433 Chapter Seven Cosmos For the Matsigenka of Shimaa, kameti ...

to what degree the Matsigenka may experience guilt. Before working through the ethnographic
material for this book, I was inclined to say that the Matsigenka do not experience guilt.
Although shame (shyness, embarassment) is both named (pashiventagantsi) and readily
observable among them, guilt is neither. Compared to my experience of my own culture and of
peasant communities in Latin America, where guilt is easy to spot, I concluded that the
Matsigenka were too self-assured and impervious to blame to feel guilty about anything.
Although guilt is less evident among the Matsigenka than in the more complex societies
of my experience, and therefore perhaps less effective as social control (or, obversely, less
debilitating to individuals), something like it is nonetheless active and influential in their lives. The
primary evidence for this is the psychological mechanism of splitting, whereby the Matsigenka
disavow unacceptable impulses, wishes or parts of themselves and project them onto others.
Splitting only occurs when it is too painful for individuals to admit to themselves that they harbor
this or that desire. This pain, a consequence of the belief that only evil people harbor such
wishes, is a component of the complex process we call guilt, according to the syllogism: “I wish
to do X; only evil people wish to do X; therefore, I am evil (and evil people are punished).”
Fearing the consequences of my evil--especially illness--I must repudiate it and (as
humans are wont to do) locate it somewhere outside myself. And, lo!, the world around me is
filled with demons. Dramatic evidence of the firmness of this split among the Matsigenka is their
belief that spiritually powerful humans may be either good (seripigari) or evil (matsikanari), but
never both at the same time. The tragedy (or irony) is that it is usually impossible for ordinary
people to tell which is which.
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