Extreme normalcy: The place of violence in indigenous Amazonians’ well-being

Abstract

While our own notions about well-being tend to foreground peaceful and amicable relations with fellow humans, for many Amazonian peoples the achievement of well-being, manifested in healthy, well-nourished and fertile bodies, requires engaging in harrowing, agonistic relations with others through warfare, shamanism, dreams and ritual practice. Drawing on the ethnography of two Lowland peoples – the Wari’ of Brazil and the Aents Chicham (Jivaro) of Ecuador and Peru, we will examine how a certain kind of person is constituted through ‘extreme’ relational experiences that, while dangerous, are considered necessary for leading a meaningful life. Further, we will discuss how the complex forms of subjectivity fostered by these experiences challenge our ideas on the presumed opacity of minds and on what psychology are about. Finally, we will show how the gradual disqualification of these extreme yet expected ways of interacting with others, following Cristianization and sustained contact with Western lifeways and forms of knowledge, leads to impoverished and monotonous lived worlds, in short to states of (ill)being antithetical to indigenous notions about proper ways of living.

Introduction

As numerous ethnologists have shown, Amerindian peoples conceive themselves to be dependent on relations with the outside, specifically with beings construed as different from themselves. The expression ‘openness to the other’, first coined by Lévi-Strauss (1995) to explain the basis for indigenous peoples’ interest in the European invaders, has proven highly relevant in many contexts. Joanna Overing was one of the first authors to explore this theme, showing how the Piaroa of Venezuela have to engage constantly with the non-human beings of the cosmos in order to constitute themselves as full persons. In her words, ‘states the necessity of differences to social life in a world where the coming together of differences implies danger, while the conjoining of like things implies safety and non-society or anti-life” (Overing Kaplan 1981: 163). Or, as Fausto and Heckenberger (2007) summarise the idea: ‘Amerindians […] strive to acquire more than an internally homogeneous self in order to become (pro)creative persons. From cannibal practices to visual quests, from shamanic trances to ritual transformations […] we observe the same effort to be more than oneself’ (p. 23). ‘Creative human activity depends on mobilizing capacities that are not just human and of which humans were (partially) deprived in the post-mythical order’ (p. 14).

These capacities include songs, myths, names and body adornments, explicitly conceived by many peoples as originally taken from enemies or other beings. What is understood as human agency refers to this capacity to capture and incorporate or tame these items of external origin as part of the process of constituting persons As we will see, the moment these figures of otherness cease to be part of social life, the sense of human agency becomes diluted, as if people lost some of their ability and will to live well (see Vilaça 2013).

In quotidian life, well-being and health are made visible by well-fed and active bodies and by a constant flow of strong speech, infused with irony, good humour and laughter. However, during ritual or in the encounter with enemies, mortal battles unfold at a symbolic or real level. These confrontations are actively sought out, and cannot be reduced to punctual acts of revenge or purely defensive actions interrupting the peaceful flow of normal life. Rather, they are conceptualised as essential to the well-being and reproduction of the community and its members.

Our objective in this article is to extend the reach of the notions of well-being and normalcy so as to include these dangerous encounters as a necessary and inescapable part of personal and collective life. We will also try to shed light on the reasons why the Wari’ and Chicham feel compelled to seek out and confront enemies, and discuss some of the consequences of this compulsion to engage in agonistic relations both for the overall dynamics of social life and for the conformation of the type of person they aspire to become. As we do not intend to make broad, generalising statements about ‘Amazonian Indigenous peoples’, we decided to present separately the two ethnographies on which this article is based, that of the Wari’ from Southwestern Brazilian Amazonia (with whom Vilaça has been working since 1986), and that of the Achuar and Shuar of Ecuador, two neighbouring sub-tribes of the Jivaroan ensemble (now known, collectively, as Aents Chicham) with whom Taylor started working with in 1976. These presentations will be followed by a comparative conclusion.

The Wari’

War

Though internally differentiated into diverse regional sub-groups, the Wari’ did not wage war among themselves. Instead, warfare was directed towards enemies, traditionally members of neighbouring indigenous peoples, with whom they had no relationship of collaboration or trade. Later, in particular from the 1950s and following the disappearance of their traditional enemies, exterminated by colonisers, the position of enemy came to be occupied by the new invaders, whom we will call here Whites following common usage in anthropological literature. ¹ While each and every Wari’ is considered wari’, a term that signifies person or human being, the enemies or wijam, whether White or Indigenous, are considered non-human and associated with animals, karawa, as a subset of the latter.

The Wari’ came to be know and feared for their disposition to wage war, especially because dead enemies very often had their limbs and head cut off, taken by the victorious warriors to be roasted and eaten by those who stayed at home. In the case of the new enemies, Wari’ raids on the houses of rubber tappers or even on dwellings located on the outskirts of the city of Guajará-Mirim, in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, drew the ire of the White population. So-called ‘punitive expeditions’ were organised in which villages were invaded by heavily-armed groups who killed as many people as possible, including women and children. The latter were sometimes thrown in the air to land on sharp machetes, cutting them in half. In the face of such violence, when the military supremacy of the Whites became clear, the Wari’ might have been expected to stop their war raids and seek refuge. But they continued to launch attacks on the White population until the situation became critical, to the point of forcing them to flee to remote areas, located on the headwaters of rivers. Surrounded and isolated, some years later they accepted the establishment of peaceful relations with the White population through the mediation of government agents, the Catholic Church and American fundamentalist Evangelical missionaries from the New Tribes Mission (today, Ethnos 360).

Why did they continue the war? Although the regional history clearly suggests that it was in fact the White population that first attacked the Wari’ to take over their land, older Wari’ men – the killers of traditional enemies – insist that the cycle of war against the Whites was initiated by the Wari’ themselves, since before that time ‘the Whites were good’. They recount that some White people actually approached them amicably, offering presents and even women, but they were killed just the same. From the Wari’ point of view, the arrival of the new foreigners in their territory was taken at first as a positive event, since their traditional enemies had disappeared and men could no longer become killers, ‘fattening’ themselves and their wives in the process. Sometimes the invitation to go to war was made precisely with this aim in mind: ‘let's kill enemies, let's fatten our wives!’ The women, keen to grow plump through sexual intercourse, tried to seduce the killers before the end of the latter's post-homicide reclusion, attempts that had to be resisted or the men would lose all there acquired fatness. The association between war and health (as well as fertility) is also made explicit in the involvement of children in post-war acts. When the killers successfully brought home bits of the dead enemy's body, which would be roasted and eaten by the non-killers, both women and men would summon their children to shoot arrows at these body parts so they could grow more rapidly. People also recount how mothers would stretch their children's limbs every day to speed up the growth process (see Conklin 2001a, 2001b; Vilaça 2000, 2010, 2017 [1992]).

War thus played an important role in gender relations and in the constitution of killers as full men. ² Furthermore, war, like hunting, ensured – through opposition – the humanity of the Wari’, associated with the position of predator, always temporary and unstable. Indeed, war was so central that when it ended as a consequence of contact, various young men tried to join the Army. Years ago, when one Wari’ youth was asked about the reasons for his decision to enlist, especially given his account of the physical suffering experienced in the barracks, his response was immediate: ‘to kill an enemy!’ ³

Rituals between regional groups

As well as warfare against their enemies, the Wari’ practiced internal rituals involving a symbolic war between distant kin, during which the latter would be ‘killed’ through the excessive consumption of maize beer (chicha). In these events, the participants were split between hosts and guests, who addressed each other by terms of affinity. In general, these guests were people who lived in another community, who were linked to different regional subgroups and who, though addressing each other by kinship terms, were considered neither close nor true kin. ⁴

The hosts offered their male guests large quantities of beer, forcing them to vomit in order to keep drinking the successive pots of drink poured into their mouths. The excess alcohol caused them to faint, a state considered as a type of death. At that moment, the host would exclaim: ‘I killed him’ (see Albert 1985 for the same behaviour among the Yanomami). The guests who could still stand up had to continue singing and dancing in a line, forwards and backwards, holding hands and staring at the ground, while they listened to all kinds of ironic comments from their hosts: ‘You have crooked legs, you don’t know how to sing!’ The excess chicha and the verbal aggressions were said to be revenge for the assaults suffered some months earlier when the male guests had visited the villages of the hosts and acted like animals, destroying house roofs and simulating sex with their wives. As one boy said just before one festival: ‘The Wari’ suffer a lot’. One of their myths, centred on a character called Hwijin, explicitly describes the offering of fermented drink as a punishment for illicit sex (Vilaça 2010).

In the past, the ritual relations between regional groups were so essential that, when compiling life stories among the Wari’, it was a surprise to learn that even during moments in which they were under heavy persecution by the Whites, in the 1950s, these ritual feasts were still being held. There are many accounts of these rituals being performed in situations inconceivable to us. Paletó, a Wari’ man, once said that the day before his family was exterminated by an armed group of Whites, they had been in the middle of one such festival. At the moment of the attack, they were bathing in the river to remove the ‘filth of the drink’.

The relations people desired, therefore, were not just peaceful interactions between close kin but equally ritual disputes between distant kin. This becomes clear in the response of one Wari’ man on being found by his relatives after remaining in isolation for around 2 years with his brother, wife and two children, fleeing from the attacks of the Whites. Before being taken back to his people, he wanted to make a rubber drum, an instrument essential to some of these rituals. He had missed other people, he said, thereby emphasising that a full life presumed the ritual activation of conflicts. As a result, Wari’ society, which in everyday life is conceived as an extensive group of kin made similar by language (consanguineal kin terms are used in everyday life to refer to any person), myths and bodies, is in fact internally differentiated between close kin, effectively real kin, and distant kin, the latter being associated with the pole of affinity, an important marker of difference in the Amerindian world. The ritual therefore brings out these normally unmarked differences, in a way that is consistent with the idea of society as constituted by the incorporation and the ‘taming’ of otherness. Contrary to our own geneticist conception ideology, for the Wari’ kin are made by and produced out of others (see Vilaça 2002).

It is through diseases, however, especially those caused by animals, that we can better understand the place of alterity in the daily life of the Wari’.

Diseases

Amerindian mythologies tend to approach the question of sickness and mortality in two distinct though not necessarily exclusive forms. Either their origin is a one-off event, as happened with Pandora's box in Hesiod (see Lloyd 2003), the consequence of a moral failure with respect to the gods, spirits or other entities, as we see happening among the Piaroa of Venezuela (Overing 1990), or they emerge as a natural consequence of the inevitable predatory relations between humans (through sorcery) and between the latter and other beings, especially animals. ⁵

Amerindian peoples are known to ascribe little importance to accidents like cuts and other injuries. These are not considered diseases, even if blood is lost and the person is incapacitated for some days. According to Pollock (1994: 145), regarding the Kulina, diseases ‘of the skin’ are mild and curable. Among the Wari’, diseases have a variety of causes. Smell is one of them, especially the aroma of poisons prepared by people desirous of revenge. The smells of strange objects also cause sickness (as happens for the Yanomami, according to Kopenawa and Albert 2013) or even the smell of human bodies being roasted out of ritual prescriptions (see Conklin 1989, 1994). Conversely, the aroma of some plants, or animals like ants, can have a healing effect. According to Wilbert regarding the Warao: ‘…it has been argued that the Warao have a “pneumatic theory of illness”, where fetid and lethal smells are the cause of illness and death, and have to be fought with therapeutic scents in order to restore health’ (apud Allard 2003: 129).

The diseases considered serious are those that involve the actions of what I call ‘doubles’ (see below). What characterises this type of disease is the victim's state of prostration and lack of appetite, especially when accompanied by fever. The Wari’ say that blood coagulates in the sick person's heart, ceasing to circulate among the other parts of the body. The external signs reveal that the victim is becoming separate from this world, refusing the food offered by kin or indeed any other interaction with them, showing that his or her double is already in another world, interacting with other persons. ⁶

The term ‘double’ is used here to denote an attribute of the person normally called spirit or soul, precisely in order to emphasise an important difference between Indigenous and Christian concepts. According to the Wari’, the double, jamixi’, is first and foremost a potency or capacity of the person to relate on an equal basis with other types of beings, adopting the same corporal form and the same perspective onto the world. It is not something located in a part of the body since it only exists when it is active – that is, when the ‘person’ (which includes animals of certain species) projects another form of self. It is not a vital principle, however, since there are living beings, such as some animals and plants that have no double.

Crucially here, what is a double or a body is contextual and depends on the perspective of the observers. Animals see themselves as humans, wari’, which is how the Wari’ see themselves. From the animals’ perspective, however, it is their bodies that are human. For the Wari’, though, the body of animals is animal, karawa – that is, different from their own. When they are visible in a human form, typically to shamans, the latter are said to see the animal's double. Likewise, the Wari’ see themselves as humans but can be seen by animals as prey – possessing an animal body, in other words. When sick or captured, Wari’ persons acquire an animal body, which is called a double by Wari’ observers. The double is thus a corporal-affective-behavioural form different from the visible body, indicating that the person is transformed – that is, integrated into another relational context among another kind of ‘people’. If the capacity to act through a double, jamixi’, is precisely what characterises humanity, then the notion of humanity is inextricably linked to the idea of transformation. In other words, humans are those who can cease to be so. Instability is therefore the main attribute of humanity for the Wari’, a fact of life, or a given, that forces them to be always attentive in their care for each other as well as for animals and to follow specific rules in dealing with them. ⁷

Animals with doubles are those who were human in mythic times and remained so afterwards, but whose humanity became invisible to the Wari’. Most of these animals constitute the Wari's favourite prey, like the tapir, White-lipped and collared peccaries, the capuchin monkey, various birds and all kinds of fish. Like all other humans, these animals live in houses with their families and hold rituals, although only shamans can see them in this form. They attack the Wari’ with bows and arrows, though in the eyes of their victims they act like animals. The motives for this aggression are diverse but primarily consist of revenge for a previous attack by the Wari’ during their hunting activities, especially if the process of preparing, cooking and distributing the acquired meat among kin has failed to respect the specific precautions relating to animals: one cannot laugh at a dead animal, take too long to eat it or refuse to share it.

Animals can also act by capturing the victim, posing as a kinsperson and leading the person far away. For this reason, one cannot be miserly with older kin and children, else the animals will come to fetch those mistreated, making them sick so as to take these people to live with them as kin. The Wari’ say that animals, as humans, are perennially interested in making new kin and hence remain alert to the internal relations among the Wari’, selecting as their targets those persons who have been ill-treated or neglected. In this sense they act as vigilantes of an intra-social morality. In the perception of the Wari’, though, the final result of the aggression or abduction is always the same: the victim's death.

This is why the death of a Wari’ person provokes sadness and mourning among his or her kin: although the dead person will see him or herself as fully human, thereafter he or she will only appear to former kin in animal form. Metamorphosis, therefore, does not affect one's own self-perception, but the view that others have of oneself. Unlike the Wari’, however, animals are immortal – in other words, when hunted and eaten by humans, their double returns home and resumes family life as though nothing had happened.

Shamanic cures

In addition to treatments using aromas and herbal baths, which can be practiced by anyone to treat milder forms of sickness, the shaman is the specialist in curing serious diseases, leading many Indigenous peoples to assimilate them to the doctors of the Whites. Among the Wari’, the shaman, usually male, is someone with a double active all the time – that is, someone who lives simultaneously among his own people and among the animals. Using this double perspective, he is able to cure. By studying the victim's symptoms, visions and dreams, as well as what can be seen within his or her body (arrows, foods and ornaments favoured by a particular animal species), the shaman forms a diagnosis and proceeds to heal the person. Shamanic action has to take place in two spheres, involving simultaneously the removal of exogenous objects from the sick person's body – sometimes with the help of his animal companions – and direct negotiation with the animal double. Generally speaking, while the victim's body remains weak or inert at home, his or her double is already to be found among the animals, possessing a body like theirs. As Viveiros de Castro (1998) observed, while our medicine ideally proceeds through the fragmentation of the sick person into organs, blood, bones and X-ray or ultra-sonic images, suppressing all of his or her subjectivity, curing among indigenous peoples entails the opposite process, adding to the sick person's body as many relational and subjective components as the shaman can access. In short, Others, be they animals, kinspersons or enemies, as well as their practices, constitute an important means of gaining knowledge both of self and of the world, by allowing experts to relate people, things and events in a chain of causality that enables actions of various kinds, among them healing (see Kopenawa and Albert 2013; Cesarino 2010).

Sorcery

As well as the diseases unleashed by animals, another cause of serious illness and death in the Amerindian universe is sorcery, carried out by members of the same people, whether from the community itself (Figueiredo 2015) or from neighbouring communities. In the Wari’ case, the victim's double is attracted in dreams through offers, by sorcery, of items appreciated by the targeted person. The victim's double, though not taking an animal form here but that of a miniature person with white skin, is treated as an animal, tied up by the sorcerer on a barbecue grill and killed by the insertion of sticks and arrow tips into its small body. Back home, the victim's body suffers with each object stuck into his or her double. If he succeeds in seeing the sorcerer's face, the shaman can travel to the forest to try to find the grill and release the double, an action that will cure the body lying inert among the sick person's kin. In general, though, the victims of sorcery die quickly since the sorcerer acts rapidly so that his identity cannot be discovered. Ideally, he should immediately pierce the eyes of the tied double so that the latter is blinded. If the sorcerer is identified, he may be killed by the shaman or by the victim's relatives.

Selfhood

As Viveiros de Castro (2001) observed, everyday life among indigenous peoples, always subject to transformations, can be described as an incessant fabrication of similarity among humans properly speaking, through commensality, companionship and affective exchanges. From a more encompassing perspective, however, the production of similarity can be defined as an extraction or ‘eclipsing’ of alterity, revealing the determination of the inside by the outside.

At the start of the 2000s, this assertion launched a debate among Americanists about the place of domestic life in Amazonian sociality. On one side of this controversy stood anthropologists who proposed a ‘praising of the quotidian’, especially Joanna Overing (1999) and some of her students; on the other, those who emphasised the centrality of relations of predation, not only Viveiros de Castro, but various other writers such as Bruce Albert, Philippe Descola, Carlos Fausto and the authors of this article.

According to Overing's critique (1999: 84; Overing and Passes 2000: 3, 9), although everyday life in the heart of the family and the domestic sphere is the main topic of interest for native people themselves, it seemed far too chaotic and commonplace to be taken as a proper research topic for anthropologists fascinated by study of the exotic. Even when these exotisizing’ anthropologists paid attention to domesticity, they found no ‘structures’ in it; so instead they focused on cosmology, eschatology and relations with the exterior in general, since ‘shamans interacting with cannibal gods, warriors lopping off the head of enemies […] are much more exciting prospects than people preparing communal meals or training and caring for children’ (Overing and Passes 2000: 9).

Adding to this discussion, Vilaça (2002) sought to show that, even leaving aside war, shamanism and ritual life, relations with the exterior encompass and found everyday actions. This is the case, for example, of the couvade ⁸ and of the many precautions generally taken with food, which always refer to the omnipresent relation between people and animals. As we have seen, the latter are keen to attract people into their collective by preying on them or abducting them. To avoid this fate, social relations of reciprocity need to be maintained with animals, as well as respect for dietary taboos and table manners. Consequently, contrary to the dissociation proposed by Overing, ⁹ when a mother feeds her child on a daily basis, for example, she does not do so casually or unreflectingly; at stake is her knowledge of the predatory capacities of the animals whose meat she is cooking. A bad choice could cause the sickness and death of the child and even of other family members. Relations with the exterior thus constantly intrude in the domestic sphere.

This dynamic is rooted in the primordial ambiguity or dual constitution of humans. Wari’ and karawa, humans and animal/prey, are not fixed categories but rather positions to be determined from external perspectives. Based on the model of the dividual person proposed by Marilyn Strathern (1988) for Melanesia, we could say that the Wari’, just like animals, are doubly constituted by a human element and an animal element. Depending on the relations maintained between them, one of the elements is eclipsed while the other becomes foregrounded. Thus, when a Wari’ man hunts an animal, he is temporarily situated in the position of human, wari’, while his karawa component is eclipsed. The opposite happens when the animal preys on a Wari’, who then assumes the karawa position (see Vilaça 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017).

However, such actions as food-taboos and other special care regarding the eating of animals are not limited to extracting difference or eclipsing the animal component of the person. As Viveiros de Castro (2001) showed us, this primordial universe has to be continually reconstituted as a starting point for human action, which cannot be conceived as anything other than a continual process of differentiation (Wagner 1975), the making of specific humans beings out a wide spectrum of humanity.

In other words, ritual affines, enemies and animals do not insidiously invade the tranquillity of daily life since it is necessary to actively seek out contact with these diverse alterities for the dynamic of social life to be maintained. It is through warfare, shamanism, hunting and rituals that this primordial difference is reconstituted. The erasure of alterities, as occurred with the end of war and the beginning of Christianisation, creates a life without extremes where a similarity devoid of meaning reigns supreme. The Christian heaven of the Wari’ is exactly this: a place where the animal component of humans is completely eliminated. It is worth pointing out that this is not a place the Wari’ especially wish to reach; rather, it is taken simply as a better choice than going to hell. Although in heaven everyone addresses everyone else as consanguine kin, people live in isolation, each in their own house, writing incessantly and mechanically the words of God, whom they hear without being able to see Him. In sum, heaven is a place of kinship devoid of true relations. Given that relations between kin are what define the social life of any type of human, and that instability characterises humanity, the Wari’ who reach heaven and there turn into people who are exclusively human, paradoxically cease to be so.

Christianity: the narrowing of humanity

During the initial period of the Christian experience of the Wari’, catechised by fundamentalist Evangelical missionaries from the New Tribes Mission at the end of the 1960s, the diseases caused by the consumption of an animal or by hunting activities were associated with the action of the devil. The Wari’ used to say that the devil ‘entered’ the animal and made it act vengefully. As one man said: ‘It is the devil that accompanies the animal double’ or ‘an animal double doesn’t exist; it is the devil that enters it’. Or that ‘the devil enters our mouth, our head; not the animals’. In the language of Roy Wagner (1975) on the processes of human invention, the Wari’ Christian devil counterinvents (recreates) the primordial world of mixture by restoring the agency of animals, once more enabling metamorphosis to be part of their world (see Vilaça 2009; Vilaça and Wright 2009).

However, the devil's agency among the Wari’ has changed over time. Previously focused more on animal capacities for action, today, especially after the Evangelical revival that occurred in 2001, it became part of an universe constituted by a more restricted humanity, and identified as the cause of the morally inadequate actions of the Wari’ properly speaking. Today, in other words, the attacks of animals that, as humans, once acted as predators vis-à-vis the Wari’, have ceased to function as the primary explanation for diseases, and shamans, who previously acted as mediators between humans and animals – precisely because they could occupy both positions simultaneously – are gradually disappearing. The place of animal assaults as a causa mortis has been taken over by a pre-existing alternative model, namely the sorcery performed by affines enraged by acts of avarice and adultery. The latter are the moral defects most condemned by the Wari’, associated by them with the Christian notion of sin. These actions are today attributed to the agency of the devil who seduces persons and compels them to act in this way. Public confession of ‘sin’ basically consists of a declaration, made in the presence of other believers, that the person ‘fell in with the devil’.

From a mediator between humans and animals, the devil has thus become an agent who brings affinity to the surface – a relation that the Wari’ consider to be a source of constant tension and which, for this reason, they tend to mask through the use of vocatives of consanguinity for effective affines, relegating the foregrounding of affinity to ritual contexts. Both myth and social practice show that the affine is, for the Wari’, a kind of enemy within, partially domesticated but containing the potential for otherness that characterises enemies and animals as well.

The transition from animality as a general condition of metamorphosis to affinity as an expression of alterity seems to imply a reduction in the scope of humanity and an interruption of the dialectic between its more extended and restrictive notions that characterise the Amerindian world (see Viveiros de Castro 1998 on the paradox involved in the coexistence of these two notions among Amazonian peoples).

It is as if at the moment when the mythology of Genesis becomes adopted – when God fixes animals in the position of prey – as a means to stabilise a more restricted humanity, a number of other implications arise, determined by the content of the relationship between humans and God.

The consequence is an inversion in the hierarchy of the original encompassment: the more extensive notion of humanity ceases to act as a starting point for the process of differentiation, and becomes encompassed by a narrower acceptation of humanity, whose limits are now defined by the category of affinity rather than animality.

This is what Anne-Christine Taylor has called the narrowing of experience in her study of the conversion of the Achuar to Christianity. In her words: ‘Acculturation begins in a condition of being locked on a state of undefined or unmarked normality by no longer engaging in the situations of interaction characteristic of the extreme states: thus an acculturated, or potentially acculturated, Jivaro is simply an ordinary being, what the Achuar themselves aptly call a nangami shuar, a “just-so” or “mere” person’(Taylor 1996: 211; see too Taylor 1981).

Considering, as observed earlier, that metamorphosis, when voluntary in the case of shamans, has a positive meaning, this narrowing does not simply constitute a gain but involves a clear loss in the means of empowerment. A ‘mere person’ is liberated from predation by animals and from the risk of transforming into one of them, but also loses the traditional means to stand out and become special.

Other transformations seem to be under way among the Wari’. Along with the emergence of this devil, no longer animalised but affinalised, Wari’ believers are beginning to entertain the idea of a closed inner self, a notion once entirely alien to the Wari’, who, as observed earlier, saw themselves as distributed and relational persons. Thus, the concept of ‘heart’, traditionally referring to thoughts and feelings, has been expanded to include a reflexive and differentiated self. People say, for instance, that so-and-so knows ‘with his own heart’, or ‘she knows for herself’, expressions that Vilaça never heard during her previous first 15 years of fieldwork – or, that is, until around 2001. It is as if at the moment when humanity ceases to be a position constituted through the human action of differentiation from animals, humans become distinct; as if affinity as the site of alterity were insufficient to maintain the relational dynamic characteristic of the dividual person, leading people to be only themselves (see Vilaça 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016).

Thinking about the encounter between Indigenous peoples and urban middle-class Westerns, Wagner concludes that what is perceived by the latter as strange or paradoxical is not their primitiveness but a ‘quality of brilliance’ (Wagner 1975: 89) that characterises those who conceive life as an ‘inventive improvisation’ (Wagner 1975: 88). Associating ‘acculturation’ with the loss of this brilliance, Wagner alludes to Christianity: ‘The dullness that we find in mission schools, refugee camps, and sometimes in “acculturated” villages is symptomatic not of the absence of “Culture”, but of the absence of its very antithesis – that “magic”, that very swaggering image of boldness and invention that makes culture’ (Wagner 1975: 89).

The Aents Chicham

The Aents Chicham ¹⁰ people, formerly known as Jivaroans, presently constitute one of the largest Amazonian groups, numbering about 200,000 persons spread over a territory roughly equivalent to the size of Portugal, straddling the border between Peru and Ecuador's eastern lowlands. The two westernmost components of this ensemble (the ‘Shuar proper’ and the Awajun) are both over 80,000 strong, while the other Chicham groups (Achuar, Wampis and Shiwiar) are smaller. The ethnic group is divided into ‘tribes’, each speaking a particular dialect said to be unintelligible to other Chicham ¹¹ ; otherwise, their cultural profile is very similar, indeed almost identical.

A-C. Taylor began working with the Ecuadorian Achuar in 1976, and most of the ethnographic material presented below in the present tense in fact reflects the state of the Achuar world as she observed first-hand from 1978 to 1985 (with sporadic short field-trips in the following decades). Given the subject-matter under scrutiny – the role of ‘extreme’ states in producing proper ways of living – her description is heavily slanted toward Chicham men's behaviour and subjective states, because they illustrate the dynamics we want to discuss more fully than women's do. A more balanced account, attentive to women's role and experiences, is beyond the scope of this short contribution.

Just as the Wari’, members of the Chicham ‘tribes’ of eastern Peru and Ecuador acknowledge a sharp contrast between, on the one hand, their domestic existence, surrounded by healthy, happy close kin in a large isolated house, and hunting, fishing and gardening for them – an existential condition defined as ‘living well/beautifully’ (shiir pujustin-) – and, on the other hand, the life they lead beyond this sphere, immersed in permanent open or latent warfare with inherently hostile Others, be they spirits, animals, other kinds of humans and especially other ‘Shuar’, that is, non-kin Chicham persons, the primary denotation of the vernacular word for enemy. Contrary to the Wari’ who view all non-Wari’ people as foes, the Chicham groups only make ‘war’ (meset) with people considered at some level to be identical to themselves yet unrelated by ties of kinship. Such is the case of persons from other tribes belonging to the same ethnic bloc or who have become ‘disrelated’ by turning against their former kin, in the case of intra-tribal feuding. Engaging in these agonistic interactions, formerly played out in mutual head-hunting expeditions between ‘tribes’ and ceaseless raiding against other more or less distant Chicham households, as well as in all the core rituals of Chicham life, is the condition for producing both the constitutive elements of ‘living well’ and the kind of selfhood needed to sustain it. However, it is important to note that war is always presented by the Chicham as defensive action, something they are morally compelled to do because the ‘good life’ and everything it includes is under constant threat from the hostile Others that inhabit the world, intent on destroying Chicham people individually and collectively.

Killing Others is justified by vengeance for presumed aggression, both past and future, the settling of the debt (tumash) incurred by all men because, inevitably, their relatives come to fall sick and/or die. Their stated ideal of existence is to ‘live beautifully’, as defined above; but given that social life is a constant battle for survival, they have to develop the skills and the ‘anger’ (kaje-) required to overcome the Enemy. Hence their cultivation of an exacerbated warrior ethos and of the repertoire of confrontational stances that has earned them their world-wide notoriety as fearsome aggressors constantly at war with each other as well as with outsiders.

In short, the ability to produce the ‘good life’ demands the acquisition of the means of defending and developing it. This defines the field within which Chicham men compete to attain positions of eminence and memorability, the source of the feelings of well-being they strive to experience. What this means, in fine, is that the ‘good life’ does not carry within itself the means to persist and reproduce itself and the kinds of persons to live in it. Such means must be sought outside the domestic sphere by actively engaging in relations with hostile Others and forcibly taking from them the valued elements needed to produce proper domesticity. In short, generative reproduction demands the willingness and ability to kill others; these processes are opposite sides of the same coin.

Life as a scarce resource

The tight articulation between homicide and reproduction among the Chicham is predicated on a number of interlocking premises: principally, the assumption that possibilities of existence as incarnate beings are given in limited numbers. Thus, all collectives (beings, whether natural or supernatural, are all presumed to gather in societies) live under a regime of ‘vital scarcity’ (cf. Santos Granero 2019), and must compete with each other either to capture as yet under-determined potentialities of existence (e.g., by attracting babies and small children into the population of the dead, or of some species of animal), or to transform an already existing live being into a kin person or the promise of one, as the Tupinamba did in vivo with their war captives or the Chicham did post mortem with killed enemies (cf. Taylor 1994, 2006).

Predation is therefore built into the production of life, given that all creatures feed on each other, both literally in the trophic chain and symbolically through competition for scarce vitality. The assumption that possibilities of embodied existence are rare is itself rooted in the fact that Amazonian animist ontologies provide no space for a mechanism – a physis or ‘Nature’ – capable of spontaneously generating new life forms on which to draw. In some Lowland groups (e.g., those of the Northwest Amazon) vitality is construed as an endlessly morphing ‘force’ or energy that needs to be captured and channelled in the proper direction (inevitably to the detriment of another species). In others, such as the Chicham, virtualities of incarnate existence come from a limited stock of singularised shapes proper to each ‘kind’, forms that must be endlessly recycled. Thus, each Chicham ‘tribe’ – and depending on context this can mean anything from a single household to a regional cluster or a whole dialectal unit – is conceptualised as a distinct species and as such must draw on the stock of person-forms provided by its deceased members. Each one of these shapes is intrinsically unique, like the items in a pack of cards. So every potential subject is inherently endowed with formal singularity. This given singularity is then further elaborated in different ways geared to emphasising its individuality (e.g., by strict avoidance of homonymy or, in the case of multiple births, allowing only one infant to live). The still potential form is then literally fleshed out by the cumulative memory of familial interaction and thereby progressively anchored into congenerity or humanity, a process constitutive of kinship, as argued by many of our Amazonianist colleagues, not least the co-author of this article (see Vilaça 2002, 2005). Thus, it is further singularised by the embodied sedimentation of a unique relational history, and thereby provided with the makings of an individual biography.

Achieving magnified personhood

But uniqueness of perceived form as well as of a bodily matter imbued with a distinctive relational history is still not enough to achieve the kind of personhood valued by Chicham, though given singularity of form and of relational history is sufficient for children or for the kind of person called a nangami aents, meaning an unmemorable or ‘for nothing’ person. ¹² Something more is required to craft the kind of individual – in both male and female form – capable of acting in the Chicham world, namely engagement in a series of agonistic confrontations with human as well as non-human partners.

The Chicham live in a world saturated with hostile intention, peopled with far more beings out to harm than with loving and trustworthy persons, and this fact of life is drummed into children from their earliest infancy. By the age of 3 or 4, they will have learnt to fear adults foreign to their household, particularly adult men, and to be alert to signs of unknown and therefore menacing presence in their environment. By early adolescence, at the same time as boys are freed of parental disciplining and left to develop their social and technical skills on their own, they will have experienced one or several frightening encounters with spirits while under the influence of the mind-altering psychotropic substances they are required to take as part of their education (even dogs are fed drugs to enhance their hunting abilities), and they will have learnt to overcome or at least to control their fear. They will begin choosing their own dietary prohibitions according to the nature of the non-humans they are trying to relate to or to avoid. They will start participating in ritual simulacra of war-related behaviour, spend a lot of time in the forest honing their hunting abilities and they will also embark on sexual adventures, always a high-risk undertaking given the strict control fathers and husbands exercise (or try to exercise) over their daughters’ or wives’ sexuality.

A little later and most importantly, they will start going on vision quests in the hope of interacting with a kind of spirit called arutam, ‘old’ or ‘used thing’, in fact the spectral avatar of a deceased, eminent Jivaroan man or woman. These harrowing experiences involve travelling alone in the forest, severe fasting and absorbing large amounts of a decoction of datura (Datura stramonium) and/or green tobacco juice, all the while summoning the spirit in song. If it appears, it is first in the shape of a terrifying apparition – an outsized warrior dripping blood, a huge ball of fire, a pair of gigantic jaguars locked in fight, among others – the seeker must stand up to and touch, whereupon it explodes and disappears, only to reappear later in a dream as a spectral, vaguely perceived human silhouette that identifies itself by name and goes on to deliver a verbal or visual message predicting success, usually in war-related matters. Women may also experience arutam encounters when alone in the forest or in their garden, either after ingesting datura or following a traumatic event (e.g., a severe beating at the hands of their husband, a grave illness, the death of a close relative) but in their case the vision granted is usually silent and purely visual, focusing on scenes of a happy and plentiful household surrounded by lush garden plots – in short, on the promise of the ‘beautiful life’.

From then on, the vision or message – indeed the spirit itself – dwells within the seeker as a kind of inner voice imbuing its host with a sense of heightened purpose, clarity and strength of mind and body as well as, in men, intensified ‘anger’ (kajé-) and the urge to kill enemies. By this stage, our young man will be ripe both to marry and to join in war expeditions. If he commits a homicide in the course of a raid, he loses his arutam soul and must rapidly seek another who will prove to be even more powerful than the preceding one, and so on ¹³ .

The acquisition of an arutam vision and the magnification of selfhood it brings about are indicated by subtle changes both in appearance and demeanour. In terms of behaviour, it is demonstrated by heightened assertiveness in discursive as well as other forms of relating to others, and by ostensible willingness to engage in the practices proper to adult men: killing enemies and game, creating a family and independent household, seducing and taming women and animals. It is also signalled by the red geometric face painting men wear whenever they are visiting or being visited by adult men from different households or other local settlements. Such paintings, though they all look very similar, are claimed to be ‘the same’ as those worn by the incorporated arutam spirit and as such they are unique to their bearer. They are in effect the visible skin of the composite person he has become through the internalisation of the enemy gaze the spirit, in his fear-inspiring avatar, directed toward the arutam seeker during their confrontation. Given that the identity of the acquired arutam must on no account be revealed, these face paintings are an exhibited secret stating that their carrier is now a sort of half-enemy to his own ‘tribe’ or family, therefore armed to resist their influence and capable instead of shaping others’ dispositions through the mastery of an array of techniques of persuasion, seduction or threat.

The arutam-enriched individual will then both expand and express his power through a range of social practices: he will gradually escape from his father-in-law's hold (young men must live in their wife's household until they have had at least one child), acquire other wives and demonstrate, by having many children, his ability to produce persons by capturing unusual portions of scarce vital resource; by proving to be a successful hunter, he will manifest his ability to communicate with masters of game; by engaging in war parties he will further magnify his selfhood, first by acquiring evermore potent arutam spirits and second by broadening the circle of allies he may count on, at any given moment, to align their interests and intentions with his own.

By this stage he is well on his way to being recognised as a kakaram, a ‘strong man’, a position that allows him to shape not only the social but also the physical space around him by getting others to refer to its coordinates according to his account of it, by way of the stories he tells about his engagement with it. In the same manner, he will be enabled to narrate his own (auto)biography in the war-centered stories men tell to their family and to other men, ¹⁴ thereby giving form and direction to the temporality experienced by the members of the group gravitating around him: his past and his debts of vengeance become theirs, as do his enemies and therefore the future open to them.

Becoming prey to others

However, the capacity of a man to impress his individual mark on the web of relations that constitute the lived world of his micro-tribe is highly unstable and by nature ephemeral. The greater a kakaram becomes, the more enemies he makes and the more exposed he and his family are to the threat of homicide and shamanically induced sickness or misfortune. For the Chicham even more so than for the Wari’, illness, death and misfortune are never accidental; they are invariably caused by the deliberate action of a malevolent being. Just as they do not distinguish between the cause and the effects of an illness – the symptom is the sickness itself – Chicham make no difference between ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ states of ill-being: whether a person is suffering from bad luck in hunting, from snake-bite, from fever and internal pain or from persistent melancholia, the process at work is the same: he or she is being attacked by an army of invisible creatures acting at the behest of a shaman. Figured as bands of tiny, luminous darts that have been acquired and familiarised by a shaman and who dwell in his phlegm until they are let loose on their designated victim, these entities lodge in the body of their prey and ‘devour’ them from the inside (the cannibal metaphor is consistently used by Chicham to designate the state of a person under attack by an enemy shaman), eventually reducing them to a state of prostration likened to the condition of orphanhood, that is, of social disaffiliation and powerlessness.

In many ways, states of illness are a reverse mirror image of the process of magnification brought on by successful vision quests: while the latter grant existential direction and the means of forging a memorable destiny (and narrating it) by overcoming human and non-human enemies, the former generate feelings of being overcome by unwanted, overpowering relational claims. Among the Achuar, the lethal attraction seems to originate in the White world, judging from the frequency of allusions to it in shamanic healing chants: ill-being is conceptualised as a process of involuntary ‘whitening’, more precisely of becoming an anonymous, bottom-of the ladder ‘poor White’, that is, a Mestizo peon – a type of person they are familiar with and whose state of economic and political disempowerment is clearly perceived by the Chicham. This is the condition the Chicham fear and resist most strongly, tantamount to the loss of the kind of identity they value. Such states of alienation can only by healed by a ‘curing’ shaman (i.e., a shaman reputed to be loyal to the victim's group), who will send his own darts into the sufferer's body to ‘seduce’ the enemy darts, dislodge them from the patient's body and, hopefully, turn them back against their erstwhile master (see also Taylor 2006).

As might be expected, the peculiar nature of Amazonian ‘dividuals’, whose bodies are made up of the relations they develop with their congeners and whose ‘soul’ is a hybrid of self and a powerful predatory Other, gives a particular spin to the notions we tend to assemble under the banner of psychology. Strictly speaking, the Chicham do not have ‘psyches’ in the sense of bounded private selfhoods. Minds, whether one's own or that of others, are not, per se, mysterious black boxes, and the idea of a specialised kind of knowledge about them (what we call psychology) makes no sense for the Chicham. All persons are presumed to experience a range of standardised cognitive/affective moods, different according to context, classified by descriptors of proprioceptive sensations relating to the heart, the seat of thought/feeling: thus, depression and dread is a state of ‘heavy hearting’, rage is ‘quick hearting’, happiness is ‘light hearting’, etc. (cf. Surralès 2003; see too Vilaça 2016 for smiliar traits among the Wari’). Such states are always designated by active verbs (the heart is doing something) and not by nominalised terms (the heart ‘depresses’, but there is no such thing as ‘depression’). Still less do they coalesce into fixed character traits: like many Amazonian languages, Chicham dialects are devoid of personality descriptors. ¹⁵ By contrast, Amazonians are very attentive to individual ‘ethological’ quirks (and very good both at masking their own and imitating others’ for fun). Persons are singularised by their specific way of talking or behaving in given situations (cf. Rogalski 2020), not by their psychological make-up. To put it briefly, everyone knows what another person ‘feels/thinks’ in a given situation. What is not known – and is the object of much rumour and speculation – is what this person's unknowable set of relationships with both human and non-human Others will lead him or her to do, whose call he will answer, who he will muster to his side or succumb to. Thus, a recently bereaved father or spouse is known or presumed to be in a certain state of being (a combination of ‘raging’ and ‘nostalging’), but is he going to kill whoever he thinks is responsible for his loss now or later? Will he draw other men into his ‘war’, which ones and with what consequences? Or will he to the contrary be lured into sickness by the overwhelming attraction of another collective? ¹⁶

Coda: Contemporary life

While the Wari’ and the Chicham share the same animist style of worlding and the same structural articulation between predation on the ‘outside’ and the good life ‘at home’, their post-contact history is widely divergent. This is in good part a matter of scale and historical experience: the Chicham are a very large group spread over a vast territory and they have been in contact with Whites since the middle of the XVI century, though until the mid-twentieth century there were only a few small colonist settlements in or at the periphery of their land. Relations with Whites (referred to as apach’, i.e., non-Indian foreigners) were mostly peaceful, based on small-scale trading, but frequently erupted into violent confrontation, when one or several local groups briefly gathered to destroy encroaching colonist settlements.

However, Whites never became proper enemies (nemas) in the eyes of the Chicham, because they are too different and mainly too intent on affirming their inherent superiority in relation to Indigenous people, therefore incapable of engaging in agonistic relations premised on an initial position of equality between the contenders (Taylor, forthcoming). Thus, fights against them were (and remain) more in the nature of pest eradication than proper warfare (as one young Shuar cynically put it, ‘we were like the anti-malaria brigade, only we exterminated apach’ instead of mosquitos’). Consequently, while such attacks figure prominently in the lore of local colonists, they are barely mentioned in traditional Chicham warrior autobiographies.

Furthermore, the Chicham were until the mid-XX century strongly resistant to missionaries’ attempts to convert them to Christianity. The Salesian and US-based fundamentalist evangelical missions only started to gain a hold over the Western Chicham (Shuar and Awajun) in the 1960s, when the missionaries began to downplay ostensible efforts to convert them and started providing them with cattle, helping them create cooperatives, negotiate collective land claims and set up indigenous political organisations. ¹⁷ While most Shuar and Awajun (but still few Achuar) claim to be Christians nowadays, their observance of devotional practice is scant, as is their knowledge of the main tenets of Christianity. They have little interest in doctrinal matters as taught by the Church, ¹⁸ and their brand of religiosity, centred exclusively on God and the devil, seems to derive primarily from the popular literature on magic, occultism, herbal medicine and ‘personal development’ spread by cheap booklets sold in frontier-town market stalls (Garra 2017, Deshoulliere 2017). Parallel to the growth of this form of Christianity, the influence and power of the missions has been waning over the past two decades, and Chicham political organisations stress their distance from them, claiming to be independent and secular. Most importantly, conversion to Christianity, whatever it implies (Taylor 1981, Tym 2022a, 2022b, Cova 2015), does not seem to have fundamentally altered the Chicham's way of construing their distinctive identity and their perception of Others. Indeed, they still adamantly cling to two kinds of practice tightly linked to their identity, namely vision quests and the cultivation of confrontational stances (see also Rubenstein 2012).

The Chicham over the past 50 years have been adept at finding new domains in which to exercise their skills in the arts of warfare, rhetoric, intimidation and persuasion, principally in Indigenous or national political organisations and in the army. Yet the world in which they currently live has dramatically changed. The Shuar and Awajun in particular are in some respects far more ‘acculturated’ than the Wari’: language loss is notable among young people, most of whom have also lost their traditional subsistence skills; many of them now live in or around towns at least part of the time, and work as unskilled labourers for mining or petroleum companies. Above all, they are confronted with the explosive development of extractive industries in the hands of international (mostly Chinese) conglomerates supported by the Ecuadorian and Peruvian state and are consequently embroiled in the social and political turmoil these developments have unleashed. Indeed, Shuar land is currently riven by the conflicts pitting, in constantly shifting alliances, the mining consortiums, the State, the upper echelons of the army, Peruvian and mainly Ecuadorian secret services backed by US resources and counselling, reportedly the Sinaloa drug cartel, some Shuar and some settler communities against other Shuar and colonist settlements, an army of environmental and indigenist national and international NGOs, an indeterminate number of lost soldiers (remnants of the Colombian guerilla movements as well as, reportedly, some Zapatista fighters), either actively solicited by Shuar leaders or attracted to the scene by the Shuar's willingness to engage in mayhem and their reputation for fearlessness and tactical savviness. This conflict is played out in actions ranging from intrusions by a handful of Shuar men into mining camps to intimidate the workers and engineers (always carefully documented by video and posted on social media) to protest marches in the local towns (usually ending in violent skirmishes with the police) and to full-out armed attacks on mining headquarters and the sequestering of bosses, army officers or State officials (Deshouillère 2016; Garra 2012; Lu, Valdivia and Silva 2017; Cova 2021; Buitron, forthcoming; Vacas Olea 2021).

A notable result of this upheaval is that feuding between Shuar families, along well-remembered fault lines inherited from the past, is once again on the upsurge. Indeed, from the Shuar point of view, the present fight is not against Whites, it is against other Shuar, while the outsiders involved are seen as merely ancillary figures (cf. Vacas Olea 2021), co-opted as allies by some communities or families bent on destroying their Chicham enemies. In short, the Shuar have ‘internalised’ a national or indeed international conflict by placing themselves as its core actors and bringing it into the sphere of proper Jivaroan war. The consequences of this process are entirely consistent with the dynamics of Chicham social life: while they are certainly united by their shared opposition to White intervention in their world, as well as by their common appetite for personal aggrandisement, conflict necessarily fosters rivalry between men aspiring to become recognised leaders and rivalry in turn eventually but inevitably leads to disunion, turning former allies into foe and vice versa.

So life for the contemporary Shuar and Awajun is anything but boring and monotonous. They are unanimous in claiming that they are once again at war, as were their ancestors, a situation which offers them ample opportunities for competitive power games and Chicham-style ‘personal development’. But what they do miss, by general consent, is the peace, pleasure and beauty of ‘good living’. Contemporary domestic life is disrupted by the constant demands of political action, mistrust and rumor-mongering is rampant, and visits to other households or even distant garden plots are often curtailed by the threat of ambushes. In fact, a number of Shuar families have taken to retreating, for short or extended periods, to isolated houses located in sparsely populated portions of their forest territory, a trend enhanced by the current COVID epidemic. However, such retreats are not available for all Shuar, since their collective territory is shrinking due to population growth and Mestizo encroachment. Above all, opting out of the present turmoil in a permanent way means falling back into the status of a nangami aents, a condition of insignificance and anonymity, antithetical to their strongly claimed identity as Chicham persons. Significantly, when young people are asked how they see their future and where they think they are going, their most common response is to say that they want to be well paid professionals in prestige occupations – engineers, lawyers, doctors – but at the same time they want to remain Shuar and live the ‘good life’ surrounded by family in an isolated house somewhere in the depths of the forest. In sum, they are trapped in a choice between becoming (hopefully) powerful in the placeless world of the Whites (Whites are seen as rootless people), or living in place, on their own land, but with clearly waning power to control the course of their life and the resources needed to occupy the ‘high’ position they so persistently seek to attain in their relations with others.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, let us briefly run through the commonalities – as well as some revealing divergences – between the two cases we have presented, in order to highlight a few general issues calling for discussion.

In both groups, the ongoing production of healthy sociality (that is to say of humanity and its attribute, culture) is conditional on the engagement in extreme, life-threatening agonistic confrontations with some form of alterity, that is, beings or things not recognised as congeneric or human. The ability to capture from Others the elements necessary for producing life – potentialities of incarnation or fertility, proper names, ritual chants or instruments – requires the formation of a certain kind of person. Such persons are not ‘naturally’ given; they have to be forged, precisely through agonistic confrontation with others. This means that the production of life is, simultaneously, a process of individuation – the pathway to individual distinctiveness and memorability, to standing apart and above a condition of anonymous ‘ordinariness’. By the same token, it is also a process of subjectification of a peculiar sort: an enhanced or magnified person capable of generating proper life is a person who has become dual, has incorporated a part of the enemy and has thereby gained a new kind of reflexivity, a new point of view on self, congeners and others – a stance that enables him/her both to relate in the right terms to various kinds of others as well as to metamorphose wilfully into other bodily forms. Both ‘warriors’ and shamans do this, but in diverging ways – temporarily ‘jaguarized’ warriors kill non-humans to become more human, shamans ally with non-humans, partially but permanently adopting ‘dual nationality’, to cure and also possibly kill fellow humans.

Among the Wari’ as among the Chicham, the concept of illness diverges from the one we have (more or less) inherited from the ancient Greeks in at least three respects: first, it does not include visible flesh wounds or clearly apparent broken bones; secondly, rather than resting on a classification of ‘symptoms’ it focuses on bodily feelings of change, whether of mood (listlessness, melancholia, etc.) or of proprioceptive sensation (fever, persistent diffuse pain, respiratory difficulty, etc.); thirdly, the causes of illness are not physical: they ultimately lie in some being's will to harm, instrumentalized through shamanic means.

Among these Amazonians, illness is viewed primarily as a condition of intentionally caused, involuntary estrangement from one's kin, of succumbing to the lure of some collective of non-humans: animals in the case of the Wari’, Whites in the case of the Chicham. Illness is thus an undoing or unravelling of the process of differentiation involved in the production of enhanced personhood: ‘sickness’ translates as ‘weakness’, the loss of the ability to stand up to the enemy which in turn implies the loss of the ability to produce congeners and engage with them – or vice versa. Healing scenarios therefore turn on the curer's capacity both to sever or weaken the fatal relation between the patients and the non-humans trying to capture them and to reconnect them to their kin, thereby to themselves and to a position of full humanity.

Just as Amazonian understandings of states of ill-being question some of the premises underlying ancient and modern Western views of illness and medicine, so too their notions about personhood and its subjective dimension challenge many of our assumptions about the nature of individuals, what constitutes their ‘interiority’ and the stories told about it. Fully formed Wari’ or Chicham persons are hybrid beings, substantifiying a combination of relations to congeners and relations to others. Purely congeneric kin would be entirely transparent to each other were it not for the relations they inevitably, even as children, engage in with invisible beings; and it is these unseen interactions that account for their relative opacity to each other. Speculation about other people's behaviour and intentions therefore focuses not on ‘psychological’ factors (why does X do this?) but rather on ‘sociological’ clues (who does X do it with?).

This is where the effects of Westernisation and more particularly Christianisation become palpable: the multiform others Amazonians feel compelled to relate to by battling with them are gradually subsumed under two single figures, that of God and the devil, and the relation to these non-humans turns from one of confrontation with equals to one of non-reversible submission to one of these two entities. Bereft of the means of becoming human in and on their own terms, converted Indians gradually become humans in Western terms – merely humans, and humans alone.

Why is this fate experienced as a loss, and not just by the ethnographers of these people? What in pre-contact times drove them repeatedly to seek out extreme agonistic encounters? What, in short, is the source of the tight necessary articulation so commonly found in Amazonian societies between warfare and life as it should be? The Chicham would argue that it lies in the ever-present threat of diminishment, collective and individual, given that possibilities of embodied being are measured. The Wari’ view illness as retaliation on the part of the animals they prey on, and this seems to suggest that, while they do not explicitly connect their bellicosity to vital scarcity, they too see life as a ‘human’ as a disputed supreme value, therefore a rare resource.

It may be that such notions are ultimately rooted in the absence of a mechanism – like the one we call ‘Nature’ – capable of spontaneously generating new life forms. Animist ontologies, such as the ones underlying Wari’ and Chicham culture, usually imply a ‘fixist’ conception of the world’, one in which different ‘kinds’ or species of beings are simply ‘there’ and always have been, in latent form in pre-speciation times, in actualied form thereafter, following the fragmentation/differentiation of the primordial community of generalised humanity which led all kinds to ‘see’ each other in divergent ways. But this is only half the story, because all beings come with the ability to metamorphose, to part ways momentarily or permanently with their given shape and take on a different body (as a dreamer's ‘soul’ can leave his body and wander elsewhere to see and be seen as a ‘normal’ live person). This means that the endless multiplicity of things in the world is due to the multiplication of perspectives on them rather than to the action of a force producing them motu proprio. Since each ‘person’ contextually endowed with subjectivity sees and lives in its own ‘nature’ according to the properties of his or her body, the same elements of the world will be apprehended from a variety of points of view: the thing a bird sees as ‘wasp’ will be seen as ‘jaguar’ by a honey bee, and this insect in turn may be seen as a peccary (i.e., as prey) by some species of bird. Moreover, the perspectives constitutive of the variety of the world's furniture are not always sealed off from one another and are also constantly changing. A shaman for example can see the world not only from the point of view of the kind (species) he belongs to but also from that of the normally invisible collective he has familiarised and been adopted by; and just as new items keep appearing in the lived world of ‘humans’, so too new elements appear in others’ perspectives. Since personhood is an endlessly extensible quality, the possible perspectives – and therefore the number and variety of things given once and for all – are equally unlimited.

A further implication of this animist, Nature-less style of worlding is that it makes no place for a stabilised, external or overarching point of view – such as the one provided by God or by Science – capable of fixing things and beings in a permanent identity transcending shape-shifting and the flux of perspectives. This raises problems for the settling of durable core identities: how can I know I am I (or we are we) save through the eyes of an Other? Hence the necessity of taking and incorporating values that incarnate the point of view of another maximally different ‘kind’ on self and the collective one belongs to. This is the central point of countless war-related rituals throughout Amazonia, in which some trophy taken from the enemy – a shrunken head, a live captive, a necklace of human teeth, or a mask representing the adversary – is gradually shifted from the position of enemy to that of kinsperson while the killer or taker of the trophy simultaneously undergoes a parallel but contrary process of ‘enemyfication’ until he is eventually reincorporated to his group as a heightened subject. As we have tried to show, such perspectival cross-overs between the inside and the outside are a constant feature of the Wari’ and Chichams’ social life, because they are the only way for them to produce and reproduce an ongoing sense of identity.