Janet Chernela

SALSA 2007
Santa Fe, New Mexico
January 12-15, 2007

Hotel St. Francis
210 Don Gaspar Ave.

The latest program information is replicated below, including some abstracts.

Links to Word and PDF versions of this information are given at the bottom of the page. A link to the SALSA-Tipiti home page, where you can register on-line, is also given there.

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SALSA V CONFERENCE PROGRAM

Session 1: Landscape, Memory, and Identity

Michael Heckenberger
Amazonian Natures: The Body, the Land, and the Spaces in Between

Arroyo-Kalin, M., Neves, E. G., Lima, H. P, Morães, C., Bartone, B.,
Costa, F.
Towards a Historical Ecology of the Central Amazon Region

Beth A. Conklin
Lessons from the Amazon?

Warren R. DeBoer
Palladia, Prisoners, and Parole: Units of Cultural Transmission in Ucayali Deep History

Miguel N. Alexiades
Headwaters of the Past: Ethnoecology, Memory, and the Struggle for Nature in a Western Amazonian Landscape

H. Dieter Heinen and Rafael Gassón
Levantamiento de los caños y asentamientos de los indigenas

Meredith Dudley
Intermediation, Ethnogenesis, and the Enigmatic Apolistas: Interpreting Arawak Influence in the Bolivian Piedmont

Love Eriksen and Alf Hornborg
Places and Paths: An Attempt to Assess and Map the Archaeological and Historical Evidence of Long-Distance Exchange Relations in Pre-Colonial Amazonia

Session 2: History, Cosmology, and Materiality

Robert L. Carneiro
Cannibalism, a Palatable/Unpalatable Reality of Amazonian Ethnology

Laura Rival
Warfare and Human Sacrifice in the Americas

Thomas Moore
Perspectives of Nineteenth-century Explorers in the Madre de Dios Basin (Peru and Bolivia)

Astrid Steverlynck
The Women of Matininó: Amazons, Exchange and the Origins of Society

Allyn MacLean Stearman and Eugenio Stierlin
Traditional Knowledge and Uses of Beeswax Among the Yuquí of the Bolivian Amazon

Loretta A. Cormier
Ethnoprimatology and the Neo-tropical Malarias

William H. Crocker
Canela Emic Structuralism: Collected in 1979, field replicated in 2005

Paul Valentine
Gender Politics: A Re-Analysis of the Kuai Myth

Minna Opas
Piro Cosmovision and Modernisation

Session 3: Personhood, Morality, and Politics

Laura Bathurst
Being a Good Person: Give and Take among the Tacana of Northern Bolivia

Evan Killick
The Role of Compadrazgo (Co-Parenthood) in Inter-Ethnic Relations in Peruvian Amazonia

Carlos David Londoño Sulkin
Evaluations of the Morality of Gendered Persons among People of the Center (Colombian Amazon)

Amy McLachlan
Sólo las brujas mambean!

Sara Jamieson
Wayuu Girls’ Initiation Rituals in an Urban Context

Carmen da Silva
The Trauma of Losing One’s Society: Xetá women who Survived the Genocide

George Mentore
Communitas in the Role of Articulating Relations between Violence and Power

Laura C. Mentore
Seeing Kinship in the Analysis of Indigenous Land Rights in Guyana

Michael L. Cepek
Of Worlds and Their Creators: Difference and Power in Cofán Politics

Session 4: Discursive Practice, Narrative, and Agency

Ellen B. Basso
Kalapalo Epistemology and Amazonian Perspectivism

E. Jean Langdon
Dialogicality, Conflict and Memory in Siona Historical Narratives

Waud Kracke
Agency in a Tupí Culture: Ergativity, Shamanism and the Visual Representation of Myths

Suzanne Oakdale
New Table Manners: Food and Ethnic Transformations

Daniela Peluso
When Names become Faces: Inter-Community Video-Messaging among the Ese Eja of Bolivia and Peru

Hanne Veber
“Let's go and ...!” Notions of leadership as reflected in autobiographical chronicles by Asháninka leaders

Giovanna Bacchiddu
From Mouse to Lion: Jokes and their Counter-Value in Apiao Society

Abstracts submitted for SALSA 2007

Miguel N. Alexiades

Headwaters of the past: Ethnoecology, memory, and the struggle for nature in a western Amazonian landscape

Dwelled in, travelled, utilized, remembered and evoked in many and continuously changing ways, the Ese Eja landscape is filled with living objects, topographical features, place names and stories. Together, these different elements speak of a complex history involving a continuous transformation of social and ecological relations. This paper examines how these transformations unfold within a booming environmental service economy, in which the meanings, access and history of this landscape are contested in new ways.

Arroyo-Kalin, M., Neves, E. G., Lima, H. P, Morães, C., Bartone, B., Costa, F.

Towards a historical ecology of the central Amazon region

Data generated by the Central Amazon Project over the last decade are articulated in this paper to present a broad overview of pre-Columbian anthropogenic landscape transformations in the central Amazon region. This sets the stage to explore important questions about the significance of landscape resilience for the socio-historical trajectories that flourished in the heart of the Amazon prior to the expansion of European colonisation.

Giovanna Bacchiddu

From mouse to lion: jokes and their counter-value in Apiao society

This paper explores issues of communication through jokes and lies. In Apiao, a small island of southern Chile with 700 inhabitants, joking is a typical communicational feature between close relatives, neighbors, and friends; sexual jokes, nicknames and teasing are commonly heard as a device to build up and display social relations. Jokes are based on partial alteration of the truth, with the explicit purpose of laughing. However, the boundaries between jokes and lies are often blurred. “From a mouse, they make a lion,” as they say in the island. A lie – the deliberately harmful transformation of events – entails invention of calumnies and false stories to expressively hurt people. Where does the joke end, and the lie begin? The paper will describe the genesis of several jokes and lies, putting them in their ethnographic context, and will examine the implications of this common social practice for those involved in it. Following Nancy Munn’s notion of value transformation (1986), lies are viewed as the “counter-value” of jokes – the transformation and subversion of a positive value necessary to the well-being of the community.

Ellen B. Basso

Kalapalo epistemology and Amazonian perspectivism

Kalapalo, a Carib language spoken in the Alto Xingu, Mato Grosso Brazil, exhibits a grammaticalized epistemological marking system. Using examples from informal, ritual and narrative communication, I discuss the grammatical and semantic features involved, and conclude with some thoughts on the relevance of “perspectivism” for understanding this aspect of discursive interaction in Kalapalo.

Laura Bathurst

Being a Good Person: Give and Take among the Tacana of Northern Bolivia

In this paper, I explore the social value of theft as a leveling mechanism in the assertively egalitarian Tacana community of Santa Rosa, Bolivia. First, I examine the material basis for Santa Rosan egalitarianism. Then I turn to the social enforcement of egalitarianism by both overt and covert means, including theft. Third, I look at egalitarianism as a value, tied to Santa Rosan ideas of what makes someone a good person. Finally, I link this material, social, and moral order to the conflicted relationships between Santa Rosans and outsiders with whom they interact, outsiders whom, in the eyes of Santa Rosans, often act like bad people. The actions and reactions of Santa Rosans and their neighbors to governmental and humanitarian aid are rooted in this interrelated social, cultural, and material universe, which provides a basis for their understanding of these interventions.

Robert L. Carneiro

Cannibalism, a Palatable/Unpalatable Reality of Amazonian Ethnology

Because of William Arens’ book, The Man-Eating Myth, many people – including even some anthropologists – came to doubt that cannibalism had ever existed. But the evidence in favor of its occurrence is overwhelming, especially that from such Amazonian tribes as the Tupinamba and the Callinago. I will describe these as well as other more recent instances of cannibalism in Amazonia, and will discuss the motivations and other features of the practice.

Michael L. Cepek

Of Worlds and Their Creators: Difference and Power in Cofán Politics

In this paper, I explore the ethnically ambiguous leadership of lowland South American messianic movements. Many of the prophets, shamans, and headmen who directed these episodes of indigenous political action have been identified as mestizo colonists, Andean religious assistants, European missionaries, and Afro-Peruvian guerrillas, to name just a few of the examples. I focus on the contemporary case of Randy Borman, the trilingual, genealogically Euro-American, and indigenous-identifying “gringo chief” who has become the most important leader of the Cofán people of Amazonian Ecuador. Through an ethnographic analysis of Borman’s socio-political position, I make a case for reconceptualizing the relationship between myth, history, cosmology, agency and identity in indigenous Amazonian political movements.

Beth A. Conklin

Lessons from the Amazon?

If we lowland South Americanists were asked to pinpoint our work’s relevance to ”big” questions about the future of humanity and the planet, what would we say? Amazonia has long held a privileged place in western imaginations and
intellectual thought about nature and culture. In the 1980s-90s, cultural ecology, ethnobiology, and ethnographies of indigenous resource management, consumption, labor, and leisure became powerful factors in environmental policy debates and quality of life discussions. Today, new research on anthropogenesis challenges conservation orthodoxies, while ethnographers grappling with how to interpret and support native communities’ responses to modernity challenge orthodox primitivisms that underlie the romance with the indigenous in popular critiques of capitalism and globalization. Taking the often maddeningly unromantic story of the Wari of western Brazil as its ethnographic orientation, this paper invites reflection on what Amazonian ethnology has to contribute to critical thought about alternatives in environmentalism and global consumer culture.

Loretta A. Cormier

Ethnoprimatology and the Neo-tropical Malarias

The importance of human cultural behavior in the disease ecology of malaria has been clear at least since Livingstone’s (1958) groundbreaking study describing the interrelationships among iron tools, swidden horticulture, vector proliferation, and increased frequency of sickle cell trait in tropical Africa. In tropical South America, little attention has been given to cultural behaviors among indigenous peoples that may affect the disease ecology of malaria. One area of potential significance for malaria involves the relationship between human groups and Neo-tropical monkeys that may be both hunted as food and kept as pets. Such close interactions set up an environment where diseases can be shared. Neo-tropical monkeys have long been suspected to serve as reservoirs for malaria in lowland South America, serving as amplifying agents in a forest enzootic cycle. This paper will focus on the relationship between human Plasmodium malariae and Neo-tropical monkey P. brasilianum in Amazonia.

William H. Crocker

Canela Emic Structuralism: Collected in 1979, field replicated in 2005

At SALSA 2005, I described the Canela emic structuralism (The Canela, 1990, Part V, Smithsonian) that I derived in the field from informants. At Estes Park, I said I would test my 1979 data again among the Canela during 2005. I did this, so now I am presenting the results by answering the question, Was the 1979 emic structuralism replicated in 2005? Mostly yes for structure, but sometimes no for traditional dualities. The Canela have two kinds of dualism, complementary and oppositional, not one. For the structuring by prepositional phrases, triads are more characteristic than dyads. I still found inanimate, animate, mediating, protecting, transforming, and generating categories of triadic structures, but the traditional ways of marking time and dividing the color spectrum were largely lost, and some 1979 relationships were challenged with objective and diachronic thinking by grammar school informants. What does this signify for Northern Gê ethnology, structuralism, dualism?

Carmen da Silva

The Trauma of Losing One’s Society: Xetá women who Survived the Genocide

When the genocide of the Xetá Indians was brought to an end around 1964, three young girls were among the eight survivors. Each of the three developed her own form of resistance against the impact of the traumas suffered after the sudden and violent separation from her society. Their memories of their tragic past remained dormant, or forgotten, until the beginning of the anthropological research opened a space for their speech. Then they could tell their stories, and were reunited with their fellow survivors, which enabled them to reawaken these memories, with the help of the different strategies employed during the course of the ethnographic work. This paper will present a brief history of the life of one Xetá woman who survived the extermination of her society. Brought up by a non-indigenous family, unable to share the codes of her culture with others, isolated and victimized by the tragedies and dramas that touched her life, this girl still identified herself and recognized herself as a member of a society socio-culturally distinct from the one she had lived in since the age of 7.

Warren R. DeBoer

Palladia, Prisoners, and Parole: Units of Cultural Transmission in Ucayali Deep History

The culture history of the Ucayali Basin, Peru, is characterized by long periods of continuity punctuated by brief episodes of seeming disjuncture. In Donald Lathrap’s vision, disjuncture was to be explained in terms of wholesale demographic shifts in genes, cognates, and potsherds, while continuity could be seen as ordinary “descent with modification” resulting from frail human memories, mutable practices, and an unspecified dose of selection. This paper attempts to problematize both continuity and disjuncture in terms of three factors relevant to the transmission and replication of cultural information: the role of material objects of variable longevity (including culturally marked features of landscape) in canalizing culture change; the movement of human bodies across cultural boundaries and the belated enculturation programs designed to convert such migrants into loyal culture-bearers; and the extent to which language promotes or impedes these material flows.

Meredith Dudley

Intermediation, Ethnogenesis, and the Enigmatic Apolistas: Interpreting Arawak Influence in the Bolivian Piedmont

The Apolistas are often referenced as an example of the westward expansion of Arawak peoples and involvement with Andean-Amazonian intermediation routes. Yet who are the enigmatic Apolistas? Although treated by D’Orbigny as a distinct ethnic group, the term “Apolista” derives from the name for the Franciscan mission center of Apolo, founded in 1696 with Lecos, Aguachile, and Pamainos peoples. The term appears in the documentary record at the same time as other “chunchos” tribes disappear. Apolistas were associated
with the Lapacho language, which appears to have an Arawak substrate. Although
Apolistas are considered extinct, descendents of Lapacho-speakers form an important component of the contemporary indigenous movement to recuperate Lecos heritage. This paper will examine historical processes of ethnogenesis that occurred in this dynamic region of Andean-Amazonian interaction, and discuss Arawak cultural affinities exhibited by the contemporary Lecos of Apolo.

Love Eriksen and Alf Hornborg

Places and paths: an attempt to assess and map the archaeological and historical evidence of long-distance exchange relations in pre-colonial Amazonia

In A Phenomenology of Landscape, Christopher Tilley mentions two fundamental components in the archaeological understanding of landscapes: (1) the significance of place names as constitutive of the very existence of “places,” and (2) the role of “paths” connecting places as codifications of social processes. In reconstructing pre-colonial landscapes in Amazonia, we can assemble various kinds of evidence for the existence of both “places” and “paths.” Places can be inferred from e.g. archaeological sites, petroglyphs, and oral history. In contrast to areas with ancient road networks, such as the Andes, the closest thing to “paths” in Amazonia is the system of rivers that served as the main arteries of travel and trade. This paper is a work-in-progress report from a project hoping to reconstruct the nature, extent, and time-depth of trade routes in greater Amazonia 500 BC to AD 1500. Using GIS cartography, the ambition is to plot various long-distance connections inferred from archaeology and ethnohistory and their distribution in time and space.

Michael Heckenberger

Amazonian Natures: The Body, the Land, and the Spaces in Between

This paper explores the dynamic relations between native peoples and their lands in ancient Amazonia. First, it examines broad patterns in material culture and built environment in several well-known areas along the Amazon (Marajó, Santarém, Manaus) to reveal aspects of dwelling and anthropogenic landscapes. Second, it compares these to patterns in the southern Amazon, particularly among related Arawakan speaking groups (Baure, Pareci, and
Xinguano). Third, the Xinguano case is highlighted to briefly elucidate the environmental history of this one region from late pre-Columbian times to the present and explore the importance of human agency in creating anthropogenic landscapes and the historical conditions of their change and changes in how they are analyzed and portrayed by Western commentators. Finally, it asks the questions: what constitutes social complexity and are there
things about it that are uniquely produced by or produce what is commonly construed as Amazonian “nature.”

H. Dieter Heinen and Rafael Gassón

Levantamiento de los caños y asentamientos de los indigenas

En el Delta del Orinoco hay por los menos cuatro idiomas que influenciaron la toponimia: el Warao (en sus dos acepciones Waraowitu y Siawani o Chaguanes); Aruaca (Lokono); Caribe (Kar’iña, Ye’kwana y Pemon); y Criolla (Jotarao; vernáculo Venezolano). Los Criollos de Tucupita tratan de implementar los conceptos geográficos europeos de cursos hidrográficos largos. Así, la mayoría de los caños grandes tienen una sola denominación mientras que los nombres Warao son tipicamente puntuales. Sin embargo, este esfuerzo es parcial y, además lleva a graves distorciones, como se ve en los caños (mal llamado) Jobure, Wina Morena, Capure, etc. demuestra. El propósito de la presente ponencia-proyecto es definer, y en casos recuperar, la toponimia indígena. En lo siguiente presentamos algunos casos que justifican esta tarea e indicamos los procedimientos previstos, así que apuntamos las diferencias elementales entre los conceptos hidrográficos Warao y Criollo.

Sara Jamieson

Wayuu Girls’ Initiation Rituals in an Urban Context

This paper examines the changes in form and meaning that the Wayuu girls’ puberty ritual is undergoing in the urban context of Maracaibo, Venezuela. As Wayuu migrate to the city from the rural peninsula, they continue to emphasize that this rite is about the appropriate moral and physical formation of girls. The rite should produce a person who is alaula sain (has the spirit of an old woman), who is koojutsu (socially respected) and will remain chaste until marriage. Using narratives of mothers and daughters , I show how mothers’ motivations to perform the puberty rite for their daughters reflect redefinitions of what it means to be alaula sain in an urban context and draw attention to differences in the way that mothers as opposed to daughters describe the importance of this rite.

Evan Killick

The role of compadrazgo (co-parenthood) in inter-ethnic relations in Peruvian Amazonia

This paper examines social relationships between indigenous people and mestizos in the Ucayali region of eastern Peru. It starts from the observation that where mestizos build relationships with indigenous peoples they prefer to do so through the institution of compadrazgo (co-parenthood). The paper analyses why mestizos choose to construe what are essentially economic relations in terms of shared god-parenthood rather than through other idioms such as kinship, friendship, or hierarchical difference. Through an examination of how compadrazgo relates to other local relationship idioms, and its apparent similarities to indigenous ceremonial and trading partnerships, the paper engages with ongoing academic debates over the relative importance of difference and similarity in Lowland South American societies and seeks to extend and assess the pertinence of theoretical concepts derived from Amazonian anthropology to societies normally considered ‘non-indigenous.’

Waud Kracke

Agency in a Tupí Culture: Ergativity, Shamanism and the Visual Representation of Myths

Like many, perhaps a majority of languages in Lowland South America, and like the other languages of the Tupí family, the Kagwahiv language is partially ergative (or “split ergative”) in form. In this paper, I will set out some of the grammatical characteristics of the Kagwahiv language that make it ergative in some constructions, and nominative-accusative in others. Then I will go on to talk about certain domains of the Kagwahiv-speaking Parintintin culture – the conception of shamanism, the mechanism of food taboos, relations with animal species and with enemies, and myth – and how thinking about these domains reflects the mode of thinking implicit in ergativity. The eldest of my Parintintin informants, Paulinho, proved unexpectedly to be a talented artist. Using pads of drawing paper and colored pencils I provided, he made drawings that illustrated (or rather, represented) a series of traditional stories and myths. These drawings themselves provide insights into the significance of the myths, and examples of the kind of treatment of agency that reflects the presuppositions of the ergative structure.

E. Jean Langdon

Dialogicality, Conflict and Memory in Siona Historical Narratives

Two themes, native versions of contact and the performative approach as revealing individual and collective identity, form the background of this paper, which focuses on conflict, memory and identity in Siona oral history. Previously I have demonstrated that the Siona Indians of the Colombian Amazon reconstruct past events in the context of the larger cosmological scheme which accords their shamans the key role in defending them from the invaders. The focus in this paper is upon narrative strategies, such as quoted speech and dialogic conversation, used by a particular narrator, in order to highlight previously ignored aspects of the nature of conflict and its place in the construction of their past and present identities. Analysis of his narratives, biography, and relation with my research demonstrates the unfolding of history and identity through the presentation of different voices and conflicting dialogues.

Carlos David Londoño Sulkin

Evaluations of the morality of gendered persons among People of the Center (Colombian Amazon)

A Muinane man (People of the Center, Colombian Amazon) once explained to me that when a man asked a prospective father-in-law properly for his daughter, by providing a “wedding basket” full of tobacco paste, coca, starch, vegetable salt, and game, he could protect his wife better. Should she get sick, he could say (ritually), “I did not steal her! I gave good tobacco for her, so who can protest, and make her sick?” His matter-of-fact tone alluded to the obviousness of the workings of a certain kind of cosmos, and to the nature of gendered kinds of beings in that cosmos. I analyze how discursive and non-discursive practices concerning these “payments,” of which the man’s statement was an example, construct gendered personhood.

Amy McLachlan

Sólo las brujas mambean!

Among People of the Centre (Colombian Amazon), human subjectivity is the product of active, nurturing care by kin, and social life is centered on the creation of moral, properly human agents. While important work has been done on the constitution, contestation and citation of moral male subjectivity and agency, there is a paucity of research on the making, mattering and evaluation of moral feminine subjectivity. In this context, where “sameness” is created through the sharing of substances (food, tobacco), people also work to make difference through substances. While food works to unmake difference, ritual substances make and mark gender difference. It seems that an important site of difference-making is the mouth. Significant differences exist in which ritual substances enter the mouths of men and women, and in the moral evaluations people produce with reference to “orality,” in its various senses.

George Mentore

Communitas in the Role of Articulating Relations between Violence and Power

In continuing my current project to find ways in which I can provide anthropological evidence for convincing Western political paradigms that other societies do have established modes for disarticulating violence from power, this paper experiments with the use of the Turnerian concept of communitas for Lowland South American societies. I will be taking the theoretical “gap” or liminality between the world-presented and the world-represented as the site in which all social beings at some time find themselves. What causes societies to give different interpretative value and meaning to this experience will be judged as a principal contributing factor to the differently expressed relations between violence and power.

Laura C. Mentore

Seeing Kinship in the Analysis of Indigenous Land Rights in Guyana

This essay presents a case argument for the relevance of kinship and relationality in anthropological theorizing on indigenous land rights in Amazonia. Drawing upon my fieldwork in Guyana and among the Waiwai, I argue that certain kinship principals of patriarchy and descent are analogically embedded within the Guyanese state’s perspective on its relationship to land and the Waiwai. This perspective is compared to kinship principles of affinity and marriage embedded within the Waiwai discourse and tactical approach to seeking from the Guyanese state legal title to lands. Differences between state and Waiwai perspectives on relationality shed important light on the multi-perspectival social life of land, its value, and its connection to the human world. Yet it is the underlying similarity between the Guyanese state and the Waiwai (that moral principles of kinship and relationality are integral to their perspectives on land rights) which demonstrates the relevance of “traditional” kinship studies in our analysis of this “current” issue in Amazonia.

Thomas Moore

Perspectives of Nineteenth-century Explorers in the Madre de Dios Basin (Peru and Bolivia)

The earliest ethnographic references to peoples clearly identifiable as Harakmbut- or Takana-speakers are provided by nineteenth-century explorers. This paper addresses the accounts of William Miller, José Domingo Espinar, Julián Bovo de Revello, Lardner Gibbon, Herman Göhring, and Nicolás Armentia. These authors, none of which was Peruvian or Bolivian, clearly identified their interests with efforts by highland elites to articulate highland markets with lowland areas where they perceived a potential for commercial activity. Their accounts are reviewed in the context of the political economy of the region at the time of writing, ideological paradigms of their times, and the personal biographies of the authors. With the exception of Armentia, who was an early contemporary, all of the accounts discussed here were prior to the rubber boom, which brought about a more direct and more intense encounter between these lowland Indians and Western economic interests.

Suzanne Oakdale

New Table Manners: Food and Ethnic Transformations

This paper focuses on the life histories of several Tupi-speaking Kayabi men whose lives spanned the twentieth century. Their narratives offer an unusually rich picture of how Brazilian government policies such as “pacification,” the push toward “assimilation” or, more recently, the encouragement to “maintain indigenous culture” are understood from indigenous perspectives. These autobiographical accounts give a sense for both how these men understood government officials’ perspectives on these processes, but also how they interpreted them and the social relations they encouraged in Kayabi terms. Echoing research on the importance of bodily transformations among lowland peoples (Conklin 1996, 2001; Gow 1991; Seeger, Da Matta, and Viveiros de Castro; Vilaça forthcoming), there is a sense in these men’s narratives that changes in food and eating practices, were key in their own and others’ ethnic transformations.

Minna Opas

Piro cosmovision and modernisation

Amazonian lived worlds have been changing in an increasing pace during the past centuries and especially during the past decades. Growth in paid labour, diversification of industrial goods available and the concomitant creation of necessities, better possibilities for basic education, introduction of clinical health care and missionary activities all have had a strong effect on the lives of indigenous people. These influences find their way also into people’s cosmovision and relations with different non-human beings. In this paper, I shall examine how these modern elements come to be incorporated into the social cosmos of the Arawakan- speaking Piro people of the Peruvian Amazon. In what ways does “modernization” affect Piro relations with the non-humans belonging to their cosmos and how does it transform their views on the non-humans themselves? I shall also try to generate comprehension of why these modern elements enter into Piro relations with some beings but not with others.

Daniela Peluso

When names become faces: inter-community video-messaging among the Ese Eja of Bolivia and Peru

This paper is based on over a decade of video messages sent between Ese Eja individuals living in distant communities. When in 1995 an Ese Eja friend in Bolivia asked to send a message to his relatives in Peru, he initiated a series of recorded messages – what I call video-messaging – between individuals and families in distant communities. Despite many of the sequences being filmed and elicited by Ese Eja individuals, these videotexts are not part of the “indigenous media” genre in its strict sense, rather, they offer alternatives to how theorists have depicted Amazonian’s motivations for using video technology. What I would like to examine in this paper is the confrontational character, so unusual for Ese Eja public dialogues, of these messages. Here, I would like to explore how and why video seems to accommodate the communication of conflict and tensions allowing for a novel opportunity for the expression of controversy.

Laura Rival

Warfare and human sacrifice in the Americas

This paper attempts to develop a renewed understanding of body/soul dualism in Amerindian thought systems and ritual practices, and asks the following question: How valid and insightful would it be to rethink Amazonian warfare in the light of anthropological theories of sacrifice?

Allyn MacLean Stearman and Eugenio Stierlin

Traditional Knowledge and Uses of Beeswax Among the Yuquí of the Bolivian Amazon

The Yuquí of lowland Bolivia use beeswax as a natural cement in several traditional technologies, especially arrow-making. The beeswax is colleced from various species of native stingless bees of the family Apidae, subfamily Meliponinae, and has a high resin content. This resin turns the wax dark or “black” in color, which explains the origin of the name “black beeswax” (cera negra). Each species of Meliponinae is identified by name by the Yuquí, who select beeswax from particular species during the fabrication of arrows based on the properties of that wax. Thus, although all wax on an arrow appears to be simply “black beeswax,” each component of the arrow receives a different treatment. Mass spectrometer analyses were run on several samples of this wax to determine its resin composition and also the variation in wax properties among species that would explain the chemical basis for distinct uses in arrrow-making. Finally, this study looks at how acculturation is affecting the perpetuation of traditional uses of beeswax and other products derived from native bees such as honey.

Astrid Steverlynck

The Women of Matininó: Amazons, exchange and the origins of society

The myth of the Women of Matininó collected by Fray Ramón Pané in 1494 leads us to explore the exchange of ciba and guanín and other symbolic objects described in other myths of amazon-like women in lowland South America. These myths provide a metaphysical commentary on the world of Amerindians, and in particular they refer to the role and meaning of exchange in this world. Two propositions can be worked out from an analysis of these myths. First, the myths support, at the symbolic level, a widespread network of exchange of valuables in lowland South America (Boomert 1987). Second, the stories refer to the exchange between men and women as the general model of human social relationships. In this context, exchange is no longer defined by the relationships between men through women, as with Lévi-Strauss (1949), but by the relationships between men and women through symbolic objects which then reproduce this creative moment at other levels of exchange involving different entities.

Paul Valentine

Gender Politics: A Re-Analysis of the Kuai Myth

The Curripaco are an Arawak-speaking people located in the Northwest Amazon. Their mythology was collected in Curripaco. Their key myth, the Kuai myth, is a variant of the
Yurupari myth common throughout the region. It recounts the birth of Kuai, his death at the hands of the trickster-hero, and the war between the genders to control his shadow-self, the sacred trumpets. The myth is enacted in ritual and serves ideological functions. This paper addresses the issues that Levi-Strauss and Chris Knight would raise. Does the myth exhibit
fundamental structural features, expressed in terms of oppositions and lunar cycles, concerning the control of women's menstrual and procreative powers?

Hanne Veber

“Let's go and ...!” Notions of leadership as reflected in autobiographical chronicles by Asháninka leaders

On the basis of a series of life-history interviews in Peru’s Selva Central the author discusses contemporary Asháninka notions of leadership and political agency. Interpretation of the narratives draws on observation of Asháninka political activism over an extended period of time and on experiences from previous long-term fieldwork in the area combining henomenological and hermeneutical approaches to the data.

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