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26 - The Inimical Gaze

Morality and the Reproduction of Sociality in Amazonia

from Part IV - Intimate and Everyday Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

By
Carlos D. Londoño Sulkin
Edited by
James Laidlaw
James Laidlaw
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Many Indigenous lowland South American peoples treat the thinking, feeling self as constituted by the process of relating to a panoply of others, including enemies. This need for alterity in the constitution of selves is arguably part of a loose but widespread and enduring pattern – an ‘Amazonian package’ – that also tends to feature claims to the effect that the collective fabrication of beautiful, competent, human bodies is a central purpose of human social life, in the context of a cosmos in which beings with similar bodies perceive each other as human and those with different bodies as non-human. I examine practices and speech genres in which people attribute an evaluative gaze to murdered enemies, sorcerers, would-be lovers, and fishhooks, among other figures of alterity, and I argue that such attributions reflect and reproduce motivating pictures of moral subjects. Over time and motivated by these pictures, people have gone about living their lives such that their evaluative deployments have more or less felicitously interpellated new generations. Morality has thus been central in the reproduction of the Amazonian package. The process, however, is not teleological.

Keywords

Indigenous lowland South American peoplesthe bodymoralityemotionssocial reproductioncosmologysemioticsfeminist film theorythe gazespeech genres
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 649 - 676
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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