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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Vaupés Multilingualism And The Substance Of Language, Stephen Hugh-Jones
Vaupés Multilingualism And The Substance Of Language, Stephen Hugh-Jones
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
By focusing on ordinary conversational language, relying on a notion of “group” derived from unilineal descent theory, and neglecting mythology and ritual, studies of Vaupés Tukanoan multilingualism have inadvertently tended to reproduce a Western ideology of language as marking national identity and concerned with conveying meaning. This paper suggests that attention to musical, ritual, and shamanic contexts reveals multilingualism in a different light, with ritual speech acts as constitutive of social groups, names as vehicles of reproduction, and breath as a substance-like bodily element and source of vitality. The more esoteric, rhetorical, musical, or visual ornamentation is given to breath, …
“Too Many Meanings”: Reading “Piro Designs”, Paolo Fortis, Margherita Margiotti
“Too Many Meanings”: Reading “Piro Designs”, Paolo Fortis, Margherita Margiotti
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
This paper explores the notion of painting as meaningful action (Gow 1999) and highlights the productivity of the idea as emerging from, and dovetailing, different strands of thought on the nature of symbols and actions. Bringing together Lévi-Strauss’ intuition on the dynamism and generativity of graphic systems, phenomenological studies on meaning making, and ethnographic analyses of Amazonian theories of corporeality and sociality, Gow has shown how Yine (Piro) designs provide a developmental model that combines ontogenesis and social change. This paper argues for the productivity of this approach in Amerindian studies, in anthropology, and in a dialogue with psychoanalytic theory …
Indigenous Transformations In The Comunidad Nativa: Rethinking Kinship And Its Limitations In An Expanding Resource Frontier, Evan Killick, Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti
Indigenous Transformations In The Comunidad Nativa: Rethinking Kinship And Its Limitations In An Expanding Resource Frontier, Evan Killick, Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
In Of Mixed Blood, Peter Gow sets out an account of the transformations of kinship and the construction of social relations among Indigenous, mainly Yine (Piro), people of the Bajo Urubamba valley in the early 1980s, when Peru’s “Comunidades Nativas” (“Native Communities”) were receiving their new official titles. We revisit Peter’s proposition by comparing it our more recent ethnographic engagements with Indigenous Asháninka/Ashéninka communities in the region. While tracing continuities from his observations, we also show how social relations now play out in different ways, as certain important resources have become scarcer and the need for …
Desire, Difference, And Productivity: Reflections On “The Perverse Child” And Its Continued Relevance, Christopher Hewlett
Desire, Difference, And Productivity: Reflections On “The Perverse Child” And Its Continued Relevance, Christopher Hewlett
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
This article is concerned with the relationships through which children have been born, raised, and made into Amahuaca people over the past 75 years, and within contemporary Native Communities on the Inuya River since their formation beginning in the 1980s. The process of making children into kin among Amahuaca people is similar to that described throughout much of lowland South America. The production, preparation, and sharing of proper food (manioc, plantains, fish, and game) as well as manioc beer are central aspects of sociality and the formation of specific kinds of bodies. While the processes of sharing substances, demonstrating care, …
Variations On Hunting And Care: Ownership, Kinship And Other Interspecific Relationships In The Eastern Amazon, Uirá Garcia
Variations On Hunting And Care: Ownership, Kinship And Other Interspecific Relationships In The Eastern Amazon, Uirá Garcia
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
This article is based on fieldwork among the Guajá people, a small indigenous group of Tupí-Guaraní speakers inhabiting the eastern portion of Brazil’s Amazon region. Aiming for an ethnographic definition of kinship, this article engages in issues related to the figure of the “owner/masterin the Amazon, proposing a dialogue with a seldom discussed aspect of this subject—namely, its relation to conjugality. I argue that relationships included in the universe of “familiarity” and “mastery” are not only coextensive with the field of kinship; they also reveal a very particular conception of humanity. The process of Awá-Guajá kinship, where the spouse is …
Gender In The Making: A Pragmatic Approach To Transgender Experiences In Lowland Tropical America, Magda Helena Dziubinska, Diego Madi Dias
Gender In The Making: A Pragmatic Approach To Transgender Experiences In Lowland Tropical America, Magda Helena Dziubinska, Diego Madi Dias
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
Based on long-term fieldwork experiences among both the Guna in Panama and the Kakataibo in Peruvian Amazonia, this article proposes to examine the transgender phenomenon in indigenous America. Making use of the notions of performance and status, we argue that (trans)gender should be understood via two complementary dimensions: at the same time that it is manifested in a set of expressive practices, it is also inscribed in a specific system of social organization. Adopting a pragmatic approach that emphasizes the relational, aesthetic and performative dimensions of gender, the article analyses the ways through which two Amerindian peoples negotiate and inhabit …
Persuasive Kinship: Human–Plant Relations In Southwest Amazonia, Fabiana Maizza
Persuasive Kinship: Human–Plant Relations In Southwest Amazonia, Fabiana Maizza
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
Based on my ethnographic research with the Jarawara people, an indigenous society in the Southwest Amazonia, the article explores the idea of thinking kinship as persuasion. Among the Jarawara, children can have more than one father, which is well known in Americanist literature, but there would exist as well an original practice what we could call "multi-maternity". I also observe that the Jarawara can have diverse parental relations - some of their children are human, while others are plants. This occurs in a system of raising (nayana) in which children and plants are raised by a father and/or a mother …
Shamans, Wives, Families: An Isoseño Case Considered Using Turner On Kayapo Dominance And Beauty, Kathleen B. Lowrey
Shamans, Wives, Families: An Isoseño Case Considered Using Turner On Kayapo Dominance And Beauty, Kathleen B. Lowrey
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
In this essay I describe what I have seen elapse over twenty years in the lives (and sometimes deaths) of two shamans and their respective wives in Isoso, an indigenous community of Guarani-speaking people in the Bolivian Chaco. These shamans’ two different kinds of shamanic practice, their two different sorts of marriage, and the two different life-trajectories of their wives resonate with the dual nature of Isoso itself and its historical constitution. The reproduction of a hierarchical Arawakan way of life through feminine submission to a Guarani “egalitarianism” of masculine dominance has been, I suspect, a dynamic of long standing …