Surfaces and lines: artefacts and designs as communicative manifestations of relationships in Amazonian cosmologies (original) (raw)
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Like Scars on the Body's Skin: The Display of Ancient Things in Trio Houses (Northeast Amazonia).
The Archaeological Encounter: Anthropological Perspectives, 2011
This paper is an analysis of the ways in which the Trio, a central Guianese Carib people who live in the border area of Suriname, French Guiana and Brazil, relate to the eclectic collection of objects they accumulate in their houses. The study of the house in Amazonia has previously been characterized by a particular attention to traditional dwelling places, their decorative value and symbolic powers, and the intricate relationship between kinship, community and settlement. In recent years, some authors interested in the integration of recent historical change to native Amazonia have addressed issues raised by the remapping of settlements, sedentarization and indigenous conversion to Christianity. My approach in this paper lies somewhere in between, as it offers an analysis of relational permanence in new indigenous architectural forms. I am looking at the novelty of ‘old’ houses and their use as display cases of personal histories as an illustration of a series of transformations experienced by the Trio in recent decades, some of which they claim to have actively sought. Ultimately I wish to demonstrate that the house and its artefacts on display constitute literal extensions of their owner’s body, and that this is particularly true in a native Amazonian cosmology which considers persons as composites of affects and capacities fabricated by careful engagement with distant alterity.
American Anthropologist, 2017
Producing geometric designs and images on materials, such as pottery, basketry, and bead artwork,as well as the human body, is elemental and widespread among Amazonian Indigenous peoples. In this article, weexamine the different geometric forms identified in the precolonial geoglyph architecture of southwestern Amazoniain the context of geometric design making and relational ontologies. Our aim is to explore earthwork iconographythrough the lens of Amerindian visual arts and movement. Combining ethnographic and archaeological data fromthe Upper Purus, Brazil, the article shows how ancient history and socio-cosmology are deeply “written” onto thelandscape in the form of geometric earthworks carved out of the soil, which materialize interactions betweennonhuman and human actors. We underline skills in visualization, imaginative practices, and movement as ways topromote well-balanced engagements with animated life forms. Here, iconography inserted in the landscape is botha form of writing and also emerges as an agent, affecting people through visual and corporal practices.
The Wauja snake-basket: myth and the conceptual imagination of material culture in Amazonia
The literature on Amazonian ethnology is plenty of mythical serpents whose deeds are related to the origin of humanity, the invention and teaching of shamanic knowledge, artefacts, graphic motifs and songs. If the mythological themes on Amazonian serpents have already been widely described and analysed, the same cannot be said about the visual forms related to these themes. Many studies on Amazonian mythology left aside the very plastic aspects of material culture. These studies did not take into account that several features of the mythological themes are precisely merged with the qualities of the visual styles. This article discusses some aspects of the conceptual imagination of Wauja (an Arawak speaking people of the Upper Xingu) material culture through the analysis of a mythical character that explicitly exposes the intrinsic and simultaneous musical and iconographic nature of weaving art. O cesto-serpente Wauja: mito e a imaginação conceitual da cultura material em Amazônia Resumo A literatura etnológica amazônica é povoada de serpentes mitológicas que estão na origem da humanidade, da criação e transmissão de conhecimentos xamânicos, de artefatos da cultura material, de desenhos e de canções. Se os temas mitológicos das serpentes amazônicas já estão amplamente caracterizados e analisados, o mesmo não pode ser dito sobre as formas visuais relacionadas aos mesmos. Muitos estudos da mitologia amazônica deixaram de lado os aspectos propriamente plásticos da cultura material, sem talvez dar-se conta que determinadas particularidades dos temas mito-cosmológicos estão precisamente fundidas nas qualidades dos estilos visuais. Este artigo discute alguns aspectos da imaginação conceitual da cultura material wauja (arawak do Alto Xingu) a partir da análise de um personagem mítico que expõe de modo explícito a natureza intrínseca e simultaneamente musical e iconográfica da arte do trançado.
Revisiting the life of things: A cognitive semiotic study of the agency of artefacts in Amazonia
Public Journal of Semiotics, 2021
Many contemporary scholars have recently defended the idea that the agency of things is symmetrical and equivalent to human agency. We propose an alternative approach to artefacts’ agency based on a field study concerned with contextually situated observations of the process of design of artefacts in Amazonia. By means of participant observation and interviews, we address the role of artefacts in relation to human agency. In so doing, we focus on the human-unique capacity for design as it is related to cognitive resources such as intentionality, decision-making, planning, and volitional adaptations of the material world to human purposes. We argue that such cognitive resources are ultimate manifestations of human agency. The findings allow us to conclude that artefacts possess a special form of agency, which operates in different ways from the agency of true agents. This agency is derived: it depends on the actions of true agents, with either function as remote intentions or are required for the artefact to work at the moment of use. Thus, the relation between artefacts and agents is asymmetrical. Given that the derived agency of artefacts allows people to expand their own agency, we propose the notion of enhanced agency for the prosthetic incorporation of artefacts into the agentive capabilities of human agents.
Maize as Material Culture?: Amazonian Theories of Persons and Things
Journal of the Anthropology Society of Oxford (JASO)-online, 2011
As a significant sub-discipline within anthropology, material culture studies have been at the forefront of ground-breaking theories regarding the relationships between people and things. A whole genre of object biographies have been produced, based on article on the 'social life of things ' (cf. Saunders 1999. Daniel Miller's (1987) interpretation of Hegel's dialectical materialism led to a serious discussion of how people and objects mutually reinforce and create each other. While Kopytoff's theory has been widely criticized for its passive, semiotic approach , Miller's notion of 'materiality' (1987, 2010) moved away from the meanings of objects to focus on how they act within the field of social relations. As more anthropologists and archaeologists engage with material culture studies, however, the assumptions on which this sub-field have been based are being called into question. Rival's edited volume (1998) includes ethnographic accounts attempting to reconcile the symbolic and material aspects of person ̶ thing relationships. Ingold (2007b) adopts a more radical view, bypassing a discussion of symbolism and critiquing 'materiality' for being an abstract category. His phenomenological approach calls for an analysis of the material substance and affects/effects of things. Instead of analysing the 'thinginess' of things, as is the case in materiality studies, Ingold advocates an exploration of how things are 'thingly'; that is, how they emerge in the world of both people and things (Ingold 2007b: 9). In this sense, things are not essential, unchanging entities but are instead contingent (Holtorf 2002) on time, space, and their relationships with other emergent things and people. This brief summary of material culture studies reveals that the basic relationships under analysis, those between people and things, are by their very nature complex and unfold over time. As anthropologists, how are we to make sense of this 'mess' (cf. Hicks 2010: 71) of things and people? In this article, I will argue that a better understanding of people ̶ thing relationships must begin from an expanded Miller, Maize as material culture? 68 notion of 'material culture.' Within material culture analyses, the materials most commonly investigated are manufactured objects. Miller (2010) studies cell phones and saris, Latour (1993b, 2000) researches trains and keys, and many other authors have analysed everything from knapped bottle glass artefacts (Harrison 2003), to potsherds (Holtorf 2002), to rubbish (Shanks 2004). Although Ingold (2000, 2006, 2007a, 2007b) has produced theoretical writings on non-manufactured materials such as trees and the weather, he has yet to write an ethnographic account of such materials in the lives of particular people. While the relationship between people and manufactured objects is undoubtedly important, in certain communities other materials also take on a central role. This article will focus on indigenous Amazonian encounters with things, including artefacts, animals, spirits and plants. Human ̶ plant relationships will be given a particular emphasis, as these engagements are understudied and not usually included in the domain of 'material culture studies' (an important exception is Rival ed. 1998). It will be shown how a more complete theoretical understanding of the relationship between people and all sorts of things can be found in the rich ethnographies of Amazonia.
This article focuses on the problem of how native Amazonian peoples perceive and construct visual imagery on geological landscape and theorise on its causes and origin. Many native theory-building strategies seem to intertwine anthropogenic markings on lithological surfaces with systems of knowledge regarding geological and biological phenomena as a whole. When native Amazonian perceptions and theories are taken into account, it is not only graphic imagery, as a discrete entity, that is under consideration, but rather complex epistemological articulations between visual graphic expression and geo-environmental context. These cognitive articulations conceive geological phenomena just as culturally and intentionally constructed as rock art is considered in a Western perspective. The neuropsychological phenomenon of pareidolia is examined as a perceptual-cognitive trigger that intertwines geological features with sensorial constructs affording cultural responses. This phenomenon is exemplified by presenting evidence on the entanglement of rock art and geomorphic features in head representations with facial elements, which occur diversely and consistently throughout Amazonia and the Andes. The aim of this article is to explore the relational nature between Indigenous knowledge and geological phenomena, considering eventual consequences upon the ways native Amazonians conceptualise causal agency in geo-situated visual imagery. When geological phenomena are qualified as human-made, or made by ancestral, spiritual or animal/vegetal non-human persons, or are themselves considered as persons, this posits a basic question: what is anthropogenic?