How to make an animal: urophagia, transformation, and otherness in the Caatinga

Abstract

The stories from the caatinga about humans transforming into animals that look like pigs, dogs, or wolves, rather than being mere anecdotes or simple cultural variations on a familiar theme (the werewolf), point to connections with an Amerindian mythical-sociocosmological background, in which otherness appears as a given and as a regime of transformation. Far from constituting merely a regional narrative motif, these stories mobilize classic problems of South American ethnology within a social universe that has rarely been described in these terms. Certainly, the caatingueiros share several elements with the vast bibliography on the theme (from the European werwolf to the Latin American lobisomem). However, what is of interest here is the ethnographic inflection that my interlocutors introduce into this literature: the Labisôme, or Bicho, does not attack humans to devour them or drink their blood, but to urinate in their mouths and convert them into Bicho, a more-than-human way of producing another of oneself and, with that, subtly displacing the very anthropological problem of otherness.