Peace and Knowledge Politics in the Upper Xingu

Abstract

With special reference to the Tupi-speaking Aweti people, this article reconsiders the nature of Xinguan pacifism in an analysis of sorcery and its relation to war in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil. It is argued that the mechanism that keeps violence there under control is probably less the result of an applied pacifist ideology—that is, rejection of war as the socius's generative matrix—than the effect of a specific conception of knowledge. It is through the Xinguans' refusal of the idea of singular truth, rather than through their rejection of war, that their logic is “good to think” through the question of peace. This article divides roughly into two parts, the first concentrating on Xinguan sorcery, and the second on their knowledge politics.