Culture and Self

Abstract

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Affordances of Rupture and their Enactment: A Framework for Understanding Christian Change

“…Some scholars argue that conversion to Christianity represents a radical rupture and a major 'break with the past' (e.g., Robbins 2007;Meyer 1998a), while others emphasise the significant continuities they see with regard to cultural ideas, categories and concerns (e.g., Hann and Goltz 2010;Hirsch 2008;Scott 2005). New ethnographic cases that support one or other side of the debate continue to be published (e.g., Luehrmann 2010; Schwarz and Dussart 2010;Vilaça 2014), but while these studies often exhibit very sophisticated theorising, there has as yet been no general theoretical framework advanced that can make sense of all of the ethnographic findings and offer an underlying logic to explain why it appears that in some cases there is more continuity and, in others, more rupture. This article therefore develops a comparative framework to make sense of the varieties of Christian change.…”

“…A small number of studies compare different communities within the same ethnic group who convert to different forms of Christianity (e.g., McDougall 2009;Vilaça 2014) and there has been some interest in cross-regional comparisons, particularly between Amazonia and Melanesia (e.g., Robbins, Schieffelin and Vilaça 2014). As yet, however, there has been no attempt to take a salient theoretical debate from within the sub-discipline and seek to address it by using a broad comparative approach.…”

Performing Contested Lands: Conservation and the Conflictive Enactments of Indigenous Territoriality in Lowland Ecuador

“…Yet such descriptions of environmental subjectivity make for an uneasy fit with how the Siekopai see their forest and themselves, as their self is not considered an inner entity on which ‘technologies of the self’ can be put to work (Foucault, 1991; see also Cepek, 2011). As the literature on personhood in Amazonia suggests, the self is relational and transformational, constituted by different bodily states of being, which one can transit between (Vilaça, 2014). This ‘multi‐naturalism’, as Viveiros de Castro has called it (Viveiros de Castro, 1998: 477), also carries the analytical implication that instead of thinking with one external reality forming the basis for a multitude of human claims, representations and stories, land should be thought of as contested and emergent multiplicities that are enacted by shifting assemblages of human and non‐human beings.…”