The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

The Nervous System
Homesickness & Dada
174
grotesque distorted monsters, they are frequently pictured in human form.
They are also dealt with as if they were human."
In other words, the spirits can be considered the mimetic principle
unleashed; not just passive copies but copiers, not just prototypes, but
chameleons. It is this quality which makes them not onlv material for the
shaman to work with, but a power for confusion and evil. You see this
particularly, but by no means solely, with the nia or evil spirits who often,
to quote Chapin, "disguise themselves as alluring men or women and try
to seduce Kunas of the opposite sex." Indeed we could say that it is this
capacity of spirits to serve not only as copies but as copiers that makes
shamans necessary, for it is the shamans who have to figure out the real
spiritual copy from the "fake," and it is they who can work on the copy,
through song, so as to affect its material "original." Ruben PereV. told
Baron NordenskioM about a girl in the Nargana community who used to
dream a lot about people who had died. Perez took a curing figurine that
she had held in her hands for a few minutes to a shaman who was then
able to diagnose her visions as those of evil spirits and not of deceased
persons. He declared that unless she bathed in certain medicines she would
go mad.
As I read the evidence, the crucial point is that this is not so much a
system as a Nervous System. As such it resists structuralist machinery via
the penis or the hummingbird if only because the system is composed of and
requires copies that are not copies. There is this fateful power for deceit and
confusion at the heart of the mimesis, and yet mimesis lies at the heart of
the world, its manifestations, its misfortunes, its curings. While spiritual
access to mimetic copies—to the alter world of spiritual reality—is both
necessary and magically empowering, and while that other world is deemed
mimetic of this world of substance, and modeled on it (or is it vice versa?),
there is also this curiously noncopied and fake-copied aspect to this mimetic
doubling which creates acute and life-threatening representational dilemmas
as well as strange fantasy worlds such as the Kalus or spirit-fortresses. A
glance at a Cuna drawing of such a spirit fortress suggests not merely the
degree of contradiction involved in claiming that the spirit world is modeled
on the physical or "real" world, but the strange beauty of that contradiction.
The arbitrariness of the sign is here construed in terms drastically different
to the totalizing closure claimed for it by Saussure and Levi-Strauss. We are
A Spirit-Fortress as Drawn by Alfonso Diaz Granatlos in 1973.
in a mobile world in which meaning, or at least reference, is both fixed and
slipping—and what this Cuna song and Cuna woman, now so famous in the
world ethnological industry which has so enthusiastically recruited them,
show us, is that the womb, the telos of the shamanic night, is precisely
where reproduction creates, as Derrida might have it, Mng under erasure,
copies that are both copies and not copies.
175