Soul Work
Soul Work
Chapter 7 analyzes the second of three parts of a speech to the dead. The songs of this part fashion immaterial bodies for the dead, their intensive bodies. The songs are parallel to each other in in series along two axes, which intersect in rows (or tə̠) and columns (or je). The simple progression of series examined in Chapter 6 evolves here into a structure of many folds or planes along three dimensions, traversed by orthogonal lines of force. This is the shape of the dead couple’s intensive bodies: assembled along several planes at once, each plane correlated with the others through the device of parallel verses, this matrix distorted by swooping lines of flight that disorganize and recombine the planes. Three forms of power are involved: the negative freedom of souls abandoned in the forest, the despotic power of the underworld to force the return of life for life, and the aleatory power of a shaman in alliance with death. Since these forces come to bear on the dead soul, directing the details of its assembly, we can understand these intensive bodies as dead subjects—subjected to powers of mutually contradictory origins.
Keywords: shamanism, parallelism, bodies, souls, underworld, dead subjects
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
