Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Over the last several days, Helena Iara has been making lots of new sounds.  Some of them sound like they'll someday become words, while others are more raw, sounds of desire and anger and hurt.  Yesterday, as we had lunch, she began to make one of those angry sounds, and Rita and I began to lecture her on table manners... until we realized that she was imitating a lion.  It was the same sound she used when she plays with her two stuffed lions, or with her feline finger puppets.  Grrrrr....

Watching Helena play with her stuffed animals has been fascinating, because she looks like an infantile version of an Amazonian shaman (at least as they are described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the great Brazilian anthropologist), whose power lies in the ability to see through the eyes of other animals.  Knowledge, for the shaman, is not to have an objective view of the jaguar, but instead to see the world as the jaguar sees it.  For Amazonian people, this kind of perspective shift is both epistemology and ethics -- how we know the world and how we act right -- because we not only learn how the jaguar sees the world, but also how to treat it with dignity, even when we need to hunt it.

This way of seeing the world might seem strange to a European adult, but to children, it makes sense.  What is play, make-believe, or just acting out a scene between Barbie and a Teddy Bear?  It is an attempt to step into the shoes of that toy, to see the world as that animal or doll might see it.  They use their toys as a shaman uses Ayahuasca: to get behind the eyes of the other.  Perhaps more significantly, I think that babies play for similar ethical and epistemological reasons: they want to see other perspectives on the world, and they want to get closer to the other.

Why does Helena roar?  She wants to see how she feels with that sound in her mouth, if she feels powerful like a lion, big and brave.  She wants to see how her parents react.  It's a way to learn, a way to try out different personalities that she might like, and a way to get closer to other people.  We can condemn commercial toys for lots of reasons, but (as I think the Toy Story trilogy argues well) when a child can play with many of them, they offer the chance of many changes in perspective, a developed point of view that the child can inhabit for a moment.

And in fact, what is this blog, but an intellectualized version of the same kind of game?  Helena can't tell me what she really feels or things, no more than a jaguar can explain its perspective to the shaman.  So, like a child with a toy, I try to project myself into Helena's perspective, imagine what she is thinking, learning, seeing.  I'm wrong most of the time, of course, but the effort changes the way that I see the world.  And that's both ethics and epistemology.