ABSTRACT
In the world of anthropology we are always faced with the worry of how to handle ‘chaos’ in our data. In our fieldnotes there inevitably lurks a certain amount of material that we perceive as ‘disorderly’, ‘illogical’, and ‘contradictory’. We ponder over such data, feel guilty about their presence; and in the end must make a decision about how we are going to deal with them. Many, in bafflement, ignore the delinquent items and treat them much as problem children who come from other neighbourhoods; others turn, in hope, to the arena of figurative language to demonstrate not delinquency, but the presence of a favoured child, the poetic one. As a South Americanist, I would be quite foolish to underestimate the power of analogic thought and its frequent use by Amerindians in their ordering of the overwhelmingly transformational universe in which they describe themselves as taking part. Nevertheless, my main argument in this paper will be that we often wiggle out of facing certain implications about the chaos in our data by resorting too quickly to such labels as ‘metaphor’, ‘metonymy’, and ‘analogic’ or ‘figurative’ thought: we say that our informants are rational, but because we do not truly understand their statements we construe their rationality as tropic creativity . 2
