Epistemological and moral ambiguity in the Yine social cosmos
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18800/anthropologica.201401.011Keywords:
Yine, perspectivism, transformation, cosmology, humanityAbstract
Like many indigenous peoples in Amazonia, also the Peruvian Yine people adhere to a social cosmology that can be called perspectivist. It includes a number of intentional beings which in different situations can transform into or be conceived of as being human. In such a transformative world, what most concerns the Yine is the epistemological ambiguity inherent in the situation: one can neverbe entirely certain of the human condition of the other person. In this paper, I shall discuss one aspect thus far little examined in relationto perpectivist cosmologies, namely morality. I shall do this by studying the causes and consequences of the epistemological ambiguity: How is the category of the human conceptualised among the Yine? In terms of morality, what separates humans from other beings with subjectivity? What consequences does this ambiguity have for the Yine daily life? I will suggest that in the Yine social cosmos a number of different human positions exist which are situated on a moral continuum without any fixed boundaries between them. Examples will be drawn from both the interaction between legitimate Yine humans and between humans and non-humans.
Downloads
References
Århem, Kaj (1993). Ecosofía makuna. En F. Correa (comp.), La selva humanizada: ecología alternativa en el trópico húmedo colombiano (pp. 109-126). Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología.
Albert, Bruce y Alcida Rita Ramos (comps.) (2000). Pacificando o branco. Cosmo-logias do contato no Norte-Amazônico. São Paulo: UNESP.
Basso, Ellen B. (1987). In Favor of Deceit. A Study of Tricksters in an Amazonian Society. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
Belaunde, Luisa Elvira (2001). Viviendo bien. Género y fertilidad entre los Airo-Pai de la Amazonía peruana. Lima: CAAAP.
Clastres, Pierre (1987 [1974]). Society Against The State. Essays in Political Anthro-pology. Nueva York: Zone Boks.
Conklin, Beth (2001). Women’s Blood, Warriors’ Blood, and the Conquest of Vitality in Amazonia. En Thomas A. Gregor y Donald Tuzin (comps.), Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia. An Exploration of the Comparative Method(pp. 141-174). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Conklin, Beth (2010). For Love of Money? Indigenous Materialism and Humanitarian Agendas. En Frank Hutchins y Patrick C. Wilson (comps.), Editing Eden. A Reconsideration of Identity, Politics, and Place in Amazonia (pp. 127-150). Lincoln y Londres: University of Nebraska Press.
Conklin, Beth A. y Lynn Morgan (1996). Babies, Bodies and the Production of Per-sonhood in North America and a Native Amazonian Society. Ethnos,24(4), 657-694.
Fausto, Carlos (2004). A Blend of Blood and Tobacco: Shamans and Jaguars among the Parakanã of Eastern Amazonia. En Neil L. Whitehead y Robin Wright (comps.), In Darkness and Secrecy. The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia (pp. 157-178). Durham y Londres: Duke University Press.
Fausto, Carlos (2005). Se Deus fosse jaguar: Canibalismo e cristianismo entre os Guarani (séculos XVI–XX). Mana, 11(2), 385-418.
Gow, Peter (1989). The Perverse Child: Desire in a Native Amazonian Subsistence Economy. Man,24(4), 567-582.Gow, Peter (2000). Helpless – The Affective Preconditions of Piro Social Life. En Joanna Overing y Alan Passes (eds.), The Anthropology of Love and Anger. The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia (pp. 46-63).Londres y Nueva York: Routledge.
Gow, Peter (2006). Forgetting Conversion. The Summer Institute of Linguistics Mis-sion in the Piro Lived World. En Fenella Cannell (comp.), The Anthropology of Christianity (pp. 211-239). Durham y Londres: Duke University Press.
Griffits, Thomas (2001). Finding One’s Body: Relationships between Cosmology and Work in North-West Amazonia. En Laura M. Rival y Neil L. Whitehead (eds.), Beyond the Visible and the Material. The Amerindianization of Society in the Work of Peter Rivièré (pp. 247-262). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hvalkof, Søren y Peter Aaby (1981). Introducing God in the Devil’s Paradise. En Hvalkof Søren y Peter Aaby (eds.), Is God an American? An Anthropological Perspective on the Missionary Work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics(pp. 9-21). Copenhagen: IWGIA.
Jungius, Hartmut (1976). National Parks and Indigenous People: A Peruvian Case Study. Survival International Review, 1(15), 6-14.
Lima, Tania Stolze (1996). O dois e seu múltiplo: reflexões sobre o perspectivismo em uma cosmologia tupi. Mana,2(2).
Lima, Tania Stolze (1999). The Two and Its Many: Reflection on Perspectivism in a Tupi Cosmology. Ethnos, 64(1), 107-131.
Londoño Sulkin, Carlos David (2005). Inhuman Beings: Morality and Perspectivism among Muinane People (Colombian Amazon). Ethnos, 70(1), 7-30.
Londoño Sulkin, Carlos David (2012). People of Substance: An Ethnography of Morality in the Colombian Amazon. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McCallum, Cecilia (1996). The Body that Knows: From Cashinahua Epistemology to a Medical Anthropology of Lowland South America. Medical Anthropology Quarterly,10(3), 347-372.
McCallum, Cecilia (1997). Comendo com Txai, comendo como Txai. A sexualização de relações étnicas na Amazônia comtemporânea. Revista de Antropologia,40(1), 104-147.
Moore, Thomas (1984). Manu National Park and Indigenous Peoples Endangered. IWGIA Newsletter,37, 126-135.
Opas, Minna (2005). Mutually Exclusive Relationships: Corporeality and Differen-tiation of Persons in Yine (Piro) Social Cosmos. Tipití, 3(2), 7-25.
Opas, Minna (2008). Different but the Same: Negotiation of Personhoods and Chris-tianities in Western Amazonia. Tesis doctoral (no publicada), Universidad de Turku, Finlandia.
Opas, Minna (2009). Christianities in the Making: Construction of Persons in an Amazonian Social-Cosmos. Acta Americana. Journal of the Swedish Ameri-canist Society,17(1), 69-82.
Overing, Joanna (1981). Amazonian Anthropology. Journal of Latin American Studies,13(1), 151-64.
Overing, Joanna (2003). In Praise of the Everyday: Trust and the Art of Social Living in an Amazonian Community. Ethnos,68(3), 293-316.
Overing, Joanna y Alan Passes (2000). The Anthropology of Love and Anger. The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. Londres y Nueva York: Routledge.
Rival, Laura (2005). The Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaroani of Amazonian Ecuador. Ethnos,70(3), 285-310.
Rivière, Peter (1994). WYSINWYG in Amazonia. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 3, 255-262.
Robbins, Joel (1997). 666, or Why Is the Millenium on the Skin? Morality, the State, and the Epistemology of Apocalyticism among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. En Pamela J. Stewart y Andrew Strathern (comps.), Millenial Markers(pp. 35-38). Townsville: Centre for Pacific Studies, James Cook University of North Queensland.
Rosengren, Dan (2006). Matsigenka Corporeality, a Nonbiological Reality: on Notions of Consciousness and the Constitution of Identity. Tipití, 4(1-2), 81-102.
Santos-Granero, Fernando (2006). Sensual Vitalities: Noncorporeal Modes of Sen-sing and Knowing in Native Amazonia. Tipití,4(1-2), 57-80.
Santos-Granero, Fernando (2012). Beinghood and People-Making in Native Ama-zonia: A Constructional Approach with a Perspectival Coda. HAU-Journal of Ethnographic Theory,2(1), 181-211.
Seeger, Anthony y Roberto da Matta y Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1987 [1979]). A construção da pessoa nas sociedades indígenas brasileiras. En João Pacheco de Oliveira Filho (comp.), Sociedades indígenas & indigenismo no Brasil(pp. 11-29). Río de Janeiro: UFRJ/Marco Zero.
Storrie, Robert (2003). Equivalence, Personhood and Relationality: Processes of Relatedness among the Hoti of Venezuelan Guiana. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,9, 407-428.
Taylor, Anne-Christine (1996). The Soul’s Body and Its States: An Amazonian Pers-pective on the Nature of Being Human. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,2, 201-215.
Turner, Terence (1980). The Social Skin. Cherfas, Jeremy y Roger Lewin (comps.) Not Work Alone. A Cross-cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival(pp. 112-140). Londres: Temple Smith.
Vilaça, Aparecida (2005). Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflection on Amazonian Corporalities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11, 445-464.
Vilaça, Aparecida (2009a). Conversion, Predation, Perspective. En Aparecida Vilaça y Robin Wright (comps.), Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas (pp. 147-166). Farnham: Ashgate.
Vilaça, Aparecida (2009b). Bodies in Perspective: A Critique of the Embodiment Paradigm from the Point of View of Amazonian Ethnography. E Helen Lam-bert y Maryon McDonald (comps.), Social Bodies (pp. 129-147). Nueva York y Londres: Berghahn Books.
Vilaça, Aparecida (2010). Strange enemies: indigenous agency and scenes of encou-nters in Amazonia. Durham: Duke University Press.
Virtanen, Pirjo Kristiina (2012). Indigenous Youth in Brazilian Amazonia: Changing Lived Worlds. Nueva York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1992). From the Enemy’s Point of View. Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Chicago y Londres: University of Chicago Press.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1996). Os Pronomes Cosmológicos e o Perspectivismo Amerindio. Mana,2(2), 115-144.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1998). Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspecti-vism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4, 469-488.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2004). Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation. Tipiti,2(1), 3-22.
Walker, Harry (2009). Baby Hammocks and Stone Bowls: Urarina Technologies of Companionship and Subjection. En Fernando Santos-Granero (comp.), The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Person-hood (pp. 81-122). Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
