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-of the visual representation-of that geography. Chapin writes that "queries as to whether the spiritual levels extend up or down, or whether the topside levels are the same as those below, often elicit seemingly contradictory responses." (78) So if there is a probl

em for mimesis and alterity at the level of levels, there is also a problem, but quite a different one, in the next stage of presentation of the cosmos. We are also told (78) that "as conceived by the Kuna" there are three general areas where the spirits live-mountain strongholds, whirlpools, and clouds. This seems to me quite a different sense of spiritual geography than the levels, yet in its way it is even stranger because the sites exist bewilderingly as both fantastic and actual. They are physical sites, close at hand, with none

of the splendid symmetry of axial sculpture of the multiple-layered cos

• mos like so many flapjacks piled one on the other. While some one-to-
  one modeling is observed-the spirit-doubles of marine and riverine animals, for instance, reside in whirlpools-it is also the case that (spiritual) elephants-elephants!-
• inhabit these whirlpools, and that the mountain strongho
  lds of the spirits, for instance, some little distance inland from the San Bias coast, can appear like the gigantic skyscr
• apers to be found in the large cities of Panama and the U
  nited States, magnificently created out of gold and silver, with flamboyant coloring, containing elephants, towers, clocks, and flags as well. Here is a picture of one such magical fortress or kalu drawn for some Colombian anthropologists in the late 1960s in color by Alfonso Diaz Granados, caciq
• ue segundo of a Cuna settlement in the n
  orth of Columbia in the Gulf of Uraba.In other such spirit-fortresses, such as the Kalu Tigun, the rhomboid shapes in the upper part of the building are tables-the same sort of "tables" (vulvas) that appear in the creation of the world, reminding us that while Panama skyscrapers a
• s much as female body p
  arts may serve as the model, and in serving as such fulfill a deadly serious mandate of fidelity, nevertheless such fidelity has its tricks. Euclidean space is shattered, as is the logic of identity. Chapin represents a world in which up is down and down is up. He reports that his Cuna "specialists who separate the world above from the world below have also told
• me with equal conviction that these two regions are one and the same. As one in
  formant put it, 'the two levels curve around the surface of the earth like pots. (83-84) And unlike the levels-version of mimesis and alterity, maps can be drawn and do in fact exist of these spirit-locations and their geography. In a footnote Chapin tells us that "Kuna curing specialists memorize the location of spirit strongholds and whirlpools in their immediate region so they will know precisely where the various disease-cau
• sing spirits live."(80) The i
  llustration he presents is of interest. It's not the sort of map you buy at the gas stations in New Jersey. It's a series of stick figures moving from frame to frame as in a comic-book, zig-zagging left to right and right to left up the page, each little frame depicting an
• encounter with salient features of
  the world therein. It's similar if not identical in form to the healers chants, as well as to the picture-writing of those chants-a philosophic orientation to representation which takes each particular as
• it comes, portraying it step by step but by no means "to scale," sometimes tiptoeing, sometimes in seven-league boots, depicting the spirit-helpers as persons walking in the midst of the world as well as ho

w that world looks to thos

• e persons. Jumping Levels, Jumping Bodies A graphic illustration of this
• non-Euclidean landscape is provided by Chapin's caustic critique of
• Claude Levi-Strauss and of Henry Wa
• ssen for their ass
• umption about the
• literalness of the woman's body referred to
• Research Greenhouse (a professional greenhouse dedicated to research on phytoremediation and phytomining)

in the birthing song Muu-Igala, sung for a woman in obstructed birth and made famous by dint of Levi-METTOPStrauss's semiotic analysis of it in his essay, "The Effectiveness of Symbols." While Levi-Strauss follows Wassen's commentary that the song depicts the healer and his figurine spirit-helpers struggling through the laboring woman's birth canal to reach the stronghold of the Great Mother Muu, in Chapin's understanding they have committed the

crime of misplaced concreteness because it is not an actual woman or an actual birth canal through which the healer's spirit helpers fight their way in search of the real woman's abducted soul, but instead a spiritual copy of woman-of woman