Tenets of the ’unseen’: The preferred information source for the supernatural in Tariana

Languages deploy various resources to express knowledge – especially the knowledge which correlates with special powers. In quite a few languages of the world, every sentence has to state how information was acquired. This grammatical marking of information source – known as evidentiality – offers a means of expressing knowledge obtained by different means, and accessible to different ’knowers’. The ways in which shamans – who are privy to special powers and special knowledge – will use evidentials are different from those for people who have no access to supranatural means. And the ways in which shamanic experience and practices are talked about by those who do not have the same powers differ from the ways in which ordinary, easily observable, experience is presented (see Storch 2010, on the role of the invisible in religion). The grammatical means of expressing access to what others cannot ’see’ is what I would like to touch upon here.