appeared excessive:

Older exchanges, as the records show, usually included an ensemble of properties—sea mammals, land mammals, human beings (slaves), yellow cedar bark, and an assortment of containers and conveyors, such as boxes, dishes and canoes. By more contemporary standards of extravagance, when tens of thousands of store blankets were given away, the early distributions were quite modest, in keeping with North American Indian conservationism. The Dionysian Kwakiutl were also so notably opposed to excess that Benedict, who, though she saw in them a fury of profligate imagination, nevertheless recognized a definite resistance to overdoing.²⁷

Historical records, examples of which are given by Goldman in an appendix, give quite a different impression from the now commonly accepted idea of the potlatch. For the most part these events were marriage exchanges and ritual distributions that were nonrivalrous, with donors giving according to their own ritual standards. What was more important than quantity was quality, in that complementary properties were matched with rank—canoes and slaves, for example, circulated only among the highest chiefs, and this is enshrined in myth, making the occasion of distribution a ritual one. What should probably be better understood as a more neutral term, distribution, follows four principles: (1) Distribution was a hereditary privilege confined to noble possessions of property and feast-giving names. (2) Distribution was an intrasexual and primarily masculine privilege. (3) Distribution was graded by the fixed order of ranking. (4) Distribution was in accordance with the segmentary order. The complete pattern emerges from the sequential order of distributions as they follow the life histories of chiefs from birth to death. Chiefs are not only heads of lineages and thereby represent them, each also bears a name, which makes them a spirit incarnate. As names, distributors relate to the supernatural world and they are individuals, because each chief has a different (spirit) name.

If I have devoted too much space to Goldman’s treatment of the potlatch it is not only because it more accurately explains one of the institutions that has come to signify the exotic and bizarre nature of indigenes to supposedly more sophisticated people. It is also because Goldman’s approach has been to uncover the themes that are integrated as distribution (the Benedictine influence), and he has followed Boas by clearing up the confusion through examining the details of history. What is religious or sacred is historical. The historical method is the primary method to be used in explanation, and therefore also in theory construction.

This is true of the structure of the Winter Ceremonial, the principal ceremonial of the Kwakiutl, in which the

family histories are important because they reveal the Kwakiutl idea of necessary sequence of events, of the line of development from myth time to the present, from the true events that transpired at the beginnings to their simulated presentation in present-day ritual.²⁸

Readers of the present book will notice not only how similar is the Kwakiutl treatment of time and ancestry to that of Hehénewa, but also the parallel between the supernatural value and role of Kwakiutl masks and Cubeo instruments or trumpets. The real and supernatural worlds of the Kwakiutl are clearly separated as one reads Goldman’s analysis of the Winter Ceremonial. But here he is writing from someone else’s text, given by informants he never knew. In the present work, written from his own experience and familiarity with his correspondents, this difference is not always evident. Indeed, the impression one gets is that the Cubeo themselves draw no distinct line between physical and metaphysical life. Their rituals are not symbolic representations in the sense of their being an object or act that is symbolic of a reality. Hehénewa ritual or religious thought is the pulling together of past history and the integration of the present into it. This is why Goldman speaks of ritual performance as self-adoration and of how it serves as the means to achieve ethnicity or the difference between Hehénewa, the aristocratic sib, other Cubeo sibs, and, eventually, other tribes in the region. Kwakiutl participants are described as actors or spirit-impersonators, whereas Hehénewa are who they dance. Kwakiutl transform or convert wood into the desired forms such as masks. Thus all carvings are presumed to be alive, and many are expressly described as speaking and as snapping their jaws.²⁹ Cubeo trumpets are the spiritual entities. They are not representations of Anaconda or Kúwai so much as they are the objects that give form to Hehénewa thought. Much as we might say writing or algebraic equations are devices for recording, storing, and communicating thought, so the trumpets, which are kept in secret seclusion and brought out for the occasion, are the secret formulae that bring thought to life. Or, even stronger, they are the real and focal characters of the other world in which the Hehénewa live. The reader will find that much of what Goldman describes in such detail is what we might today call a virtual world in which the Cubeo live, in addition to the earthbound world of the daily round. It is a world that we would think of as one of altered consciousness assisted by taking a drug (mihi). However, such a world exists in the minds of Hehénewa as the world of religious thought. It is as if, in the present work, the relative historical powers of aristocracy and religion, first expounded in Ancient Polynesian Society, have been reversed.

Nevertheless all three works show how entities of thought that appear to be separate in the physical world—animals, fish, flora, significant places in the landscape, rivers, the sky and cosmic phenomena—are woven into one fabric in the mental world. As with the Kwakiutl, so also with the Hehénewa, the primary animal connection was with the ancestor. Though the Winter Ceremonial seems to have been more formally organized than Cubeo rituals, their meanings are similar. In both societies the cement that glues the physical with the metaphysical world is shamanism. Among the Kwakiutl the shaman inherits his powers; among the Cubeo he is taught. Among the Kwakiutl the ecstatic experience is self-induced; among the Cubeo hallucinogens are taken. But then, among the Kwakiutl, the chiefs are shamans or masters of the shamans, whereas Cubeo payés are not chiefs. Kwakiutl ritual revolves around the figure of hamatsa or Man Eater, founder and devourer who, by the dialectical logic that governs Kwakiutl thinking, is to be resurrected into the life giver. The Winter Ceremonial is resurrection in all its varieties. Even the imagery in Kwakiutl art reflects this:

In Kwakiutl thought, the sky itself appears as the great mouth of heaven that swallows the sun. At eclipse it is asked to disgorge its mouthful with cries of Vomit! Vomit! The imagery of devouring as a phase of a cycle that is always dual is most intimately connected with the inevitable observation that one form of life devours other forms of life, but life is always restored.³⁰

The Mouth of Heaven explores Kwakiutl religion in the same way that Ancient Polynesian Society explores aristocracy—from historical documents. In the Polynesian book, rank was the primary focus but was shown to be upheld by religious thought, which it also served to constitute. Among the Kwakiutl, the emphasis is on religious thought, but the way into this is rank. While the idea of rank, especially aristocracy, is made perfectly clear, just what is religious thought? For Goldman, the Kwakiutl and the Hehénewa Cubeo are intellectuals, and their chief intellectuals are referred to as savants. People such as this, who are preliterate—or even literate in the case of some Cubeo—are just as curious about the universe as Euro-Americans who seek knowledge of the universe through science and/or religion. The difference is that the latter have shaped their thought to the mechanical imagery of an industrial age [and] start from the premise that they can explain the organic by analogy with the inorganic. The Kwakiutl and the Cubeo however, start from the opposite premise—they seek to explain nature by analogy with the organic.³¹ Religious thought among the Kwakiutl is the way in which they seek to know the laws of their world for same reasons we do: to know how to live in it. But they do not have a place that is, in some way, outside the world, a privileged place. While Kwakiutl consider humanity the standard for all life, humans are understood to share or take on properties exemplified elsewhere in nature, especially among animals. In his closing paragraphs, Goldman criticizes Benedict, functionalists, by whom he presumably means early French and later British theorists such as Durkheim, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown (who, contrary to Goldman’s generalization, pushed the organic analogy on behalf of structure and function), and the Oxford school led by E. E. Evans-Pritchard. In true Boasian fashion, he castigates Lévi-Strauss for being too preoccupied with innate structures of the human mind to the neglect of the majestic integrative achievements of any particular ‘savage’ tradition.³²

It is just such a majestic integrative achievement that the present book provides. It is not simply that Hehénewa religious thought is such an achievement, but also the translation of that thought into a book. Cubeo religious thought is not linear, but, like it or not, a book imposes a linear structure, hence construction, on its subject matter. This is particularly germane when the fundamental premise of Cubeo religious thought is that the people were produced by thought, not by devouring and regurgitation, as among the Kwakiutl. So, although description of ritual performances and scenes of daily life are given in the book, what Goldman has to do is translate the thinking of one people (the Cubeo) into the way of thinking of another (Euro-American). Translation plays as literal a part in this book as it does a figurative part. In order to make himself as certain as possible that he understood what Cubeo men were telling him (and his information was gleaned entirely from men), he followed the Boasian method of fieldwork, with the difference that he tried to replicate Boas’s longitudinal work by seeking variety in the one sib. He got together on as many occasions as was possible about five to seven Hehénewa and Bahúkiwa, whom he quizzed about his observations, first made among the lower sib, the Bahúkiwa, in 1939. As his fieldwork progressed in 1969 and 1970, he asked questions about answers he had received as well as about his observations among Hehénewa. This method provoked disagreement, argument, discussion, elaboration, and, sometimes, assent and agreement. As many Cubeo men were literate, Goldman corresponded with them and with one in particular, Pedro Rodriguez, in such a way that he was able to obtain texts, accounts of what was thought about a particular matter, what the history was. Many of these are incorporated into the book, and I have identified them and set them off as extracts. If the people one is writing about consider themselves, and the world, as a product of thought, then it is a good thing to get their thoughts across directly whenever possible.

There is one notable stylistic difference between the present work and its three predecessors. In each of these, Goldman wrote an extensive conclusion that isolated the principles he had described in their ethnographic detail to make more immediate their systematic interrelationship. I think it was the Bendictine influence that lay behind this. In the case of Ancient Polynesian Society, several chapters were devoted to drawing out these principles, which served not only as analysis and theory, but also as conclusion. In the present work there is no such analytical conclusion. Instead the book closes with a chapter on gender

A reader for the press that first considered the manuscript suggested there might be a conclusion. I myself wondered why there wasn’t, but as Goldman had told me this was his best work I knew there must be a reason. Unfortunately, he became so ill that I never got the chance to ask him. But I think one reason is stated at the very beginning of the chapter:

In the preceding chapter, the concern was with ritualized and desocialized powers. Here it is to be on powers associated with social life. Gender is a field of special powers, mainly of generative forces that propel and regulate sexual reproduction. In Cubean cosmogonic theory, as we have repeatedly observed, the appearance of sexual reproduction marked the momentous transition from the era of the Kuwaiwa to that of the human communities.³³

The kúwaiwa are the creators of all life. But who created the creators? They are self-created males; that is, they are gendered, not hermaphrodite or bisexual, not both male and female. Being male, their self-creation creates only one of several possibilities. But this particular creation is not only differentiated within itself, between older and younger (the principle of rank by seniority), it also provides the foundation for the organization of the human community it creates, namely patrilineal descent. Patriliny and seniority at all levels of organization privileges one individual or one group over another. It produces status. The Hehénewa enjoy a superiority over the Bahúkiwa, who, in turn, are little above the slave/monkey level of the Maku. The aspect of descent Goldman had isolated in ancient Polynesia, status, he shows to be present in a quite unrelated society following quite a different thought plan.

The existence of females and the fact that, in the physical world, they bear children, is a major subtraction from the metaphysical blueprint of the real world created by the Kúwaiwa. If sexual procreation was admitted to the religious system of thought it would totally compromise status, notably male status. But if the creators create the female, and the organization of sexual reproduction, then the metaphysics remains true to itself. Mavíchikori, the spirit of death, is responsible for this by initiating the first marriage between two sets of gods—Anacondas and Kúwaiwa. Two quite different properties are created here—the biological and the cultural. By initiating marriage, Mavíchikori also initiates the first sexual intercourse. Whereas among the Kwakiutl, the generalizing principle was the transformation of opposites in dialectical fashion, the Cubeo principle is to fuse opposites. A human being, especially a male, is a fusion of spirit and animal. All this is accounted for in myth, but the very idea of the female is absent, except in the form of Yurédo, the supernatural midwife and the shadowy Single-Breasted Woman. So long as the female and her role in reproduction is sidelined, so to speak, the awful ambiguity of female presence in the world and the power it represents are to some extent suppressed.

Make no mistake, the idea of the female, that is, of gender, is the area of ambiguity in the Cubeo mind and in the thought that created the world, including humans. Women’s menstruation and their sexuality is destabilizing for it is demonic, and anything demonic is hard to handle. But socially the institution that ensures reproduction, marriage, is not at all ambiguous for the preferred marriage is between cross-cousins. Ideally this leaves a stable core of males around which spiral the females. Sisters and daughters leave their natal villages at marriage, and foreign women, strangers, come in. The presence of the female is temporary, but children return to her village when they marry, if the cross-cousin-marriage preference is followed. This is not to say that Cubeo husbands and wives and parents and children do not hold strong emotions for each other; they do. But the Cubeo live in two worlds, and the presence of women, or the mystery of life, is the most difficult intellectual problem for the Cubeo. It is the woman, then, who, brings the intellectual world of the Cubeo down to earth. And it is on earth that changes are happening.

As Goldman writes, he returned to Cubeo expecting to see them more completely modernized than he had left them thirty or so years before. Instead he found them in the midst of a cultural revival. For many years they had been schooled by missionaries, and many of his informants were literate and bilingual. Nevertheless, as Boas found among the Kwakiutl, people do not forget their culture. They may well learn another one, but their own goes underground, or rather hides in the back of peoples’ minds. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, a pioneer of anthropology in this region, found the same thing among the Desana and extracted lost information from one informant, Antonio Guzman. Goldman does not provide a clear reason