Social Analysis

Once conceptualized as self-evident connections between discrete social units systematized through ethnographic fieldwork, relations are being increasingly treated as instantiations of local ontological theories. The ethnography of indigenous South America has provided a source of inspiration for this analytical shift. As manifested in the contributions to this special issue, at the core of indigenous practices and discourses on relations lies a tension between ‘dependence on otherness’ and an ‘ethics of autonomy’. In this introduction, we revisit this tension by focusing on the ‘taming of relations’, a process through which subjects attempt to maintain the autonomy of each being vis-à-vis their relational constitution dependent on others. We argue that rather than being a necessary condition, autonomy is always a partial outcome of relations linking human and non-human others.

Through the study of form, we explore how relations constitute persons for the Huni Kuin of Western Amazonia. Shamanistic song, and the role in it of patterned design, reveals a specific aesthetics that emphasizes processes of becoming, transformation, and figure/ground reversal. Since bodily substances and actions of others affect the ‘thinking body’, well-being depends on making visible the relational network that exists inside and outside one's embodied self. An aesthetic battlefield unfolds where the doubles of ingested substances invert the predatory relation and come to envelop the ‘eye soul’ of the one who ingested them with their design and ornaments. This setting allows us to address the fractal quality of personhood and the permanent disequilibrium between symmetrical and asymmetrical relations in Amazonia.

This article explores how viscera, bodies, and forces emerge in resemblance to one another. In the connections between the animals’ butcher, the treatment of body parts, and the rituals of herd marking in the Argentinean highlands, folds and wrappings of viscera, leathers, meats, and dances make things ‘look like’ something else in different scales, highlighting correspondences or reflections between entities. Each level of these compositions refers to another, and a change in one can affect all of them. Resemblances are constantly evaluated and topologically manipulated, either to enable their mutual stimulation or to avoid connections and thus to establish differences between the perspectives of different beings. This article argues that the fabrication of similarities and differences through the manipulation of resemblances offers a privileged key to an understanding of Andean and Amerindian sociality.

Through an ethnographic exploration of Pehuenche conceptualizations of doubles and of greeting and funerary practices in Southern Chile, this article considers the ontological relevance of sensorial perception as a main operator for stabilizing the tension between autonomy and dependence on otherness. The article aims to establish how relations between ‘real people’ or che, in Pehuenche daily life, do not precede mutual sensorial perception; instead, they can be seen as the result of such perceptions. In so doing, and building upon the concept of ‘potential affinity’ as a persisting relational principle of relatedness, I show how the minimal unit of analysis of sensorial perception is not composed of separated unities. Rather, it is an assemblage of multiple capacities involving both visible and invisible relational entities.

This article focuses on sorcery, revenge, and anti-revenge among the Qom people in Argentina. For them, death is the result of sorcery or a shamanic attack. When a relative dies, the family may decide to avenge him through practices performed on his body. Nonetheless, under specific circumstances relatives decide not to take revenge, performing what I refer to as ‘anti-revenge’. Ethnographic analysis of relations among victims, aggressors, and avengers reveals how alternation between relational excess and fissures makes individuation possible. The processes responsible for the composite character of personhood lead to a relational excess that needs to be restrained. The relation between revenge and anti-revenge is a key aspect of a Qom understanding of personhood, in which individuation needs to be achieved to avoid indifferentiation.

Taking as a starting point an apparently minor event during my fieldwork—the fact that I received an indigenous name from the Aweti, a Tupi-speaking people who inhabit the upper reaches of the Xingu River—this article explores how personal qualities are elicited through names. A presentation of the Aweti onomastic system will highlight its analytical potential to interpret not only the case in question, but also a native theory of descent centered on the familial transmission of chiefdom. Personal names emerge as a way of producing people by evoking specific relations, while simultaneously particularizing the named person. Making a difference from what she or he was before having it, a name operates as a counter-identity device at the same time that it engenders identity qualities.

Based on an analysis of ethnographic data collected in Apiao, Chiloé, this article offers a view of relations as inescapably fraught connections between different entities. These relations are articulated in highly ritualized hospitality practices involving reciprocal exchange of food and drinks in a domestic space. Cutting across established, contrasting analytical categories, such as consanguines/affines and friends/enemies, hospitality practices reveal the immanence of otherness. Relations can occur only among different/differentiated individuals and are always expressed through an alternation of the contingent positions of host and guest, where one offers and another receives. In hospitality interactions, sameness is denied and transformed into otherness, revealing the importance of asymmetry and disclosing the latent hostility and potential danger implicit in relations. The other is first and foremost a dangerous and unpredictable guest.

This afterword offers a commentary on the concept of relations discussed in the introduction and the individual contributions to this special issue by critically reflecting on the key concepts that have emerged in it. It contributes to the discussion with a reflection on the use of the term parente in Amazonia, showing how its exclusive use in inter-ethnic contexts indicates a play of perspective in the way that relations between different groups of people are experienced.