Why Gender Relations are Blood Relations
Luisa Elvira Belaunde
Instituto de Saúde Coletiva, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil

In 1986 Joanna Overing alerted us to the need of avoiding a "catch 22" in the study of gender, especially, in the interpretation of menstrual practises and symbolism. Thirty years later, enough data has been gathered as to provide a fuller picture of what blood is to Amazonian peoples and why the management and cleansing of its flow is crucial to health and reproduction, for both men and women. This paper draws a comparative study of blood management practices across various indigenous groups aiming to tease out some shared conceptions. Attention is paid to the embodiment of knowledge in a person's blood, the ingestion of other people's blood through blood letting, and the visibility effect of the blood let. It is argued that gender relations are articulated around differentiated attitudes towards the management of the blood flow and should be understood from a perspectivist point of view, since the blood let is a substance as powerful as psychoactive plants in the opening of new dimensions of perception.

The Seduction of the Enemy:
A Strategy for Producing Persons and Artifacts among the Cashinahua
Els Lagrou
Department of Anthropology and Graduate Program of Sociology and Anthropology, UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), Brazil.

By applying a theory of art (image-making in its broadest sense) as a meta-linguistic or non-linguistic statement about relatedness among humans, as well as between humans and non-humans (who, for Amazonians, can be human from a certain point of view), I intend to think through the relation between artifacts and persons in Amazonia.
I consider the agency of designs to be intrinsic to the way they act on the world and the body among the Cashinahua. Material artifacts do not stand for or substitute persons and relations in Amazonia, they become beings on their own, with agency of their own. Amazonian thought prioritizes bodily and subjective accumulation in the form of knowledge, establishing relations or the enhancement of subjectivity through relatedness. Knowledge of how to make things is more important than the things themselves. As or more important than materializing, knowledge invokes design images in the mind. Cashinahua designs suggest their own existence in the world. Thus objects not only individuate (because they participate in the agency of the maker), but also gain an existence of their own which encompasses the synecdoche kind of individuality. Cashinahua artifacts and images represent a new synthesis, capable of acting on the world, and in this sense "are like persons."
The Cashinahua do not treat other beings as extensions or possessions of a person. A child is only partly a replication of its parent's own identity, sharing always in other identities as well, and thus becoming unique. Thus children are like artifacts and artifacts are like children who have passed the rite of passage and has already "thoughts of his own" (ma hawen xina hayaki). Everything points towards a theory of power related to knowledge, a knowing of how to make persons and artifacts and of how to bring strangers close enough to make them willing to collaborate. Thus Cashinahua ritual comes down to an aesthetics of bringing enemies close, to making predatory enemies happy enough (benimai) to volunteer in generously giving during the ritual encounter -- giving exactly that kind of knowledge they had notoriously refused in myth -- in other words, seducing them into collaboration.

Instrumental Speeches, Morality and Sociality among Muinane People
(Colombian Amazon)
Carlos D. Londoño Sulkin
University of Regina, Canada

During my fieldwork in Muinane communities in the Colombian Amazon, I was struck by numerous discursive self-depictions which men and women produced concerning their own competence and morality. Among the things Muinane men stressed in these "moral self-portrayals" were the great amount of knowledge they possessed, the authentically Muinane or clanic character of this knowledge, the propriety of their processes of acquisition of it, the legitimacy of their use of it, its effectiveness, and the respect and fear others had of them because of it. Women too produced numerous self-depictions, but expressed less of an obsession with their own agency, and no claims to dangerous knowledge. Even more frequently than moral self-portrayals, Muinane men and women produced negative evaluations of other people, concerning the same issues. They surreptitiously or openly denied the legitimacy of other's exercises of knowledge, their good will, their formal correctness, and so on. Attending with particular care to the forms and thematic contents of morally evaluative expressions, I explore Muinane people's critiques and moral self-portrayals as expressions of their understandings of knowledge as tied to embodied selfhood and the achievement of social life. In particular, I make the case that discourses and other symbolic deployments linked to these understandings partly constitute both individuals' subjectivities and the very matter of social relationships.

From One to Metaphor:
Towards an Understanding of Pa'ikwené (Palikur) Mathematics
Alan Passes
Novelist, Film Writer, and Anthropologist
United Kingdom

Amazonian knowledges, often profoundly metaphysical, can also define the physical universe in such a way as to exhibit the greatest degree of perceptual and reasoning skills. This paper explores an aspect of Pa'ikwené knowledge called púkúha, jointly meaning 'to understand' and 'to count.' It describes the highly developed indigenous numerology (terms range from zero into the thousands) and the close relationship, no less imaginative than empirical, between mathematics and linguistics that is not always apparent in non-oral societies such as ours. The Pa'ikwené mathematical system is conceptually inventive (recognising such notions as a fourth dimension) and lexically profuse: some numerals have over two hundred different forms current in everyday conversation thanks to an intensive process of affix-based morphemic transformations. Thereby, depending on the type of item it refers to, a number-word can belong to twenty-one numerical classes relating to five separate semantic categories of things that incorporate discrete qualities (animate/inanimate, male/female, concrete/abstract, natural/supernatural) as well as particular arithmetical and geometrical ideas.
Taking an anti-Platonic approach, the paper reveals Pa'ikwené mathematics not as a cognitive system detached from the human sphere, but, rather, very much grounded in it. As such, it considers mathematics an embodied, experiential and innately metaphorical (Lakoff & Nuñez 2000) mode of knowledge for classifying and expressing the lived-in world. In line with this, it is argued that Pa'ikwené numbers simultaneously operate at the literal and figurative levels, i.e., both as conventional fixed-meaning symbols and polysemic images of the different classes of things that comprise the Native cosmos.

"The Effectiveness of Symbols" Revisited: Ayoreo Curing Songs
John Renshaw
Consultant, Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo
United Kingdom

In this paper I shall reconsider Lévi-Strauss's well-known, but little discussed, essay on the effectiveness of Amerindian curing songs, using material on sarode or curing songs collected among the Ayoreo of the Gran Chaco during my first period of fieldwork in 1977-78. The paper will attempt to analyse the underlying logic of sarode in the light of the discussions raised by Joanna's introduction to "Reason and Morality" and her article on the "Shaman as a maker of worlds" (Man 1990).
I shall start with a description of the sarode, the types of illness treated and the contexts in which they are used, and will compare them with the Cuna shaman's song discussed by Lévi?Strauss. I will show that although the sarode are rather short and simple compared to the Cuna song, they form part of a corpus of indigenous knowledge - I am apprehensive about using the term "myth" (cf. Overing 1985: 161 footnote 22) - that has to be understood in order to comprehend the source of their "power" or effectiveness. This body of knowledge refers back to a universe of undifferentiated, original people (jnani bajade) that are nowadays animals, plants, things, peoples and so on. I will try to "suspend disbelief" and will argue that at least from the Ayoreo point of view the effectiveness of the sarode derives not from their symbolic or metaphoric value but from their ability to harness the "power" of the "original" plant or animal referred to in the song.

Sensual Shadows, Insensitive Bodies:
Yanesha Non-Corporeal Modes of Sensing and Knowing
Fernando Santos-Granero
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Panama

Yanesha people would agree with Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas in that knowledge can only be achieved through sense perception. They would, however, disagree on what exactly "sense perception" means. In the Western tradition the senses are considered to be the "physiological" methods of perception. We can only know, it is asserted, through the body and its senses: vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. In contrast, Yanesha people view bodily senses as imperfect means of knowing that often obscure or distort the true nature of the world. Only "our shadows" (yechoyeshem), they argue, are endowed with the proper senses that allow for a correct perception and thus for the possibility of "true" knowledge. It is for this reason that, from a Yanesha point of view, shadow souls are sensual whereas bodies are considered to be somewhat insensitive. Yanesha recognize three circumstances in which shadows are free to exercise their sensual capacities and thus engage in processes of knowing: 1. while people are asleep; 2. during ritual vigils; and 3. after consuming narcotics or hallucinogens. From a Western perspective under such circumstances the corporeal senses are diminished, deprived, numbed, or overstimulated. From a Yanesha perspective they are simply left behind together with the body, thus allowing the senses of the detached shadows to become activated. This paper explores Yanesha non-corporeal modes of knowledge, as well as their theories of perception and technologies of sensing. It also evaluates how knowledge acquired through the shadow's senses differs from that obtained through the body's senses.

Pakara - The Basket of Knowledge
George Mentore
University of Virginia

At the same time that, in June 1982, when 900 devout exiled North American Christians were killing themselves and their children in the northern forests of Guyana, the Waiwai, living further south on the headwaters of the Essequibo River, perplexedly sought to make sense of what to them registered initially not only as an extraordinary event at the extreme end of their capacity for understanding, but also as an apocalyptic prophecy predicted both by missionary biblical teaching and their own traditional mythical knowledge. Distant from Waiwai territorial space and cultural logic, the event of mass suicide marked yet another realization of the tangible yet strange and dangerous character of the world beyond the ewtoto (village community). The Waiwai have for a very long time known and even experienced some of the strange and dangerous world beyond the intimacy and safety of their community. Such knowledge and experience have mostly been disarticulated from normal village life and placed in the discursive terrain of storytelling, one with a remarkable similarity in technique to the woven design of the shaman's basket. Between the structure as well as the role of storytelling and the deliberate design of the shaman's basket, a technique for diverting danger by containment can be apprehended. The apocalyptic dark shamanic powers of the outside world may be kept at bay by the wisdom of a woven pattern, which ultimately entraps danger within the pakara - the basket of knowledge.

"You Shall Have the Poor with You Always" (Matt. 26:11)
Images of Suffering and Charity With-in Juazeiro do Norte:
Utopia and Sociality

Roberta Bivar C. Campos
University of Pernambuco-Brazil

This article provides a discussion on how images of charity are related to an ideal image of society - a Utopia. By going deeper into the relation between images of suffering, poverty and mendicancy I explore how a group of penitents "the Ave de Jesus" from Juazeiro do Norte (Ceará-Brazil) creates a sociality based on generosity, hospitality and sharing whereby they realize a messianic expectation. The major argument leads to amore general discussion of the bases of social life, the material on the Ave de Jesus serving to stress the significance of sociality based on charity and a whole complex organized around it that challenges some classical anthropological theory on gift-reciprocity.

Bororo Funerals:
Images of the Re-facement of the World
Sylvia Caiuby Novaes
University Of San Paulo, Brazil

I analyse, in this paper, Bororo funerals as moments of defacement and refacement (Taussig, 1999). Death starts a series of transformations that involve the dead person, the corpse itself, the soul, the making of the deceased's representative and the relationships among the living. All these transformations are ritually performed and are objects of public secrecy. Data accompanied by a selection of photographs taken by myself during 30 years of field research among the Bororo Indians of Mato Grosso, Brazil, will be presented in order to illustrate Bororo funerals as moments when society has to be recreated.

Matsigenka corporeality: a non-biological reality:
On notions of body shape and the constitution of identity.
Dan Rosengren
University of Göteborg, Sweden.

In this paper I challenge notions of the knowing body that presently are argued to be an aspect of the multinaturalism that is part of Amazonian perspectivism. The argument is based on conceptions of identity that among the Matsigenka is seen as something more stable and enduring than bodily form since it requires passing a formative process of socialization (in a wide sense).
Peter Gow
University of St. Andrews
(title to be announced)
Peter Gow
University of St. Andrews
(title to be announced)

Joanna Overing
University of St. Andrews
(title to be announced)

Dell Hymes
University of Virginia