Anthropology Commons^™

Indigenous Health Agents In Amazonia: Creative Intermediations And A Poiesis Of Care, Johanna Gonçalves Martín

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

No abstract provided.

Community Health Workers In Central-Southern Amazonia: An Ethnographic Account Of The Munduruku People Of Kwatá Laranjal Indigenous Land, Daniel Scopel, Raquel Dias-Scopel, Esther Jean Langdon

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

This article analyzes the role of Munduruku indigenous community health workers (CHW) with the expansion of biomedical services as part of state presence and territorial control in Brazil. Centuries of interethnic contacts among the Munduruku have resulted in a plurality of health practices. Since 1999, Primary services have increased significantly, when the Indigenous Health System (SASI) was created. CHWs were incorporated as part of the health teams serving the indigenous lands. Munduruku CHWs have not only assumed an important role in the delivery of biomedical services, but also are key in the articulation between different traditions of care. Although there …

Territorial Rights In Brazil: Chronic Difficulties And New Approaches To Sustaining Traditional Landscapes, Jeremy M. Campbell

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

No abstract provided.

Just Recognition And Biocultural Rights, Laura Zanotti

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

No abstract provided.

Review Time And Its Object, Laura Rival

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

This is a book review.

Cross-State Differences In The Processes Generating Black–White Disparities In Neonatal Mortality, Benjamin Sosnaud

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Research

The U.S. Black neonatal mortality rate is more than twice the White rate. This dramatic disparity can be decomposed into two components: (1) disparities due to differences in the distribution of birth weights, and (2) disparities due to differences in birth weight–specific mortality. I utilize this distinction to explore how the social context into which infants are born contributes to gaps in mortality between Black and White neonates. I analyze variation in Black–White differences in neonatal mortality across 33 states using 1995–2010 data. For each state, I calculate the contribution of differences in birth weight distribution versus differences in birth …

Desire And The Work It Does: Alterity And Exogamy In A Kotiria Origin Myth From The Northwest Amazon Of Brazil, Janet M. Chernela

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

In terms of the pan-Amazonian social paradigm that transforms affines into kin and assimilates them into the consanguineal unit, Eastern Tukanoans must be regarded as exceptional. This paper explores a foundation myth that allows us to better understand relations of self and Other, incest and exogamy, and violence and amity among the Eastern Tukanoan-speaking Kotiria. The narrative provides a heretofore-absent foundation for Tukanoan affinity, revealing complications and nuance in Kotiria notions of alterity and the generative role of Desire in its transformation. It is a synthesis not from nature, but from poesis; not from trust, but from theft; not from …

Life In Oil: Cofán Survival In The Petroleum Fields Of Amazonia By Michael Cepek, Gabriela Valdivia

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

No abstract provided.

The Kararaô Of Central Brazil By Gustaaf Verswijver, John Hemming

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

No abstract provided.

Club-Fighters Of The Amazon: Warfare Among The Kayapó Indians Of Central Brazil By Gustaaf Verswijver, Laura Zanotti

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

No abstract provided.

Upriver: The Turbulent Life And Times Of An Amazonian People By Michael F. Brown, Robert Wasserstrom

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

No abstract provided.

Birds Of Passage (Pájaros De Verano) By Directors Cristina Gallego And Ciro Guerra, Kendra Mcsweeney

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

No abstract provided.

A Walk To The River In Amazonia: Ordinary Reality For The Mehinaku Indians By Carla Stang, Elizabeth Rahman

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

No abstract provided.

Metaphoric Recursiveness And Ternary Ontology: Another Look At The Language And Worldview Of The Yaminahua, Carlos A. Segovia

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

My purpose in this paper is, first, to explore metaphorical recursiveness in Yaminahua, i.e. the latter’s folding of the common binary structure: {(x) things + (y) words} into the threefold scheme: (A) things + (B) external analogies + (C) internal metaphors, as displaying a multi-iconic semiotic system of the type: A ≈ [B] ≈ C, which is finally reduced to a twofold indexical system: A ← [B], contra Graham Townsley’s dismissal of semiotic theory as being of no relevance in contrast to cognitive construction. And, secondly, to show that within the traditional Yaminahua worldview "animism," "totemism," …

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 …

The Villas Boas Brothers And Anthropologists, John Hemming

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

This paper describes the history of the Villas Boas brothers of Brazil and their role in establishing and administering the 26,000-square-kilometer Xingu Indigenous Park in the Amazonian state of Mato Grosso. Many anthropologists came to work in the Park during the Villas Boas brothers’ decades-long residence there. The paper details some of the unique features of the Park that shaped fieldwork conditions and describes the relations between anthropologists and the brothers. Despite some skeptics, the great majority of anthropologists expressed a positive assessment of the brothers’ work. The article includes an appendix listing the anthropologists who worked in the Park …

Wearing Pink In Fairy Town: The Heterosexualization Of The Spanish Town Neighborhood And Carnival Parade In Baton Rouge, Amy L. Stone

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Research

The Spanish Town parade is currently the largest Carnival parade in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with hundreds of thousands of attendees dressed in pink costuming, cross-dressing, and wearing pink flamingo paraphernalia. This chapter traces the queer origins of the Spanish Town parade to the racially integrated bohemian gayborhood of Spanish Town in the 1980s. Using interviews, archival research, and participant observation, I argue that current LGBTQ residents of Baton Rouge, even those who have never lived in Spanish Town, claim a vicarious citizenship to the neighborhood and parade through an understanding of the queer origins of the parade in the 1980s …

Becoming Msm: Sexual Minorities And Public Health Regimes In Vietnam, Alfred Montoya

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Research

This article explores the discursive and practical marking of male sexual minorities in Vietnam, as targets of a series of biopolitical regimes whose aim, ostensibly, was and is to secure the health and wellbeing of the population (from the French colonial period to the present), regimes which linked biology, technoscientific intervention and normative sexuality in the service of state power. Campaigns against sex workers, drug users, and briefly male sexual minorities, seriously exacerbated the marginalization and stigmatization of these groups, particularly with the emergence of HIV/AIDS in Vietnam in 1990. This article also considers how the contemporary apparatus constructed to …

Mismatches: Museums, Anthropology And Amazonia, Anne-Christine Taylor

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

Over the past decades, museums, particularly the large Euro-American ethnographic ones, have had trouble developing adequate presentations of Amazonian cultural productions. To some extent, this failure can be seen as a side effect of a more general trend—namely, the widening rift between museums and the discipline of anthropology. However, I will argue that the mismatch between the museum context and Amazonian indigenous peoples and cultures also draws on the former’s difficulty in understanding and adhering to the idea of museums, as opposed to other Western technologies of visualization and transmission. The aim of this conference, drawing both on my experience …

Visualizing A Post-Apocalypse: Notes On New Ayoreo Cinema, Lucas Bessire, Bernard Belisário

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

This essay describes one recent Ayoreo film and its production in order to reflect on the wider significance of lowland South American Indigenous cinema and analyses of it today. Informed by the authors’ roles in the collaborative editing of the film Ujirei, the article details how one Ayoreo filmmaker cinematically visualizes a unique aesthetic response to the aftermath of pandemic upheavals and world-ending violence – a response that pointedly exceeds any prescriptive or structuralist approach to lowland Indigenous cinema. In order to better grasp the subjective, conceptual and political implications of this project, the essay aims to craft an analytic …

State Of Our Community: San Antonio Lgbtq+ 2020 Survey, Amy L. Stone, Robert Salcido Jr, Charlotte Georgiou, Ryann Williams

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Research

In 2017, researchers, advocates, & community members formed the Strengthening Colors of Pride team & set out to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, & other gender & sexual minority (LGBTQ+) people in the San Antonio Metro Area. Project leaders, with the help of a research team & community advisory board members, developed the largest survey of LGBTQ+ identified individuals ever conducted in South Texas. The survey provides important insight about the demographics of LGBTQ+ people in the area & their experiences with housing & homelessness, healthcare, employment, familial rejection & support, financial stability, resiliency, & …

Patrimony, Publishing, And Politics: Books As Ritual Objects In Northwest Amazonia, Stephen P. Hugh-Jones

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

With particular reference to works by Tukano and Desana authors, this paper examines some of the cultural and historical factors that underlie the unique propensity of indigenous peoples of Northwest Amazonia to publish their narrative histories in books. Jointly written by a knowledgeable elder and a younger literate amanuensis, each book in Coleção Narradores Indígenas do Alto Rio Negro series contains the origin narratives, myths, and recent history of a particular group, told from the point of view of one of its clans. Writing down and thus rescuing oral traditions under threat from the pressures of education, urbanization and other …

Grandes Interrogações Sobre O Futuro Dos Povos Indígenas Isolados, Conselho Indigenista Missionário

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

O presente artigo, de autoria coletiva da equipe do Conselho Indigenista Missionário (Cimi), pretende traçar um quadro geral da situação de vulnerabilidade dos povos indígenas em isolamento e contato inicial no Brasil, tendo como referência temporal o ano de 2016. É preocupante o avanço da exploração dos recursos naturais em territórios ocupados por esses povos, principalmente com a mineração e a exploração de madeira, seja dentro de terras indígenas destinadas aos povos em isolamento, em terras indígenas partilhadas por outros povos, ou em territórios onde a proteção ou o reconhecimento pelo Estado não se faz presente.

This article, written collectively …

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 …

Territorialidad De Los Grupos Familiares De Pueblos Indígenas En Aislamiento (Pia) En La Región Del Yasuní, Amazonía Ecuatoriana, Roberto Esteban Narváez Collaguazo

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

El artículo presenta información etnográfica y una interpretación etnológica sobre los Tagaeiri y Taromenane como parte de los grupos familiares en aislamiento que habitan en el Yasuní, su forma de vida tradicional y su territorio, en un contexto de actores externos que inciden en la generación de violencia y de amenaza a su supervivencia. Sobre los pueblos en aislamiento en Ecuador existe información referenciada en datos indirectos que han dado indicios de presencia a partir de registros de rastros e imágenes satelitales y algunos datos directos, como avistamientos, encuentros en la selva, fotografías aéreas y, el principal, encuentros que generaron …

Thinking Through Tubes: Flowing H/Air And Synaesthesia, Stephen P. Hugh-Jones

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

The tube, as both object and concept, has cropped up from time to time in the ethnography of lowland South America, most notably in Rivière and Lévi-Strauss’s discussions of blowpipes, hair tubes and pottery and in Hill and Wright's writings on Yuruparí flutes and trumpets. Using data from Northwest Amazonia, this paper first seeks to provide a more rigorous definition of the tube as a concept, exploring its various manifestations and relating these to the body as an image of totalization and detotalization. With reference to myths about creation and Yuruparí, the paper then argues that flows from tubes provide …

Good Reasons Or Bad Conscience? Or Why Some Indian Peoples Of Amazonia Are Ambivalent About Eating Meat, Stephen P. Hugh-Jones

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

Originally written for a conference on meat attended by farmers, anthropologists, people involved in cultural affairs, and other members of the public, and seeking to avoid emphasis on cultural difference, this paper explores common ground between Euro-American and Amerindian ambivalence about meat consumption. Meat-eating raises two shared concerns: an intuitive recognition of the resemblances between humans and animals and an uncomfortable awareness that human life often depends on the death and destruction of other living beings. I suggest that, behind some obvious cultural differences, Amazonian shamanic and ritual procedures aimed at the de-subjectification of meat share points in common with …

The "Uncontacted" As Third Infamy, George Mentore

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

This paper principally addresses the "problem" of anthropological thinking, that is, on how and why it remains with us and not with the peoples who do not subscribe to our contested regimes of truth. From my research on the topic, it appears we have not achieved any substantial moral progress on the question of exposure to indigenous otherness since the first European "contact." This failure is primarily due to our hardheaded rationalist refusal to accept our inability to access the felt reality of the Other directly. Or, better still, of the failure of our language to obtain the shared reality …

Christianity + Schooling On Nature Versus Culture In Amazonia, Aparecida M. N. Vilaça

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

Based on the analysis of Evangelical Biblical translations, as well as on the school writing of Wari' (Southwestern Amazonia) students, produced in indigenous secondary school classrooms and at the intercultural university, this article aims to show how, in both church and school, a nature separate from humans is invented with which they should relate in a utilitarian and also contemplative way. Simultaneously nature’s opposite is invented–a culture that excludes animals and subjects them.

Rexistência Nas Fronteiras Do Capitalismo/Colonialismo: A Ecologia Política Do Isolamento E Da Soberania, Felipe Milanez

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

Ofereço a perspectiva da ecologia política para rever e atualizar a política de “isolamento” e “não-contato” com base nos conceitos de soberania e necropolítica, sugerindo uma nova proposta de prática política para situações de conflitos em territórios ocupados por povos indígenas que resistem à conquista pela guerra e distanciamento. Da perspectiva do estudo dos conflitos ambientais, a ecologia política questiona a noção de isolamento ao inseri-la como parte do sistema mundo capitalista/colonial. Diante do quadro crescente de fascistização social e violência do Estado, cuja pressão sobre os territórios tornou-se ainda mais intenso, é a morte e a vida destes coletivos …