Speaking through animals: Kawaiwete shamanism and metalingual play Suzanne Oakdale University of New Mexico, 1431 Bryn Mawr Dr NE, Albuquerque, NM 87106, USA article info Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: Amazonia Language ideology Shamanism Perspectivism Referential play Non-referential language abstract Working from transcripts of Kawaiwete shamanic cures and myths, this paper looks at moments of referential play, situations in which animal terms are used to refer to humans and their physical states as well as moments when referential language is replaced by non- referential communication. As the Kawaiwete are a Tupian-speaking Brazilian indigenous people, their shamanic and myth performances offer a means of considering how a low- land people’s language ideologies relate to the construction of ontology. Given that Amazonian or “Amerindian ontology” has been represented as the inverse of “the Western ontology,” and that a focus on reference is associated with “Western” language ideology, this emphasis on referential play and the creative manipulation of the metalingual func- tion of language, is counterintuitive. This paper argues that these techniques are key ways the “perspectival” aspects of lowland cosmologies come to be summoned and experienced. Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Tanya Luhrmann, among others, has asked how, in evangelical Christianity, God becomes real to congregants, given that this being “cannot be seen, heard, or touched” (Luhrmann, 2004:519). For practitioners of lowland shamanic traditions, such as those Amazonian indigenous people, called Kawaiwete, who I will discuss here, the parallel question might well be, how do people know that when shamans are speaking, that they are conveying the voices of spirits? How do those involved come to believe the voices heard in some ritual events are not, in fact, those of an uncle or grandfather speaking in falsetto or guttural tones, but are truly the voices of beings from other spaces and times? I argue that one of the key ways Kawaiwete shamanism works to create a sense of the spaces of the cosmos and the beings who populate them is through the manipulation of the metalingual function of language, specifically by referring to humans and their physical states in terms usually used to refer to animals. This sort of metalingual play only occurs when spirits occupy the same space-time as humans in certain ritual events and when they are speaking directly to humans. The language used to call spirits into this shared space is, in contrast, largely non-referential as communication across different cosmological domains occurs in other ways. While the focus on reference is associated with the Western intellectual tradition, the manipulation of the referential function of language, may never- theless also be a key way distinctive “perspectival” aspects of lowland cosmologies come to be summoned and experienced. “Perspectivism” as formulated by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2012, 2014) describes the ontology of Amazonian or Amerindian peoples and has at times been extended to a describe that of all non-Western peoples. Also called “multi- naturalism,” this type of thought, most readily apparent in myth texts and shamanic ceremonies, appreciates animals and humans equally as types of persons, as both having the capacity for culture, but understands them to have different per- spectives because they possess different types of bodies, which give them access to different “natures.”“Multiculturalism,” a E-mail address: soakdale@unm.edu. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language & Communication journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2018.02.004 0271-5309/Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Language & Communication xxx (2018) 1–8 Please cite this article in press as: Oakdale, S., Speaking through animals: Kawaiwete shamanism and metalingual play, Language & Communication (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2018.02.004