General MacArthur among the Guna The Aesthetics of Power and Alterity in an Amerindian Society by Paolo Fortis CA1 Online-Only Material: Supplement A This article deals with issues surrounding the study of indigenous appropriations of symbols of military power. It focuses on the case of Guna people from the San Blas Archipelago of Panama who, in the 1940s, carved some wooden figures in the likeness of General Douglas MacArthur and used them as auxiliary spirits in collective healing rituals. By appealing to anthropological reflections on the notion of style, the article suggests a correlation between stylistic variations in forms of visual art, sociality, and power. It exploits the potential of style analysis for interpreting historical phenomena from an anthropological perspective. It is argued that there is a strong link between the stylistic changes in Guna woodcarving and the sociopolitical transformations that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. The Guna figures of MacArthur are the outcome of a stylistic switch toward individuation, paralleled by the creation of strong political subjects called upon by the historical events of the first half of the twentieth century in San Blas. Finally, the case of cross-cultural appropriation discussed in the article shows the potential of ethnographic studies of local lived worlds in furthering the understanding of global events such as World War II. This article explores the relationship between visual arts, forms of sociality, and notions of power in an Amerindian lived world. By focusing on an instance of cross-cultural appropriation of images of military power, it studies the making of specific objects and powerful nonhuman subjects as well as the polit- ical implications of such processes in specific sociohistorical circumstances. I here consider the historical case of Guna people from the San Blas Archipelago of Panama (see fig. 1) who, in the 1940s, carved wooden ritual figures in the likeness of the US General Douglas MacArthur and used them in collective healing rituals on a number of occasions. 1 Moving beyond this specific case, I look more broadly at the representation of white people in Guna ritual artefacts and ask the following question: What can the representation of white people and their concomi- tant military imagery tell us about Guna sociality and notions of power? The perspective that I adopt in this work seeks to pursue an alternative route to the one taken by studies of contem- porary forms of cross-cultural appropriation, which tend to emphasize aspects of so-called global interconnectedness. A notable example is Clifford’s (1988) analysis, which provides an account of the modern colonialist world in which Picasso, his fellow artists, intellectuals, and, to a certain extent, gallery- goers came to challenge Western aesthetic paradigms in the first three decades of the twentieth century. According to an example used by this author, we could read the presence of a blue plastic Adidas bag visible on the lap of the Melanesian umpire overlooking the match shown in the 1975 film Tro- briand Cricket “as part of the same kind of inventive cultural process as the African-looking masks that in 1907 suddenly ap- peared attached to the pink bodies of the Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1988:148). This approach sheds light on European and Amer- ican aesthetic consumptive practices and processes of othering. Taussig explicitly expounds the merits of an anthropology that focuses on “the West itself as mirrored in the eyes and handiwork of its others” (1993:236). His analysis is based on a number of selected instances where colonial administrators are reflected in artefacts produced by the colonized. He sug- gests, for example, that one look at the representation of white people in Guna shamanic carvings as a copy, a form of mi- metic appropriation aimed at acquiring the powers of white people. From this perspective, the hauka possession ritual of the Songhay-Zerma is another example of abduction of the power of white colonizers by means of mimicking their behav- iors and bodily appearances. As Picasso and the Melanesian umpire partake in the “same kind of inventive cultural process,” so Jean Rouch’s films Les Maîtres Fous and Trobriand Cricket Paolo Fortis is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University (South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, United King- dom [paolo.fortis@durham.ac.uk]). This paper was submitted 5 II 15, accepted 11 IV 15, and electronically published 1 VI 16. 1. I use here the new system for transcribing the Guna language (pre- viously spelled “Kuna”) formulated by Guna linguists and officially adopted by the Guna General Congress (Orán and Wagua 2011). This chiefly differs from previous forms of transcription, including the one I adopted in my earlier publications, in the use of the voiced stop consonants g, b, and d instead of the previously used k, p, and t. q 2016 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2016/5704-00XX$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/687112 Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 4, August 2016 000 This content downloaded from 129.234.117.223 on June 02, 2016 01:49:07 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).