Joy within tranquility: Amazonian Urarina styles of happiness

Enjoyment in life among Amazonian Urarina is examined through the lens of two contrastive concepts of happiness. The first, “tranquility,” is a relatively long-term, relational condition implying emotional spontaneity and a flexible, freely chosen work routine that allows for a merging of action and awareness. It epitomizes a broader concern with the development of an individual “style of life,” where attitudes, manners, and actions come into alignment. The second concept, “joy,” is a fleeting state of excitement and anticipation, epitomized by the prospect of sharing a meal. While the two concepts imply a distinction between the sensuous and the moral, or pleasure and the good life—loosely analogous to the classic distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia—it is argued that the experience of joy in its purest form effectively crystallizes and intensifies many of the ingredients that make up tranquility, thus resolving the tension by suggesting the possibility of harmony between sensory enjoyment and virtuous living

Joy within tranquility: Amazonian Urarina styles of happiness

Enjoyment in life among Amazonian Urarina is examined through the lens of two contrastive concepts of happiness. The first, “tranquility,” is a relatively long-term, relational condition implying emotional spontaneity and a flexible, freely chosen work routine that allows for a merging of action and awareness. It epitomizes a broader concern with the development of an individual “style of life,” where attitudes, manners, and actions come into alignment. The second concept, “joy,” is a fleeting state of excitement and anticipation, epitomized by the prospect of sharing a meal. While the two concepts imply a distinction between the sensuous and the moral, or pleasure and the good life—loosely analogous to the classic distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia—it is argued that the experience of joy in its purest form effectively crystallizes and intensifies many of the ingredients that make up tranquility, thus resolving the tension by suggesting the possibility of harmony between sensory enjoyment and virtuous living

Three questions about the social life of values

This afterword to the Qualifying Sociality through Values special issue reflects on the challenge, aptly considered by each contributor, to revamp and rejuvenate the sociality concept in light of the ethical turn. It poses three questions. Firstly, just how important are values for sociality? That is, to what extent is social action really conceived and executed through values? Secondly, how does sociality itself figure as a value, and how should we accommodate values that are not obviously prosocial such as separation and withdrawal? Thirdly, what is the relationship between competing values–when and how (if at all) do values genuinely conflict rather than complement or reinforce one other, and how do people then choose between them? These questions are crucial, I suggest, if we are to advance our understanding of how people embark on the shared project of crafting good and meaningful lives

All alike anyway: an Amazonian ethics of incommensurability

Urarina people of Amazonian Peru rarely make explicit comparisons of a kind that would focus attention on differences between entities being compared, especially when this could imply, or facilitate, a value judgement. As such, the kinds of comparisons in which anthropologists routinely indulge – of groups and cultural practices, or forms of life – seem to be all but absent, as do interpersonal comparisons of the kind well-described by social comparison theory in psychology. This chapter examines the various forms of thinking and social practice to which an ethics of non-comparison gives rise, arguing that it is closely related to a general reluctance to assume or assert knowledge of the capacities of others: a kind of evaluative abstinence that ultimately amounts to an important way of showing respect. By recognising the singularity of persons and things – not only their incommensurability, but also interdependency – Urarina people avoid establishing relations of dominance and the imposition of hierarchy

Russia’s perspective on international relations and international law since 2007

Russia’s course of action over the past 12 years caused global concern. This thesis outlines the precise moment that Russia altered its foreign policy and the underlying reasons for that change. In doing so, the approached to international relations and international law are considered and analyzed.The bachelor thesis further outlines the main Russian positions on foreign policy and derives a hypothesis that is further proven through the consideration of two case studies

On logophagy and truth: interpretation through incorporation among Peruvian Urarina

This paper develops an Amazonian critique of Western theories of interpretation as grounded in correspondence between a proposition and a state of affairs, and of truth as correspondence between mind and reality. For the Peruvian Urarina, language has materiality and force and implies a non-arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, and is moreover based in a very different mode of adequation of person to world: a process grounded in absorption rather than representation. The view that words are effectively consumed by others reaches its apogee in the baau genre of ritual discourse, in which a healer’s speech is literally digested by the patient as a core part of the healing process

State of play: the political ontology of sport in Amazonian Peru

Building on the importance of "play" in traditional sociality, organized team sports such as soccer are instrumental in promoting a new moral and political order among Urarina people of Peruvian Amazonia, one grounded in notions of roles, rules, and the abstract individual. As a vehicle of nationalist sentiment, highly amenable to ritualization and bureaucratization, sport is central to the process by which the state expands its territory and influence. Like warfare, but unifying rather than fragmenting in its effects, sport harnesses the energy and vitality of youth and co-opts them for other ends

Equality without equivalence: an anthropology of the common

This article elaborates an Amazonian conception of the common and the challenge it poses to Western thinking about individualism and equality. It is suggested that a number of distinctive features of Amazonian Urarina sociality may have their basis in a shared refusal of factors that give rise to relations of equivalence between people. This kind of singularism, or ‘individualism without individuals’, results from an orientation to the common as a collective resource that is antithetical to property, in which subjectivity is shaped in relation to wider ecological and affective resources that are continuously and collectively produced. This embraces not only shared economic resources, such as land or game animals, but also ways of organizing and producing affective, cognitive, and linguistic relations, ‘commonalities’ of various kinds which never reduce differences to an abstract subject, such as the individual of liberalism or the collective of socialism