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Experiences of Power among the Sekani
since it is the role of the headman to suggest displacements to indi-
vidual hunters that will bring them into areas of the homeland that
have been temporarily abandoned; such areas are dangerous invita-
tions to occupation by neighboring groups, potentially leading to con-
flict. Finally, displacement defines the normal habitus of the hunter’s
daily life. Hunting and trapping are activities that require continual
displacement. Space is therefore the main trope for expressing the sur-
vival of the band.
When people argue that place is constructed (as in the two collec-
tions edited by Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003 and Feld and Basso
1996 ), they mean that space is inscribed with complex meanings that
become powerful metonyms and metaphors for social life. Space is a
metaphor than can be “embodied” (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003 ,
5 ), in the sense that it is felt as a subjective condition. Space is thus not
only a metaphor inscribed with social life, it is also an active agent that
“spatializes” social life and individuals. It is linked to “time” only in-
directly through the intersubjectivity of daily life.
Here is what I am trying to say: I was struggling for years to un-
derstand a notion, power, that seemed to be linked to time because I
had conceptualized it as a holdover from before time began as such.
I thought of power as a survival of an atavistic force. My obsession
with time prevented my seeing what was under my nose all along,
since it was clearly a mistake to try to understand power in terms of
time in the context of a culture that neither places importance on time
to conceptualize and organize daily life nor uses it as a metaphor for
social reproduction. My temporal obsession was clearly a product of
ideological interference, since I had long worked out the importance
of space for the organization of hunting and for social reproduction
(Lanoue 1992 ).
The real clue to understanding power lies in the artificial contrast
between a hunter’s normal mobility and his ritual immobility that
transforms him into symbolic prey, which only then metaphorically
evokes the animal’s powers that survived from the pre-Transformer
epoch. In this sense, these powers are, literally, time-less since they are
unchanged by the passage of time and never explicitly created; they
justare. That is the point of the Transformer stories, dealing with the
