Everything transforms

A couple of weeks ago, Rita, Helena, and I went to visit one of Rita's childhood friends, a family that Helena loves to visit, because the son always brings out his toys.  This visit, she became obsessed with little games that would have been called "Transformers" when I was a kid: these were not exactly the brand name Transformers (cars or other machines that turned into robots when you moved the parts around), but something a little more organic, like rocks that turned into dinosaurs and leaves that became crocodiles.

Helena also loves other stories of transformation: books and songs about caterpillars that become butterflies, stories of peasant girls who become princesses (though, since I'm not always happy about the politics of such stories, I also tell stories of princesses that become peasants).  She also loves doll clothes and the changes that they imply.  All in all, we can say that Helena, like many kids, loves change.

There is something human in this process: children may think that adults are so different from them that in order to "grow up", they will need to pass through a metamorphosis similar to that of a caterpillar.  I wonder, though, if something even deeper isn't going on here: last week Rita was preparing a paper for an anthropology conference in São Paulo in which she compared the role-playing of little kids to the idea of clothing in Amazonian tribes.  In the West, we have the idea that play-acting is like being on the stage: an actor pretends to be something for a time, but then returns to his same being when he doffs the costume and the persona.  Yet in the Amazon, a change in clothes means a change in essence: when I put on the mask of a jaguar, I begin to see the world like a jaguar sees it.  Others treat me as a jaguar.  The clothes of a jaguar make me a jaguar.

Kids seem to see the world in the same way.  They aren't invested in their own personality or identity, in the way that an adult (or especially an adolescent) will say "I'm not the kind of person who..." They are much more willing to transform, to try on other "clothes".  Through many philosophers who write about play (Benjamin, Freud, and Agamben come to mind) talk about the repetition that play involves, I think that this kind of personal experimentation is even more important.  And, quite frankly, much more fun.

How old is...

"How old are you, Helena Iara?" I asked her as we came back from running errands a couple of days ago.

"Two years old."

 "Your Aunt Sandra is going to have a birthday in a couple of weeks.   Do you know how old she'll be?"

"Two years old."

"Truth is, she'll be 31."

"Yeah?" (said, by the way, exactly like that)

"And your Mommy, how old is she?"

"Two years old."

This conversation continued through quite a few people that Helena knows, and I soon discovered that I, her grandma and grandpa, her cousins, and everyone else she knows is also "Two years old."  Now, it's quite possible that "Two years old" to Helena just means "has an age" or "has parties for a birthday," or even that the answer is simply rote.  Just for a moment, though, I want to take her seriously: does she think that everyone is only two years old? And if so, why?

Here, then, a first hypothesis: for Helena, there is no real evidence that anything is older than she: in her eyes, everything came into existence simultaneously when she popped out of the womb.  Everything is two years old because she has only been able to see it for that time.  And though this idea might seem silly, it tracks one of the most important epistemological theories in western philosophy, the solipsism of Bishop Berkeley.  We naively think that our perception of the world is an interaction between our senses and the things around us, but Berkeley showed that one can coherently argue that it all goes on only in our own minds.  Though Berkeley largely wrote as a kind of thought experiment, and didn't live out his ideas (he never walked into the street in front of a carriage, thinking that the horses that would trample him were only ideas in his mind), the mere attempt to respond to his crazy idea made future thinkers (especially Kant) develop much more coherent theories of perception and knowledge.

Add the element of time to Berkeley's idea, and you get Helena's "Two years old."  The world exists because I see it; I wasn't here more than two years ago; ergo, the world and all of the things in it are two years old, just like me.

Maybe, though, I can give a second hypothesis: Mommy is two years old because, as a Mommy, she really is only two years old.  Yes, Rita was born more than two years ago, but before Helena was born, she was not a Mommy.  The baby is not the only new birth at delivery: a child creates so many new relations, roles that had not existed before.  If the child is the first in the family, a new Mommy also emerges from that operating room.  A new Daddy, too (it might be argued that my repeated existential crises over the past two years have to do with my inability to accept that at 39, I was born into a new name and new "identity.").  My parents suddenly gained new names of Gramma and Grampa.  As that, they are really only two years old.

This idea isn't solipsism, but closer to the new anthropological theory of perspectivism, which Viveiros de Castro postulates as the epistemology of Amazonian Indians.  The relationship of a capybara to a jaguar is the same as that of a monkey to a harpy eagle: they fear the predator.  So according to many amazonian tribes, when monkeys talk of eagles, they call them jaguars.  When little fish talk of jaguars, they refer to the bigger fish that eat them.  And (in an odd twist), the "jaguars" that humans have are Gods, who demand us as sacrifices.

Put this idea onto the plane of family relations, and Helena may we be right.  Because we entered into new relations when she was born, Rita and I (and my parents, and everyone else important in Helena's life) came into existence (or a new existence) when she was born.  We are, in that way, just two years old.

Does this make me feel any younger?

Her Mommy

Over the last week, we've see the same scene several times: Helena takes two toys, one big and one small, and then says of the larger, "É a mãe dela." (It's her mother)  She's excited about the idea, and won't staop saying it until we repeat and agree.

When you think about it, "Mother" (or father, uncle, any kinship terms) are a strange kind of noun.  If you and I are talking together, and we say "tree" or "car," we can trust that we are probably referring to the same concrete thing.  But when I say "Mother" and you say "Mother," we are in fact talking about very different people.  The same word "means" different things.

I was tempted to write that Helena is learning that Mother is a term of relationship, and not one of reference, but that assumes that the "original" or real way we use words is that of signifier and signified, a sound that refers to a concrete thing.  I'm not sure that's true, though: babies may understand relationship nouns before they understand absolute nouns.  "Mommy," "Daddy", and many of the other first words in a baby's vocabulary are, in fact, relational.  Perhaps the "her Mommy" is in fact a way to transform relational into absolute, and not the other way around.

One of the most interesting developments in Brazilian anthropology in the last decade has been based on the same idea: for the native people of the Amazon basin, all nouns are relational.  It isn't just that "Mother" points to the relationship between the speaker and a woman, but "jaguar" or "fish" do as well. This idea seems at first impossible, until we see that what "jaguar" means is really "he who can eat anything."  Thus, if a fish could say "jaguar", it would be talking about a fisherman.  If a monkey could say "jaguar", it might refer to a harpy eagle, which hunts monkeys as it flies through the trees.

We see this kind of language in European poetry, or in proverbs like "man is a wolf to man," but we seem to think it is a secondary, metaphorical way to use language.  Both babies and Amazonian indians suggest that it may be the other way around.

Why words?

Today, as Helena and I walked to the beach, she bow-wowed at every dog we saw, meowed at every cat, and even tried a neigh at the horse tied up in the wetlands by the dunes.  She makes the same sounds when she sees animals in her picture books: a couple of posts ago, I suggested that she is naming the animals in a kind of onomotopeia, but today as she and I talked, I reconsidered.

One of Helena's favorite videos right now is a Italian song about the sounds animals make: Il croccodrillo como fa?, and she loves another video that just shows animals and the sounds they make... What's interesting, though, is to watch how she gets scared at the sound of certain animals: yes, the crocodile, but also the cicada and the certain birds.  And as she and I talked as we walked to the beach today, I realized that (at least in the videos), she never gets scared by the animals whose sounds she knows how to make.

In the history of the West, at least since the Greeks, the role of language is to represent: words refer to things, and we judge their truth based on whether or not they reflect what's there in the world truly.  And though it might seem that Helena uses "bow-wow" to refer to a dog, honestly I don't think that's what she is doing.  I think there is something much more complicated and interesting going on here.

According to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, while European epistemology (the science of how we know what we know) is based on ideas of reference and signification, Amazonian Indians see truth not as representation, but as a shift in perspective.  The shaman doesn't know the jaguar by studying it from outside, but by learning to look through the eyes of the jaguar.  One of the techniques that Amazonian shamans use to see through the eyes of the other is sound: one tribe will "steal" the songs of another and then sing them to try to understand the perspective of their enemy (in Araweté, strikingly, the word for "enemy" literally translates as "future music".).

Let's add another element here: understanding is one way to overcome our fear.  Just giving a thing a name can help, but the better we understand the motivations, the experience, the perspective of what frightens us, the less we fear it.

 I wonder, then, if Helena Iara making the sound of animals that scare her, isn't living out the Guaraní heritage of her middle name.  Helena used to be fascinated and terrified by dogs, but since she has learned to say "bow-wow," both naming them and putting their voice in her mouth, the terror has subsided.  She makes a sound, incarnates their perspective (even if in a very superficial way), and comes to fear them less.

If she's really doing this, she's pretty darn clever.

The gift

For at least a month, Helena Iara has been obsessed with giving things to Rita and me.  She wants to give us her toys, feed us her food, give us her clothes and her books...  Now, lest one think that we have been successful in creating a truly altruistic baby, I have to add that several seconds afterward, she wants those things back, which created some minor complications when she offered us food, at least until we understood what was going on.

Reflecting on this giving of gifts, as Helena and I sat in the hammock today, watching the monkeys play in the trees, I told her a little bit about how different anthropologists have looked at the gift.  She wasn't entirely interested in the differences in the way that Claude Levi-Stauss or Marcel Mauss or Eduardo Viveiros de Castro understand gift giving, but I think that she understood the basic idea: we give gifts to establish and strengthen social relations.  Whether we're talking about the formal gift-giving that happens in diplomatic meetings, the gifts exchanged between tribes when they encounter in the Amazon basin, or birthday gifts for babies, when we give a present, we get back trust.

Every Christmas, you'll see an article in the Times or some newsmagazine, in which a famous economist talks about the failure of the marginal utility of gift-giving.  My mother gives me a sweater; she paid $75 for it, but I would not have paid more than $30, so according to these orthodox (and Scrooge-y) economists, there is a $45 inefficiency in the market.  Their lesson, of course, is that we should all just give each other cash.

Gift-giving, fortunately, is not a capitalist activity, for all of the attempts to make it one.  It's a process of creating trust, building relationships.  I give a friend a birthday gift, he gives one to me, and we become better friends in the process, more mutually engaged, more willing to trust and depend on each other.  

What Helena has done, as I tried to explain to her, is short circuit the process.  She gives me her toy and then wants it back right away.  In the process, she built something like trust (she knows she will get it back) and something more than just "like" love.  We laugh, she smiles, and a family grows from it.

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.