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The aim of the article is to intervene in one of the most interesting contemporary debates
in the anthropology of Christianity, the issue of the relationship between dividualism and
individualism, by exploring a specifically Amazonian configuration of this opposition
through my own ethnographic research with the Wari’, an indigenous group of southwest
Amazonia. My interest in this topic extends beyond the limits of the debate itself: I see it as
a favorable environment for demonstrating the productivity of concepts originating from
Amazonian ethnology—especially the Lévi-Straussian notions of “opening to the Other”
and “dualism in perpetual disequilibrium,” as well as the perspectivism conceptualized by
Viveiros de Castro – in more general discussions of cultural change, a topic on which I have
been working over the last twenty years.
Keywords: Amazonia, Christianity, ontology, perspectivism, individualism, cultural
change, alternation
For some decades, the Christianization of indigenous people was associated with
global political and economic issues that, according to anthropologists, had forced
these peoples to recognize the limitations to their own cosmological frameworks.1
1. An early version of this text was presented at the Locating Religion Seminar of the Cen-
tre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University
of Cambridge, UK, where I worked as a visiting scholar in January and February 2014.
My thanks to Joel Cabrita and David Maxwell for the invitation, and to the other peo-
ple present for the lively debate, especially Joel Robbins, Geoffrey Lloyd, and Richard
Werbner. I also thank Hau’s anonymous reviewers for their comments and sugges-
tions. Field research among the Wari’ was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation
These limits had left them unable to respond to their new lived world, including
the sudden expansion in their geographical and social horizons, and the advent of
new diseases untreatable by traditional therapies. The presumption was that indig-
enous ethnic groups would discover the insufficiency of the worlds conceived by
themselves, and would embrace Christianity as an effective tool in their adaptation
to the new world now before them (see Weber [1905] 2003, [1920] 1956; Bellah
1964; Geertz 1973; Horton 1975; also see Hefner 1993 and Pollock 1993 for critical
comments).
More recent anthropological works, based on ethnographic research with
Christianized native peoples, particularly in the Pacific region and Africa, have
transformed our ideas about both the reasons for and consequences of long-term
Christian experience in people’s lives. As Robbins (2004: 86–88) has argued, if
Christianity is indeed frequently adopted in the crisis situations arising from con-
tact with the Western world, this occurs independent of its cosmological premises,
given that the latter are largely unknown during these early moments. This means
that the religion cannot be claimed to provide intellectual solutions to problems
arising from the transformation of the lived world. And neither can the opposite
be asserted: namely, a purely material interest in conversion, as suggested by those
responsible for coining the expression “rice Christians”—for a handful of rice, or
any other material item, entire populations could be converted.
As we know, the definition of what constitutes a convert has varied consider-
ably within Christianity itself, ranging from participating in rituals and comply-
ing with norms to the notion of inner and true conversion, especially with the
advent of the Protestant Reformation, and the Calvinist doctrine in particular. In
any event, although in most cases the interest in Christianity is indissociable from
transformations linked to globalization, especially since the missionaries would
never have reached these remote places without the latter, the movement of con-
version is determined, initially at least, by the social and cosmological premises
of the natives, not by the Christian religion, since, as stated above, the premises
of the latter could only be unknown at the time. In other words, Christianity is
shaped by native culture, as occurs in the first phase of cultural encounters, which
Sahlins (1981, 1985) associates with the assimilation of the new events by means
of indigenous categories (see Robbins 2004: 10). It is only with the passing of time,
which enables knowledge to be gained of the bases of Christianity through biblical
translations, learning new rituals, and incorporating specific “technologies of the
self ” (Foucault [1976] 1990: 26–29; Robbins 2004: 217), that Christian cosmology,
values, and culture as a whole come to exert a direct influence on the reorganiza-
tion of the sociocosmological bases of native culture.
While the existence of distinct phases of Christian experience now appears to
be a consensus among scholars, the same cannot be said when it comes to deter-
mining the central characteristics of this second phase—in other words, the types
of transformations that Christian doctrine in its full sense, even taking account its
huge variations, imprints on native culture.
for Anthropological Research, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National
Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and Rio de Janeiro
State Research Support Foundation (FAPERJ).
The divergence among a group of authors, most of them dedicated to the study
of Pacific societies, has generated one of the most intense—and I think most fasci-
nating—debates in the anthropology of Christianity. This debate revolves around
the notion of personhood. In very simple terms to be reworked in more detail later,
some authors support Robbins’ (2004) conclusion that transformations in the no-
tion of personhood, including the establishment of individualism as the dominant
value, and the new morality arising from this shift, comprise the core changes in-
troduced by Christianization, incidentally attesting to the productiveness of the
theories developed by Mauss ([1938] 1985) and Dumont ([1971] 2006, [1983]
1986) on the phenomenon. Another set of ethnographers opposes the idea that
individualism predominates, though most recognize that the notion is indeed a
constitutive element of the native Christian world. For those authors, though, indi-
vidualism is taken to combine with the traditional dividualism or relationalism—
which suppose a notion of the person as multiple and indissociable from his/her
relations—to produce a configuration distinct from the hierarchical encompass-
ment proposed by Robbins. In sum, the disagreement between the authors in this
debate concerns not the coexistence of these two notions of personhood among
Christianized native groups, since the majority concur with this possibility, but the
type of relation established between them.
The aim of the present article is to present a specifically Amazonian configu-
ration of the relationship between dividualism and individualism, based on my
own ethnographic research with the Wari’, an indigenous group living in southwest
Amazonia. My text is stimulated in particular by Robbins’ article published in this
issue of Hau. Here Robbins returns to the opposition between individualism and
relationalism/dividualism that founds the moral conflict of the Christian Urapmin
(Papua New Guinea), reaffirming its hierarchical organization: that is, the encom-
passment of relationalism, the primordial value of the traditional Urapmin world,
by Christian individualism. In so doing, he introduces a new argument to explain
the ethnographic evidence presented by other authors showing the persistence of
dividualism as an alternative and nonencompassed value. Turning to Dumont once
more for inspiration, Robbins defines the transcendent character of individualism,
which, clashing with values central to the smooth flow of social life, is unlikely to
ever become fully attained on this earthly plane.
I should immediately make clear that my interest in this topic extends beyond
the limits of the debate itself: rather, I see it as a favorable environment for dem-
onstrating the productivity of concepts originating from Amazonian ethnology—
especially the Lévi-Straussian notions of “opening to the Other” and “dualism in
perpetual disequilibrium” (Lévi-Strauss 1996), as well as the perspectivism concep-
tualized by Viveiros de Castro (1996, 1998, 2012a)—in more general discussions of
cultural change, a topic on which I have been working over the last twenty years
(Vilaça 1997, 1999, 2006, 2007, 2010).
As one type of change among others, Christianization presents various advan-
tages as an analytic topic. Foremost among these is how it allows a symmetrical
approach to the different parties involved in so-called cultural contact, since the
Christian perspective, in all its nuances, is made explicit during the work of cate-
chism. This enables us to identify a series of equivocations (Viveiros de Castro 2004)
involved in the processes of intercultural translation informing these encounters,
the work of Marilyn Strathern (1988), emphasizes the essentially dividual qual-
ity of the Christian person, whether the latter is Melanesian or Euro-American,
which, he argues, helps explain the considerable interest of native peoples in this
religion. What is usually characterized as the Christian individual, Mosko suggests,
is merely a relational moment of the dividual person (Strathern 1988: 14–15), one
in which parts of the self are eclipsed as a means to incorporate others, thus mak-
ing it completely different to the Euro-American individual (see also Hirsch 2008).
In his article, Mosko (2010) reviews the ethnographic data of other authors in
order to prove the pertinence of his approach. These authors, who include Robbins,
responded to Mosko’s criticisms with a range of arguments. Errington and Gewertz
emphasize the association between “possessive individualism” and Christian-
ity, though they also recognize the persistence of relational values in social life.
Unlike Robbins, however, Errington and Gewertz explicitly admit the possibility
of dividualism being a part of Christianity (as a global religion) itself, affirming
that “Christianity can (perhaps) lend itself to dividualistic thinking, [though] it by
no means always does” (Errington and Gewertz 2010: 251). Like Knauft (2010),
Barker (2010) focuses his own countercritique on Mosko’s methodology, highlight-
ing Mosko’s difficulties in perceiving the changes arising from Christianization.
Among the authors who joined this debate at a later stage, I shall mention only
those cited by Robbins (this issue): namely, Werbner, Daswani, and myself, all of
whom have looked to blur the two extreme poles of the debate by arguing for a non-
hierarchical relationship between the two models of personhood in the Christian
lives of the peoples under study. As remarked earlier, Werbner and Daswani re-
place the idea of dominance with that of oscillation, emphasizing the contradic-
tory quality of the Christian message. In his analysis of the Christian experience of
Apostolic Charismatics in Botswana, Werbner (2011: 196) comments on the “felt
sense of Christianity’s paradoxical nature.” Evoking the Renaissance theological de-
bate contained in the work of Cusanus, Werbner (ibid: 197) explores the concept
of the coincidentia oppositorum: that is, the idea of the “implied tension at the heart
of Christian theology” (ibid.). He thus concludes that not only is “Christianity . . .
more than compatible with dividuality” (ibid.: 198), but also “in southern Africa
there is an unstable yet enduring twining of individuality with dividuality” in the
form of an “alternating personhood” (ibid.: 199). This approach echoes Daswani’s
(2011) in his article on “(in)dividualism” among Pentecostals in Ghana. There
he writes: “I describe Ghanaian Pentecostals as ethical subjects who work at re-
solving this tension between individual desires for rupture and dividual affective
relations. . . . By understanding Christian identity as a living tension between states
of individuality and dividuality” (ibid.: 257).
Commenting on the work of these two authors, Robbins (this issue) argues
against the notion of oscillation and for the importance of the organization of val-
ues through hierarchical encompassment. As indicated above, he contends that the
appearance of this kind of oscillation or alternation relates to the fact that indi-
vidualism is a transcendent value, one sought but ultimately unachieved precisely
because this value always conflicts with others. Along with the works of Werbner
and Daswani, Robbins also mentions my own analyses of Wari’ Christianity, espe-
cially a more recent work where I sought to combine the Lévi-Straussian concept
of “dualism in perpetual disequilibrium” (Lévi-Strauss 1996: 239), extensively used
in the Amazonian literature, with the Melanesian concept of the dividual, thereby
contributing to the ongoing debates between anthropologists working in these two
regions (Vilaça 2011). In this earlier article I looked to show, along the same lines
as Werbner and Mosko, that Christianity is conducive to the incorporation of the
Wari’ dividual, though I added that they are also absorbing the individualist aspects
constitutive of the Christian message, seeking to elaborate them in their own way.
As we shall see, this implies some limits to the forms of expression of alternation,
though not its suppression.
demanding anything in return. Over time, though, these generous attitudes were
replaced by the introduction of an economic ideology that emphasized equitable
exchange, meaning that the Wari’ had to pay for everything they received with local
produce and work.
Conversion took place in a highly collective form, the first “wave” beginning at
the end of the 1960s, around ten years after contact with the missionaries had been
stabilized. At the start of the 1980s, however, a new “wave” occurred in the opposite
direction, leading to their deconversion en masse. The reasons given by the Wari’
for the latter decision were the deaths caused by animal spirits, as well as the club
fights and sorcery attacks associated with affines. They reconverted en bloc at the
start of the 2000s, stimulated, they said, by the Taliban attack on the World Trade
Center and the fear that the end of the world would catch them unprepared, taking
them all to hell. I had visited the Wari’ for the first time in 1986, at which point they
had already deconverted from Christianity and resumed their rituals and shaman-
ism, so it was only from 2002 onward that I was able to see them as Christians. This
was when I began to concentrate my field research on this topic.
Going back to the missionaries, it is worth noting that they based their work on
the premises of a very particular strand of Christianity, originating from the reviv-
alist churches of the southern United States. As far as I know, only one person from
the first team of missionaries, a woman, had been to university, an institution spe-
cifically established to train missionaries (Biola University, situated on the outskirts
of Los Angeles). All the others had been recruited in churches and trained in the
mission’s boot camps, where they had learnt jungle survival techniques to be used
later in their fight against the devil. These details are important since we know that
Christianity’s considerable internal diversity is a determining factor in the outcome
of catechism: in other words, it has a specific effect on the encounter with other
cultures or religions (see Fienup-Riordan 1991 and Cannell 2006).
In the aforementioned article by Werbner (2011: 191), for example, the au-
thor stresses the influence of the American individualist ideology among the New
England Charismatic Catholics studied by Csordas, for whom “the self as cultur-
ally constituted . . . is the discrete self rather than the relational self,” which, he
argues, accounts for the difference between them and the Apostolic Charismatics
of Botswana.
Turning to the Wari’ case, we can highlight the conflict between the life experi-
ence of the missionaries, educated in an environment in which individualism is un-
questionably a key value, and the message contained in the various books making
up the Bible, written and compiled into a single book around two thousand years
ago, when, as we know, individualism was not a dominant ideology. Unlike the
Urapmin, or the Christian Apostolic Charismatics of Botswana (Werbner 2011: 181)
and Ghanaian Pentecostals cited here—who all received the Christian message di-
rectly from the Holy Spirit and have little direct contact with the Bible, even going
as far as to reject it in the Ghanaian case, according to Daswani (2011)—the Wari’
conceive the Bible to be the only means of relating to God, its message mediated by
lower-middle-class missionaries from the United States whose own belief requires
them to translate the text literally. Conflicts are thus central to the Wari’ experience
of Christianity. The outcome is, in Sahlins’ words (1985: xiv), a “structure of con-
juncture,” a form of Christianity peculiar to diverse other Amazonian groups who
have experienced similar kinds of catechism. The conflict between the ideology in
which the missionaries were trained and the biblical text is compounded, therefore,
by the conflicts and contradictions inherent in the biblical message, its heterogenic
aspect, emphasized by historians like Peter Brown (1988) and anthropologists like
Mary Douglas (1995: 20–21) and Fenella Cannell (2006). In the words of the latter:
“However unyieldingly orthodox the form of Christianity that may be visited on
another culture, it can never contain only a single message with single possibilities
of interpretation, because Christian doctrine is itself paradoxal” (ibid.: 43). Before
we explore this point, I wish to quickly introduce the Wari’ relational world.
Dividualism in Amazonia
Adapting this description to the Melanesian model of the dividual, I have looked
to show (Vilaça 2011) that the Wari’ person is a dividual constituted by two com-
ponents: wari’ and karawa, which have the double sense of human and animal,
predator and prey. The production of kinship via the flux of elements conceived as
constituent parts of their bodies (kwerexi’), such as semen, sweat, speech, care, affec-
tion, and the sharing of food, is ultimately based on the relation between the Wari’
and animals, both internally constituted as wari’ and karawa (the “one-is-many
mode,” in Strathern’s formula: 1988: 14–15). The Wari’ are produced as humans by
differentiating themselves from animals/prey, who in their confrontation with the
Wari’ are produced as animals/prey and their human component is eclipsed. The
wari’–karawa dividual pair ceases to be internal to one person and characterizes
the Wari’–animal pair instead, in line with the moment of individuation identified
in the NME model (the “dual mode”: ibid.: 14–15). The latter differs from individu-
alization, since rather than producing self-contained persons, it produces one-half
of a relational pair. It is important to add that the outcome of any confrontation
may be precisely the opposite: the animal may prey on the Wari’, assuming the
predator position, wari’, and turning its victim into a karawa.
A relational dynamic based on opposing pairs is an essential characteristic of
this model. In Strathern’s words (1988: 14): “Relation is sustained to the extent that
each party is irreducibly differentiated from the other” (Strathern 1988: 14). In my
view, this oppositional dimension has been largely overlooked by authors using the
notion of the dividual to consider Christian experience, who in general emphasize
only its partible aspect (see Robbins in this issue for the same observation). It is
precisely this oppositional aspect that enables the association between dividual-
ism and the relational models developed for Amazonia. The words of Viveiros de
Castro on Amazonia resonate with those of Strathern: “The parties to any relation-
ship are related insofar as they are different from one another. They are related
through their difference, and become different as they engage in their relationship”
(Viveiros de Castro 2001: 25–26).
As I mentioned earlier, there are some clear affinities between this model and
a concept elaborated by Lévi-Strauss (1996: 239) in the context of Americanist
ethnology: namely, the idea of a dualism in perpetual disequilibrium, a logical
principle that implies an ordering of the world into stable pairs that become succes-
sively differentiated.2 Lévi-Strauss (1996: 230) argues that Native American peoples
ascribe a negative value to self-similarity, which has the power to paralyze the soci-
ety’s system of reproduction. Thus each position or category demands its opposite,
such that the notion of compatriot, for example, is unthinkable without that of the
foreigner or enemy.
As Viveiros de Castro (2001: 19) has shown in a work exploring the Lévi-
Straussian notion of dualism and relating it explicitly to the Melanesian model of
the person, this dichotomy is reproduced at all levels of the system, from the col-
lective to the individual, following a fractal model (see Kelly 2005). Thus compa-
triots are themselves differentiated into affines and consanguines, the latter into
same-sex or cross-sex siblings (or between younger and older ones), until we arrive
at the individual, who, as Viveiros de Castro (2001: 25) shows, is not so much an
“individual” as a “dividual” (ibid.: 33), constituted by a body and a soul, the former
comprising the compatriot or consanguine pole, and the latter the enemy or af-
fine pole, owing to its association with the exterior, or more specifically with its
capacity to produce transformations to the body, altering the person’s “identity.” In
the kinship production process analyzed by Viveiros de Castro in his 2001 article,
the “affine” pole is systematically eclipsed—but never eliminated—at the different
levels of the fractal model. It is the persistence of affinity that explains the instabil-
ity of this dualism, producing new pairs in a continuous (and infinite) movement
of extracting affinity.
In contrast to Melanesia, where gender categories constitute one of the main
principles of differentiation, in Amazonia, as some authors have shown (see
Descola 2001 and Strathern 1999 for specific comments on this difference), the
pairs of opposites are constituted at different levels by configurations of the human/
nonhuman opposition (which includes the compatriot/enemy and consanguine/
affine oppositions).
kinship prior to Christianity was determined by their relations with animals, since
the Wari’ made themselves into kin in order to differentiate themselves from the
former. We are faced with concentric spheres of values, therefore, the innermost
sphere dominated by consanguinity and the outermost and encompassing sphere
dominated by affinity—here the name of difference in the amplest sense.
In Viveiros de Castro’s model, the dominant value is not one which people aim
to realize, as in the case of Christian individualism as formulated by Robbins and
Dumont, but one taken to be constitutive of the innate world, and which people
seek sometimes to eclipse and sometimes to emphasize. In Viveiros de Castro’s
synthesis (2001: 28–32), Amazonian sociality is characterized by two indissociable
movements pursued in opposite directions: the everyday movement of eclipsing
affinity and producing kinship; and ritual movement, performed in collective cer-
emonies, warfare, and shamanic action, in which relations of alterity—whether
with spirits, creator heroes, enemies, or affines—are objectified and recreated, and
thereby reintroduced back into the system.4 The two movements are not equiva-
lent, however, since affinity/alterity is the starting point, effectively constituting the
innate world. For Viveiros de Castro, these two divergent movements explain not
only what seems to be an ambiguity inherent in native systems, which sometimes
emphasize consanguinity/identity and other times affinity/difference, but also a
historical divergence—at least until recently—between Amazonist anthropologists,
some of whom define Amazonian socialities through a focus on peaceful relations
and the production of consanguinity (Overing and Passes 2002), while others em-
phasize the preeminence of relations with the exterior, pursued through warfare,
ritual, and shamanism (Albert 1985; Fausto 2007, 2012; Vilaça 1992, 2000; Viveiros
de Castro 2001).
4. See Strathern (1988: 118 and 1999: 98) on the idea of distinct socialities in quotidian
and ritual life.
5. See Leite (2013) on these parallels. See also Kelly (2011).
Castro’s model (2001), without which the movement of differentiation cannot take
place. After this period of inversion, action assumes its customary direction.
Wagner argues that in tribal societies culture and relations are conceived to be
constitutive of the innate world, and people look to create differences, producing
themselves as special, “individualized,” powerful persons. Such movement does not
produce self-contained individuals, as I looked to show on another occasion where I
adapted Wagner’s model to the Wari’ (Vilaça 2013), but involves precisely an eclips-
ing of alterity, or a “de-affinization,” in Viveiros de Castro’s terms: that is, the pro-
duction of a specific humanity, differentiating the Wari’ as a group from the animals.
An important point of Wagner’s model concerns the unproblematic character
of contradiction (Wagner 1975: 116)6 in these differentiating systems, since human
intentional action does not aim to produce the kind of linear, coherent world found
in our conventionalizing systems, where the innate is constituted precisely by in-
dividuals, idiosyncratic beings who must produce conventions capable of coordi-
nating human action. In these systems, individuals exist and culture is produced.
Differentiating systems look to differentiate themselves from the conventional, and
the paths toward this aim may be multiple and coexistent, leading to the multiple
perspectives that we have been commenting on.
For Wagner (1975: 124, 145–46), Christianization can lead to the inversion of
the direction of the movement: that is, the transformation of differentiating sys-
tems into conventionalizing systems through the reconfiguration of the innate
world and the problematization of contradiction.7 In this schema, the individual
becomes part of the innate world, and relations are produced through the creation
of conventions. Contradictions become experienced as moral dilemmas, diverging
perspectives that must be resolved to ensure the system’s coherence.
It is interesting to compare this model of transformation with that of Robbins—
a somewhat forced comparison, since the notions of value and hierarchy, central
to Robbins’ account, are not made explicit in Wagner’s model, though in my view
they can be found there. Using this hybrid language, we could say that, for Wagner,
in differentiating traditions positive values are found in differentiation, while in
conventionalizing traditions they are found in actions that look to produce con-
ventions and through them relations. In the latter, therefore, individualism is not
so much a positive value that people wish to live, but something to which they are
6. See also Lévy-Bruhl ([1926] 1985: 78, 361). It is important to note that the use of the
term “contradiction” here refers to this somewhat vague perception of a coexistence
of divergent behaviors or ideas, rather than being determined by the debates between
Aristotle and Heraclitus on the Law of Contradiction. In the latter case, attributes said
to be contradictory must be “predicated of the same subject at the same time, in the
same respect and in the same relation” (Lloyd 1966: 87; see also 86–102). An interest-
ing comparison can be made between this type of characteristic and the absence of our
sense of whole among Melanesian peoples according to the analysis by Hirsch (2008).
On the unsuitability of the Dumontian concept of “totality” in relation to Amazonia,
see Viveiros de Castro (2001: 27).
7. See also Keane (2007) on the relation between Christianity (and modernity) and the
process named by Latour (1993) as purification, specifically the clear differentiation
between subjects and objects.
compelled owing to their own innate constitution. Cultural change involves the
transition from one innate world to another, implying the inversion of the direction
of action, something that can be conceived as a moral transformation.
For Robbins, there is no change in the Urapmin universe of the innate since the
latter remains relational. The new value introduced with Christianization, namely
individualism, has the effect of making relationalism conscious, meaning that peo-
ple begin to make choices and consequently experience an intense moral conflict.
This corresponds to what Wagner identifies as the great danger of the production
of the innate becoming conscious. The impossibility felt by the Urapmin of making
themselves plain individuals would arise from a movement analogous to Wagner’s
idea of the counterinvention of the innate, explaining the “transcendence” of this
value, which is never fully realized.
The idea of moral conflict is not part of Wagner’s model—nor of Viveiros de
Castro’s model for the values of affinity and consanguinity in Amazonia—since
there is no choice to be made, properly speaking, given that there is only one mor-
ally sanctioned direction of action (the quotidian). Conflict would occur with the
inversion of action, which voluntarily produces the innate, were it not surrounded
by ritual precautions and necessarily episodic. A collective and everyday inversion
would imply the transformation of the native conception of the innate, precisely
what, following Wagner, occurs in large social transformations. In the case of dif-
ferentiating traditions, transformation would involve the invention of nature and
the individual as part of the innate world, which converges with the analyses of
other authors of the modernization of animist societies (Descola 2013: 66–67) or
nonmodern societies in general (Dumont 1986: 40–43; Latour 1993: 139).
As explored later in this article, Christianity was initially appropriated by the
Wari’ through the dividualist perspective of the person, also present in the Christian
message, and, through this message, they looked to eclipse the constitutive alterity
of their selves, as they did traditionally through intrahuman kinship. The individu-
alist aspect of the Christian message was also comprehended by them, but instead
of adopting it as a value for guiding life, they exiled it to the posthumous worlds of
heaven and hell. This does not mean that Christianity has not led to transforma-
tions in the notion of personhood, especially when we consider the shift in genera-
tions, whose importance has been signaled by various authors (Durston 2007: 83;
Keane 2007: 139; Maxwell 2007; Barker 2010: 248 ).
For the Wari’, conversion has primarily involved the introduction of the notion
of an inner self, which has started to form part of their discourse. This arises from
the introduction of new concepts through translations and above all the suppres-
sion of traditional rituals—collective festivals, warfare, and shamanism—where
difference–affinity was voluntarily reinserted into the system, having been substi-
tuted by Christian rituals focused on the production of identity and the inner self,
among them confession.
through the establishment of kinship ties between persons, defusing the possibility
of kinship with animals by constituting stable human bodies. This stability was
never permanent, though, since animals insisted on attacking the Wari’, or abduct-
ing them, associating them with their own kinship network. Insofar as animals
appeared as humans, the Wari’ would become animalized, so that the innate world
of the internalized dividual person (the “two-in-one” phase defined by Strathern
1988) was counterinvented as resistance and imposed itself on them. On the other
hand, during moments of inversion of the movement of invention—that is, collec-
tive rituals, warfare, and shamanism—the innate world founded on difference was
voluntarily produced.
Christianity was adopted by the Wari’ as an additional way of ensuring the suc-
cess of this eclipsing. Hence they were especially interested in the Book of Genesis,
where animals are desubjectivized by God. After creating heaven, earth, and all
the animals, God, according to the Wari’ version of the Book of Genesis (1:26),
said: “Let us make people who are similar to us. He will be the leader/chief (taram-
axikon) of all the fish and birds and all the strange animals. He will be the leader of
all of the earth too. He will be the leader of all the strange animals who crawl across
the earth. This is what he said.” Another verse is also revealing: “Eat all the animals,
all the birds, and all the strange animals that crawl across the earth as well” (1:30).
By determining that animals are prey only, divine creation desubjectivizes them,
constituting the Wari’ as predators and therefore as the sole humans. To share God’s
perspective, the Wari’ sought to turn themselves into kin with him, becoming his
children through the physical approximation to missionaries or directly through
prayers and reading the Bible, taken to be a divine food (Vilaça 2012). From posi-
tions to be adopted within a relation of mutual opposition, wari’ and karawa be-
came categories at the moment when the Wari’ accepted—and identified with—
the divine perspective (see Vilaça 2009: 154–55). Consequently, we could say that,
through Christianity, the Wari’ aim to decomplexify the dividual person in just the
same way as they once did through the production of kinship.
The return to the innate world of the “one is many mode” continued to occur
and be perceived as resistance, although animal agency was subsumed by the devil,
who, according to the missionaries, enters animals and makes them act as people,
as predators, like the snake in the Book of Genesis. When a person became sick
and this sickness was associated with the ingestion of some animal, or the activity
of hunting itself, the Wari’ would say that the devil “entered” the animal and made
it act in a vengeful way. As one man said: “It is the devil that joins with the animal
spirit” or “Animal spirits don’t exist, it is the devil who enters them.”
The devil, then, corresponds to the wari’ side of animals, who thereby constitute
the Wari’, their victims, as prey, karawa. They also say that the devil raises them like
people raise chicks, feeding and caring for them, prior to eating them. The trans-
formation of the Wari’ into prey by the devil emerges clearly in their conception
of hell, the abode of the devil, a place where bodies remain in a process of eternal
roasting, like prey never released from this state (see Vilaça 2009: 158–59).
The relation of the Wari’ to God is conceived in opposition to their relation
with the devil, just as kinship within the local group was inconceivable without the
dialogue with animal subjectivities. This is made explicit in various prayers and
commentaries, as in this remark made by people during a church service:
8. Mosko’s (2010: 230) observation concerning the devil among the North Mekeo sug-
gests a point of comparison: “Villagers accordingly understand sin as adding to one’s
person some bit or taint of Diabolo, which simultaneously closes oneself off from re-
ceiving Deo’s gifts.” See Kopenawa and Albert (2010: 261) on the Yanomami.
9. This brings us back to Lévi-Strauss’ analysis (1996: 49–50) of Amerindian twins, al-
ways conceived in the form of opposites. In a footnote, the author (ibid.: 50) draws a
comparison between the fall of the mythic deceiver and the fall of the biblical Adam,
which could be explored through an analysis of the role of the devil and the notion of
sin. For a detailed discussion of the concept of the devil among the Amazonian Ese Ejja,
see Lepri (2003: 239–59). See also Rivière (1981: 8) on the Trio. Evens (1997: 212) in an
analysis of the biblical episode of Adam and Eve suggests the equivalence between the
serpent and God: “The serpent is peculiarly identifiable with the absolute, with God.”
Among the Yanomami the shaman Davi Kopenawa identifies God with the trickster
Yoase, whose actions could be associated with those of the devil (Kopenawa and Albert
2010: 492).
(New King James Bible) reads as follows: “Or do you not know that your body is the
temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not
your own?” The translation into Wari’ in the calendar reads as follows: “You must
all already know that your body is like the house of the Holy Spirit (Tamatarakon
Iri’ Jam). He enters and remains in you. [The body] was given to you by God. You
cannot say that ‘it is mine’ among you.”
This is a notion very similar to the one we named the Wari’ outer self, in op-
position to the inner self: just as in the pre-Christian world the self was constituted
relationally and determined from the outside, either by the perspective of kin or
that of animal spirits, in the Christian world the self is determined by God or by the
devil, who fight with each other for the perspective of the Wari’.
The ambivalence of the body is a central part of Christian paradoxes, either
negatively valued as the seat of sin (God has no body and therefore never sins, the
Wari’ say), or attributed a positive value in God’s incarnation in Jesus.10 While the
missionaries wanted—like the missionary Leenhardt ([1947] 1971: 263–64) from
the viewpoint of the Canaque Boesou—to give the Wari’ a stabilized and unified
body, which would serve as the seat for their relation to God, the Christian concep-
tion of the body is essentially complex and oscillating. As a Wari’ elder observed:
“God asks the person to give him all the parts of his body to leave nothing for the
devil. If he gives [part] to the devil, he drinks and goes with women.”
The complex notion of personhood transmitted by the Bible undoubtedly com-
prises an ideal environment for the propagation of the dividualism of the Wari’
and other native groups. Furthermore, what appears contradictory to us and the
missionaries, which they attempt to resolve through theological discussions or the
notion of mystery, appears unproblematic to the Wari’. So, for instance, the Wari’
often assert that God has no body and soon after remark that “God’s body is like
that,” given that personal characteristics, the person’s way of being, are for them
located in the body.
Christian individualism
As well as enabling the Wari’ to resume the relational mechanism of the divid-
ual person, the missionaries, paradoxically, transmitted a clearly individualist
message. The works of Donald Pollock (1993: 189) and Anne-Christine Taylor
(1981: 652) comparing the simultaneous activities of Catholic missionaries and
Evangelical missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics among the
Amazonian Culina and Achuar, respectively, show that both kinds of missionar-
ies base their work on clearly individualist conceptions, recognized by the Indians
as such, whether adopting or rejecting them. The most important difference, ac-
cording to the authors, resides in the fact that the individualizing premises are
made explicit by the Evangelicals, while they remain implicit in Catholic practice.
Among the Achuar, the Evangelicals laud routinized physical work and relate
success in accumulating capital to divine assistance, while the Catholics created
10. See Cannell (2006: 41–43) and Schmitt (1998: 344) on Christianity in different histori-
cal moments and environments “attributing a strong ambiguity to the body.”
11. On the sanctification of work for Calvinists and Lutherans, achieved through the wor-
ship of God and self-discipline, see Troeltsch (1976).
12. On the relation between Christianity and interiority, see Foucault ([1976] 1990: 60–79);
Charles Taylor (1989); Lambek (1998: 122 n. 20); Cannell (2006: 15); Keane (2007);
Robbins, Schieffelin, and Vilaça (2014).
Believing for them only meant changing their life, and believing is an intimate rela-
tion with God, which they had not known” (Royal Taylor, pers. comm. 1994).
13. In those festivals, members of different subgroups, referred to by affinity kinship terms,
were “killed” by an excess of fermented maize beer (chicha).
invention brought by the missionaries, given that the Wari’ had no concept of an
inner vital principle of the kind we usually equate with the soul. Everything for
them amounted to the body, which changed form depending on the person’s rela-
tional context and perspective. The Wari’ call this other objectified body jamixi’ or
tamataraxi’, the latter being the expression chosen by the missionaries to designate
the Christian soul.
Although the devil initially acted through animals, over the years he has shifted
to enter people directly, inciting them to act with greed and anger, just like affines
usually do. Hence while affinity as the place of alterity, or as an expression of one of
the poles of the dual constitution of persons, has proven resistant to the unification
intended by Christian fraternity (insofar as it is once again counterinvented by the
devil, unaware to people, as happened with animality), the disappearance of the
animal pole has caused a narrowing of the person’s axis of expression, affecting its
outcome. It is as though dividualism could not be expressed in the same way when
humanity became reduced to the Wari’ per se, that is, a universe in which affinity is
no longer one of the fractal configurations of this dualism, leaving the Wari’ as its
only expression (see Vilaça 2013).
This process is analogous to what Anne-Christine Taylor (1996: 211) observed
in the Christianization of the Jivaro Achuar: prevented from enacting any extreme
relations, people became “just-so-persons,” apparently equal to what they had been,
but in fact very different owing to the transformation of the world they inhabit.14
It is also analogous to the process experienced by the Canaque who, according to
Leenhardt ([1947] 1971: 263–64), abandoned the relations of “participation” with
nonhuman beings with the advent of Christianity, though maintaining intrahu-
man participations, that is, the mutual constitution of persons, which we could call
relationalism. Leenhardt ([1947] 1971: 268–72) adds that this was an important
path in the unification of the person, essential to the experience of Christianity, but
distinct from the self-cenetred Western individual, undesired by the missionary
(see also Clifford 1992: 78 and Vilaça 2013).
In the terms set by Wagner’s model, we could say that counterinventions of the
innate world cannot be sustained partially, that is, with the suppression of one of
the dimensions of this world (the animal pole of the person and the human pole of
animals) and the absence of the episodic movements of voluntary inversion in the
direction of action where the innate is fabricated. The result is indeed a movement
toward the transformation of the innate world, constituted, as I remarked earlier,
by an idea of nature and individuals to be domesticated through conventions and
new rituals. This process is far from being completed among the Wari’, however, a
fact certainly linked to the idea of individualism as a “transcendent” value, which
is only realized with great difficulty in these cultures, as Robbins (this issue) has
shown.
14. One of the article’s reviewers pointed to the interesting parallel between Taylor’s con-
cept of “just-so persons” and the affirmation made by the Ilongot, according to per-
sonal information from Michelle Rosaldo, that with the abandonment of headhunting
in the wake of evangelization, by the same New Tribes Mission, the world has become
“greyer.”
15. On the relation between the absence of affinity and the static aspect of the posthumous
Kraho world, in opposition to the dynamic aspect of the lived world, see Carneiro da
Cunha (1978: 122 and 128). Also see Overing (1985: 157), where heaven among the
Piaroa comprises a place without affines, “asocial safety.” “All immortal beings in the
Piaroa cosmos live alone, have a solitary existence.” See also Viveiros de Castro (2002:
207) in his essay on the interest of the Tupinambá in the missionaries and Christianity:
“an alterity without which the world would succumb to indifference and paralysis.”
message, which oscillates between the emphasis on the dividual and individual
person, to take the transcendent character of this value to its extreme. At the same
time, though, the transformation of ritual life and the new concepts introduced
with the translations and readings have constrained the full realization of the di-
vidual, which suggests the possibility that the individual might, in the future, come
to “walk with its own feet on the earth” (Dumont 1986) of the Wari’.
In sum, the present article supports Robbins’ general arguments on the intrin-
sic relation between Christianity as a religion and individualism, although it looks
to demonstrate that, as shown by Mosko (2010) and other authors like Cannell
(2006) and Hirsch (2008), there are dividualist aspects evident in the different
Christian doctrines that corroborate the conflict of values lived by Christianized
native peoples.
I have also aimed to show that, for the Wari’ at least, it is unproductive to think of
the relationship between individualism and dividualism/relationalism in the form
of a hierarchy, even if we consider that the dominant value is not materialized as
such in social practice, as Robbins argues in the case of the individualism theorized
by Dumont. In some ethnographic cases, the model of alternation between the dif-
ferent configurations of personhood seems to me the most adequate for conceiving
this relation, as Werbner and Daswani have shown in relation to specific African
contexts and I have done in relation to the Wari’. Robbins’ counterargument to this
idea, which insists on identifying relational or dividualist contexts as of less impor-
tance in social life, fails to adequately explain the cases in question.
In order to sustain the notion of alternation in opposition to hierarchy, I took a
long detour, proposing an Amazonian reading of Dumont’s theory of value, based
primarily on Viveiros de Castro’s (1993) analyses of kinship and Wagner’s (1975)
theory of cultural invention. By tracing continuities between very diverse theories,
I have aimed to show that when we attempt to use the language of an encompass-
ment of values to describe the sphere of Amazonian kinship, especially the relation
between consanguinity and affinity as proposed by Viveiros de Castro, a series of
differences emerge in relation to Dumont’s model, especially regarding the way
in which it is applied by Robbins. Firstly, the idea of dominance emerges in the
Amazonian context associated with the concept of the given or innate world, and
not as a value to be pursued or sought. Expressed differently, people do not look to
realize affinity, but find themselves compelled into these relations through coun-
terinvention, without any intervention from their own agency. This explains the
absence of the idea of moral conflict (not in general, of course, but specifically in
the domain of kinship classification) which is central to Robbins’ model—an ab-
sence also related to the fact that each of these values is lived in distinct contexts
of social life: consanguinity is the dominant value in the local group, while affinity
encompasses the extragroup relations or the relations with the outside more widely.
Although cultural change is undoubtedly occurring among the Wari’ with their
ever-increasing adherence to Christianity, this cannot be attributed to the trans-
formation in the relation between values, as Robbins argues, with individualism
taking over the most important aspects of social life. Rather, such change is driven
by the transformation of the innate world and the privileged direction of human
action in Wagnerian terms. Instead of thinking of life as a dialectic between differ-
entiation and conventionalization, or between quotidian and ritual, which allowed
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