Digital Commons Network^™

“Purús Song”: Nationalization And Tribalization In Southwestern Amazonia, Peter Gow

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Starting from a statement about knowledge and power by a Piaroa informant of Joanna Overing, the article analyses two descriptions of a meal on the Purús river in the early twentieth century: a Piro song and a short essay by Euclides da Cunha. Contrasting these two pieces in the context of how the ancestors of the Piro people of today came to meet the famous Brazilian writer, I propose the concepts of “nationalization” and “tribalization” as modes of symbolic action. Nationalization takes local events and escalates them into the space-time of the nation state, while tribalization deactivates the dangerous ramifications …