![]() Secondly, in so doing, I will reveal what may be called the fractality, or self-similarity, of the -warah – that is, according to Gell (1998, p. 137), its re-occurrence at different levels of magnification and minification, traversing inter-personal and intra-personal relations (Viveiros de Castro 2001, p. 31) 2. In this sense, although I will briefly review how the word -warah defines ownership of what we might term « objects », my argument will focus on the ownership of people. First, I will establish the relationship between chieftaincy and living human bodies by describing the constitution of both. It is impossible, within the scope of this article, to explore all of the meanings of this word, and I will therefore take up the challenge presented in my conversation with Poroya and limit myself to two points. 2 Various studies of the Melanesian person have made imaginative use of the mathematical theory of f (.)ĤPoroya’s clarification, however, is only a fraction of the story, for I later understood that the chief and the living body are but some of the figures that the concept of -warah contains.The order of the statement is furthermore interchangeable, such that it would be equally correct to assert that « our chief is our body and our owner », for example. It is impossible to say this phrase, as it is, in the Kanamari language. Realizing my difficulty in understanding this, he explained to me in Portuguese that « our body is our owner and our chief ». He explained to me that my question was wrong because the word -boroh means « corpse », not « body », and that the correct way to refer to the (living) body is -warah. ![]() I therefore asked him the question in Portuguese, since Poroya spoke it better than other Kanamari. The Kanamari were always very polite about my linguistic mistakes, but the question I was asking Poroya was not immediately intelligible to him. I was asking about some of the characteristics of the Kanamari chiefs of the past when I questioned him concerning those chiefs’ bodies, as I recalled from earlier talks that these chiefs were always described as being « large people » (tukuna nyanim). The first time that I heard the word -warah used in this way was in a conversation about chieftaincy with a Kanamari man called Poroya. In this context, the Kanamari -warah is simply another interesting example of a widespread feature of lowland South American societies.ģThe situation became more complex, however, when I learned that -warah also means « living body », and that it is used to refer to the bodies of humans, animals and some plants. There is nothing particularly exceptional about this and there are numerous examples in Amazonia where mastery over people and ownership of things merge or determine each other: the Carib words oto (Kuikuro) and entu (Trio) mean both owner of things and of the village, coming thus to mean chief (Heckenberger 2005 Brightman 2007, pp. 83-84) while Panoan-speakers call their chiefs by words that mean « master » and also indicate ownership of material things, such as ibu in Kaxinawa or igbu in Matis (McCallum 2001, pp. 33, 111-112 Erikson 1996, pp. 180-181). I first heard it used to define ownership of material things, but it soon became clear that the word was also used to refer to the chief. There are two factors that make the Kanamari a particularly interesting case study for relationships of mastery: first, the concept of the owner-master pervades all aspects of their socio-cosmology second, the Kanamari word that indexes this relationship has a meaning that makes it differ from other, analogous terms that are often rendered as « master » or « owner ».ĢThe Kanamari word in question is -warah, which, as I quickly learned, means « owner ». I will show how the master is constituted and how his relationship to a multiplicity is articulated. My discussion will concern the ethnography of the Katukina-speaking Kanamari, an Amerindian people who live in the vicinity of the middle Juruá River, in the Brazilian part of Western Amazonia 1. In this text, I will focus on the figure of the master as a container of others, as a singularity that detains a multiplicity within his person. They generally involve an asymmetry in which one term of the relation, the « master », is often seen to encompass or contain his creatures or followers, whom he protects and cares for (see Fausto 2008, pp. 333-335). ![]() Relationships of this type are widespread in lowland South America and there is great variation in their scope and form. 1 The Kanamari number some 1,600 people spread out over a large area whose axis is the Juruá River, (.)ġThis article is a study of an Amazonian relationship of « mastery » or « ownership ».
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