#  Video: Translation As Linguistical and Bodily Metamorphosis 

 





March 30, 2023

 

 

On March 30, 2023, the CSWR invited Aparecida Vilaça, Professor of Social Anthropology at Brazil’s Museu Nacional, to have a conversation concerning the issues of translation. There are two distinct concepts of translation at work in the encounter between an Amazonian Indigenous people, the Wari’, and the New Tribes Mission evangelical missionaries. While the missionaries conceive translation as a process of converting meanings between languages, conceived as linguistic codes that exist independently of culture, for the Wari’, in consonance with their perspectivist ontology, it is not language that differentiates beings but their bodies, given that those with similar bodies can, as a matter of principle, communicate with each other verbally. Translation is realized through the bodily metamorphosis objectified by mimetism and making kin, shamans being the translators par excellence, capable of circulating between distinct universes and providing the Wari’ with a dictionary-like lexicon that allows them to act in the context of dangerous encounters between humans and animals.

 

 Full transcript

 SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

 SPEAKER 2: Translation as linguistical and bodily metamorphosis in missionary encounters in Indigenous Amazonian, March 30, 2023.

 CHARLES STANG: Good evening and welcome. My name is Charles Stang, and I have the privilege of serving as the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. Welcome to this evening's event, the annual Hackett lecture in global Christianity.

 We're very excited to resume the annual Hackett lecture, which has been in hiatus since the pandemic disrupted our in-person programming. We're especially excited to welcome this evening's speaker Aparacida Vilaca, who is Professor of Social anthropology at Brazil's Museo Nacional, Latin America's premiere center for ethnographic theory and political anthropology.

 Her work focuses on Indigenizing perspectivism and sociocultural change. First trained in biology, she's carried out ethnographic research among the Wari people in southwestern Amazonia for over three decades and has published extensively in multiple languages on Indigenous agency, embodiment, kinship, cannibalism, conversion to Christianity, and ecologies of knowledge.

 Professor Vilaca was the first Global South visiting professor at the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University and was previously affiliated with Stanford University, Cambridge University, King's College, Ecole de Jose \[INAUDIBLE\] Social, the University of Bergen, and Universidad Autonomia Autonoma de Mexico.

 Professor Vilaca's lecture this evening is entitled translation as linguistical and bodily metamorphosis in missionary encounters in Indigenous Amazonia.

 Before I invite or give the digital floor to Professor Vilaca, I'd like to announce the center's next online event. Next Wednesday, on April 5, 1:00 PM, Dr. Natalie Dyer will be speaking on reiki energy medicine and post-materialism. That event is part of the center's no theology series hosted by my colleague Giovanna Parmigiani, who is a research associate in the center's new Transcendence and Transformation Initiative.

 That will also be a Zoom webinar like this, and we'll put the link to register in the chat function. As always, the best way to stay abreast of what we're doing here at the center and its programming is to sign up for our weekly newsletter. So this is how the evening will unfold. I will soon disappear and Professor Vilaca will appear to give her talk.

 When she's done, I will reappear to manage the Q&A from the audience. If you'd like to pose a question or a comment, please do so with the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom screen, and please indicate if you'd prefer that your question remain anonymous.

 If we only have time for some of the questions, rest assured that. we'll pass on all your questions and comments to Professor Vilaca so that she can see what her remarks provoked in you. Without further ado then, Professor Vilaca, the floor is yours.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Thank you so much, Professor Stang for the invitation. And also, of course, I want to thank the Center for Global Religions and Harvard Divinity School. I'm very honored to be here giving the annual Hackett lecture. Thank you so much.

 Well, in this seminar, I would like to reflect on the conflict between ontologies involved in the encounter between an Indigenous Amazonian people, the Wari, and the evangelical missionaries of the new tribe's mission based on the analysis of the different concepts of translation underlying this encounter.

 The choice of translation as a focal point is not for us to choose, since it's a central part of missionary activity as a whole and particularly important to the work of the fundamentalists of evangelical faith missions for whom the Bible was dictated by God from beginning to end.

 This means that it must be translated literally into the language of remote people and not only for the missionaries, since the Wari long before this specific encounter found themselves concerned with the question of translation, reflecting in minute detail on it, as we shall see, although they conceived it very differently.

 It's not my intention to touch into the intense linguistic, philosophical, theological, and anthropological discussions concerning the concept of translation per se, since this as well as being outside my view of competence would lead me away from my central objective, which is to present the idea of translation, imply it in the prospectivist ontology of an Amazonian people in light of the contrast with the conceptions of a specific group of missionaries concerning the same topic.

 Missionaries' word translation from its earliest moments. Christian missionary activity was intrinsically related to the work of learning native languages, taken as the condition of possibility for transmitting the divine message.

 In his analysis of the activities of Catholic missionaries among the Tagalog of the Philippines, \[? Vincent ?\] \[? Hafayao ?\] shows that as early as the beginning of the 17th century, the Spanish King issued a decree requiring that all missionaries in the islands learn the Indigenous language.

 The same policy was adopted in the American colonies, both in Mesoamerica and in the Andes. This was an explicit response to the tendency towards then secularization propagated by the Protestant reform.

 Over the centuries and following the global expansion of Protestantism, which culminated in the faith missions created as part of the revivalist movements in the 19th century Europe and North America, translations were made into the idioms of Native peoples around the world.

 For the fundamentalist missionaries who concern us here, preaching in the Native language forms the core of their activity.

 In the words of a New Tribes Mission missionary, I quote, "The missionaries have concluded that for the spiritual trust to penetrate their hearts, to be understood and move them, they must be transmitted in the maternal language, even though some agents know how to express themselves in Portuguese," end of quote.

 With this objective in mind from its outset, New Tribes Mission missionary training included studies of language and literacy, which would later focus exclusively on those trainees demonstrating more aptitude for linguistics.

 According to the missionary Johnston, such people are able to capture a new language, like children, offering information to the linguists outside the field area and thereby, I quote, "Cut down the time it takes to break down a language," end of quote.

 The linguist \[INAUDIBLE\] argues that the idea of language as a code separable from cultural practices has been a recurring Western concept which presumes that, and I quote again, "The vernacular could be expanded, abstracted, and changed in myriad of ways to express ideas that were foreign and still remain the same vernacular," end of quote. The aim is to achieve word for word translations in the belief that the translations will thereby stay close to the literal meanings of the original Bible text.

 Although personally disinterested in native cultures, conceived to be little more than an array of errors, the missionaries need to understand at least some of their basic premises, especially those relating to the religious universe, since this is where many of the key terms to be translated are sought, including words for God, the devil, good, evil, and sin.

 The idea adopted especially by evangelical missionaries that the existence of functional equivalence in the word's different language is based on a specifically relativist notion of culture, which is characteristic of the mainstream Euro-American thought.

 This presumes the existence of a physical world, a nature, let's say, that is given and universal created by God for the missionaries, and whose shared elements are named differently by each culture, thus justifying the search for linguistic equivalence.

 Such cultural relativism is accompanied by a hierarchical and evolutionist element which supposes Western culture to be the epitome of civilization, an idea reflected in a hierarchical conception of language, determining the practice of missionary translation.

 As we shall see now, while for the missionaries there are two or more languages requiring the passage from one to the other, for the Wari, there is just one language through which people who live together can immediately communicate, irrespective of whether this is Wari, Portuguese, or a mixture of both.

 The Wari perspective on translation, worlds translation. For the Wari, translation is a complex operation which does not involve the search for new words to designate the same things, but different worlds designated by the same \[INAUDIBLE\]. Life is based, therefore, on an awareness of the coexistence of different worlds, and not, as among the missionaries and ourselves, different cultures with particular perspectives onto the same world.

 The Wari term for language is the same for mouth and tongue, \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\], our mouth tongue, which designates not only this part of the body, but also the voice, lexical prosody, and oral tradition as a whole.

 Until pacification, which took place between 1956 and 1961, the Wari had no peaceful contact with any other ethnic group. The only differences in the speech identified by them refer to prosody and to elements from the lexicon of people they call foreigners, members of other Wari geographic subgroups, inhabitants of neighboring territories, and speakers of the same language in a broad sense, and who maintain among them ritual and marriage relations.

 The Wari associate this difference with bodily peculiarities by referring to them as that's what the body of the \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\] is like. \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\] is the name of a subgroup. It's worth observing that body, \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\] for the Wari, is what characterizes the person and refers not only to physical substance, flesh, but also to habits, affects, and memory. It explains why a person acts in a particular way, such as a quiet woman, for example, saying of her \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\]. That's what her body is like. So that's why she's quiet.

 But not only the Wari, although, from the viewpoint of the Wari, they themselves are the only humans, Wari, they know that enemies, other Indigenous peoples and whites, whom they call enemies, as well as animals of diverse kinds, including fish, various types of birds, snakes, and mammals, they see themselves as humans. And they act as such, preying on the Wari, which manifests as sickness and death the victim.

 The subject imposing itself as a predator is considered human Wari, causing the other to occupy the position of brain, \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\], associated with no humanity. So Wari and \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\] are positions, therefore, that define the difference within a wide relational universe in which all beings are human.

 Although both animals and enemies can occupy the position of humans, animals were the only ones, at least until contact, with whom the Wari had social relations, properly speaking, through their shamans. Through them, they know that animals speak the same language as themselves, \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\], people language, although they can be comprehended only by those who can hear what they say, a capacity that depends exclusively on the social relation established between them, especially living and eating together.

 The Wari concept of translation as the possibility of communication between different types of people therefore involves the shift from one collective of humans to another and occurs to a bodily transformation enabled by new foods, the proximity to other bodies, and the new relations of sociality as a whole.

 The person thereby begins to inhabit another world, the automatic consequence of which is the capacity for verbal communication with these new people. In no case of encounters with humanized animals, whether mythic or historic, do the Wari mention language as an obstacle to communication. To them, it seemed obvious that those who perceive each other as human, as companions, automatically share the same language.

 Given the transparency of language and its determination by co-residents, it is understandable that the Wari do not share the same concept of translation as the missionaries, although they do elaborate this topic in minute detail, as we shall see.

 Translation through body metamorphoses. I turn to the account of an abduction by a jaguar, very common among the Wari until the recent past, which provides a very clear illustration of their concern with translation. The event was told to me in \[INAUDIBLE\] village in July 2005, and the narrator and victim was \[INAUDIBLE\], a woman of about 60 at the time we spoke.

 Various other local inhabitants were present. When the episode happened, \[INAUDIBLE\] was about five years old. One day, the adults had sent the children to the stream to fetch water. \[INAUDIBLE\] mother then appeared and called her to come and catch some fish somewhere else.

 So she went along. She had no idea it was a jaguar, since it looked exactly like her mother. On the way, they came across some palm fruits, much relished by the Wari. And her mother took maize from the basket she was carrying to eat with the fruit. Soon after, a torn piece of the child's foot, which her jaguar mother removed.

 At this point, the listeners lost in surprise. After walking for a while, they stopped to sleep. Milk was seeping from the breast of her mother, who was breastfeeding one of \[INAUDIBLE\] brothers at the time.

 When the girl was almost asleep, she noticed a man approach, who lay down on top of her mother to have sex. The girl exclaimed, "Who is this man?" So the mother smacked the girl's bottom lightly as the Wari do, to put a child to sleep. Again, the listeners lost it, very surprised, and asked for more details about this moment.

 The next day, they ate some palm fruits and carried on walking until the girl heard the voice of her older brother, who was shouting to her. At this point, the supposed mother said she was going to defecate and disappeared into the forest. \[INAUDIBLE\] then approached. \[INAUDIBLE\] body was covered in jaguar fur, which they cleaned off.

 At the end of the narrative, I asked whether she had not seen any trace of jaguar in the supposed mother, a bit of her tail, or something similar, which appeared in other accounts I have heard. And she replied, "Nothing. It was truly my mother."

 Just how much of a problem translation is for the Wari becomes evident in comments made by the listeners at a specific point in the jaguar account when the narrator said that they stopped to eat palm fruit.

 "What was it? A fruit?" someone asked, "Seven-banded armadillo." \[INAUDIBLE\] her husband, the woman who was asking retorted. "Tail of six-banded armadillo." \[INAUDIBLE\] his wife pondered. "Perhaps it was \[INAUDIBLE\]." "I don't know," the narrator said. And \[INAUDIBLE\] immediately corrected herself. "That is it." Papaya is \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\]," meaning for the jaguar.

 It is as though the listeners had Wari jaguar dictionaries in their minds that they used to translate what the narrator said. As can be seen, the problem is not finding equivalence in the Wari language to words spoken by the jaguar. It is presumed that the jaguar to the ears of the girl, who saw it as her mother, spoke Wari language, that is, a people language, comprehensible to all humans.

 The problem resided in identifying the world of the jaguar, the empirical equivalence, so that words uttered by the animal. What is a palm fruit to the jaguar? As a jaguar, it cannot be the same thing as for the Wari, who, in contrast to the girl who saw the animal as her mother, did not share its point of view.

 This is a clear example of what \[INAUDIBLE\], the anthropologist, has called perspectivist translation, highlighting the difference between the standard Western conception, the one shared by the missionaries, and the Native conception.

 In his words, and I quote, "The problem for Indigenous perspective is not therefore one of discovering the common \[INAUDIBLE\], say the planet Venus, to two different representations, say, morning star and evening star. On the contrary, it is one of making explicit the equivocation implied in imagining that when the jaguar says \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\], he's referring to the same thing as us, meaning a tasty, nutritious, and heady brew," end of quote.

 As the author observes, the capacity to translate is typical to the shaman, who, through an experience of bodily transformation, can circulate through more than one of these discordant exteriorities, returning to tell the Wari what he saw and heard. It is the shaman, therefore, who constitutes the lexicon of the Wari jaguar dictionary, to which my Wari friends resorted when they heard the abduction narrative.

 Given that each shaman has a unique experience, it makes sense that this dictionary has different entries for the same reference, which explains the oscillation and conjectures of the listeners concerning the relations between two reference rather than between two worlds.

 The verb meaning to transform in Wari language is \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\], understood as the actualization of a new body, one that is equally human, since it is seen as such by the new companions in another relational context. This capacity is not limited to shamans, who defer by being able to control the process. But it's common to all beings deemed human, Wari, which includes, as we have seen, the diverse animals as attested by the jaguar episode just described.

 It is the capacity of some beings to transform themselves, which leads to the attribution of a spirit or double to them. Although this very rough translation of spirit evokes the idea of a component of the person, something like a vital principle, the Wari notion in fact resists any essentialisation. The attribution of a spirit results from the capacity to transform, not the contrary. Nobody under normal condition has a spirit.

 Shamans, generally men, are like chronically sick people who, assailed by animals of a particular species, have not been cured and have turned into their companions. The Wari often say that animals prey on the Wari with the eventual aim of turning them into king, the outcome of which is death for the victim, who goes to live forever on the side of the animals.

 In such cases, the person's Wari body disappears, and what goes to live among the animals is, from the Wari viewpoint, the person's spirit. In the case of a shaman, the animals decide to cure him by bathing his body in apparently boiling water, after which his body is reconstituted.

 Henceforth, the shaman's spirit will be continually activated, implying the coexistence of two bodies, one of them living among the Wari, which he perceives as human and king, and the other among the animals, which he also sees as human.

 The Wari typically say that the shaman accompanies the animal or the animal's spirit. With this double body, the shaman acquires a double perspective, that of the Wari and that of the animal species that he accompanies, which gives him access to animals as a whole, since, as they would explain to me, they do not differentiate a deer from a collared peccary, or a jaguar. All are seen as people. And it's common for a shaman to change his animal companions and consequently his body simply by accompanying and eating with other species.

 This strange vision is precisely what allows him to act as a translator of perspectives. Given his continuously transformed state, the shaman is a being who circulates through distinct relational universes, living with different types of humans, and learning about their language, or, that is, about the distinct reference to which the same worlds from people language apply.

 The jaguar woman as a dictionary, material translation. The following narrative shows that more than a capacity arising from the body. From bodily transformation, translation itself may be achieved by the body.

 In July 2005, \[INAUDIBLE\], a woman of around 65, wife of my Wari adopted father, \[INAUDIBLE\], and who I call mother, narrated some events she herself witnessed when she was still a child and involving her mother. And the name of her mother is \[INAUDIBLE\]. What follows is a summarized version.

 One morning, when \[INAUDIBLE\] was around five years old, her mother, after a discussion with her own older sister, went to the river and was invited by a young man, her nephew, to go fishing at a spot further on where he claimed there was a lot of fish. The young man carried her in his bag for a stretch of the path.

 After a while, \[INAUDIBLE\] began to hear voices calling her. "It's an animal that called you, it's not Wari. Look, here's your daughter. She's crying a lot." Then her true nephew shouted to the figure who was pretending to be him, "Put her down on the ground."

 This was when \[INAUDIBLE\] realized that the supposed nephew was licking leaves as they trekked along the path, just as jaguars do. She looked carefully and saw a glimpse of a tail. Hearing the insistent calls from her kin \[AUDIO OUT\] her behind and departed. According to \[INAUDIBLE\], my adopted mother, her mother was covered in jaguar fur from being carried by the jaguar.

 One day sometime later, \[INAUDIBLE\] father killed a lot of capuchin monkeys in the forest. Seeing the prey, the mother put the monkeys in her mouth, still raw, and drank a lot of blood. She then spat out the liquid. And \[INAUDIBLE\] and other people saw that what emerged from her mouth was not blood but bits of maize \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\] drink, a kind of beer. And we should recall that the jaguar's \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\] is blood.

 Afterwards, according to \[INAUDIBLE\] description, her mother seems to have turned into a dictionary. Dictionary is my words, of course, which rather than substituting one word for another transformed one object into another inside her body, a consequence of her double identity.

 On another occasion, she called her daughters to go bathing with her in the river. There they saw many tiny fish that the Wari called \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\]. The mother told the girls, "I'm going to fetch some insect larva. Wrap some leaves together to make a recipient for us to roast them." Meanwhile, the mother caught the little fish. When she showed them to her daughters, they were no longer fish, but insect larva. \[INAUDIBLE\], narrating the event to me exclaimed, "The fish turned completely into larva." Other occasions like that happen in sequence.

 The efficacy of the body as a medium of translation, a kind of three-dimensional Google Translate, emerges here in its extreme in an almost caricatural form when the metamorphoses of the person is objectified as a metamorphoses of the things surrounding him or her. The duality of the person's body, invisible to the Wari, is expressed as a duplicity of things that are transmuted as they traverse the body.

 Those who observed \[INAUDIBLE\] mother therefore had the opportunity to live in two distinct worlds simultaneously, the world of the jaguar and that of the Wari. But the idea of translation by the body is not limited to specific and rare cases, like the one narrated above. Isn't the mimicry of whites common in the first context of Native peoples around the world a perfect example of perspectivist translation too? Let us show some examples.

 Mimetism as translation. In his essay on the Christianization of the \[INAUDIBLE\], cites various examples of what he calls a mimetic enthusiasm for the ritual apparatus of the missionaries. One of them, taken from Father Manuel \[INAUDIBLE\] first Brazilian letter. And I quote Father Manuel \[INAUDIBLE\].

 "All of those who have dealings with us say they want to be like us. If they hear the mass bell toll, they rush to attend. And whatever we do, all of them do. They \[INAUDIBLE\], beat their chests, raise their hands to the sky. And one of their main figures is already learning to read and observes lessons every day with great care, and in two days knew the entire alphabet. And we taught him to bless, absorbing everything with great gusto. He says, he wants to be a Christian."

 Writing about the Guarani of Paraguay, the anthropologist Graciela \[INAUDIBLE\] remarks that at the mission village of St. Ignacio \[INAUDIBLE\], the chief and shaman Miguel de \[INAUDIBLE\] considered by Father \[INAUDIBLE\], a true minister of the demon, pretended to be a priest.

 And I quote \[INAUDIBLE\], "Simulated that he was saying mass, he put some clothes over a table, and on top of them a \[INAUDIBLE\] tart and a heavily painted vase with maize wine. And speaking through his teeth, conducted many ceremonies, showing the tart and the wine like the priests, and finally eating and drinking everything. With this, his vassals venerated him as though he were a priest," end of quote.

 The impressions of the missionary Friedrich \[INAUDIBLE\] on his first visit to the Wari just some time after the first contacts reveal the same kind of mimetic behavior. Unlike the examples just cited however, this imitation did not refer to the religious ritual per se. So I quote the missionary.

 "While we were on the river shore watching ourselves, the Indians were on the bank watching us and trying to imitate us-- our gestures. One of our missionaries used false teeth. And when we removed them from his mouth to wash them, imagine this. Two of the Indians also tried to remove their natural teeth from the mouth in order to imitate the cleaning gesture," end of quote.

 Mimesis involves more than simply the assimilation of the specific techniques. The descriptions of the mimetic behavior of Native peoples indicates a central place reserved for the body and for bodily transformations in this process of apprehending another perspective.

 For Michael Taussig, \[? mimesis ?\] is an alternative science based on essential transformation. As \[INAUDIBLE\] notes in his article on Amerindian perspectivism, ritual paraphernalia, like clothes, masks, and adornments, are instruments, not costumes, with the power to conjure metaphysical transformations.

 Among various examples, we have the \[INAUDIBLE\] people of Venezuela, whose shamans utilize clothing that allows their transformation into animals. Likewise, the Wari use of white people's clothing and the consumption of their food are both effective modes of transforming into whites that, like shamanism, do not imply a unique identity, and far from being a process without return are founded precisely on this oscillation of positions.

 Further equivocations. In the encounter between the Wari and the missionaries, obviously other questions emerged over time related to the translation between words, properly speaking, which the missionaries undertook with the help of Native translators. The latter, the translators, as we might guess, were young people who lived close to the missionaries, sharing their food and habits, which, according to The Wari, allowed them to comprehend what the missionaries said.

 It's interesting to note that the term chosen by the Wari to express the idea of word translation the passage from one language to another is to imitate, repeat. However, the fact that the passage from one language to another is not problematized does not mean that reflection was not required from Indigenous translators.

 It is precisely this point that I wish to examine briefly now in order to explore another type of equivocation constitutive of translation related to the conflict between distinct conceptions of the word subsumed by an apparent synonym.

 I shall take, as an example, the translation of the verb to love, central to Christian discourse. This verb is absent among the Wari, who express the feeling love us to not dislike. Love for a person is conceived as the suppression of indifference and anger, precisely what people feel for enemies.

 One episode I witnessed firsthand seems to me a perfect illustration of the problem I'm trying to address. An artist from Rio de Janeiro offered to be, and to my Wari adopted brother and father, who were visiting me here in Rio, a red heart sculpted in wood. And I suggested my Wari brother Abraham that he gave it to his wife as a souvenir of his visit to Rio.

 The next day he came to me to show that he had written with a pilot pen in the middle of the heart the following phrase. I don't dislike you at all, \[INAUDIBLE\], the name of his wife, dedicating it to his wife. This was what Abraham translation of the expression, I love you, frequently written on hearts depictions he could see in magazines and TV.

 It's interesting to observe the implications of this absence of a term for love in the translation of Christian hymns and biblical texts. One interesting illustration is the \[INAUDIBLE\], which says, in its Portuguese version, that Jesus loves everyone, translated into Wari as Jesus doesn't dislike you, you, and you.

 The apparent coincidence between the perspectives of the Wari and the missionaries demands that we accentuate their dissonance. In their mutual work, the missionaries and the Wari seem to have reached an agreement on the suitability of the term to not dislike as the translation of the verb to love. Indeed, to not dislike is to love, which is clearly expressed by the text written by Abraham on the wooden heart offered to his wife.

 However, in contrast to the missionary conception of love as a natural basis for the relation between God and humans and what good Christians should feel for each other and every person, the notion of love as not dislike reveals an entirely distinct starting point, a world of anger and enmity, on which human agency acts as a transformative capacity.

 We are presented then with a radical difference in what is conceived as the innate universe in as the direction of human agency. For the Wari, kinship and love must be produced by themselves. And the failures in this process are conceived as resistance. That is, as the imposition of this innate world which entices them back.

 This attraction is what they identify as the devil and sin. For the missionaries, human agency is historically situated in the opposite direction, reducing sin and hate from the paradise constituted by God for Adam and Eve.

 Lesson book one, written by the missionaries with the help of Wari translators, to be read during church services and which presents God and the Creation explains that everything created by God, from the forest to the animals, was initially good. I quote, "God's things were very good in the past. Just after he created them in the beginning, everything was entirely good. There were no bad animals. There was no bad forest. There were no thorns. He didn't know how to make bad things," end of quote.

 Evil first address from the greed of Lucifer, one of his followers. Hence, although the present Christian world is one of original sin, which makes it similar to the innate world of the Wari, it does not involve for the missionaries the true original world, but its fallen or corrupted version.

 As can be seen, an important difference is involved, though not one immediately visible, which provokes the illusion that they involve coinciding visions of personhood and moral action. The missionaries, observing the interest of the Wari in suppressing anger, believed that the Indigenous people recognize their corrupted state and wished to act in the same way as other Christians to overcome their state of original sin.

 As can be seen, both in the first and subsequent phases of the missionary encounter, important, though not immediately visible, ontological differences are involved, which bring about the illusion that they involve coinciding visions of personhood and moral action. In the beginning, the missionaries, observing the interest of the Wari in imitating them, thought they were easy targets for conversion, soon to discover that they were also eager to resume their old customs.

 Transformation for them was not a one-way process, as the possibility of oscillation is a central part of it. In other words, difference must be preserved, or the world becomes flat and paralyzed, as \[INAUDIBLE\] showed us when analyzing the relations between Native Americans and the whites.

 Later on, when the work on language translation itself begin, difference again imposed itself as a constitutive part of the innate world of the Wari, becoming visible through the irreducibility of Christian concepts, like to love to the Wari language, although superficially it seemed to the missionaries that they had found the perfect word to word translation they were looking for.

 The equivocity involved in the apparent coincidence of these movements accounts for the disappointment of the missionaries with what they call the superficial conversion of the Wari and what seemed to them to be their main misunderstanding. Salvation would be based on actions rather than any recognition of Christ as our Savior. Thank you so much for your attention.

 CHARLES STANG: Thank you so much, Aparecida. That was very interesting. I have to confess, I'm grateful that I have recently read Cannibal Metaphysics by Viveiros de Castro. So some of what you said is familiar to me. The perspectivist ontology that you were drawing on is, I mean, this is new to me, but I've read some of it. So it was-- I could follow you.

 And so, before I begin, let me say for our audience, if you have questions for Professor Vilaca, please put them in the Q&A function. And while you're doing so, I will presume to ask my own. So I'm going to try to summarize what I took to be some of your points and see if I've got it right. Is that all right?

 APARECIDA VILACA: All right.

 CHARLES STANG: OK. So I think, I mean, one of the things that I think is so amazing about the anthropological work in South America is bringing forward, of course, that there is a very developed and in many ways incommensurable metaphysics operating-- ontology and metaphysics operating among Indigenous peoples, and that we-- and that the West has brought to bear its own metaphysical frame.

 And there are these problems if we don't recognize that there is a fully intact metaphysics, although it's not a metaphysics expressed in learned treatises. It's a metaphysics expressed in largely oral cultures.

 But the thing that really struck me in your lecture, Professor, was the idea that different-- it's not a matter as it is in the West of different words or different languages referring to a common agreed-upon world, it's that there are different worlds, as you put it. And one word can refer to all of these different worlds.

 So an example of that was the fruit that the jaguar ate. What kind of fruit? To a jaguar, what is fruit to a jaguar as opposed to fruit to a human? The same word fruit could have to different reference, depending on whether it's a jaguar or a human.

 And consequently, the whole enterprise of translation changes pretty dramatically if you're moving between these two different understandings of the world and language. I have to confess also, for someone, of course, raised on Western conceptions of Western metaphysics, it's very challenging but also thrilling to try to inhabit this worldview that you're describing.

 So the question I have-- sorry, that was a long-- first of all, have I said anything inaccurate?

 APARECIDA VILACA: Not at all.

 CHARLES STANG: I'm trying to-- I'm getting it. Good. So my one question I have for you is, how successful are these various Indigenous groups in preserving their own metaphysics in the face of a missionary metaphysics?

 To some degree, you begin to get at this at the very end of your talk when you're saying that the Indigenous groups aren't behaving like converts in the way that the missionaries would expect them to. They're moving back and forth. That suggests to me that they're still committed to their metaphysics. But I'm wondering if you're witnessing these Indigenous groups losing their commitment to their own metaphysics?

 APARECIDA VILACA: Oh, yes. I am. I am seeing all this happening. So I think that the missionaries work among Indigenous people is very destructive.

 It's really something that goes-- evangelical, I mean, mainly nowadays evangelical-- because the Catholics after the Vatican Council, the Vatican transformation in the Catholic Church in the '60s-- the Catholic missionaries, they changed completely their way to work. So they say, they respect Indigenous culture and they allow, let's say, shamanism to happen. And they like it.

 But evangelical, they are very radicals. They are literalists, and they are fundamentalists, and they say that everything that the old people, that the ancient people say are lies, because the devil was the one who spoke to them, who taught them. So everything was lies.

 And they were very powerful because, of course, they arrived with technology and medicine. So they show-- they display their power, although they just do not talk about it. But they say, for example, when the Wari was there, they were very sick just after the contact. They were very sick.

 And the missionaries gave them antibiotics. And they say, this is not me, not this pill, or this thing that is curing you, but God. So they just associated their power with God. So it was not something very-- it was very convincing, let's say.

 And the Wari, at the time that the missionaries arrived, 2/3 of the population died because of the epidemic. So they were very, very weak. And so, it was really something that the missionaries arrived with a lot of power. So but so, they were very destructive. And the Wari were very impressed with those manifestations of power.

 What happens is that they begin to learn the language, and they begin to just criticize their culture, criticize their way of living, everything. And it just, of course, weakens their way of life, they're proud. They were really proud of the culture. They like it. They think it's beautiful. But the missionaries kept saying that it was horrible, horrible.

 So what I think, nowadays they do not, let's say, get back to the metaphysical-- because shamans, for example, do not exist anymore. But as the missionaries work with the Native language, and they know, they are conscious that it's a dangerous, is that it's very dangerous, because when you use the Native language, of course, the Native culture is present.

 So they still work with the Native language. And with that, Wari culture and Wari metaphysics gets into their lives again. So when they say to love and not to dislike is the way that they jump into this world where the basis is enmity. The basis is not liking. And then, human action is to like.

 So I think that the Native language is very powerful to keep their metaphysics in, but in a very subtle and very kind of temporary way so they get glimpses of it. But they do not-- the Wari do not make their rituals anymore, the traditional rituals. They do not have shamans anymore. So it is a heavy, heavy change.

 CHARLES STANG: That is fascinating. I think a lot of people will react as I did to the end of your lecture, the detail you just mentioned, that to love, there's no word to love, but instead, to not dislike suggests that the base layer of reality is actually a contest in which anger and suspicion, that is the baseline.

 And human agency is what can intervene through kinship, can complicate that base layer, and how that's a complete inversion of the Christian narrative of the humans being the ones who fall in. And I found that absolutely fascinating. I'm still trying to digest it.

 But this thing you've just said now is also enormously significant, of course, because what you've said is that although the Indigenous metaphysics is under threat by all this power of the missionary technology, just the fact that the missionaries are speaking in the Wari language means that the metaphysics is still potent. It begins to speak back.

 \[INTERPOSING VOICES\]

 CHARLES STANG: It begins to-- it has almost a kind of subaltern or insurgent metaphysical power. It pushes back against that. Which, of course, would suggest that Indigenous language revitalization is key for this metaphysics to survive-- the language and metaphysics are integral, it sounds like you're saying.

 APARECIDA VILACA: And there is something else. Because the evangelical missionaries, they offer them a very important character, which is the devil. And the devil makes them. So the devil, how do you say, encompasses all spirits, everything. So everything that belongs to this old world, like animal spirits, everything.

 So the devil is the one who, within Christianity, abrogates, encompasses the spirit. So the spirits are still there, but it's the devil. So Christianity with this trickster, the devil, has a very-- gives the Indigenous people-- they gives them their tools for them to go back to their metaphysics.

 So I think that the devil is studying conversion to Christianity among different Indigenous people in the world. We see that the devil is central for Christianity to be accepted because the devil is there.

 CHARLES STANG: I see. Now, that is fascinating for me as a student of the ancient world. Because when Christianity spreads throughout the Mediterranean and what we call the Middle East, it encounters worlds-- let's call them metaphysics-- where there is a rich panoply of spirits, and gods, and entities with which people are interacting. But Christianity collapses that, or groups all of that, into either angelic or demonic powers. And under the demonic is the devil.

 What now I find-- I usually regard that as a kind of-- it collapses the options. Because as an ancient Christian, you either follow the angelic or avoid the demonic. Whereas the negotiation of these entities and spirits is much more complicated. It's actually, it looks much more like an Indigenous world view where you have to-- they're not always just good or bad. They're ambiguous characters, just like humans are.

 But what I hear you saying is the very fact that evangelical Christianity affirms the existence of the devil, allows for the continued belief in all these spirits.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Yes.

 CHARLES STANG: So it doesn't deny spirits. It doesn't try to deny the spirits. They know the spirits are real, but they're under the power of this adversary, the devil. And so, that allows the Indigenous metaphysics and practices to still work with these spirits. Is that, I'm hearing that right?

 APARECIDA VILACA: Perfect. Perfect. I couldn't say better. Yes.

 CHARLES STANG: That's fascinating. Well, there's a question from the audience. I have more questions myself, but I want to get one from the audience here. It is an anonymous question. It reads, if I understand correctly, the Wari are an example of later contact or more recent contact. How do we imagine this has played out over time with much earlier contacts, such as in Mexico among the Maya et cetera?

 I guess, now I'm paraphrasing the question. Do we imagine what you're witnessing with the Wari, do we imagine that same kind of clash of metaphysics happened in the 15th and 16th century?

 APARECIDA VILACA: Yeah. I do imagine anthropologists and historians when they write about it, it's very similar. It's very similar. And I think that the Wari case is very interesting. And several Amazonian cases of contacts between Indigenous peoples and missionaries, they are very interesting, because you can see it happening now.

 So something that we can-- we imagine that was happening in this 15th, 16th, 17th century, they're happening now today among Indigenous people in Brazil and Papua New Guinea for example. And I think that there was this clash in Mexico.

 The point is that after two centuries, let's say, something different happened. So it's a moving thing. So as I was telling, in the beginning the Wari did not have any conception about word to word translation. And then, they, within time, they begin to add to the missionaries to do translation. So they begin to think about word to word translations. But so it was something that is changing and changing.

 So and the first, when you have the first generation of Christians, and the second, and the third, it's completely different. So in Mexico we have, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 generations, more, and more, and more. So it changes. So you have more hybridims, and more mixing, et cetera. And we don't find it now in Indigenous Amazonia.

 When people were categorized by evangelicals, they are very-- so it's different also between-- because in Mexico, there are more Catholic missionaries. And here, nowadays we have more evangelical missionaries. So depends on the kind of Christianity.

 Even the life story of the missionaries, because it changes everything. There are some missionaries there that they have actions and they do things completely different. And the outcome is different. So not just the faith if it's evangelical or Catholic, but the history of the missionaries, the history of the people, the conditions, that historical conditions, if they were dying from epidemics, if they were not dying. So things are different.

 CHARLES STANG: I want to ask you a question about the figure of the shaman.

 APARECIDA VILACA: OK.

 CHARLES STANG: You said earlier that the shaman, by virtue of being someone with a double body, who can move between the human and the animal, depending on what animal companions he takes up, that the shaman becomes a translator of perspectives. That he becomes a translator of perspectives because he can transform his body. Fascinating idea. It makes perfect sense within this metaphysics.

 But I wanted to ask you, how do we know about this figure of the shaman among the Wari if, as you just told me, there are no longer any shamans?

 APARECIDA VILACA: When I was-- nowadays, I mean. But when I began my fieldwork in 1986, there were plenty of shamans.

 CHARLES STANG: Oh.

 APARECIDA VILACA: I've been working among the Wari-- because the Wari, they had the first contacts with the new tribes missionaries in 1956, '61. And they said-- so this is history. I was not there. They said that they became-- that they professed, they were Christians, in the beginning of the '70s. In the beginning of the '80s, they gave up Christianity. They say they abandoned God. Because they were still sick. There was not-- God was not-- doing nothing for them.

 So when I arrived there in 1986, they were traditional. They had shamans. They would do rituals, et cetera. They re-converted into 2001 when they say they were watching-- there was a communal TV there in the village.

 And they were watching the TV. And they saw the Taliban attacked the World Trade Center. The missionaries who were there told them that the end of world-- that was the end of world, the sign of the end of the world. So that who the ones who were not Christian, they will go to hell and they would be roasting for eternity as prey, and that they had to convert very quickly.

 And there was a revivalism. So lots of people converted-- lots of people. And they stay converted until nowadays. I don't know what is going to happen, but that's what happened.

 CHARLES STANG: How difficult that must have been for you to witness.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Horrible.

 CHARLES STANG: Horrible.

 APARECIDA VILACA: It was horrible, yeah. That was very, very-- and then I decide, as an anthropologist, I decide to follow the Wari. I always follow them. So they were going to church. I arrived there-- when I arrived there after, I don't know, two or three years, I arrived there 2002, January.

 And they begin asking me if the Talibans were already in Rio de Janeiro, if there was a war, what was happening, that I had to tell them what was happening. Because they thought that this thing will happen, will arrive in their village. They were very scared. And I tried to explain, but anyway, it did not work.

 And so, they were afraid of the end of the world. Because for them, the hell, the Christian hell is really hell, meaning that they become prey. Because they spend their whole lives trying to differentiate themselves from animals.

 Because, as I said, they see everyone as humans. They know that everyone see each self, he or herself as a human being. Although they cannot see the animals as humans, they know that the animals see themselves as humans.

 So they have to differentiate. So who is going to prey? So the one who preys just gets this position, the position of humanity. So this is what they do. So imagine the hell, imagine they figuring out that they would go to hell, where they would be roasting, like prey forever, and ever, and ever. So they were very scared.

 They do not like the heaven either. They don't care about heaven. They say that in heaven, everyone will have a single house, who live by him or herself, alone, which they hate. And we'll be there, writing the words of God.

 God will be there. God won't be seen. God cannot be seen, but will dictate words to the Wari. And they will get writing, and writing the whole day. So I asked them, so this is hell, isn't it? \[LAUGHS\] They say, no, no. This is better than becoming prey. So that's it.

 CHARLES STANG: Fascinating. So they are terrified of hell because it means a permanent condition of being prey and predator.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Perfect.

 CHARLES STANG: Whereas so much of their efforts in life are differentiating themselves from prey, trying to be the human predator to the animal prey. But that heaven, this Christian heaven, is not really attractive. So they're more motivated by fear of hell than attraction to heaven. Interesting.

 APARECIDA VILACA: When you ask a Wari person, why did you convert? Why do you say you're a Christian? They say, for not-- the first thing is, not to go to hell. That's the first answer immediately.

 They never say, oh, I want to go to heaven, or they never say, oh, God, they believe in God. There's something inexistent. They don't say this. They don't say-- they say, well, God sees everyone. So God is more of a persecutor, someone who is always watching, always ready to punish, or-- so they are afraid of God.

 CHARLES STANG: What an absolutely debased form of Christianity that they are being fed.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Yeah.

 CHARLES STANG: I mean, that is very hard to hear. I have a question that departs a bit from your lecture, but it has to do with the category of the shaman. So I have an interest in the history of the category of shamanism which, of course, starts very far from Amazonia. It starts in Russian ethnographers of central Asian traditions.

 I'm wondering if you can say anything about how that title shaman, that category shamanism, has been carried over into the Amazonian context. I mean, I know it's now very common. But how do you feel about it? Does it fit? Obviously, all of these groups have their own names for this title, for this office. But how do you, as an anthropologist, feel about the category of shamanism?

 APARECIDA VILACA: Well, first of all, shamanism is something very closely linked to hunting activities. So hunting peoples, hunting groups, they tend to have shamans, because there is always this possibility to communicate with animals.

 So in Asia and Siberia, you have shamans. And they talk with the preys. They talk with the animals. So there are many diverse possibilities. And we know that there was a migration from this area to the Americas. So that's how you explain shamanism here.

 So shamans, they are part of a world where animals are central. Central to their lives, to their thoughts, to their philosophy. And all those people in the Americas-- there are few exceptions. I really cannot name one exception-- they have this extended notion of humanity. So humanity is not something that just belongs to us who see ourselves as humans, but we know that it's a large category. And you can see that in Siberia too.

 And so, this category, this position of shaman is so central to do this mediation between this humanity and other humanities. And shamans in Amazonia depends on the ethnic group. But sometimes they become shamans through heritage, so the son of a shaman.

 Usually they are men. That's why I say this shaman and he, because it's very rare that women become shamans. This case of the women abducted by a jaguar is a rare case because she became a shaman, because she became a jaguar woman. Because shamans are animal people. They are animals and people at the same-- persons at the same time. And this woman she became a shaman.

 And so, shamans, they are so crucial to this communication with animals. And they are essentially part of this idea, I told you, that the notion of humanity is extended to other people. So you need a mediation, you need a translator. So shamans, they are translators.

 But they are not translators of words, as I was saying, but translation of worlds. So for you to access another world, the world of a species x or species y, you need to have to change your body. So you change your body, and then you be able to understand what this people they are saying. Not the words, because the words are the same, but the reference. You understand which reference means what.

 CHARLES STANG: Right. So they're a translator of worlds and bodies.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Yes, true bodies, translating worlds through bodies.

 CHARLES STANG: Translating words through bodies.

 APARECIDA VILACA: So that's why I think that mimetism is this kind of shamanism in practice in a way that it's a kind of collective shamanism, because people, they are transforming their bodies. They are trying to transform their bodies to be able to become an animal-- not an animal in this case, but a white person, or an enemy, or whatever, because they are trying-- they cannot do that just listening or learning words, new words, but they have to change their body.

 CHARLES STANG: Well, I have to tell you that I find this field, this conversation of which you're a part and which you're helping lead, so fascinating. I come from another corner of the world, a world much more familiar to the western academy, the ancient Mediterranean world, early Christianity, the birth of Western metaphysics.

 And I remember, when I was preparing for my general exams and I was asked to read Claude Lévi-Strauss, and I read The Savage Mind and Totemism for the first time, I fell under the spell of those books. I found them fascinating. And then, more recently, to pick up this--

 APARECIDA VILACA: Cannibal Metaphysics.

 CHARLES STANG: Cannibal Metaphysics, and to hear you speak now, it's very exciting. It's really thrilling to be initiated into a completely different metaphysics and one not found in texts.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Yeah, that's true. That's our experience there. And I think that maybe people-- no anthropologists, they might ask me. But do you believe in this story of the person becoming a jaguar? What? Are they crazy? And what are they dreaming? Or did they take drugs or whatever?

 What I say is that, it doesn't matter to me. It's not my question. My question is, what kind of world those people are living in? That's my question. If it's true or not, it's not my problem, my personal problem, my intellectual problem, I mean.

 So I want to be able to describe or to translate, because I see anthropologists as translators too. We are kind of shamans. I want to translate or to describe this world to my colleagues, to other people. So that's the way. So it's not about believing or not. This is a kind of Christian question. And I want to make anthropologists questions.

 CHARLES STANG: Well, I think it also helps us question our implicit metaphysics, which is to say, as you start lecturing, you put under a question mark, is there a consensual reality and all languages are just different names for a stable referent, a stable world of reference? That's probably something we might want to question too. \[LAUGHS\]

 APARECIDA VILACA: Yes.

 CHARLES STANG: So if an encounter with what Viveiros de Castro will call cannibal metaphysics forces us to question that basic metaphysics we're operating with, then I don't need to answer whether I believe the jaguar woman became a jaguar. But I might want to question whether there is one consensual reality, and all our languages are just arbitrary signs pointing to the same referent.

 APARECIDA VILACA: That's now-- even biologists, they are studying that the words for animals, they live in different world than we do and et cetera. So it's very interesting.

 Because, in fact, what I'm trying to-- what I'm studying, and I've been studying for decades now, is the encounter between those people who think about the body as the site of the person, or site of personhood, what consists of the person, and those missionaries who think that the soul is what is important.

 So and those missionaries who think, as I said, that there is, as you were saying now, there is a common word, a common world, and perspectives on it. So a tree is, of course, a tree. But you call tree, I call it \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\], and the French person calls something else. But this is a word.

 And that's why we can, for them, word to word translations are possible because there is a common referent. But what if you are dealing with a people who do not see the world as this? So the world for those people is a different world. So they translate, for example, their maize beer for my coffee. So when I say-- so you see? So it's not just that--

 CHARLES STANG: I see.

 APARECIDA VILACA: --what they take as beer I take is coffee. And so, it's that kind of translation. So it doesn't matter if I call coffee or beer, but it's some beverage, some thing that I drink, either ritually or either during my day et cetera. So that's what is important. That's where the focus is.

 CHARLES STANG: Well, thank you so much, Professor Vilaca. Vilaca, I'm saying it wrong. I'm working on it.

 APARECIDA VILACA: That's OK.

 CHARLES STANG: Sorry. I want to say, this also-- your lecture also reminds me of one of the first talks I hosted as the director of the CSWR, which was Eduardo Kohn after his book came out, How Forests Think.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Oh, of course.

 CHARLES STANG: So this is reminding me of some of these very same issues. Listen--

 \[INTERPOSING VOICES\]

 SPEAKER 1: This was-- I'm sorry. What were you going to say something?

 APARECIDA VILACA: No, that's it. Eduardo Kohn, I was about to mention his name, because he was showing his book, How Forests Think, that there are several words in what we think is one word, and that animals could talk in a way. So but we cannot understand. But they have a way to talk.

 CHARLES STANG: Yeah. Honestly, this is one of the most fascinating academic conversations I have had the pleasure of tracking.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Good.

 CHARLES STANG: So thank you so much.

 APARECIDA VILACA: And there is-- I am just launching a book with the philosopher, Geoffrey Lloyd. I don't know if you know him. He is from Cambridge. And he studies ancient Greece and China. And he's a philosopher of science. His name is Sir Geoffrey Lloyd. Anyway, he was-- sorry?

 CHARLES STANG: No, go ahead. Please, go.

 APARECIDA VILACA: OK. So he was reading my book, \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\], a book, a kind of memoir that I wrote, where I put all this kind of ethnography but in a kind of fluent language, no academic language.

 So he was reading exactly about the jaguar story et cetera. And he kept asking me questions. Yes, that's it. Questions about this, is she really transforming to a jaguar? How do you believe it? So at the end, we made a book. And the book is being launched. The name of the book is, Of Jaguars and Butterflies that we write.

 CHARLES STANG: Oh my God. Would you two like to-- I would like to invite you to come back and talk about that book.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Of course, I can. And we can ask Geoffrey to come with me because and he's--

 CHARLES STANG: Yes.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Yeah, metalogs on issues of anthropology and philosophy. So all those questions that you were asking me and other questions he was asking me as a philosopher. And I was trying to answer as an anthropologist. So we made it in the form of dialogue, metalogs. And so, that's all about these kind, transformations, and humanity, et cetera.

 CHARLES STANG: OK, I am going to look that up.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Take a look, yeah.

 CHARLES STANG: I will. I will indeed. Thank you so much. This was very rich and very engaging. So for those of you who are still joining us, I just wanted to say, please be on the lookout for future events for the remainder of the semester. Many of them will be like this one, Zoom seminars.

 And I want to thank Professor Vilaca again. And I will-- you've really intrigued me, and I will be reading more of your work, including your new book with Geoffrey Lloyd.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Yes, take a look. And we can be together maybe to talk with you.

 CHARLES STANG: Yes.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Yeah, that would be-- we're going to have the launch in Cambridge on May 17. So May, yeah, May 17. So afterwards we can talk about it.

 CHARLES STANG: Maybe in the fall semester when--

 APARECIDA VILACA: Yeah.

 CHARLES STANG: That would be lovely.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Thank you.

 CHARLES STANG: And in the meantime, I'm going to order a copy and read it. Thank you so much.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Thank you. Thank you all. Bye.

 CHARLES STANG: Good night, everyone. Good evening.

 APARECIDA VILACA: Bye. Good evening.

 \[MUSIC PLAYING\]

 SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.

 SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.



 

 

 



 

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