On logophagy and truth: interpretation through incorporation among Peruvian Urarina

This paper develops an Amazonian critique of Western theories of interpretation as grounded in correspondence between a proposition and a state of affairs, and of truth as correspondence between mind and reality. For the Peruvian Urarina, language has materiality and force and implies a non-arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, and is moreover based in a very different mode of adequation of person to world: a process grounded in absorption rather than representation. The view that words are effectively consumed by others reaches its apogee in the baau genre of ritual discourse, in which a healer’s speech is literally digested by the patient as a core part of the healing process.