O sea el proceso no termina cuando la persona sale en libertad

“Each time we drink the yãkoana powder, the xapiri descend from their houses in the chest of heaven. They come to us dancing on their mirrors, like television images. They follow paths invisible to ordinary people, delicate and luminous like the ones white people call electricity.

That's why its dazzling glow disappears as soon as it breaks. These countless paths of spirits come from very far,

but come close to the shamans in an instant, like the words of the telephone”

(A Queda do Céu/The Falling Sky – David Kopenawa)

The constant presence of photographers and filmmakers during the Matis’ epidemiological history in the Javary Valley occupied the meaning of tsussin, a polysemic term used to refer to spirits, movement, de-embodied beings, vital principle – by the presence of two different concepts: disease and photography (Arisi, 2011). It is through this equivocated translation of globalized culture’s abstractions and its technological outcomes in order to familiarize shared reality that the linkage between image-making and shamanism can be caressed, as well as the Matis’ application of tsussin offering hints of a reverse anthropology. In ATN, a definition that constantly appeared for tsussin was of shadow, but I would only understand its correlation with spirit and photography when I started to review the footage56. The first conversation in front of the camera with Shapu turns explicit the equivocation of this anthropological investigation57, where, hosted at Silene’s house, a pile of photos Shapu and his brother Damë had taken which I had printed was characterizing a metaphysical photo- elicitation:

“M: So, you’ve said this photo is the tsussin of you father…

S: - Aham…

56_{Tsussin as shadow was even written down in the Matis-Portuguese dictionary (see Emsheimer, 2012, p. 75), but I hadn’t given any}

importance to it at that time;

57 _{Shapu was sitting in the floor while I had to lay down because of an unstable digestive system. My body, that had become used to Dutch}

water treatment, had forgotten its ability to cope with the inefficiency (if not the lack) of water treatment in the Amazon, which obliges people who can’t afford financially or still lack instruction in how to build their own water treatment system to consume directly the river water, even in a relatively urban environment;

by Ma rk us E nk an d Sha pu M ëo , 20 18

M: So… now the central question of my research! Does this [pointing to the photography] have any relation to the tsussin as a spirit?

S: - It does, yes.

M: But what is this relation? Can you tell me?

S: - The relation with the spirits…? Here we have it [points to his father in the photo].

M: Hum?

S: - It is here [points again to the photo].

M: And how is it?

S: - It’s tsussin.

M: But how is this spirit? Because tsussin is spirit but also photography, then?

S: - Aham.

M: And what makes them connected; the photo with the spirit? S: -They are connected by the spirit.

M: The photo is connected with the spirit? So this photo is connected to Kuini’s spirit?

S: - Because there is only… there is this here [pointing his finger around, directing to the floor sometimes] that we used to name as

tsussin. Understood?

M: Hum…

S: - For example, it is connected to what we call tsussin [pointing to his father in the photo]. You understood?

M: No.

S: - This here is tsussin [pointing his finger to the floor and behind the photo while making a circle]

M: Oh, this one here.

S: - Yes, tsussin. And this is why it is connected [pointed to the photography] and we named it tsussin.

M: And what is this here? [making a circle with my finger]

S: - This here is tsussin. M: But this is spirit?

S: - Yes, spirit.

M: This here? [pointing directly to the shadow of his fingers]

*we both start smiling to each other as if a great epiphany had happened*

S: - This is the spirit… [continuously spinning his finger pointed at the floor]

M: Oh boy! But is this also what nawa [white people] name as spirit?

S: - Hm…

M: But if something happens to this photo, if it is burned, for example? If it gets on fire?

S: - On fire?

M: Yes… will it have any effect on Kuini?

*after some moments of silence*

S: - No. For a long time, a paper like this didn’t exist, a photo. And that is why we, my people, used to think a lot about this, that it was

tsussin. For example, a tsussin [points to the shadow], they put it as tsussin [points to the photo]. You understood?

M: I understand… but it is not the same tsussin as when we are dreaming, and then we go… it is not the same tsussin?

M: But is there a connection between these tsussin? [pointing upwards and after to the photo]

S: - Hm…. This one not [points to the photo]. In this one [photo] you have the image of the people. The one linked to dreams, for example, like my uncle used to say [Tëpi Pajé], are just like humans. And they feel them to see what they are dreaming, just like humans, like people. Our ancestors, from the past.”

Our dialogue went on to discuss dreams and the tsussin world58, and, even though a requirement for a more extensive research into tsussin, this Matis word does unites spirits, images and shadow. The relation becomes more evident when considering other Amerindian examples, as the Cuna’s purpa and its doubled-image of the world, where the substance’s image could make their spirit re-exist in a magical mimesis process of burning magazines’ photography (Taussig, 1993), or the Yanomami’s xapiri, in which, after inhaling the powder of yãkoana, the shaman’s image might travel with the founders of ecology, that is, the spirits of the forest (Kopenawa and Albert, 2010)59.

The lack of effect in the photographed, for instance Kuini Pussa, Shapu’s father, by a potential fire in the photo, could mean that there is no magical work happening to that objectified image and, therefore, no effects. During our dialogue, the photo was merely a representation, although with an embodied potential. For the magic of mimesis to work, the copy must be in a working process to effect its original, considering the complementarity, yet distinction, between the spiritual and the substantial (Taussig, 1993). Even with an intact potential, setting that specific photo to fire wouldn’t be necessarily

“releasing the soul of the entity burned, activating and bringing it into the world as an effective agent in a process parallel if not identical to the healer activating the spirit-power of his wooden figurines by chanting to and with them” (Taussig, 1993, p.135).

58 _{Shapu told me the tsussin have cities just as we do and live there, celebrating parties, similarly to a paradise. Also, he told me that his}

uncle Tëpi Pajé had affirmed to him to celebrate and be happy, rather sad, when his time would come, because what really matters are the tsussin - as our flesh would unavoidably be eaten by animals.

59 _{If we consider that the shadow acts as an ‘anti-image’, because light would have been absorbed by the image, rendering the lack of this}

absorbed light to be a shadow, tsussin as shadow would be, at least, inversely equivalent to an image, as if tsussin was simultaneously anti-tsussin as image too;

The creation of photography and cinema is related to a play between light and shadow, as in producing an image, the mimetic machineries require both light and shadow60. Inversely, for the indigenous Cuna, the material objects/artifacts61 are activated by the healer through mimetic magic to “bring forth images that battle with images, hence spirits with spirits, copy with copy, out doubling the doubleness of the world” (Taussig, 1993, p.128). Cinema, as the “chosen art form which can produce a likeness in which society can examine itself” (Moore, 1997, p.158), produces double images that play between light and tsussin as shadow, producing - through the objectifying contact of the camera - a dimensionless (moving)

tsussin. It is the spirit that affects the substance in which it is a copy of, even if it is an image as photography or a film.

Cinema’s doubled images mirroring back dialectical images that may reproduce tsussin from

dream-worlds, for instance, could be associated to the Yanomami artistic project AMOAHIKI

(Motta e Lima, 2008) and the experimental documentary Xapiri (Motta e Lima, 2012), both

making Shapu and I get enthusiastic watching the possibility of dream-world spirits. Such audiovisual projects that join art, anthropology and shamanism, with the film’s poetic and sensorial aesthetic, holds some sort of mimetic power that enables spirits, or simply put, that enables images to affect its viewer. The Possibility of Spirits (Van de Port, 2016)62, as another example, uses an essayist-montage approach with a surrealist touch and extreme close-up to set in motion reflections about how cinema could deal with recording spirits.

60 _{Photography, that is, graphically inputting light into a material object;}

61 _{Such material artifacts have their (spiritual) double in the inverted paradise of commodity’s existence (see Taussig, 1993)} 62 _{Other films and works from Van de Port are available in http://www.mattijsvandeport.eu/www.mattijsvandeport.eu/films.html}

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