Dividuality in Amazonia: God, the Devil, and the constitution of personhood in Wari' Christianity

Abstract

This article explores the Christian experience of the Wari', an Amazonian native group, in light of a central feature of their personhood: its dual composition, both human and animal. Arguing that the centrality of the relation with God has resulted in a more stable human person, the article provides an ethnographic examination of how this relation is produced and maintained. Analytic categories derived from the New Melanesian Ethnography – the notions of the ‘dividual’ and the ‘partible person’– are applied to the Amazonian context, enabling a particular description of the Wari' person and the Christian God, and the subsequent visualization of some key aspects of the relationship between God and humans. Through this comparative exercise, the article looks to contribute to the dialogue between Amazonianists and Melanesianists that has been unfolding over the past decade or so. It also aims to insert Amazonian ethnography into the anthropological debate on Christianity, today strongly anchored in data and conceptual tools derived from Pacific societies in general and Melanesia in particular. Résumé L'auteure étudie l'expérience chrétienne des Wari', un groupe autochtone d'Amazonie, à la lumière d'un trait central de leur conception de la personne : sa composition duale, à la fois humaine et animale. Partant de l'idée que la centralité de la relation avec Dieu a donné naissance à une personne humaine plus stable, l'article examine du point de vue ethnographique la manière dont cette relation est créée et entretenue. Les catégories analytiques issues de la Nouvelle ethnographie mélanésienne (notions de personne « dividuelle » et « partible ») sont appliquées au contexte amazonien, permettant ainsi une description particulière de la personne Wari' et du Dieu chrétien et la visualisation de certains aspects fondamentaux de la relation entre Dieu et les humains. Par cet exercice comparatif, l'auteure cherche à contribuer au dialogue entre amazonistes et mélanésianistes qui s'est établi depuis une dizaine d'années. Elle cherche aussi à insérer l'ethnographie de l'Amazonie dans le débat anthropologique sur le christianisme, aujourd'hui solidement ancré dans les données et les outils conceptuels issus des sociétés du Pacifique en général, et de la Mélanésie en particulier.

Culture and Self

“…As I have tried to show elsewhere (Vilaça 2009), "conversion," as a change in worldview, had already been conceived by the Wari' in one of their myths. In the latter, the ancestors fed only on lizards, because they saw all the other animals as jaguars and fled from them in terror.…”

“…(Montoya 1985:57, in Chamorro 1998 The same occurred in other regions of America, as Laugrand (1997) has shown in his analysis of the Christianization of the Inuit (Canada), whose shamans also appropriated attributes of the missionaries as a form of differentiation and empowerment. The problem, it was clear, was not one of belief (Pouillon 1993;Robbins 2007;Vilaça 1997). The existence of the new divinities was not questioned, and the focus was on learning how to interact with them in order to obtain specific results, such as immortality, understood as the end of illness and death (Viveiros de Castro 1992de Castro , 2002.…”

“…The generalized fraternity proposed by Christianity and performed in rites of commensality enabled them to mitigate another aspect of predation, namely, the harm caused by affines through fights and sorcery. By eclipsing affinity, the Wari' momentarily relieved themselves of this danger (Vilaça 1997). Because it involved kinship, Christianity was necessarily a collective experience (see Gow 2006), distant from the individual conversions expected by the missionaries.…”

“…A Wari' group peacefully approached the house of the Protestant missionaries for the first time in 1956 (Vilaça 2010).…”

“…Consequently, the subjectification of the animals results in a constant fear of undesired transformations, which primarily threaten their children. One of the modes of resolving the problem is through the process of making kin (Vilaça 2002a(Vilaça , 2005, which is a means of stabilizing bodies, differentiating a collective human identity out of a generalized humanity of which animals form part, by sharing food, bodily substances, care, memories, and affects. This amounts to a continuous investment, therefore, that must necessarily be shared by everyone.…”