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The Ordinary Envy of Aguabuena People: Revisiting

Universalistic Ideas from Local Entanglements
DANIELA CASTELLANOS
Departamento de Estudios Sociales
Universidad Icesi
Cali, Colombia
SUMMARY Envy encompasses various forms of relatedness among Aguabuena
people, a small potter community of rural Andean Colombia. Drawing from ethnographic material, this article explores how envy is reciprocated in three concrete scenarios (kinship, legal sues, and hydraulics), arguing for an understanding centered in
envys ordinariness and daily practices as an analytical context from where to revisit
more universalistic ideas. [envy, entanglements, Aguabuena/Colombia, context]
Envidia was one of the first and most common words I heard throughout my
stay among Aguabuena people.1 Used as a noun stating an ontological status no
one questioned (la envidia aqu es el pan de cada da, envy here is the daily
bread); as an adjective of the people, the place, divinities or objects (la gente de
Aguabuena es la ms envidiosa de todas, Aguabuena people are the most
envious of all); or as a verb performed by others and by those enunciating a
fact (ellos envidean, they envy, yo envidio, I envy), envy was a feature that
everyone in (and outside of) Aguabuena agreed most identified and distinguished them from other people living nearby in the village of Rquira in the
Colombian Andes. Contrary to my expectations, it did not always mean something bad or of which to be ashamed. Neither was it a concept that needed to be
explicitly accounted for, in the sense that people would search for explanations.
Instead, it was a shared fact that eagerly engaged them in correlating daily
practices with (envious) performances.
How can envious people like this live together? How is it that envy might not
always stand for something deplorable? Moreover, why are envys sources not
a matter of concern? If we look back at the way envy has been understood in
anthropology and related disciplines, the threatening and corrosive part has
been the one most emphasized together with envys causes. Envy troubles and
undermines communal life (cf. Foster 1972a; Schoeck 1970; Smith 2008) and is
rarely recognized to promote the creation and maintenance of social bonds as
seemed to be the case among Aguabuena people.2 Could it be that what
Aguabuena people understand as envy is not the same destructive emotion of
which we usually think? Or could envy work as a polyvalent expression (something like a wild-card word) covering a different range of good and bad moral
qualities?3
From the literature, envy corresponds mainly to a state of exception that
needs to be normalized through fear of witchcraft, illness, or the evil eye (Foster
Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 40, Issue 1, pp 2034, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.
2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/anhu.12066.

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1972a; Briggs 1998; Eves 2000; Overing and Passes 2000; Maloney 1976; Taussig
1987). This interpretation parallels philosophical and theological ideas across
time (like the Christian view of envy as one of the deadly sins), anchoring envy
as an immoral and antisocial trait, a universal feature that shows a vicious side.
Yet, envy stands at the core of humanity (Epstein 2003).4 If we explore the
Aguabuena case, what if envy is not always the extraordinary but the norm?
What if rather than being the exceptional, as Peter Geschiere suggests for
witchcraft (2013), we can think of it as becoming ordinary, so ordinary that we
do not seek for explanations? With this in mind, what can we learn from
Aguabuena people in this regard; and moreover, could this make a difference to
our understanding of what being human entails?
In what follows, I will consider envys qualities in social life drawing on
ethnographic material.5 I take a different stand from earlier works whose understanding of envy overlook local usages of the concept by relying exclusively on
its Latin etymology and rest on moralizing assumptions of envy as negative
(see for example Ariel de Vidas 2007, Foster 1965, 1972a). Rather than focusing
on the ways groups combat or neutralize it, as has been the mainstream (cf.
Foster 1972a; Maloney 1976; Shoeck 1970) , I am more interested in envys
quotidian aspect and daily performances. Among openly envious beings like
Aguabuena people, what causes envy becomes a marginal concern overshadowed by an interest on envys craft. (In fact the obvious question to us of what
are people envious of was an inquiry that I never heard Aguabuena people
asking despite acknowledging each others envy.) Turning the focus on envys
normality instead of its exceptionality brings into the scene more experiential
possibilities. How does envy remain so fluid among Aguabuena people to the
extent of being the foremost way of relating? This seems a crucial question to
ask and also one closer to Aguabuena peoples interests. Moreover, how far
does envy remove us from social connection and social closeness, or is it an
integral part of social involvement (as Stasch 2009 suggests in his argument on
otherness)?6
Far from reinforcing the picture of envy contributing to an atomistic society
of individuals as islands, a threat because of the hostility, aggression and
violence it brings (Foster 1972a: 165), my analysis centers on entanglements
linking envy, closeness, and reciprocity. To do so, I present three complementary and overlapping scenarios: kinship, legal sues, and hydraulics. First, I shall
give brief description of Aguabuena people.
Aguabuena: Both as the People and the Place
Aguabuena people are a small close-knit, Spanish-speaking community of
potters (approximately 150 people in 20092010) related through kinship and
compadrazgo ties.7 Living in the rural area of the village of Rquira, they inhabit
a mountainous landscape in the heart of the eastern cordillera of the Colombian
Andes. Their popular ceramics (rustic vessels used for cooking or as flower
vessels) are widely known in the region, and their envy is also acknowledged
by themselves and other villagers (Castellanos 2012). Recognized by the Colombian state as potters, Aguabuena people do not ascribe to any other social or
ethnic identity. In fact, as much as it has been proven by archaeologists that

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there is a close relationship between the craft they make nowadays and the
pre-Hispanic tribes (Broadbent 1974, Falchetti 1975, Orbell 1995; Therrien 1991),
Aguabuena people do not claim to be their descendants. Craft was first done by
the antiguos, the ancient ones, the name used when referring to their great
grandparents and whose traces are visible in the ruins of kilns or abandoned
workshops as well as in ceramic shards scattered across the hills (Castellanos
2004). These antiguos owned land that was called Aguabuena. The property was
then divided among their siblings and their children (a process started approximately eighty years ago). Thus, from being first a place name, Aguabuena
then clustered the descendants of those living there and whose kinship ties and
also craft technology spread throughout a territory.
In the past 60 years there have been major changes in the ceramic production
and in the gender division of labor (cf. Duncan 1998). Pottery making transformed from a part-time activity performed mainly by women and combined
with agriculture into an almost permanent activity involving the whole household (Castellanos 2004). Mens involvement however, although more intense
than before, is also flexible. Some migrate to rural areas to work as miners or
coffee collectors or to urban places to work as construction workers (Castellanos
2012).
The distribution and sale of crafts depend mostly on local middlemen who
come in trucks to workshops to collect the ceramics and then spread them across
the country. Middlemen regularly drive to the mountain, through a dusty and
stony road connecting Aguabuena place to Rquira. This arrangement reinforces
an exploitative relationship between potters and middlemen, which is often
resisted through the craftsmanship of Aguabuena people (Castellanos 2012).
Being Too Close: Kinship among Envious Ones
One thing envy does to Aguabuena people is to entangle them. In other
words, it places them too close to one another in a mesh from which it is
difficult, if not impossible, to split them apart. This closeness is experienced as
saturation at various levels: spatially, they live in the same place; economically,
they perform the same craft and compete within the same market; kinship wise,
everyone is related through family and compadrazgo ties, holding reciprocal
moral obligations.
Being the same bunch of people, however, has contested representations.
Thus, they state, we are one big family, referring to their dense and overlapping web of family ties, with kindred ralea (an infamous ilk), but at the same
time they bring to the fore the negative moral qualities of their descent, sometimes also calling themselves mugrera (the filthy ones), playfully referring to
their bodies covered with clay most of the day. Often they also claim they are
juntos pero no revueltos, meaning that they are together but not really mixed, as
a way to emphasize how distant they feel from their relatives.
Strong bonds are also maintained through compadrazgo partially overlapping with kinship. Until a young person marries, they can accumulate up to
five couples of madrinas and padrinos who are also members of their family.8
This creates an extended co-godparenthood web, reinforcing social and moral
obligations to one another. Unlike in other cases in the Andes (cf. Bolton and

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Meyer 1977; Arnold 1998; Skar 1998), godparenthood in Aguabuena does not
occur between individuals with a marked economic or symbolic difference and
forms of vertical godparenthood, and the consequent patronclient relationships are rare between godparents and godchildren.9 To the same extend,
godparenthood is seen more as a family obligation, reinforcing or hindering
social relations, like in cases of family networks lived as agonistic relationships
in which people often express feeling plundered by their kin or ritual relatives.10
As much as they are closely bound, however, there is also a resilient aspect
of being together. In fact, while stating that they are the same family, people
also give accounts of their social disconnection, portraying images of isolated
families whose daily lives are confined only to their workshop.11 As doing craft
is considered time consuming, social life, which Aguabuena people use to
mean visiting other workshops, is said to be limited. This apparent isolation
has the countereffect of preventing people from getting involved in gossip,
quarrels, or fights and therefore is seen as a good thing. However, as much as
families in their workshops liked to see themselves as fully devoted to their
ceramics, another scenario was taking place on the ground. In fact, contrary to
what people expressed to me, I often observed or knew of families spending
the night over at other families workshops regardless of whether their workshops were far away or close by. Those who were doing so were often criticized as being away from their homes, which meant that they were working
less.
One last aspect of this closeness, related to the physical awareness of
Aguabuena peoples co-presence, summarizes well the tensions through which
belonging was enacted. Sitting at the threshold of the enramada, the semi-open
space of the workshop, ones execution of work became a task of the public
domain, as people passing by were able to observe (though not neatly) or infer
according to the sound coming from the different manufacturing tasks what
was happening inside the workshop. Likewise, the enramada allowed those
working to follow what was happening outside. An alternative means of
keeping in touch was the small holes, called puntos, through which people
secretly observed outside their households. Spotting a middlemans truck full
of pots in the back, for example, was considered a great success in this surveillance. It gave valuable information about which potters crafts were recently
collected and how much money that family was likely to be paid. A quick look
at the pots stacked in the back of the truck was enough for the observer to
recognize the potter who made them. The enramada then conveyed the twofold
closeness of Aguabuena people: on the one hand it was a space where a sense of
belonging was crafted, while on the other hand, it separated people by confining them to their ceramic workshops.
This balance between claiming to be isolated from the rest with little interest
on their activities while acutely secretly scrutinizing others lives or visiting
each other while morally deploring those doing it was taken as expressions of
envy. People were said to stay in their workshops all day long, fully engaged in
their work either because they were envious in that they did not to give their
time or attention to their relatives or because they wanted to prevent the envy
of the others by avoiding gossip, but at the same time they were enviously

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gazing at others through puntos or paying envy-driven visits to relatives. Thus,

envy was reciprocated in a frame oscillating between multiple affectations.
The Reciprocity of Suing
Demandar (suing) is a ritualized practice that all adult members of Aguabuena
have been involved in more than once in their life time. Without exception, all
the people I knew or heard about during my fieldwork had themselves faced
more than one lawsuit. People often joked about it, making clear that not being
involved in legal actions was comparable to being isolated, in other words, to
not having social relations. Suing forged new forms of relations by drawing
people together by means of legal and social entanglements but also by involving a third party, the State.
Indeed, the municipal inspection office, located behind Rquiras food
market, was a very popular place, frequently visited in 2010. There, a final year
law student worked as the inspector, helped by a young assistant in his school
years. From 9 to 11 a.m. every Sunday to Thursday, the inspector was there to
hear peoples complaints and accusations. Upon declaring, the assistant wrote
a citation to the accused one, a letter delivered in the afternoon either by the
inspector himself or via a courier on a motorbike. The party being charged
usually had one week to respond to the claim. A conciliation session then
followed. However, most often, the agreement was never fulfilled and tensions
and disputes increased, leading to parties taking true legal actions through
private lawyers hired in the neighboring towns. Often, the accused countersued
the person starting the legal action, exchanging and even juxtaposing (when
more than one legal case was going on) roles of plaintiff and defendant.
Like the rest of Aguabuena people, Julia and Miguel, an old couple in their
seventies who were close friends and informants in the field, often visited the
inspection office. During the time I stayed at their house (four months) I heard
much about the legal lawsuits they were engaged in with their relatives. In fact,
one of Miguels favorite themes was to recount the long list of lawsuits he had
lodged or to which he had to respond. Likewise, others often told me about
how Miguel or Julia had just sued them. As Miguel remarked in one of our
afternoon chats, his relatives envied him, so he had no other choice but to
ponerle el pecho, bite the bullet, facing their envy by suing all those who
envied him. While saying this, he looked excited. It was an issue that did not
worry him but instead occupied his mind giving him extra energies in an
otherwise tedious life. It was a bodily disposition, which propelled him to act
with a great deal of intensity and passion during his daily routines.12 Regarding
the accusations against him, which were also numerous, he explained them as
his relatives attempts to harm him, hinting at a reciprocal game of quarrels.
What shall they do if I sue them, well, they have to go and sue me in return! If
I sue them because they owe me money, they will sue me back arguing that they
have already paid me, he said while laughing. From Miguels statement it is
clear that legal actions bounced between the parties, weaving together reciprocal threats and envy; far from posing a problem or a crisis, this was something
ordinary that made life exciting and fully consumed him. Moreover, it was a
moral obligation that drove those being accused to respond by countersuing.

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Like Miguel, many others were actively engaged in this game. Suing then
was part of daily life, an important aspect of life together in Aguabuena, and
more than an expected and normal behavior, it was also a performance that
required a great degree of competence. Usually, ones intentions to start a legal
case were publicly stated before taking any action in the inspection office.
The openness of this act contrasted with the secrecy and surveillance of other
fields in social life. Through the act of suing, a third partyin this case a state
institution was involved in Aguabuena peoples resolution. However, people
were very often dismissive of the inspectors capacities in mediating their
problems, thinking that he often took sides as a consequence of bribes.
During my stay in Aguabuena, both the inspector and the people quoted
envy as the main factor in the charges made at the inspection office. Of course,
there were different interpretations from the two sides involved. On one hand,
the inspector recognized envy as a sufficient explanation that drove people to
start legal cases, while on the other hand, Aguabuena people went beyond this
and correlated concrete actions in an empirical effort concerned at defining
envys craft. Robbery of water tubes or timber; stealing ceramic designs, raw
or fired pots, or even the names given after pots; rape attempts; hand-tohand fights; poisoning the water in the creek by disposing of dead cows in it;
destroying neighbors fences; enlarging ones own property by moving the
fence further or even failing to build a fence on time;13 crossing in front of
someone elses house (if they were enemies); not paying debts; negocios
incompletos, unfinished business such as being paid in advance and then not
showing up for work in a workshop or not paying the agreed amount of money
for work were all included in the list of concrete envy-driven actions. Lawsuits,
however, rarely reached a conclusion and moreover changed or exchanged
their directionality by means of shifting the roles of the agents involved. How
is it possible that so many problems are going on in such a small place where,
on top of it all, the people are relatives? What is going on there? the puzzled
inspector asked me in one of our interviews. He continued: I came to know
that place through the people that kept on coming to my office. Agua-buena,
Good-water, ha! What an irony . . . I told them they should change the name to
Agua-picha, Rotten-water! While the inspector along with many had a perception of Aguabuena people as very problematic (a remark that the people themselves accepted not only as a proof of their special character but also as a sign of
their skills and capacities to endure difficult life conditions and of their belonging to the place), his remark highlighted an interesting paradox: Aguabuena was
not only a place where there was no good water, but a place with almost no
water at all!
On Hydraulics: Hoses as Social Relations
Aguabuena people have their own ways of acquiring and transporting water
from the creeks to their houses by means of thick, long (up to 70 m), black
rubber hoses joined in a system.14 This artisanal aqueduct helps them fight the
dryness of the place and to overcome the lack of state-provided running water
services in the area. On their journeys these hoses pass through various physical
spaces. Thus, a single hose is sometimes put in the air, like an electricity cable,

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sometimes buried deep, several meters away from the meadow or road, like
a giant snake or worm, and sometimes fixed to the mountain wall that runs
parallel to the dusty road until it finally reaches the end of its journey: the tank
of a household. On its way, the hose meets numerous bifurcations of more hoses
that are waiting to be connected as a way to change the flux of the water. An
extended family has one main hose from the creek until a point where it gets
near the households of all the relatives that agreed to be part of the connection
system. At this point there are more hoses connected by family members with
more added over time, according to their needs. This act of connecting different
hoses to the main one in order to change the flux of the water is called pasar el
agua, passing on the water.
The composition of the net of water hoses is always changing, as there are
continuous fights among the members of a hose compound and consequent
connections and disconnections. Many of these fights are disputes about who
should pass on the water and to whom it should be passed onto and when and
how often to pass it on. During my fieldwork it was common to illegally
connect a hose to a different main hose than the usual or permitted one, an act
considered water robbery.15 People found out because water stopped reaching
them. Other actions involving hoses were disconnections or cuts. So stealing
water, cutting a hose, or altering the flux of water were among long list of
actions classified as envious that were turned later on into legal accusations at
the inspection office.
The black rubber culebras (snakes) constituted a complex system of water
supply that in some ways resembled the social relations of Aguabuena people,
their changing fluxes and their envy in motion.16 In fact, if lost, one could find
(or avoid) the way to a household by following the hoses. Moreover, like the
circulation of water through interconnected hoses, envy also seemed dynamic,
drawing on the continuous changes and re-compositions of interconnected
social networks.17
Sketching a Context for Envy
In his article on the importance of context in anthropology, Roy Dilley (2002)
brings to the fore an interesting element usually neglected by scholars. He states
that context has often been an overlooked category linked to a wider epistemological history embedded in power relations. He also points out at the importance of considering the way our informants establish relevance, selecting
phenomena and connecting elements that serve to make sense of things (while
deliberately leaving other aside).
This problem of context, as Dilley names it, is a crucial one when thinking
about envy. One of the most popular explanations on envy has made the
economic issues the most relevant ones across different societiesfrom smallscale or face-to-face communities to factories or corporations (cf. Foster 1965;
Douglas and Isherwood 1990; Smith 2008). Envy appears as a leveling mechanism when people face scarcity, competence, and rivalry; a device regulating
human relations while either promoting homeostasis or grounding profound
capitalistic behaviors (like in the limited good theory). In the case of peasant
societies (a social type in which potters were included), for example, an earlier

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idyllic picture of more communal and egalitarian lifestyle (Redfield 1930, 1960;
cf. Harris 2005) was abandoned in the second half of the 20th century for a more
contentious explanation, the so called mentality of mutual distrust, which
defined human relationships as mainly having a contractual character (see
Friedman 1958: 24 in Foster 1965: 302; Friedl 1963: 280; Lopreato 1962). In a
society torn by fear, envy and distrust, the balancing between centrifugal
forces amidcentripetal forces (Gregory 1975: 75), between conflict and
cooperation, seemed the key aspect to address when thinking about how communal life was rendered possible (cf. Whyte 1972; Foster 1961; Bolton and Mayer
1977).
Whereas the etymology of the word envy (from the Latin invidere which
literally means to look upon) has been agreed to be sufficient for explaining
its meaning across various cultures (see for example Foster 1972a or Ariel de
Vidas 2007), envy is popularly understood as a distress or deep sorrow, which
arises by desiring something belonging to the other (Foster 1972a; Celse 2010;
DArms 2002). Within this frame, it is also said to be a transitive action involving three parties: an envier, a rival, and an object (which could be also a quality)
assumed to be owned by the later one and out of which the sorrow comes up.
Envy then needs to be always targeted at someone, this someone usually considered to be of a similar kind, as comparison is always established among
equals (cf. Aristotle 1941; Ben-Zeev 1992).
This understanding of envy grants a teleological character to the concept
relying on external elements. In fact, when thinking of envy we have to consider
first what people are envious of as the two sides of the same coin. Within this
logic, possible causes like the limited good have been one of the most recurrent context-wise strategies used to explain envys occurrence (cf. Bennett 1966;
Foster 1961; 1965; 1972b; Kennedy 1966). The triad of the envier, the rival, and
the object as preexistent conditions for envy also omits a fourth party, represented by those witnessing such actions and recognizing them as acts and
effects of envy. This last component comprises the social attunement of those
experiencing envy and their propensity to interpret it, reproduce it, or act
accordingly.18
As I mentioned above, Aguabuena people were never concerned with
what caused their envy, neither were they actively searching to eradicate it.
Instead, they embodied it and were eagerly engaged in classifying the empirical
facts that mattered to them as envious-driven actions. These envious actions,
though phrased in an emotional tone, were not reduced only to emotions or
moral discourses but instead correlated with quotidian and concrete things like
cutting or disconnecting water hoses, not paying visits to relatives, or visiting
them too much.19 Envys context as built by my informants dealt with envys
performances being mainly a bodily and craft matter. However, there were also
other elements. As all people did pottery making and depended on middlemen
for collecting and distributing ceramics, there was a rivalry and competition
among kin and workshops. Also, they inhabited a territory highly fragmented
because of land tenure practices juxtaposed with kin obligations that fomented
quarrels over resources. Finally, other resources besides land, for example water,
were also scarce. As much as this picture fits well into the limited good
theory, I argue instead that the closeness and saturation of Aguabuena people

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relate not merely to economic variables but also to kinship and land tenure.
Again, both explanations are plausible, it is then a matter of how we build
context and establish relevance.
From the point of view of a more existential interested anthropology
(Jackson 2005), envys performances put to the fore its motion as a dynamic
social force forging a more experiential (analytical) context. If envy is
Aguabuena peoples shared human condition, one that they explain entangles
them, then perhaps as anthropologists we should also look at the forces pulling
together the threads that contribute to create this intricate human mesh in
which both overlapping and multiple connections and disconnections occur.
Final Words: Entanglements or What Keeps Threads Bound
Like Miguel, Matilda, a woman in her forties, enjoyed enumerating long lists
of envious acts. In many of our chats, while working together at her workshop,
she would recall multiple exchanges with her relatives and compadres. The
following are some of the thoughts she shared with me one afternoon:
Sometimes I feel like Im suffocated, sometimes Id like to run away from
this place! People are always looking at me, observing me. No one minds their
own business; peoples delight is in the life of others. At the same time I dont
want to go anywhere, because they will win over me. And if I go somewhere
else, who is going to help me when I am in need? I have so many debts, and the
ones who owe me are not paying me back so then I cant pay back my creditors.
Ive lawsuits to face at the inspectorate, and Ive sued in return because Im not
a stupid woman. One of the neighbors tried to steal my land by moving the
fence, and another took some of my timber. Then I forbade the neighbor to cross
the communal path that leads to her workshop as its officially mine [she
laughed]. She sued me in return for this. My godmother and my sister up there
are always cutting my water hose, and they do it every time Im in great need of
water! My compadre threatened that he wouldnt help me with the middleman.
Theres so much envy around that one cant live in peace. But I cant leave,
where would I go then? Who else if not them will be willing to help me?
This same rhetoric was also used by many others. People usually complained
by pointing at others mischief while stating that there was too much envy
around. At the same time envy was seen as indispensable for surviving harsh
living conditions. Envys saturation arose mixed feelings as, on one hand, it
made people want to move elsewhere, while on the other hand, it reassured
them that they should not go anywhere else. Indeed it seemed a paradox to me
that the exacerbated envy urged them to leave and at the same time anchored
them, emplacing them in the hill and among the rest of the people. In fact,
moving elsewhere raised feelings of insecurity among my informants. The
idea of not letting the others win over me, stated unanimously by many other
women and men across generations, while phrased in a competitive manner,
highlighted a social game in which people engaged in gauging each others
performances.
From Matildas words as much as from Miguels, reciprocation framed collective action: for example, sues with countersues, disconnection of water with
disconnection from paths, and more importantly, envy with more envy. As

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Dario, another of my friends in the field and a very young man in his early
twenties, said when speaking about the envy of the people, envy bounced
back and forth from one person to the next one like a pendulum. Certainly, he
was also thinking of reciprocity and phrased it by pointing out its oscillations.
Moreover, as Matilda claimed, there was a certain delight that did not solely
corresponded to forms of negative reciprocity creating a permanent crisis. The
situation was rather different. Being part of daily life or the ordinary, the
entanglements of Aguabuena people seemed exciting at times (as in Miguels
case or the shared idea that envy was a means for living cleverly). Above all,
they were means of keeping people close (to the point of discarding the idea
of moving elsewhere) and a dynamic way of constantly activating peoples
exchanges.
The moral obligation to give back something similar or equivalent to what
was receivedpointed out long ago by Maussalso applied to the envious
context of Aguabuena. However, it involved other transactions than the giftexchange ones. Envy demanded a great attention in others and living for others,
an ambivalent interest focusing both in corrosive and quarrelsome activities but
also in proximity and empathy.20 This apparent paradox is present in Matildas
statement, for whom being away from her envious relatives meant to be outside
of their reach also in terms of more solidary forms of living, made all possible
(paradoxically) because of their envy. From these thoughts, envy seemed more
an intersubjective enterprise (cf. Jackson 1998), indeed a multifold entanglement of what being in-between others entails.
Notes
Acknowledgements. I am grateful to the Aguabuena people. For their helpful comments I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers. I would also like to give special thanks
to Francies Montier, Karolina Kuberska, and Jan Grill. Previous drafts of this text were
worked during my doctoral studies at St. Andrews University. During my time there I
had the great input of Paloma Gay y Blasco, Stephanie Bunn, Nigel Rapport, Huon
Wardle, Tristan Platt, and Mark Harris.
1. During the years 20092010, the Institute of Colombian Anthropology and
History (ICANH) granted me the scholarship Pioneros de la Antropologa Colombiana
2010, which supported me economically during 12 months of fieldwork. During that
year,
I also received the support of the CAS Centre at the University of St. Andrews (UK).
2. Aguabuena people are not the only case. For other exceptions see also Gosh
1983.
3. Aguabuena peoples concept and uses of envy were various and did not always
corresponded to my own understanding of the term or dictionary definitions. Several
times, I recorded stories of peoples behaviors or attitudes that I thought were about
pride, lack of generosity, mischief, or crafty manners but that were always instead taken
as envy. Some other stories paralleled envy with the skilfulness needed to survive, a sort
of social intelligence.
This wide range of meanings for a concept like envy has also been reported in other
ethnographies mainly from non-western societies. Two significant cases are the Ilongot
and their concept of liget studied by Michelle Rosaldo (1980) and the Nayaka of India
and their category of batha (2004) analyzed by Nurit Bird-David. In these two cases, envy
was a powerful emotion connected with anger, rage, passion, and care. Other authors
like Gassan Hage (2002), following Bourdieu, have discussed envy as a social force
within social physics.

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4. Humanitas, translated as kindness, or compassion and empathy towards others,

was the heavenly virtue defined to counteract this deadly vice, according to medieval
moral classification systems. Vices were combatted by virtuous qualities, which in turn
were often opposed to particular sins reversing the process initiated by the vices. These
opposing entities varied and included the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the theological
and cardinal virtues, and the Ten Commandments (Benfell 2007: 186).
5. The argument of this text is based mainly on ethnographic fieldwork. It is beyond
the scope of this article to include more comprehensive discussion on the historical
developments of the category of envy. I have discussed the crystallization of this category in relation to the colonial legacy of violence, conversions, and missionary activities
of the Augustinian monks in relation to the indigenous populations of Rquira elsewhere (see Castellanos, n.d.).
6. In other words, the concern stands for the links between envy and community.
How is it that envy builds community or how is that it renders us proximate one
another? In what follows in the text, these questions are indirectly addressed through the
ethnographic material. Far from reaching a conclusion, the data suggest the complexity
of this issue and its importance when looking closer at proximity and empathy, at their
negative forms and their relationships to kinship.
7. Compadrazgo, literally co-fatherhood, is the Spanish form of ritual kinship established through rites of the Catholic Church between a person, his or her biological
parents, and his or her godparents (Barnard and Spencer 2010:145).
8. Godparents are always married individuals. They accompany the transformation
of a child into an adult through different ceremonies, most of them of a religious
character. Godparents are present at a childs baptism, first communion, confirmation,
and marriage, and also at a ceremony called la presentacin a la Virgen, a Catholic
ceremony that has no fixed date or age. The last pair of padrinos is acquired at the high
school graduation ceremony. Of all these different padrinos the most important are those
from the baptism, as the relationships and bonds between the families are meant to
be long lasting. The other padrinos will have obligations toward their ahijados and
compadres only for the day of the ceremony.
9. Aguabuenas case stands in contrast to other ethnographic examples of compadrazgo,
where the biological parents are always the ones who choose their childs godparents with
an eye to both the childs and their own advantage. Godparents are chosen to reinforce
existing ties with other kin or with friends, or to establish a special relationship with a
socially superior person who can be useful to the child or the parents. Preferably, only
individuals of equal or higher status than oneself are chosen as co-parents (Osborn 1968).
In Aguabuena, not only are the godparents usually the ones who need to ask the childs
parents, but also, due to the limited number of eligible godparents, it is less probable that
individuals with higher status will become padrinos of a child.
10. This bonding is also accounted by outsiders. Middlemen with whom potters have
commercial exchanges and Raquireos, Rquira villagers see those from Aguabuena as
a close-knit community, and often describe them as a bunch of people being much too
close to one another or the same people.
11. Sundays are the exception. The food market that takes place in Rquira on this
day is highly attended by Aguabuena people who see it not only as a time for buying the
weeks food but also as an opportunity to catch up with the latest news.
12. Miguel was much older than Julia and was retired with a knee problem that
prevented him from doing any physical work. While he was mainly at home sitting on
the veranda of the house, Julia was always very active taking care of the household,
milking cows twice a day, and harvesting, among many other activities.
13. These fences are, however, fragile and easily moved beyond the boundary of
ones plot.
14. There are two creeks. One is called Furca and is located up in the mountain in the
district known as Candelaria Occidente. The other one, the creek of Pueblo Viejo, runs on
the other side of the mountain through the district of the same name. Few potters have
their own springs of water. Even in this case they need hoses to carry the water into their
houses and share their water with some of their relatives.

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31

15. By referencing a hose connection to a net of hoses as illegal, potters morally

condemned an action standing outside a social contract. Regardless of the flexibility
of their agreements, as the constantly changing structures of their hose compounds
showed, potters were inflexible in including those who were considered part
of a hydraulic network, which in turn, paralleled a social one. Moreover, the
entire artisanal aqueduct and its various bifurcations was indeed considered
illegal by the Colombian governmental authorities working for the environmental
office.
16. I would like to recall here the fact that culebras stands also in the colloquial
Spanish used by Colombians for debts. The paragon is telling because debts, as discussed
above, are other potters means of being close, in which the transitivity and therefore
effects of the practice are challenged.
17. This water use contrasts with other ethnographic examples from the Andes where
anthropologists have described a more equitable and transparent use of the irrigation
system, increasing social cooperation (cf. Trawick 2001).
18. These others may include Aguabuena relatives, neighbors, friends, and enemies,
but also the anthropologist.
19. Another turn is needed here regarding envys relations to emotions. There is a
general consensus in the literature to understand envy as an emotion particularly of a
resentful kind (Schoeck 1970), and within this tendency anthropology has developed
interesting frameworks ranging from seeing emotions earlier as solely bodily, universal,
irrational, unconscious psychological forces (cf. Rorty 1980) to later analyzing them as
socially shaped and socially shaping the self in a moral order (cf. Abu-Lughod and Lutz
1990; Rosaldo 1980; Lutz and White 1986).
20. Along the same lines, other scholars have recently questioned the role of empathy
in shaping human relations and, beyond that, analyzed it as part of the anthropological
project (Bubandt 2009; Holland and Throop 2008; Venkatesan 2012), drawing attention to
the kind of knowledge it implies and the ways it shapes moral and other intersubjective
bonds. Some of these works have pointed to the oscillation of empathetic relations,
which move between compassion and care for others but also contribute to concealment,
suffering, or hurt (Groark 2008), as well as the ways in which violence and empathy are
intimately related (Bubandt 2009).

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