This thesis deals with the differences of values between those held by people of the small Aymara village of Pocobaya and the modernising nation of Bolivia that encompasses them. Previous 'acculturation' studies have seen indigenous communities as almost powerless to resist the onslaught of Western values. As more and more Pocobayenos are exposed to the outside world they see ever more clearly how their language, values and customs are denigrated by the surrounding society. Nevertheless, the values of land and community have an over-riding importance and Pocobayenos critically examine the conflict of values and make efforts to make sense of this antinomy in a meaningful and personally relevant way. A central aspect of this thesis is how in a number of situations Pocobayenos account for cultural differences in their own indigenous terms. In their cosmology we can see an articulation of this ethnic difference in a manner which includes an historical perspective. History and cosmology bring together a powerful metaphor for the illustration of ethnic relations in contemporary Bolivia. The dominant Hispanic culture is shown to be considered as contingent and the values it presents are incorporated into a coherent indigenous cosmological schema. A central issue in the thesis is how Pocobayenos articulate historical changes within their own mythic explanatory schema, similarly, differences in gender ideology are seen to be critically incorporated into indigenous ideas about gender relations. Pocobayenos emerge as actively and critically engaged in providing meaning to the differences between themselves and the surrounding metropolitan culture.

How can anthropologists describe the relationship between Christian and Amazonian ontologies? Based on a 13 months-long fieldwork, this ethnography of the Evangelical mission town of Makuma in lowland Ecuador describes the relationship between the Shuar and North American missionaries. In Makuma “Christianity” and “Shuar” both refer to ways of relating particularity to a universal but put different emphases either on the body or on belief, and on relation or on boundaries. I argue that these are constituted by “technologies of introjection of the future”. For Shuar people, these technologies range from manioc beer to powerful hallucinogens which serve to anchor a perceived chronic instability of Amazonian bodies. Shuar Christians avoid using any of these, which complicates their participation in social life. All the alternatives they have found revolve around the Bible. As another “technology of introjection of the future”, the Bible appears to Makuma Christians as a text addressed to them personally by a God come from a future beyond the future to help them live that future in the present. They translate the Bible into the Shuar language and document the world from the Bible's perspective to stabilise the relationship between God, themselves, and Shuar people. Both “technologies of introjection of the future” are distinct but can be made to work together. I present various forms of cooperation between Shuar and missionaries (Bible translation, maintenance of a hydroelectric powerplant) alongside attempts to articulate a new relationship between the Shuar, God, and the Church that would bypass the missionaries (Islam, adventism, or indigenous churches). These are judged by the Shuar for their effects on kinship. I conclude the thesis with a more abstract definition of “technologies of incorporation of the future” which enables their articulation with capitalism and colonialism and opens up broader comparative horizons.

This thesis deals with different aspects of the processes of production of sociability among the Xikrin-Mebengokré of the Cateté River, central Brazil. I focus on ceremonies and their performance, as ways of access to Mebengokré conceptions concerning the morality and aesthetics of social life. I analyse the semiotics of ‘kin’-ship production, the performative aspects of emotion as a sociability tool, the use of song and dance for the co-ordination of collective technical tasks, and a Mebengokré ‘theory of language’ as social agency. In the conclusion I focus on the criticism of some of the key theoretical aspects of Ge ethnology, in the light of my previous analysis.

This thesis examines the processes through which Amahuaca people began living in Native Communities where they have legal titles to land, and are organized through the ‘corporate' body of elected officials mandated by Peruvian law. The thesis focuses on the period beginning in 1953 when the Summer Institute of Linguistics established the first mission among Amahuaca people at the headwaters of the Inuya River in Eastern Peru. This initiated a period of continuous contact between Amahuaca people and wider Peruvian society. By taking a historical approach to understanding contemporary life among Amahuaca people, the thesis engages with the problem of how they have come to understand their past and how this is expressed today. The primary narrative is that through their engagement with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Amahuaca people have learned to live together. This notion of living together stands in sharp contrast to the ways they often appear in the literature, which focuses on the lack of large villages and any overarching social and political organization. Through an analysis of the transformations Amahuaca people have undergone as a result of their decision to participate in the SIL's project, the thesis challenges this notion of lack and sets out an alternate way of perceiving of Amahuaca sociality. The analysis begins with a series of collective ceremonies in the 1960s, which were the only moments when Amahuaca people were said to coordinate activities at a level beyond the extended family. Taking this as an entry point, the thesis tracks the movement of a specific group of families through time and space to explore the types of relationships they were engaged in during this period of massive change. The overall aim is to locate continuities in the ways Amahuaca people relate with one another and the wider world to better understand how processes of transformation might be understood as the outcome of particular relationships people made over the past half-century. Today, the same families who lived in the first mission are spread out from the headwaters of the Inuya and Mapuya Rivers to the provincial capital of Atalaya. The overarching narrative of becoming civilized is given geographic significance based on this movement from the headwaters to the larger rivers and towns; however, most of these families reside in one of two Amahuaca Native Communities (Comunidades Nativas) located near the midpoint between these two poles. One of the major themes of the thesis is to understand how people negotiate living together in a Native Community as a formulation of becoming other.

No description available.

This thesis is about how the Shuar, a group of people living in South-Eastern Ecuador, create centralised political institutions. Over the last century, Shuar have experienced a rapid transition from a highly mobile lifestyle based on small, fluid, politically autonomous family groups to a sedentary life in large, nucleated communities. Owing to the decline of missionary involvement, the gradual loss of power of the ethnic federations, and drastic changes in the subsistence base, Shuar have also become increasingly reliant on state-derived resources, secured by their participation in electoral politics. Based on long-term fieldwork within a network of forest sedentary communities, the thesis explores how Shuar seek to organise themselves in order to live together peacefully and to benefit from public resources while keeping the state at bay. It shows how Shuar have acted creatively to institute new forms of centralised political association which enable them to suppress longstanding antagonistic relations while still prioritising personal and domestic autonomy. Through their management of sedentary communities and their appropriation of external institutions such as schools and government offices, Shuar effectively regenerate domestic wellbeing and valued forms of selfhood. At the same time, they create new political categories and individual identities. The interplay between everyday sociality and consciously created political collectivity reveals the importance of two contrasting but interlinked processes: the flexible shifting back and forth between centralised and decentralised social arrangements; and the emergence of increasingly formalised ways of organising collective life, along with inflexible forms of inequality that escape internal control. By showing how processes of institutionalisation can result in increased formalisation and stratification, but also in social fluidity and political improvisation, the thesis contributes to the broader anthropological understanding of state formation and the political imagination.

No description available.

In this thesis I explore the knowledge practices of the Pastaza Runa, an indigenous group of the Ecuadorian Amazon. A central claim in my work is that processes of knowledge acquisition among the Runa involve an acknowledgement that human bodies, as well as non-human ones, share a network of ‘likeness’. This is not to be located specifically in the possession of a soul nor in the ‘shared’ substance of the body. For the Runa, humans share with non-humans specific ‘patterns’ of action, which I call ‘forms’. Things can affect humans (and vice versa) because they share a certain formal resemblance. Such resemblance is not found in discrete entities, but rather in the movements between entities. As such, forms cannot be reduced to the physicality of a singular body: they are subject-less and inherently dynamic. The concept of forms developed in this thesis seeks to think about the relationship between human and objects in ways which go beyond ideas of ensoulment or subjectification. Such focus is central to my analysis of the relationship between humans and objects, and, in particular, between women and their ceramic pots. I explore the connection between women and pots by following closely the sequences of elaboration of ceramic vessels. Pottery making is intimately linked to women’s capacity for engendering novelty. I suggest that, for the Runa, the differentiation between women and men is not ‘made’ but rather given a priori. The ‘givenness’ of this difference has major implications for what one - as a Runa woman or man - can know or do. Thus, I explore how women, by virtue of their capacity for giving birth, are thought to be ‘inherently’ inclined towards ‘exteriority’. By virtue of such ‘outward’ propensity, women need to engage in processes of making knowledge visible to the eyes of others. This ‘exteriorizing’ process has important consequences for the ways men and women are respectively thought to become ‘acculturated’. Ultimately this work also aims to examine how processes of ‘change’ - a key concept in Amazonian cosmologies - are inevitably gender inflected.

The Trio are a group of Carib-speaking Amerindians who live on both sides of the Surinam Brazilian Frontier. At present they number about 600 and they retain much of their traditional culture. This thesis deals with the social organisation of these people, and the subject is treated in three parts. The first part - Chapters I, II, and III - provides a background to the main part of the study which is to be found in teh second part - Chapters IV to X inclusive. The final part - Chapter XI - consists of certain comparative and theoretical points which arise from the thesis.

In Argentina, indigenous populations have been marginalised from the nation-state’s projects of enfranchisement even though their labour has often been in high demand. The Guaraní of the Argentine Gran Chaco are a case in point. Once highly involved in the extractive frontier economy of the region, they have had very little access to broader political projects of belonging. Over the last few years, however, this historical trend has been reversed. On the one hand, Guaraní settlements currently constitute a surplus population whose labour is no longer demanded by the regional economy. On the other, state-sponsored cash transfer programmes secure the subsistence of Guaraní families while multicultural legislation has sought to enfranchise them in new ways. At the local level, these simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion have created a series of tensions and contradictions that mark everyday life. To investigate these processes, this thesis explores the various motivations, opportunities, and challenges that characterise the political and economic life of Guaraní settlements. It considers the gendered impacts of unemployment and welfare dependency at the settlement level and analyses the ways in which autonomy and dependency play out in local politics. This leads to an ethnographic exploration of factional conflict and to an appreciation of how people negotiate legal projects of institutionalisation. It is shown that practices of egalitarianism, hierarchy, autonomy, and representation are intertwined with ideas about gender, work, and plurality. The thesis argues that a concern with abundance lies at the heart of Guaraní life. Two subjunctive moments – an annual harvest celebration and the game of football – are explored as particular instances in which the Guaraní appear to attain such desirable states of abundance; at the same time, it is argued that these moments create a space of ‘illusion’ wherein the gendered ties of dependency and control that underpin abundance are fundamentally misrecognised. The thesis elaborates a theory of Amerindian political economy in which wageless life and abundance partially displace more classic themes of labour and scarcity. In doing so it provides new understandings of how collectivities are fashioned among subaltern populations, while highlighting how inclusion and exclusion are achieved and experienced in the everyday.