Acknowledgments – Els Lagrou, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Anouska Komlosy, Robert Storrie, Anne-Christine Taylor, Janet Chernela, Carlos A. Uribe, Dan Rosengren, and the participants at the CRACIA and ELSA seminars in 2021 provided me with important insights and details, some of which made it into the text. Fernando Santos-Granero, Philip Charrier, Federico Bossert, and Mickaël Brohan also made valuable editorial comments on the text.
- 1 Joanna Overing was born in Takoma Park, MD, USA, in 1938. She received a BA and MA degrees in Hist (...)
1It was through the most wonderful serendipity that I came to do my Ph.D. under the supervision of Joanna Overing.1 On May 7, 1995, I finished my lunch and left don Manuel Marulanda’s food station in Araracuara, on the northern shore of the Caquetá River in the Colombian Amazon, and headed towards the house of Tropenbos Foundation’s local administrator, Alejandro Jaramillo. On the way, I crossed paths with Tom Griffiths, a tall, thin Englishman who was pursuing ethnographic fieldwork with Uitoto-speaking clans who overlapped with the closely related Muinane clans I was working with. I had met Tom in passing a few months earlier at a Yukuna dance ritual. I felt a combination of respect, admiration, and mild resentment, stemming from my admiration for anybody doing graduate studies—he was doing his D.Phil. research at Oxford University, under the supervision of one Peter Rivière—and my carefully controlled jealousy for anthropologists who spoke indigenous languages better than I did. We chatted, and I asked Tom about graduate programs in the UK:
“Do you think your university would take me in?”
“They would probably take you on … But right now, for Amazonian studies, maybe Oxford is not a likely option. My supervisor might be retiring soon …”
“Damn. OK.”
“But you know, the person doing the most exciting research is a woman who lectures at the LSE … Joanna Overing.”
“LSE?”
“London School of Economics.”
“Is that a university that specializes in economics?”
“No … it’s big, and it’s got all kinds of programs … a very old anthropology program, in fact.”
“I’ll have to find out more about it. But what about Hugh-Jones?”
“He’s good for sure! I did my master’s at Cambridge with Steve and he does great supervision. At this point, though, if you are looking for a lively place to study … critical, really modern … maybe consider going to Joanna Overing.”
2Back home in Medellín, trying out that newfangled thing called the internet, I found Professor Overing’s address and then wrote her a long letter telling her that I had worked in the Colombian Amazon for six months over the previous two years, could speak a modicum of Muinane (of the Bora linguistic family), had received top grades throughout my undergraduate degree, and had done very well in my Graduate Record Examination. I expressed an interest in epistemology and evolutionary models, and asked her if she would consider taking me on as a student.
3A few weeks later I received a letter from Professor Overing stating that she was no longer at the LSE but was in the process of moving to Scotland, where she now had a post at the University of St. Andrews; however, if I were interested in going to St. Andrews with her, she could offer me a scholarship that covered my tuition and a living stipend. She never showed any interest at all in my grades or my Graduate Record Examination results. I was admitted and funded, if I wished to be, with no preliminary formalities or bureaucratic hoops to start with. There was a University of St. Andrews brochure in her letter. I fell in love with the picture of the dining room in Deanscourt, the grad student dorm. I could not believe my good luck.
4In St. Andrews some months later, I got a fuller picture of the happy accident that led to my scholarship. St. Andrews, at the behest of their own Ladislav Holy, had seduced Joanna—she insisted that I call her that after I proffered a few clumsy iterations of “Professor” or “Dr. Overing”—away from the LSE with the offer of a full professorship, control over the Centre for Indigenous American Studies and Exchange, and a hefty sum of money for her to bring students to support her research program. That was the source of my scholarship. My letter had arrived just after she had St. Andrews’ offer. “It was a good letter, Carlos,” she told me.
5Joanna’s rallying power was at full strength during the years I was there, 1996-1997, and on and off in 1998 and 1999. French scholars Catherine Alès (CNRS) and Jean Chiappino came, as did a number of Brazilians, like Nadia Farage, Rafael Bastos, and visiting post-doctoral fellow Marco-Antonio Gonçalves. Anouska Komlosy, a student of Joanna’s at the LSE, decided that she loved Joanna so much that she would move to St. Andrews to do her Ph.D. under Joanna’s supervision, even though Anouska’s fieldwork interest was in China, an ethnographic area with which Joanna had had little involvement. Other graduate students with whom I overlapped were Brazilians Els Lagrou, Guilherme Werlang, Roberta Campos, and Adolfo de Oliveira; Bolivian Gonzalo Araoz; and Spaniard Javier Carrera Rubio.
6I had no real prior experience with the affordances of European and North American universities, so I had little sense of proportion, and took for granted the luxury of St. Andrews and of Joanna’s situation. Today, as a professor at an economically harried university in the Canadian prairies, I dream of the infrastructure and wealth that would allow me to have something like the departmental seminars at St. Andrews, with visiting speakers every Thursday, and the Amazonianist seminar every other Wednesday. The latter was run out of Joanna’s funds, and while I was there it brought visiting speakers from the UK, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Brazil. So we always had scholars coming through and sparking meaty conversations: I recall Mark Hobart, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Benny Shanon, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Steve Hugh-Jones, Mark Harris, Luis Eduardo Luna, Rafael Menezes Bastos, Christina Toren, Tom Paine, Paul Oldham, Dan Clayton, Lindsay Crickmay, Louise de la Gorgendière, Michael Stewart, Harvey Whitehouse, Brian Street, and Fernando Santos-Granero, among others.
- 2 I’m using the past tense because I’m writing about Joanna as I knew her in the 90s and early 2000s (...)
7Our Joanna of that time was bright, cheerful, warm, powerful, egalitarian, and protective.2 She was also ambitious, and strove to build a thriving, bubbly, cohesive community of like-minded scholars. As an earlier student of hers, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, put it, Joanna wanted to create a Piaroa-like itso’de, or house. Sociality in Piaroa houses was based on an aesthetics of living, with convivial relations, personal tranquility, and artful everyday life as widespread aspirations and key criteria for success.
8Joanna had picked up the term “conviviality” years earlier from Ivan Illich (1973), finding his use of it to account for Ancient Greek and Thomist understanding of friendship and playfulness in personal relations to work well as an analytical term for indigenous Amazonians’ understandings of their own ways of manufacturing and controlling the social environment through the intellectually and emotionally skillful, communally sensitive, yet autonomous actions of its members. The idea that certain analytical terms or vocabularies may be poorly suited to grasp certain foreign concepts was structural to Joanna’s understanding of her own work, and she often claimed that Western thought did not have the vocabulary to catch on to socialities and philosophies such as the Piaroa’s, and that they were therefore incapable of defining the very fundamentals of indigenous thought and practice. She harnessed the term “conviviality” as a remedy for that (Overing and Passes [eds.] 2000). The term has since gained popularity among regional specialists.
9Joanna’s students at St. Andrews certainly had good reason to feel that her efforts to create a convivial, productive scholarly community had been successful. Twice while I was there, she rented a big farmhouse in the Scottish countryside and took her students and other visitors to spend a weekend of peripatetic learning and good companionship. I particularly recall walking around a reindeer farm with Jakob Meløe, a Norwegian philosopher. What had attracted Joanna to him was his attention to how understanding a term involved, necessarily, an understanding of some subset of the workings of the physical and social world. Meløe spoke to us at great length about the kind of knowledge of water and waves and wind and fishing that it took to build a boat and to understand, really to understand, the term “mizzen,” beyond knowing that it referred to a kind of sail. Another luxurious event was a visit by the Swedes Kaj Århem, Dan Rosengren, and (dear departed) Sven-Erik Isacsson, where again we walked St. Andrews’ beaches and golf course while talking shop. Collectively, we found Joanna’s picture of anthropology motivating and her accounts of social life, in Amazonia and beyond, compelling.
- 3 Manuela Carneiro da Cunha’s Ph.D. thesis for the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, defended in 19 (...)
10Joanna had been recognized as a mover and shaker by fellow scholars since the late 70s, especially after she organized the seminal symposium “Social Time and Social Space in Lowland South American Societies” at the 1976 Americanist Congress and edited the resulting landmark volume; there, she spearheaded the transformation in the regional specialization with her call to abandon the prevalent analytical categories and concepts stemming from Africanist and other sources in anthropology, with their emphasis on descent, filiation, lineages, and the determining role of the jural, and to develop instead concepts derived from ethnographic engagement with Amazonian lifeways, and better suited to analyze them (Overing Kaplan 1977; see also Costa 2019, p. 689).3 Lydia Morris and Stephen Nugent, her first Ph.D. students, graduated in 1978-1979. In the 80s Joanna truly rallied around herself a thriving community of like-minded students and other intellectuals; most notable among Amazonianists were her students Fernando Santos-Granero, Peter Gow, and Cecilia McCallum (Ph.D.s respectively in 1986, 1988, and 1989). Many more of us would follow in the 90s and early 2000s.
11In his 1996 review of the state of Amazonianist anthropology, Viveiros de Castro declared that one of three major analytical styles in contemporary studies of Amazonian societies was that of the “moral economy of intimacy,” an approach he attributed mainly to Joanna and her former students (Viveiros de Castro 1996, p. 189). That same year, Anne-Christine Taylor spoke of an “English school of Americanism” (Taylor 1996, p. 206) or “British Americanists” (ibid., p. 213, n. 10), a category that she populated with the names of Joanna’s students. The foreign labels came with some criticism. Taylor admired the finesse with which the “English school” treated sociality as inherently affective memory, but nevertheless protested that these accounts struck her as “somewhat one-sided and indeed surprisingly angelic, for they tend to minimize a vital component of social relations, namely hostility or vindictiveness” (ibid., p. 206). Viveiros de Castro’s review similarly stated that the analytical approach of the moral economy of intimacy tended to privilege local groups’ internal relationships at the expense of proper attention to interlocal relationships often characterized by reciprocal, predatory violence (Viveiros de Catsro 1996, p. 189). To call Joanna’s approach one of “moral economy” perhaps also suggested that she identified collectivist claims that championed the values of community as “moral,” in a simplistic opposition with condemnable utilitarian, individualist accounts (Laidlaw 2014, p. 22).
- 4 See Santos-Granero (2000, p. 269) for a critical account of this division.
12Joanna’s and her students’ writings indeed often paid considerable attention to Amerindian people’s own interest in love, care, tranquility, peacefulness, equality, humor, moral discernment, and other convivial relations, emotions, and virtues. I can well see how they could have sounded romantic. In part, though, this emphasis was pointedly meant to countervail pop cultural and scholarly portrayals of Amazonians as violent, dog-eat-dog, male-dominant peoples (e.g., Chagnon’s representation of the Piaroa’s neighbors, the Yanomami, as “fierce people” [Chagnon 1968]). The contrast tempted some scholars to begin to divide Amazonianist scholarship and scholars into irenic doves and warlike hawks, according to their treatment of violence and predation.4
13I don’t think Joanna was ever really a dove herself. In her publications, she was incisively critical of Marxists, cognitivists, structuralists, and certain brands of feminism (e.g., see Overing Kaplan 1981, p. 152, 155), and seemed to understand an important part of her scholarly life to be good fights she leapt into with loyal students and friends as allies by her side. She was very sensitive to criticism. When an erstwhile Brazilian protégé printed something to the effect that her portrayal of Amazonia was too irenic, she felt betrayed. “That kind of stuff you hash out at a seminar, or in person … you don’t publish it like this!” she said to me. I got into some trouble myself not long after when I commented that a passage in the draft introduction to The Anthropology of Love and Anger volume sounded too “lovey-dovey.” It was a sensitive matter, and she chided me: “You are sounding like them!” We discussed it together—not an opportunity everybody got—and the passage was reworded.
14In the introduction to The Anthropology of Love and Anger volume, Joanna and Alan Passes responded to Viveiros de Castro’s (1996) critical assessment of her analytical approach with the claim that what was at issue was precisely the meaning of “the social.” They argued that Western grand narratives of society, including some dominant trends in moral philosophy and anthropology, have “layers of signification” (elsewhere, Joanna called it “baggage” [Overing 1986]) that impede a good understanding of Amazonian philosophies and ways of life. These narratives associate domestic life with the private, informal, and the everyday, and deem this to be a mainly feminine realm; they associate the male realm of the public with the collective and formal. Much moral philosophy situates moral reason in the public domain, as abstract arguments about rights and obligations in the context of impersonal relations. But Joanna and Alan protested that the attributes analysts dub “domestic”—relations at home, childcare, feeding, everyday community life—are those that most Amazonians identify with the realm of the social, without deeming this to be a mostly male or female domain. Relations of affinity and predation with outsiders are often construed as asocial (Overing and Passes [eds.] 2000, p. 6).
15They hastened to add that this argument did not entail, as critics had argued, that she and her students ignored predatory relations across community, tribal, or cosmic boundaries, nor the relevance or presence of anger, hate, or distrust in their lives (Overing and Passes [eds.] 2000, p. 5-6). Indeed, Joanna had been saying for years that difference, affinity, predatory relations, and violence were always there as a backdrop or condition of the social. For instance, take her claims that for a number of Amazonian peoples, “the universe exists, life exists, society exists, only insofar as there is contact and proper mixing among things that are different from one another” (Overing Kaplan 1981, p. 161); that for Piaroa, “society can only exist through the interaction of unlike beings—affines—and […] such interaction is very dangerous,” “since in-laws are strangers who may eat you” (ibid., p. 162). A “conundrum […] very general to lowland South Amerindian Indians [sic] […] states the necessity of differences to social life in a world where the coming together of differences implies danger, while the conjoining of like things implies safety and non-society or anti-life” (ibid., p. 163). The key is that violent, angry, ugly, capricious, destructive, asocial forces must be transformed into the beautiful and social (Overing and Passes [eds.] 2000, p. 6) before they can be considered “social”—if the latter term is to be a translation of Amazonian peoples’ concepts.
16The fact that Joanna had both a desire for warm community and the willingness to scrap seems to me to explain two important moves in her life. Much as she described the Piaroa’s strong sense that relations in the community should be mutually supportive and ensure tranquility and a beautiful life, and how motivated they were to seek such relations if they were somehow absent, so too she described her departures from the US in 1974 and the LSE in 1995. She felt unappreciated in the US during the last few years of her Ph.D. at Brandeis, at a time when she was also teaching at Vanderbilt. Her theoretical preferences certainly differed from those of her interlocutors at Brandeis, and she had tensions with a number of strong characters in Boston. One powerful figure was David Maybury-Lewis, whose theoretical approach she was critical of, and whose personal interactions with her she remembered with displeasure. In Joanna’s “Catch-22” piece (Overing 1986), readers can identify some of the theoretical tensions she had with her thesis committee member Joan Bamberger. She had felt mistreated by Bamberger’s husband, the colorful Terence Turner: “Terry once blew a raspberry at one of my public lectures!” In contrast, she spoke fondly of how Peter Rivière, at Oxford, had loved her kinship work and had persuaded her to move to England, where she took up a joint appointment at the LSE and the University of London.
17England was a mixed bag for Joanna. One French contemporary of hers told me that, though the English constantly harped on about gender inequality, the establishment at Anglo-Saxon universities remained deeply misogynistic. “Those women felt like an invisibly oppressed minority,” she added. She made some great male friends, but women were less numerous in academia and, according to friends who knew her back then, she didn’t make strong alliances with female peers.
18Carlos A. Uribe, a Colombian anthropologist who received his MPhil at the LSE in the mid 80s, remembered that Joanna and Maurice Bloch were two of the most charismatic faces of the department, and famously at odds with each other. “It wasn’t so much personal as a very different engagement with anthropology. Joanna liked recent, critical approaches to the politics of anthropological writing, while Maurice didn’t so much.” When I met Joanna a decade later, she spoke of that relationship as the most significant among several characterized by career-threatening antipathy from established male professors. One of her students from her time in London mentioned to me that despite Joanna’s self-confidence and her humorous ability to take on strong men in that institutional context, she transmitted to her and to other young women great concern with the possibility of their writings “ending up and dying on some man’s desk”—that is, being kept from burgeoning through informal means.
19There was another source of gender trouble for Joanna at universities in London. Sex between university professors and students was not as heartily and publicly condemned back then as it is in the 2020s, and I believe she was too much of an anarchist or Dadaist type ever to side with the institutional foreclosure on sexual relations between professors and students, but she certainly detested coercive relations and she despised male instructors who pursued female undergraduate students. As her student put it, Joanna stepped in on occasion to give students refuge and practical pointers when they had to deal with a teacher or supervisor who made unwanted advances. This was another source of friction with colleagues at several universities.
20Though Joanna’s imp of a husband, Napier Russell, kept her from becoming bitter, she was ready to leave the LSE—it was prestigious, but too hostile. She was explicit in her accounts of her move away from it, stating that the most powerful senior male professors there would ensure that she never got promoted to the rank of full professor. She gladly accepted Ladislav Holy’s and St. Andrews’ invitation to move there into a full professorship and a departmental chair. “St. Andrews is much nicer than the LSE … the people in the department are much more mutually supportive,” she told me. For a while, this was true, and then for a while it wasn’t.
21In 1996, Joanna gave her inaugural lecture as full professor at St. Andrews. I believe she was the second woman in such a position there, hired very soon after the first one, a Mathematics professor. At the dinner party to celebrate the inauguration, I found it appropriate to toast her with a much-too-long story about a rabbit that serially invited a hungry weasel, a hungry fox, and a hungry wolf into its den, promising to show each one his graduate thesis if only they postponed their plans to devour him. “Well, what is the title of your thesis?” each predator asked. The rabbit responded, “How a rabbit preys upon a weasel” (or in later scenes, “upon a fox” or “upon a wolf”). In each scene, the predator laughed with condescension and followed the rabbit into the den to see his thesis. The story led to a final scene that invited listeners to descend into the den, where they would witness the rabbit typing away, surrounded by the bones of larger beasts. In a corner, there was a lion chewing on something. The moral of the story? The title of your thesis doesn’t matter; the only thing that does is who your supervisor is.
Joanna and Carlos, St. Andrews, 2001
(photo of author)
- 5 I wanted to become just such a warm, affectionate, mentorial presence, and to express this with te (...)
22Joanna’s mentoring style was another aspect of her persona that aligned with the gist of her scholarship on indigenous Amazonian sociality. She emphasized conviviality and made it a point to downplay structure. An important aspect of her early work on the Piaroa concerned how they indeed had rules for kinship and marriage that could be laid out in an abstract fashion, but then they broke, bent, massaged, reinterpreted, played, selectively applied, or ignored those rules as they went about living their social lives (e.g., Overing Kaplan 1975, p. 133-134). She often addressed me as “luv,” which I found endearing.5
23One problem for me with Joanna’s informality was that I initially had no idea of what was expected of me. Would I be taking any courses? (No.) And what the heck was a “tutorial”? I had no idea, nor that tutorials would be the vertebral column of my training. For months, I wondered whether I was passing, in the sense of getting a grade that would allow me to continue. It took me many months to figure out the structure myself, and to stop waiting for grades. I still wonder whether Joanna created a cocoon for me and for my little cohort that somehow protected us from bureaucratic institutional demands, and somewhere in the guts of some computer in St. Andrews there are grades and other standardized measurements with our names tied to them. I certainly never saw them.
24But then the tutorials were something else. Half the time these were at her place, a 15- or 20-minute bus ride outside St. Andrews. I’d arrive at her lovely house after two or three weeks of reading and writing to be welcomed by Napier. I would then go into her home office for a couple of hours’ chat. We’d drink coffee, she would update me at some length on the emotional state of her much-loved fox terrier (e.g., “Lucy’s been playing a lot at being a mummy … she really wanted puppies”), and then we’d talk about the essay I’d written, new questions or doubts that I had, and ethnographic details from my work with Muinane clans. As often as not we’d go out for walks, and I’d be invited to stay over for lunch or dinner. Not infrequently, this would segue into a larger get-together with other students and colleagues who were coming for a drink.
25A parenthetical note on humor: In both everyday life and her theoretical writing, Joanna attended to the social effects of good laughter, and to the skillful use of humor and folly to establish congenial footings of relations, trouble hierarchies, and subvert tyrannies—the topic of her own chapter in The Anthropology of Love and Anger book (Overing 2000). I recall her expressing great admiration for Irving Goldman’s insights into that among the Cubeo (1963). Doubtless, Napier and Joanna became a couple in part because of her frank admiration and enjoyment of his sometimes elegant, sometimes bawdy, but always ready sense of humor; indeed, he put her students at their ease with great facility, and as I recall, we all loved the guy. He kept on a cork board in their dining room a collection of pictures and postcards of trees with features that resembled genitals, assholes, or people shitting or having sex, ever ready to lighten the mood; for years, every time I happened upon such a tree or postcard, I’d make sure to send the image to Napier.
26Joanna knew herself to be a good speaker, but I recall her telling me, with wry regret, that she could never make a roomful of people laugh and relax like Napier could. She was doing herself a partial disservice: indeed, she never quite gave up on a certain dignity of demeanor that those more invested in being comical did, but she could certainly enthrall and entertain a crowd. She could tell stories about indignities well enough, for sure. One that I recall well, and that again underscored the social efficacy that she attributed to laughter, was her telling of a visit to the great Mary Douglas’s house with her friend Nigel Barley, author of the very comical The Innocent Anthropologist (1983). “We had just had lunch and were sitting in the living room, when I farted. We all heard it. But Mary was just quiet. And Nigel didn’t say anything! But when Mary left the room some minutes later, he laughed really hard. ‘Why didn’t you laugh back then?!’ I said, ‘That would really have helped to dissolve the tension!’”
- 6 Ladislav died that first year I was there, and Sandor died while I was in the field; when I return (...)
27Joanna’s very first task for me in January 1996 was to read an article by each member of the department and to identify commonalities and differences among them. At the time the full-time members were Roy Dilley, David Riches, Nigel Rapport, Ladislav Holy, linguist Sandor Harvey, missionary anthropologist Mario Aguilar, and Joanna herself; Tristan Platt was in the field so I didn’t meet him at that time. Andeanist Lindsay Crickmay had a fellowship at the CIASE as well.6 I recall finding them all exciting and new. I had not studied post-modernism in much depth at all in my undergrad program in Colombia and wrote in my essay—to Joanna’s mirth—that she and her colleagues were “post-modern,” to signal, as I reductively understood it, that they questioned the possibility of producing anthropological truths along the lines of the natural sciences.
- 7 Laidlaw (2014) states that anthropologists should engage more, and more judiciously, with virtue e (...)
28For our second tutorial, I wrote an essay laying out my interest in importing persuasively into social and cultural anthropology a powerful evolutionary epistemological model, and to be a natural scientist of social life. The gist of her response was the following: “I love science! But what you are describing sounds to me like a ‘truth-conditional theory of meaning.’ Take a look at Charles Taylor’s chapter on that, in his Human Agency and Language book.” In the months that followed she also had me read her essay on world-making (Overing 1990) and work by philosophers Nelson Goodman, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, and Michel Foucault. “Foucault may just have been the smartest scholar of this century,” she said. My first few months at St. Andrews were therefore philosophy-heavy. The authors she had me read persuaded me that the criteria for accepting or rejecting knowledge claims can be shown to be, to an important extent, sociocultural and historical products. So are the moral worlds within which people imagine themselves to live.7
29Those eighteen months at St. Andrews at the beginning of my Ph.D. were a delicious time, if also, initially, one of epistemic torment. My concerns were not those of the post-modern scholars whom Cambridge philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner denounced, who self-flagellated over the structural inequalities they were bound to perpetuate through the practice of anthropology, but more along the lines of giving up on safe certainties. Years later, my friend Els Lagrou explained to me that Joanna treated each of her students differently, according to each one’s interests, challenges, and obsessions, and that she had told her, “Carlos’s problem is that he’s still obsessing about the really real.” But under Joanna’s influence, in the eyes of some, I became easily lumpable with the despicable po-mos, purported deniers of the exceptional epistemic power of Western natural sciences. I recall debates with erstwhile science-über-alles types, such as my father-in-law and brother-in-law, both science popularizers. At the core of our new differences were our takes on the possibility of objective knowledge or a language of observation that somehow captured reality. Joanna called that “realism”—a “boo” word, in her vocabulary and then in mine. In that regard, Rorty’s prescription seemed like the best option: use knowledge if it happens to be useful for a purpose—be it prediction, better governance, technological advance, more powerful poems, or the reduction of cruelty—but don’t waste your time discussing the possibility or nature of ultimate truths, ultimate realities, or the really real, for these are unprofitable topics.
30I recall a pattern where I would read one of Joanna’s articles, count my blessings for having such a brilliant supervisor, and then somehow lose sight of the edge of her brilliance till I read her next chapter or article. I also sat in on her undergraduate course in Amazonianist anthropology (beginning in February 1996) and on her Linguistic Theory in Anthropology (beginning in September 1996), and more and more came to see things her way. She had us read a couple of chapters from Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and laid out for us his account of systems of interrelated signs. “There is no as yet better theory of meaning,” she said to us, even as she decried structuralist assumptions about certain universals of the mind. Take, for example, the claim that thought is all binary oppositions. She didn’t like the polar opposition Saussure created between the individual and the collective, nor the distance between synchronic langue and historical parole.
31When she took us through Saussure’s account of phonology and semantics, she noted that his linguistic structures, these systems of arbitrary signs, were disembedded from social life—a fundamental flaw from an anthropological point of view. There seemed to be no connection between the social and physical worlds “out there” and the system, but connections within the system seemed to be amenable to very rigorous methodological applications aimed at discovering further models and sets of rules through which analysts could predict the next elements in the system. Meaning lay in unconscious levels of the mind, and users shared an identical stock of concepts.
32Joanna found Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1993 [1929]) important as a foil to structuralism and certain Marxisms, and certainly to Western individualist accounts of personhood and sociality. For one thing, Vološinov made the case against individualist accounts of the mind that explained it in terms of universal, biological principles, making instead a strong case for a sociological, semiotic account where consciousness is the ongoing product of material signs deployed dialogically, in real time and space. One aspect of his work that was important for Joanna was that it was an account of social struggles, which he stated were first and foremost over the meanings of signs. His work was itself a scrap with other Marxists and structuralists, and she certainly admired that. His ideas and his name bubbled up in her arguments against structuralism, certain Marxisms, certain feminisms, and cognitivism.
33With Lévi-Strauss, anthropology tried to jump onto the same bandwagon of science that linguistics purported to be, with its rigorous methodology. It aimed at discovering general laws of thought that governed semiotic systems, and at coming up with models and sets of rules through which they could predict subsequent elements in said systems. Under his influence, anthropology became for many a study of the structuring capacity of the human mind, and analysts gave logical priority to the model over contingent behavior and experience. For Joanna, to the contrary, the key was practice—and everyday, ordinary practice at that. “Systems? Sure. But how are they used?” In part, this entailed pushing the anthropological focus away from the mind itself and towards its products (Overing 1987, p. 72).
34In line with Vološinov’s central claim that language was evaluative, Joanna criticized Lévi-Strauss’s treatment of language as mainly about classification, and of totemism as a system of logical relationships of analogical nature. She claimed that this was too intellectualist and that it failed to consider that claims about relations between animals and human beings could be literal, a matter of belief and moral motivation. She noted that Lévi-Strauss was being liberal and seeking to avoid calling natives stupid—and so he used what she called in her “Mummy” article “the metaphorical safety net” (Overing 1985). But even as she was critical of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss and eager to get rid of much of their baggage, she still insisted that meanings were relational. “This must not be thrown out,” she said to us in class.
35She certainly never threw it out herself. That her metatheory was semiotic surfaces again and again in her work. This is an important distinction between her anthropology and the more recent and more radical “ontological turn.” Take, for instance, her essay on translation, where she bought that human beings everywhere share a capacity for reason, but was suspicious of the concept of a “rational bridgehead” or common core of belief and logic shared by all cultures (Overing 1987, p. 75). People differ in time and across social groups, and in the metaphysical premises that they accept about the world, its constitutive features, inhabitants, and causalities. These metaphysical premises are not themselves amenable to processes of rational proof. In Joanna’s semiotic, language-centric take on social life and on knowledge, labels for things are nodes with relational ties to other words, behaviors, and propositions about particular worlds. Those relational ties or semiotic associations are constitutive of meaning. But these associations are many and are at least in part the product of particular historical processes and experiences. This entails that labels carry “baggage”—meaningful but arbitrary associations—that may be widely shared within certain groups, but not beyond.
- 8 To my recollection, Joanna didn’t engage with the related Derridean point that even mutual underst (...)
36This “baggage” troubles translation, because it entails that no word, and certainly no major concept, can ever be exactly translated from one language to the next.8 The terms in Piaroa that Joanna translated into English as “house” and “woman” have associations and particular meanings in Piaroa that are not part of the meanings of houses and of women in English. Worldviews expressed in different semiotic frameworks can have very different universal premises or metaphysical ideas, which makes them, at least initially, incommensurable. That is where experience and creativity come in. The problem of translation is a trivial point or an obvious fact of life: there are no “perfect” translations. Whenever we give a name to something, we create a world, and by changing the name, we transform its emotional and intellectual impact (or its “import,” to use Geertz’s and Taylor’s vocabulary, and perhaps its accent, to use Vološinov’s). The challenge of translation—a form of changing the names of things—is to learn about and comprehend certain things about the world in question, figuring out how people’s words and other meaningful actions fit into alien frameworks of words, concepts, thoughts, moral judgments, and metaphysical assumptions (Overing 1987, p. 76).
37Joanna saw the anthropologist’s process of coming to understand the claims and actions of their research subjects as one of knowledge and creativity, of moral and intellectual leaps and a (perhaps temporary, perhaps tentative) embrace of a different worldview, such that those claims and actions make full sense. This involves shedding or at least relativizing some of the conceptual baggage of old analytical labels and concepts such as marriage, descent, alliance, culture, society, ethnicity, kinship-based society, and the like. It also involves being wary of our own moral, aesthetic, and epistemic criteria for gauging knowledge claims.
38The point about criteria is important. (Here I think to myself that it makes sense that early on Joanna had me read Richard Rorty, for whom leaps in knowledge and changes in paradigm are not themselves criteria-driven, for the criteria themselves are part of what is up for grabs.) In line with Feyerabend, Joanna treated the kind of anthropology she liked as a good model for natural science to follow to achieve progress. Namely, this progress (the revolutionary kind more than normal scientific progress) requires that we rid ourselves of logicians’ “illiterate demand” (I was thrilled when I first read that snarky phrase) for a single, simplified objective language for analysis, premised on a Western metaphysics that posits the existence of one true, objective, really real world (Overing 1987, p. 71). As they saw it, transitional stages of theory-building, when one moves from the old to the creation of the new, require thinking and acting that appear irrational from the perspective of the old, because the latter’s very criteria (including criteria for rationality) are very much a part of what is in question. Again, the move requires creativity, perhaps madness, and likely humor: with Feyerabend, Joanna preferred the attitude of reflexive self-deprecation and fun of Dadaism to the puritanical dedication and seriousness of political anarchism.
39Back then she asked,
What would happen if when we come upon a strange, “unreasonable” ritual or a statement that ignores our empirical judgements about the world we used the term “ontology” (what is considered real in the world or cosmos) or “epistemology” (theories of knowledge about understanding the reality of that world or cosmos), rather than “magic” or “symbol”, to lead the questioning about the “unreasonable”? (Overing 1987, p. 83)
Her own prescription was that
[i]n construing unfamiliar statements, what must give is knowledge about the world; it is not the word itself that is critical, either ours or theirs. When there is an incompatibility between the utterance and the world as we view it, it is creativity, experimentation, and the suspension of belief that we need: once the alien world is understood, we can then make final decisions, moral or otherwise, about the appropriateness of labels, those that would enable us to communicate best about that world. (Ibid., p. 84)
40In her 1986 article on gender, Joanna also spoke of multiple-world ontologies, but again, her metatheory was semiotic: people, together, co-construct creatively and imaginatively, through their meaningful interactions, the very worlds within which those interactions make sense. In that essay, too, she wrote critically of Western analytical concepts that “carried baggage” (Overing 1986, p. 138) that stood in the way of understanding the ways of life of other peoples. The particular baggage in question was a Western, formative picture in which culture is taken to dominate the natural environment, and, by metaphorical or metonymical extension, men are taken to dominate women. Incorporated into analytical concepts, these paradigmatic associations between power, dominance, and gender relations turn into distortive assumptions bound to lead analysts of diverse peoples’ ways of life to conclude in every instance that women are dominated.
41In her 1985 “Mummy” article—perhaps my favorite—Joanna had even more to say about morality than she did in her 1987 “Translation” piece. She analyzed there the example of Piaroa stating that “the tapir is their grandfather” (Overing 1985, p. 158). She imagined a liberal anthropologist committed to positing the Piaroa’s rationality and persuaded that the literal use of kinship terms can only refer to genealogical relationships established through biological reproduction; such a person would be unable to conceive that it might be a literal claim premised on a different understanding of the world. “The point is that to use our understanding of natural kinds (or rather, the ‘cultural kinds’ of the anthropologist) as the basis for understanding the meaning of another society’s classifications is to impose our own metaphysical prejudices upon our analyses of them” (ibid., p. 160).
- 9 She wasn’t using the term “social” at the time quite as she did later in the introduction to The A (...)
42The construal of a strange utterance given by an informant calls for construing the world so as to make sense of the utterance. In Joanna’s terms, “what gives is the world, not the word” (Overing 1985, p. 174). She thus proceeded to lay out how Piaroa went about deploying kinship terms in myths and other contexts, and to figure out what the world within which such usages made sense had to be like. The ontological principles that affected the uses and meanings of those kinship terms concerned the nature of being of a kind and being different, where society was conditioned on difference and danger, and non-social existences were associated with identity and safety.9 Theirs was an ontology of multiple worlds that were sometimes connected and sometimes not, and where the social world Piaroa normally inhabited was not deemed an anchoring, bedrock reality (ibid., p. 157-158).
43Joanna discovered that Piaroa wizards (she preferred that term to “shamans,” for a while) used kinship terms polysemically, alternatively as egocentric and as class terms. Each term had multiple meanings and wizards could choose among these to stress certain aspects of relationships between beings and to deemphasize others. The classification of one mythic being to another (or to living Piaroa) in kinship terms was determined by an unpredictable combination of predicates regarding events (like marriages, births, and deaths); the relative ages of beings; their gender; their size; their habitat associations; specific consanguineal or marital relationships (which did not need to be biological consanguinity as we understand it); the moral quality of their relationships; and the worlds the beings inhabited (among the several possible in the Piaroa universe).
44Making sense of “the tapir is our grandfather” required contextualizing it among these factors and predicates. Joanna did so, and concluded that the claim was not one to the effect that they had mystical relationships with the tapir. Rather, it had to do with predications of the term “grandfather” and the multiple-world cosmology of the Piaroa. Though a being from an older generation, the tapir could not be a “father” because of the moral quality of their relationship. He gave ancestral Piaroa a malevolent power, something a father would never do, though the class of grandfathers just might. But Joanna would not have had issues with worlds where mystical interspecies relations were indeed possible.
45Joanna’s and her students’ anthropological project, akin to what Bernard Williams (via Laidlaw 2014) called “the ethnographic stance,” sought to gain an imaginative understanding from the inside of Amazonian peoples’ ethical concepts and forms of life, and to learn to use and think with those concepts and participate in their forms of life, without necessarily adopting those concepts and values as their own. Her call to bracket off the “baggage” in Western analytical concepts and her dismissal of “silver bullets” or “monologic theoretical one-shots” that explain everything were very much, and eventually explicitly, a kind of decolonization of knowledge: a way to avoid indulging in “the patronizing gaze and vocabulary of Western social theory” (Overing 2006, p. 13), and thereby to understand better the creativity and poetics of indigenous peoples.
46In the final week of my stint at St. Andrews prior to heading for the field, I received three pieces of fieldwork advice. One friend told me to keep one blank page between any two written pages in my fieldwork diary for eventual reviewing notes, Nigel Rapport told me to write everything down, and Joanna told me to “follow through” with my questions. I think she was referring in particular to following through with genealogies and marriages and questions of kinship, but also to following up on the threads that are presented to us contingently in the field. Certainly, she had done that herself to write her 1975 monograph, which features precisely the kind of insights that came from “following through.” Her 1981 review brought this thoroughness up again, this time in a critique of Maybury-Lewis and Gê scholarship of the day, for failing to set out systematically Gê marriage prohibitions and detailed genealogical data, and to analyze their use through time, for only then could their structural consequences be known (Overing 1981, p. 155).
47I left St. Andrews halfway through 1997 to do fieldwork in three-month stints with one-month breaks in between, till the end of 1998. I came back to St. Andrews in May 1998 to participate in a workshop on the “aesthetics of emotions” that Joanna organized with her student Alan Passes. The Swedish Amazonianists Kaj Århem, Sven-Erik Isacsson, and Dan Rosengren were there, as was my own Colombian mentor Juan Álvaro Echeverri, and, of course, a good number of Joanna’s current and older students. It was a warm, intellectually titillating affair, and to this day I insist that her workshop model is the most intellectually profitable kind of scholarly event. At its best, people pre-circulate fairly advanced writings, everybody agrees to read everything before the meeting, presentations are brief, and then there is at least an hour for discussion about each paper. Joanna invited me and two other Ph.D. students of hers to develop our papers for inclusion in the edited volume that would result from the workshop.
48I returned to the Amazon for a last stint of doctoral fieldwork, and then moved to Amsterdam, where my wife was doing her own Ph.D. My first task was to write up my book chapter, which I did quickly, concerned with taking time away from work on my Ph.D. thesis. I visited St. Andrews for a month in the summer of 1999, at which point Alan (via Joanna) and Joanna herself provided very useful editorial suggestions for my book chapter—so much so that its general structure served in the year that followed as organizational scaffolding for my entire Ph.D. thesis. Joanna and Alan’s edited volume came out in 2000 with the title The Anthropology of Love and Anger. Having a published chapter (Londoño Sulkin 2000) in this important book was instrumental to my getting a tenure-stream job right out of my Ph.D. in 2001—yet another example of how Joanna helped her students along.
49I think with some regret that it would have been all the more nourishing to have been in St. Andrews with Joanna while I wrote my thesis, but we made it work. We had thesis-writing tutorials by phone and email in 1999 and 2000. I’d email her a chapter, and she’d phone back and we’d talk for twenty minutes or so during which she’d recommend that I cite this or that person and correct a few typos. Because I was very much her student and already focused on matters of everyday life, people’s understandings and moral evaluations and emotions, and the footings of interpersonal relations, she found little of structural substance to demand from me, except for much-needed reminders to consider women’s perspectives. I had to temper a certain neediness for reaffirmation, since I never felt, as the process advanced, that I was receiving quite enough attention. This is a common feeling among Ph.D. students everywhere, I’ve since found. I now think she gave me just about the attention I needed, and no more.
50As academic departments are prone to—certainly the Departments of Anthropology I’ve known—the one at St. Andrews had developed some rifts by 1999. In the months and years that followed, some very smart people at St. Andrews gave each other scars or reopened old ones, and the place became temporarily balkanized. The department’s composition has changed greatly since that difficult time, and it is a different place today; at the time, however, people lost jobs and records appeared elsewhere treating it as an example of a toxic working environment. My understanding is that Joanna was incensed at certain pettinesses but did her best as chair to try to defuse the situation. She was unsuccessful and much hurt by this. A friend who was there at the time told me that Joanna’s troubles were compounded by blood-pressure issues and by the drugs she had to take to control these.
- 10 Though not on the same page as theorists in social anthropology—especially regarding relationality (...)
51When the time came for me to defend my thesis in 2001, Joanna was careful to ensure that my viva voce (thesis defense) examiners were allies and friends, and not hostile critics. She recruited Pete Gow (who was at the LSE) to be my external examiner, and her co-author Nigel Rapport to be my internal.10 (I was her twenty-second Ph.D. supervisee, as per her CV; she would eventually guide thirty or so students to completion.) I have seen Joanna a few times since, most pleasurably at a 2005 celebratory gathering of her students, set up by George Mentore and Fernando Santos-Granero ([eds.] 2006), and then when she delivered a keynote lecture at the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA) conference in 2008. Her health had deteriorated when I last saw her at the SALSA meeting in Gothenburg in 2014. The last time I phoned her for her birthday, already some years ago, she didn’t recognize me.
52Over the years, I’ve wondered how my doctoral training, so informal and dependent on my relationship with Joanna, compared with that of colleagues who studied elsewhere. Some attended more institutionally structured programs and took courses in which they seem to have read much more widely and desperately than I did. But more and more, I see my graduate education as a rare luxury and a beautiful exercise in both community- and intellect-building, and a product of a series of accidents that I have to call fortunate. I had ample time to study the texts Joanna suggested, ample time to write, and then profited from her generous, critical attention and morale-boosting support for a few dedicated hours every few weeks. In her informal, warm fashion she facilitated the conditions for us to make my graduate program a dialogical process, one that fashioned me into a scholar along her lines: ethnographically focused on thinking, feeling, conscious selves, who deployed more or less similar semiotic forms acquired through their unique engagements with their fellows and with the world, and whose mutual engagements, sensitive to aesthetic and moral considerations, led them to achieve their particular forms of social life. In this, I’m recognizably akin to many of my academic siblings and others on whom Joanna left an intellectual mark. I love that.