In the Amazonian literature, the scarcity of numerical terms and lack of interest in counting, which characterize diverse indigenous peoples in the region, are usually associated with linguistic ...issues or cultural limitations. My purpose in this paper is to take a different approach and relate the enumeration processes of one of these peoples, the Wari', to their conception of beings as intrinsically transformative, which affects the determination of quantities and the stability of sets.
Culture and Self Vilaca, Aparecida
Current anthropology,
12/2014, Volume:
55, Issue:
S10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this paper I discuss the continuity-versus-change dichotomy by comparing the actions of Catholic and fundamentalist Evangelical missionaries working simultaneously among a number of native ...Amazonian groups. While Evangelical action shows strong continuity in its emphasis on the development of an inner self among the natives, effectively constituting the seat of their relation with God, the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) has shifted emphasis away from transforming and civilizing the Indians toward preserving indigenous culture. My interest here resides in analyzing how the natives experience these different perspectives and adapt them to their own projects of continuity and change.
This article explores the Christian experience of the Wari', an Amazonian native group, in light of a central feature of their personhood: its dual composition, both human and animal. Arguing that ...the centrality of the relation with God has resulted in a more stable human person, the article provides an ethnographic examination of how this relation is produced and maintained. Analytic categories derived from the New Melanesian Ethnography — the notions of the `dividual' and the `partible person' — are applied to the Amazonian context, enabling a particular description of the Wari' person and the Christian God, and the subsequent visualization of some key aspects of the relationship between God and humans. Through this comparative exercise, the article looks to contribute to the dialogue between Amazonianists and Melanesianists that has been unfolding over the past decade or so. It also aims to insert Amazonian ethnography into the anthropological debate on Christianity, today strongly anchored in data and conceptual tools derived from Pacific societies in general and Melanesia in particular. L'auteure étudie l'expérience chrétienne des Wari', un groupe autochtone d'Amazonie, à la lumière d'un trait central de leur conception de la personne: sa composition duale, à la fois humaine et animale. Partant de l'idée que la centralité de la relation avec Dieu a donné naissance à une personne humaine plus stable, l'article examine du point de vue ethnographique la manière dont cette relation est créée et entretenue. Les catégories analytiques issues de la Nouvelle ethnographie mélanésienne (notions de personne « dividuelle » et « partible ») sont appliquées au contexte amazonien, permettant ainsi une description particulière de la personne Wari' et du Dieu chrétien et la visualisation de certains aspects fondamentaux de la relation entre Dieu et les humains. Par cet exercice comparatif, l'auteure cherche à contribuer au dialogue entre amazonistes et mélanésianistes qui s'est établi depuis une dizaine d'années. Elle cherche aussi à insérer l'ethnographie de l'Amazonie dans le débat anthropologique sur le christianisme, aujourd'hui solidement ancré dans les données et les outils conceptuels issus des sociétés du Pacifique en général, et de la Mélanésie en particulier.
While our own notions about well-being tend to foreground peaceful and amicable relations with fellow humans, for many Amazonian peoples the achievement of well-being, manifested in healthy, ...well-nourished and fertile bodies, requires engaging in harrowing, agonistic relations with others through warfare, shamanism, dreams and ritual practice. Drawing on the ethnography of two Lowland peoples – the Wari’ of Brazil and the Aents Chicham (Jivaro) of Ecuador and Peru, we will examine how a certain kind of person is constituted through ‘extreme’ relational experiences that, while dangerous, are considered necessary for leading a meaningful life. Further, we will discuss how the complex forms of subjectivity fostered by these experiences challenge our ideas on the presumed opacity of minds and on what psychology are about. Finally, we will show how the gradual disqualification of these extreme yet expected ways of interacting with others, following Cristianization and sustained contact with Western lifeways and forms of knowledge, leads to impoverished and monotonous lived worlds, in short to states of (ill)being antithetical to indigenous notions about proper ways of living.
This afterword offers a commentary on the concept of relations discussed in the introduction and the individual contributions to this special issue by critically reflecting on the key concepts that ...have emerged in it. It contributes to the discussion with a reflection on the use of the term parente in Amazonia, showing how its exclusive use in inter-ethnic contexts indicates a play of perspective in the way that relations between different groups of people are experienced.
The aim of the article is to intervene in one of the most interesting contemporary debates in the anthropology of Christianity, the issue of the relationship between dividualism and individualism, by ...exploring a specifically Amazonian configuration of this opposition through my own ethnographic research with the Wari', an indigenous group of southwest Amazonia. My interest in this topic extends beyond the limits of the debate itself: I see it as a favorable environment for demonstrating the productivity of concepts originating from Amazonian ethnology-especially the Lévi-Straussian notions of "opening to the Other" and "dualism in perpetual disequilibrium," as well as the perspectivism conceptualized by Viveiros de Castro - in more general discussions of cultural change, a topic on which I have been working over the last twenty years.
This article is an ethnographic essay on the notion of an 'ontological turn', taken here in its literal sense of ontological change. It explores a specific sociocosmological transformation – one ...resulting from the conversion of an Amazonian people, the Wari', to Christianity – via the concept of ontology. The central question here concerns the relationship between an Amazonian animist/perspectivist ontology and the naturalism characteristic of Christian-Western thought. Through a critical reading of the notion of ontological change advanced by Descola (2013) in Beyond Nature and Culture, the article aims to show that the transformation experienced by the Wari' with the arrival of Christianity can be described neither as a linear transition between ontologies, nor as the result of the foregrounding of conceptions or kinds of relationship previously found in an encompassed form. The separation between humans and animals, and the constitution of an inner self typical of Christian naturalism, are becoming gradually absorbed into the Wari' world now but were non-existent and inconceivable in their traditional universe. An examination of the translation choices made by the Evangelical missionaries from the New Tribes Mission and the apprehension of these ideas by the Wari' suggests a complex and non-linear transition between the two ontologies.
Native Christians Vilaça, Aparecida; Wright, Robin M, Professor
2009, 20160429, 2013, 2009-02-01, 2016-04-29, 2016-05-02
eBook
Native Christians reflects on the modes and effects of Christianity among indigenous peoples of the Americas drawing on comparative analysis of ethnographic and historical cases. Christianity in this ...region has been part of the process of conquest and domination, through the association usually made between civilizing and converting. While Catholic missions have emphasized the 'civilizing' process, teaching the Indians the skills which they were expected to exercise within the context of a new societal model, the Protestants have centered their work on promoting a deep internal change, or 'conversion', based on the recognition of God's existence. Various ethnologists and scholars of indigenous societies have focused their interest on understanding the nature of the transformations produced by the adoption of Christianity. The contributors in this volume take native thought as the starting point, looking at the need to relativize these transformations. Each author examines different ethnographic cases throughout the Americas, both historical and contemporary, enabling the reader to understand the indigenous points of view in the processes of adoption and transformation of new practices, objects, ideas and values.
Praying and Preying offers one of the rare anthropological monographs on the Christian experience of contemporary Amazonian indigenous peoples, based on an ethnographic study of the relationship ...between the Wari’, inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia, and the Evangelical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission. Vilaça turns to a vast range of historical, ethnographic and mythological material related to both the Wari’ and missionaries perspectives and the author’s own ethnographic field notes from her more than 30-year involvement with the Wari’ community. Developing a close dialogue between the Melanesian literature, which informs much of the recent work in the Anthropology of Christianity, and the concepts and theories deriving from Amazonian ethnology, in particular the notions of openness to the other, unstable dualism, and perspectivism, the author provides a fine-grained analysis of the equivocations and paradoxes that underlie the translation processes performed by the different agents involved and their implications for the transformation of the native notion of personhood.
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