"Falas" instrumentais, moralidade e agência masculina entre os Muinane (Amazônia colombiana)

Individuals among People of the Center (Colombian Amazon) produced numerous discursive depictions of themselves and of others, regarding their own competence and morality and others' lacks thereof. Here, I attend particularly to a set of portrayals that pertained mostly to men: those concerning forms of knowledge that each People of the Center deemed uniquely their own. Individuals stressed the great amount of knowledge they possessed, the propriety of their processes of acquisition and the legitimacy of their use of it, its effectiveness and authentically patrilineal character, and the respect and fear others had of them because of it. They also criticized others for shortcomings in these regards. They articulated their evaluations in terms of what they found to be admirable or desirable in gendered human subjectivity and action, in the frame of a perspectival cosmos permeated by predatory relations. I argue that individuals produced such portrayals motivated by desire to embody a certain ideal of masculine agency, and spurred by their awareness of the likelihood that their own actions and subjectivities would be portrayed as immoral, animalistic or otherwise inadequate by others around them. As a whole, the essay stresses the importance of attending ethnographically to individuals' subjectivity.Entre a Gente do Centro (Amazônia colombiana), as pessoas retratam discursivamente a si mesmas e a outrem numerosas vezes, tecendo considerações sobre a competência e a moralidade próprias e a carência alheia dessas qualidades. Neste ensaio, atento para um conjunto particular de retratos discursivos: aqueles que, concernindo especialmente aos homens, se referem a formas de conhecimento que cada grupo da Gente do Centro considera dele próprio e de mais ninguém. Os indivíduos enfatizam a grande quantidade de conhecimento que possuem; a retidão dos processos que levam a cabo para adquiri-lo; a legitimidade do uso que dele fazem; sua eficácia; seu caráter autenticamente patrilinear; e o respeito e medo que, por causa dele, inspiram em outros. Também endereçam críticas a outrem por falhas relativas a esses aspectos. Essas avaliações baseiam-se no que se considera admirável ou desejável na subjetividade e na ação humanas - masculinas e femininas, diferencialmente -, nos marcos de um cosmo perspectivista permeado por relações predatórias. Meu argumento é que os indivíduos produzem tais retratos morais motivados pelo desejo de encorporar um certo ideal de agência masculina, sob o estímulo de saberem provável que suas próprias ações e subjetividades sejam retratadas, por outros à sua volta, como imorais, animalescas ou, de todo modo, inadequadas. O ensaio sublinha, no geral, a importância de atentar-se etnograficamente para a subjetividade dos indivíduos

The making of real people : an interpretation of a morality-centred theory of sociality, livelihood and selfhood among the Muinane (Colombian Amazon)

In this monograph I interpret a wide-ranging native theory of sociality of the Muinane, an indigenous group of the Colombian Amazon. This theory simultaneously addresses their livelihood activities, some aspects of their phenomenological experience, their bodily form, their group identity, and their views on the achievement of a uniquely human, morally sociable way of life. The Muinane understand their thoughts/emotions as well as their bodies to be material in origin and character. Proper bodies and thoughts/emotions are made out of ritual substances and foodstuffs, which have divine subjectivities and agencies of their own, and which ‘sound’ through people, establishing people's subjectivities and agencies. Such subjectivities and agencies lead to the communal achievement of `coolness', the state of convivial sociability, tranquility, abundance and generalised good health that constitutes ideal community life. Because they share substances, kin are also understood to share bodily features and thoughts/emotions. Their consubstantiality leads to mutual love and to an intersubjectivity that enables them to live well together, without unseemly contestations or differences in ultimate moral purposes. However, the material character of bodies and thoughts/emotions is also a source of danger. Animals and other evil beings can sabotage proper community life by replacing people's moral substances with their own false ones, causing people to experience mad, envious, angry and even sorcerous thoughts/emotions, and to suffer from weakening or lethal bodily diseases. It is the moral obligation and inclination of properly constituted human beings to make new human beings, by intentionally forging their bodies, their thoughts/emotions and their ‘baskets of knowledge.’ They must do this by transforming evil substances into proper substances, through work and through everyday or sporadic rituals. The matters addressed in this monograph -native theories of sociality, of self, of livelihood and so on- are of central pertinence to ongoing discussions in Amazonianist anthropology

Fuambai’s strength

Despite Fuambai Ahmadu’s upbringing in the United States, she accepted at the age of twenty-two her mother’s invitation to return to her Kono people in Sierra Leone to undergo their secretive initiation ritual to transform her into an unambiguously female, marriageable adult and a member of the women’s secret Bondo society. The most dramatic part of the ritual involved having the external part of her clitoris and her labia minora excised by a sowei, a woman in charge of such ceremonies. This ritual, known as Bondo, was the feminine counterpart of the Poro initiation for boys, in which these were circumcised and given instructions on how to be men. Proud of her initiated status, she has struggled over the past two decades to correct and contest Western anti–Female Genital Mutilation (henceforth, anti-FGM) critics’ overwhelming, indignant imaginary of African initiation rituals as torture and mutilation, and of initiated African women as sexual cripples and weak victims of cruel patriarchal traditions. This essay draws a moral portrait of her; in the process, it engages with the anthropological study of moralities and advocates for a liberal pluralism with relativistic entailments

Paths of Speech : Symbols, Sociality and Subjectivity among the Muinane of the Colombian Amazon

The Muinane, an indigenous group of the Colombian Amazon, narratively present individual subjectivity as stemming from cultivated substances that constitute the bodies of human beings, or else from wild substances that usurp the role of proper stuffs. Moral subjectivity in particular stems from the tobacco, coca and other substances shared by a community. Subjectivity in such an account is both individual and collective, and either divine or animalistic as well. Muinane people’s rhetoric at times seems to present subjectivity as radically determined by extra-individual entities. However, the author argues that consciousness of the self is very much a part of their accounts of action — that is, that they understand their own actions to be self-directed as well as other-directed, and furthermore, that their ways of speaking about their own social interactions and thoughts/emotions performatively shape them. The author stresses the achieved character of social life and the intrinsically social character of selfhood, without making a case for a monolithic culture that monologically determines subjectivity and sociality.Les Muinane, groupe indigène de la Colombie amazonienne, décrivent la subjectivité individuelle comme provenant soit des substances cultivées qui constituent le corps des êtres humains, soit des substances sauvages qui usurpent le rôle des bonnes substances. La subjectivité morale, en particulier, provient du tabac, de la coca et d’autres substances partagées par une communauté. Dans une telle narration, la subjectivité est à la fois individuelle et collective, d’origine divine aussi bien qu’animale. Le discours des Muinane semble parfois présenter la subjectivité comme radicalement déterminée par des entités extra-individuelles. L’auteur affirme, cependant, que la conscience du soi entre en grande partie dans leurs narrations de l’action — c’est-à-dire qu’ils comprennent leurs propres actions comme étant orientées vers soi autant que vers autrui et que, de plus, leur manière de parler de leurs propres interactions sociales ainsi que de leurs pensées/émotions confèrent une forme à celles-ci. L’auteur met l’accent sur l’aboutissement de la vie sociale et sur le caractère intrinsèquement social du soi, en évitant de mettre en exergue une culture monolithique qui déterminerait de manière unidirectionnelle la subjectivité et la sociabilité