Dividualism and Individualism in Indigen

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): 197–225
SPECIAL SECTION
Dividualism and individualism

in indigenous Christianity
A debate seen from Amazonia
Aparecida Vilaça, Universidade Federal do

Rio de Janeiro
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
his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Aparecida Vilaça.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.1.010
Aparecida Vilaça 198
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).

199 Dividualism and individualism in indigenous Christianity
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,

especially the contrast between a conception of bodily translation, such as the

consubstantialization and mimetism enacted by the Wari’, as we shall see below,
and literal translation, as exemplified by the translations of the Bible made by the
American fundamentalists who first encountered them.
The dialogue with Robbins’ model (this issue) of the distinct forms of person-
hood coexisting in Christianity has allowed me to fine-tune the model of cultural
change I have been developing, based on the alternation of perspectives character-
istic of Amazonian shamanism. I take the opportunity to draw from the author’s
use of the works of Werbner (2011) and Daswani (2011), where the ideas of oscil-
lation and alternation provide explanatory models for the Christian experience of
the African peoples under study, in order to conceptualize the different ways of
relating to alterity found in the Amazonian world, demonstrating the possibility
for distinct types of “identity” to coexist, here related in particular to the various
configurations of personhood that characterize the Christian life of many of the
region’s indigenous peoples.
Following Robbins’ model, where the question of morality is central to Chris-
tianization, and through a dialogue with the theories of Roy Wagner (1975) on
distinct modes of cultural invention, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2001) on
the equivocities constitutive of perspectivist translations, I look to shift from the
transformation of values to the domain of ontology, properly speaking. This move
allows us to reimagine these changes as transformations of the innate world, based,
in Amazonia, on a complex dialectic between humanity and animality.
Specifically in relation to Dumont, the author honored in this special section of
Hau, and whose perception of the transformations arising from Christianity has
inspired some of the most productive analyses in the anthropology of Christianity,
I offer a reexamination of his model of hierarchical encompassment, fundamental
to Robbins’ theory, from a somewhat unusual perspective. To this end I turn to
Viveiros de Castro’s application (1993) of Dumont’s notion of hierarchy in order to
conceptualize the relationship between affinity and consanguinity in Amazonian
Dravidian systems, categories that in the latter context reveal an encompassment of
values, in contrast to their equipollent disposition in the Indian Dravidian systems
studied by Dumont. This analytic prodecure enables a properly Amazonian trans-
lation of Dumont’s theoretical framework, situating value not in the individualism/
dividualism opposition, but in the consanguinity/affinity duality, associated with
the notions of the constructed and the innate, respectively.
Locating the discussion

Two of the main protagonists of this debate are Robbins (2004, 2010) and Mosko
(2010), who defend two divergent positions, drawing on the same ethnographic
data but inspired by distinct anthropological theories. Combining the models of
Sahlins (1981, 1985, [1992] 2005) and Dumont (1986) on the transformations that
arise from the encounters between cultures, Robbins (2004) stresses the importance
of the hierarchical relation between the key values of each culture within the new
configuration. From an opposite perspective, Mosko (2010), setting out from the
theoretical bases of the so-called New Melanesian Ethnography (NME), especially

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.
Locating the Wari’ and the missionary encounter

The Wari’, speakers of a Txapakuran language, are an indigenous group of around
three thousand people, distributed in eight main villages, as well as numerous
smaller satellite villages, in the southwest of Brazilian Amazonia, close to the bor-
der with Bolivia.
Until the mid-1950s, the Wari’ had no peaceful contacts with any other peo-
ple, including the Brazilians living in the region. The latter, whom I refer to here
as whites, were named and treated like their other enemies or wijam: killed and
whenever possible eaten. The fear generated by this practice among inhabitants
of the nearby city of Guajará-Mirim, as well as the economic interest in rubber
extraction, led to the massacre of the Wari’ by organized groups of rubber tappers,
who, armed with machine guns, exterminated the entire population of villages,
forcing the survivors to relocate to ever more isolated areas. To stem the violence,
pacification expeditions were organized. The members initially included govern-
ment agents and American Fundamentalist Protestant missionaries from the New
Tribes Mission, which had recently begun work in Brazil and Latin America. After
several years of failed attempts, they finally achieved the first peaceful contacts with
the Wari’ around 1956. By 1962 most of the population had moved to live with the
missionaries on a daily basis.
These expeditions, which included the participation of diverse other people,
including manual laborers from the city hired at the last minute, caused serious
epidemics. Combined with the earlier armed massacres, these led to the decima-
tion of two-thirds of the Wari’ population. The missionaries spent their time nurs-
ing the population and distributing antibiotics and food, essential given the meager
resources allocated to these expeditions by the Brazilian government. Once estab-
lished in the villages, the missionaries refocused their efforts as soon as they could
on learning the language, a task for which they had been trained by specialists from
another faith mission, the Summer Institute of Linguists/Wycliffe Bible Translators
(Stoll 1982; Johnston 1985). As fundamentalists, the main objective of their work
was and remains the literal translation of the Bible, for them a book dictated ver-
batim by God.
Even before they could communicate with the Wari’, the missionaries were able
to encourage an association between the effect of the antibiotics and the power
of God by praying next to the sick while they received medication. This proved
crucial to the Wari’ interest in these whites, combined with what they perceived as
their surprising generosity: the missionaries would give food to everyone without

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.
Perspectivism and transformability among the Wari’

In a discussion of Amazonian ethnology in an earlier work (Vilaça 2009), I raised
a number of questions concerning the applicability of Robbins’ model to this eth-
nographic universe. I specifically queried the idea that the adoption of a new cul-
ture inevitably comprises any kind of radical change, given that this absorption
of the outside is the traditional model of reproduction or relation to the Other
throughout much of the Amazonian world, and ideally involves the possibility of
reversion to the previous state. Moreover, this praxis applies not only to the actions
of warriors and shamans, but also to indigenous encounters with white people,
among them the missionaries, as described in ethnographic accounts of diverse
Amazonian groups.
Indeed this is the theme of the “opening to the Other” explored by Lévi-Strauss
(1996: xvii) in The story of Lynx, and later revived by Viveiros de Castro (2002,
2011) in his analysis of the relation between the seventeenth-century Tupinambá
and Jesuit missionaries, where he concludes that the Other “was not there a mir-
ror but a destiny,” given the essential ontological incompleteness that this people
imagined for themselves (Viveiros de Castro 2002: 220,). Just as Taussig (1993)
demonstrated in his analysis of mimetism among the Cuna of the Caribbean, the
indigenous population of the Brazilian coast also wished to be like the whites, imi-
tating their gestures, clothing, and words. This mimesis convinced the missionaries
that the natives had a keen interest in the Christian faith, though they were soon
disappointed with what they called the “inconstancy of the savage soul” (Viveiros
de Castro 2002: 195; see also Clifford 1988: 344).
In the Amazonian case, turning into the Other as the means of relating to alter-
ity makes taking the idea of adoption formulated by Robbins (2004: 11), inspired
by Sahlins ([1992] 2005), as an explanatory model for transformations somewhat
problematic, as well as requiring us to consider the question of oscillation as a cru-
cial point in this relational dynamic. Although native culture is obviously present
in defining how the Other is appropriated, we are dealing not with the coexistence
of two cultures per se, but ideally, at least from the native viewpoint, with the al-
ternation between them: they become white, then Indian, then white, and so on
and so forth, in the same way as shamans are now human, now animal (see Vilaça
2007, 2010).
The question becomes further complicated when we observe that for various
Amazonian peoples, culture—that is, the set of categories and values and their

relations, as defined by Robbins (2004: 6)—is not limited to humankind, properly

speaking, but shared by various kinds of spirits and animals. As Viveiros de Castro
(1998: 472–73, 2012a) makes clear in his formulation of Amazonian perspectivism,
what varies between these different humans is not culture but what we call nature,
that is, the material world we inhabit. Instead of multicultural relativism we have,
in the author’s words, multinaturalism or somatic perspectivism.
Among the Wari’, diverse animals are considered human, wari’, sharing the
same cultural practices and values. What varies between them is precisely their
perspective, which defines the world in which they live. Hence both the jaguar and
the Wari’ drink beer, called by the same name, tokwa, but while what the Wari’ call
beer is a drink made from maize, the jaguar’s is blood. Translation here is a complex
operation, therefore, which involves not the search for new words to designate the
same things, a process undertaken by the missionaries, but different worlds desig-
nated by the same words. Life is based, then, on an awareness of the coexistence
of different worlds and not, as among ourselves, different cultures with particular
perspectives onto the same world (see Vilaça in press).
The possibility of interspecific transformation via bodily metamorphosis is a
constituent part of the perspectivist universe, potentially occurring in controlled
form through shamans, who provide an important source of knowledge, and in un-
controlled form through the diseases and abductions inflicted by animals on other
persons. Among the Wari’, from the viewpoint of the agent or patient, turning into
an animal simply involves exchanging one set of relations for another, since, which-
ever set is involved, the agent and companions perceive themselves as human. The
change occurs in the perspective or the gaze of the person’s former compatriots or
kin, who now perceive him or her to be transformed with an animal body. Hence
in the place of an inner self we encounter an “outer self,” a self determined from
the outside via the gaze of the other (Robbins, Schieffelin, and Vilaça 2014; see also
Taylor 1996; Taylor and Viveiros de Castro 2007: 159). Shamanic cures, among the
Wari’, involved negotiating with animals, convincing them to return the victim to
his or her former kin.
The different perspectives are, for the Wari’, coexistent and equally true, al-
though action is aimed toward the imposition of one perspective (that of the Wari’)
over other perspectives, or, in the case of shamans and the collective transforma-
tion into the Other, the acquisition of an alien perspective. In other words, while a
hierarchy of perspectives does exist, it is contextually determined and always oscil-
lating (Vilaça 2005; see Lima 2002).
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
2. This concept is a development of the notion of concentric dualism, elaborated by the

author in Lévi-Strauss (1963).

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).
Reapproaching Dumont: Discussing hierarchy and value in Amazonia

Viveiros de Castro’s appropriation of the Dumontian hierarchy is focused precisely
on the point where, for Dumont (1983: 166–67), the opposing terms are equiva-
lent, namely the relation between consanguines and affines in Dravidian kinship
systems, common to India and Amazonia alike (albeit not to the Wari’). In contrast
to the Indian universe, though, Viveiros de Castro (1993: 171–74) posits that in
the Amazonian world affinity encompasses consanguinity as an unmarked value,
just like individualism in the Christian world according to Dumont. In Viveiros de
Castro’s hierarchical approach (1993: 174; also see Albert 1985), which applies to
Amazonian kinship more broadly, not just to Dravidian systems, the coexistence
of values produces no moral conflict, however, since these values are arranged in
distinct spheres of the social universe. Hence affinity encompasses consanguinity
in wider relational spheres, those involving relations with alterity, whether the lat-
ter is represented by foreigners or enemies.
Returning to the Wari’, generally speaking people from other subgroups are
treated as prototypical affines and very often called by affinal terms.3 The opposite
occurs at more restricted relational levels within the local group, where consan-
guinity emerges as the dominant value. It is at this level, then, that people look to
extract or eclipse affinity and where real affines are frequently addressed by con-
sanguine kinship terms (see Viveiros de Castro 1993: 174).
Affinity is never ultimately eliminated, since it forms an essential part of the sys-
tem, given that without affinity the world would become paralyzed (Lévi-Strauss
1996: 62–64). Hence it comprises the encompassing value of the system as a whole,
insofar as relations with the exterior determine internal relations. In other words, as
I mentioned earlier apropos the Wari’ (Vilaça 2002), the production of consanguine
3. Wari’ society is constituted by eight subgroups of mytho-historical origin, who origi-

nally inhabited specific territories. People from another subgroup are called “foreign-
ers” (tatirim) and are attributed differences in accent, in the details of some myths, as
well as in food taboos. Though not valorized, marriages between persons from differ-
ent subgroups were common in the past, and are frequent today when the subgroups
find themselves partially mixed in the postcontact villages. The Wari’ have a Crow–
Omaha-type kinship system without marked positions of affinity. Real or effective af-
fines from another subgroup are called by terms of affinity especially in the context of
the chicha festivals held between subgroups, which we shall discuss later on.

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).
A Wagnerian approach to change

A clear similarity exists between this model and Wagner’s in The invention of culture
(1975).5 According to Wagner (ibid.: 41–50), each culture defines the universe of
the innate in contraposition to what is conceived to be produced by human action.
Although the innate is also culturally produced, people cannot be aware of this
since it is essential that the innate is taken to be part of the world as such. In the nor-
mal course of life, this invention of the innate occurs through a process that Wagner
calls “counter-invention,” since it is produced despite human actions. The return
to the innate world is perceived by agents as the world’s resistance to human ac-
tion. On special occasions, however, including rituals, the direction of the agentive
movement is reversed and the innate is produced voluntarily (ibid.: 93–99). Given
the symbolic risks inherent in this process, it normally occurs in a special space,
controlled by people with special capacities, such as shamans and ritual specialists.
This involves the movement in an opposite direction, as predicted in Viveiros de
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.
Dividuality in Wari’ Christian life

In the pre-Christian world, control of undesired interspecific metamorphosis—
that is, the eclipsing of the karawa or animal pole of the person—was achieved

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:

Wow! The devil really doesn’t want us to escape. He doesn’t like us to

accompany God. He says: stay away from God!
He dislikes all God’s things. He really doesn’t like God’s things. That’s why
God’s speech becomes incomprehensible to us [when we listen to what
the devil says: in many of their prayers, the Wari’ ask God to make them
deaf to the devil’s calls].8
In sum, the presence of the devil, by reconstituting the dividual nature of animals,
also reconstitutes the dividuality of the Wari’, enabling relations with God to be
modeled on the consubstantialization of children by parents and effected through
an opposition. However, as I have tried to show in the article mentioned above
(Vilaça 2011), the devil is associated with God in an even more direct way in the
biblical episode of the conflict with Lucifer and his departure from heaven. In the
Wari’ reading of the Bible, the devil is conceived as part of the divine person or, we
could say, a member of his kin group, having been created by God and lived with
him intensely in heaven before rebelling and moving away like a kinsman who be-
comes an enemy. As the Wari’ say: “kaxikon jam, Lucifer, was raised by God until
he decided that he did not want God to be the taramaxikon (chief) and therefore
came to earth and taught the Wari’ to disobey.”
This reading suggests that, following the Wari’ logic explored here, God was
originally a dividual before detaching his animal component, karawa, the devil.
The latter then reconstituted the human pole of animals, acting as a typical trick-
ster figure by undoing the acts of the creator—that is, by giving back to animals the
agency taken from them by God. It should also be noted that other Amerindian
groups conceive the relation between God and the devil in similar fashion, as re-
lated opposed terms, like the Apapocuva (Guarani), according to Fausto (2007: 90),
and the Yanesha, according to Santos-Granero (2007: 68 n. 2).9
Dividuality as part of the innate world is also intrinsic to the Christian message
taken by the missionaries to the Wari’, evident not only in their discourse concern-
ing the devil, but also in diverse biblical passages translated literally by them. As an
example, we can take I Corinthians 6:19, which was used to illustrate one page of a
calendar made by the missionaries in the Wari’ language. The Bible verse in English
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.”

a cooperative system ruled by a notion of property alien to the Indians (ibid.:

669).11 The cooperative created among the Culina is also the example chosen by
Pollock (1993) to illustrate what seems to be an important equivocation made by
the Catholics. The removal of goods for sale was related to a notion of individual
productivity which, as for the Wari’ involved in the cooperative at the Catholic
village of Sagarana that I saw operating in the 1990s, was not traditionally valued.
According to Pollock (ibid.: 183), the system—based on the idea that social rela-
tions could be measured by individually owned goods—violated the Culina view
of sociability, which led them at the time to reject the missionary projects and
thus Christianity.
Among the Wari’, as among the Achuar, the Evangelical missionaries act out
an explicit individualism in their everyday practices. They encourage individual
exchanges within the market economy model, demanding that each item offered
to them by the Wari’ is paid with an item of equivalent value. So, for example, a
hook would be equal to one hen’s egg, while two hooks would have to be repaid
with two eggs. They also encourage the execution of services, such as cleaning the
house yards, very often paid directly in money. Here, though, the Wari’ tend to act
similarly to the native peoples cited by Sahlins in his article on “sentimental pessi-
mism” (Sahlins [1996] 2005, 1997a, 1997b), using the new resources to extend their
network of kin, minimizing the individualizing character of these practices, a fact
that has very often frustrated the missionaries. In 2005, for example, a man killed a
tapir and, to my surprise, after distributing some of the meat to his close kin, sold
the rest in his house, using some scales to weigh the cuts and charging a fixed price
per kilo, which the buyer could pay in either money or produce. My reflections on
the mercantile and individualizing character of this practice were cut short when
I saw people’s elation at being able to obtain meat that previously would have been
limited to close kin and thus unavailable to them. The possibility of buying meat
had the effect of extending the ties of commensality and, therefore, kinship with
the local group as a whole.
The missionaries were disappointed not only with the difficulties shown by the
Wari’ in appropriating the ideology of the market, but also with what appeared to
them to be a strange absence of an inner self capable of serving as a locus for a pri-
vate relation with God, one which, from the viewpoint of the American missionar-
ies, formed part of the innate world of each and every person.12 For the Wari’, as we
have seen, by being determined from the outside, the self is rather an outer self, an
always provisional identity that in no sense “belongs” to the person, or, in the words
of Viveiros de Castro (2012b: 41), “a Self that is radically Other.” In a comment by
the New Tribes missionary Royal Taylor on the abandonment of Christianity by the
Wari’ in the 1980s and 1990s, the search for an inner self among the Wari’ is clear:
“They were not converted through the spirit, only through mental persuasion.
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).
Conclusion: New configurations

As I mentioned at the start of this article, over time this configuration has trans-
formed. From 2002 to 2008, the period in which I carried out my research on the
Christian life of the Wari’, I was able to observe important modifications. The first
was the suppression of traditional rituals, including shamanism, which was still
fully active at the start of the Christian revivalism in 2002. Although they were
called the devil, the shamans remained active, keeping present the humanized ani-
mals, and consequently the animality of the Wari’, who continued to be victims of
attacks by animal spirits. Over the years, worn down by the isolation to which they
were condemned by others, the shamans began to refuse contacts with their animal
partners, who thereafter abandoned them. They say they now follow Jesus, not the
animals. The last shaman of the Negro River, Orowam, whom I called grandfather,
converted in 2005. In parallel, the dietary taboos, which sought to regulate relations
with animals and avoid predation, ceased to make sense following the Wari’ efforts
to turn themselves into God’s children, thereby sharing his perspective of human–
animal relations, as transmitted in Genesis.
In terms of the other rituals involving the controlled inversion of the movement
of invention, or the insertion of difference–affinity into the system, funerary can-
nibalism, war, and warfare cannibalism were abandoned soon after pacification in
the 1960s. The chicha festivals, however, remained central to the constitution of
Wari’ sociality and personhood, making explicit the affinity eclipsed in everyday
life.13 With the extension of Christian fraternity to everyone, these rites lost their
meaning, since there was no longer any place for the objectification of the rivalry
between affines or, consequently, for the traditional means of its domestication,
like the war club fights, which resolved conflicts by enabling them to be made ex-
plicit. The suppression of these rites was accompanied by the introduction of new
ones, such as the church services in which everyone can become a child of God
by eating his words (Vilaça 2012), and the Bible conferences in which generalized
consanguinity is produced through rituals of commensality that involve prototypi-
cal affines, the members of other Wari’ subgroups. The constitutive difference of
social life has lost the ritual contexts of production, replaced by rituals aimed at the
production of social and personal identity.
Confession occupies the central place in the production of this personal iden-
tity: that is, the person’s equation with him- or herself, through the invention of an
internalized self, separate from the others and visible to God. As a result, the Wari’
notion of the heart, traditionally the locus of thought and feeling, necessarily vis-
ible in the constitution of the body, has undergone a process of internalization, be-
coming equated with the Christian soul (see Robbins, Schieffelin, and Vilaça 2014
for a more wide-ranging analysis of this phenomenon). This constitutes another
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.”

One example of this transcendence is the Wari’ invention of heaven, a place

peopled by caricatured individuals, living private lives in isolation from each other,
each one occupying his or her own house. They hold no festivals, never marry,
never exchange food and never live with each other. They spend all their time writ-
ing down God’s word, dictated to them, but without any visual or physical contact
with God. Only there are they finally completely human, having entirely eliminated
their animal component—even that represented by affinity—and thus the risks of
metamorphosis and anger.
It is important to note that the Wari’ find nothing attractive about this heaven,
which is only valued in contrast to hell: the latter is highly feared as a posthumous
destiny, since unlike what happens in heaven, in hell it is the animal pole that be-
comes fixed, transforming the Wari’ into prey in a never-ending roasting process.
Heaven and hell are thus two opposed objectifications of the same notion of the
individual, as elaborated by the Wari’, and are both negatively valued. The consan-
guine kinship extended to everyone in heaven has the strange outcome of complete
isolation, as if the absence of affinity, though desired, makes relations as a whole
meaningless. Likewise, consanguinity given a priori, rather than as an outcome of
daily acts of caring that transform “dislike” into “like,” or enmity/affinity into con-
sanguinity, is not considered a proper relation (see Vilaça in press).
The final passage to the individual is necessarily accompanied by the end of
transformation. Individualism in its full Euro-American sense, as perceived by the
Wari’, is not something they aim to achieve; rather, it is something that produces
not just conflicting moral effects, but an ontological catastrophe, the same outcome
predicted by Lévi-Strauss (1996), the paralysis of the world. In hell they are roasted
on a fire that never completes their transformation of prey into food, which in the
case of hunted animals allowed them to revive through the acquisition of new bod-
ies. In heaven they do not speak, do not marry, do not have children, and do not
hold festivals. The position of full humanity acquired in heaven, freed from attacks
by animals and affines, equivalent to pure animals/prey in hell, leads to stagnation
and the appearance of a dead world.15 The image of heaven offered by a Wari’ man
in 2009 seems to me a clear caricature of what happens when difference is elimi-
nated: “In heaven everyone has the same face, as though they were angels (jami
pawin). And they use the same clothing, the same color. There is no difference be-
tween people, you don’t recognize them as different.” This seems to have been why
the Wari’ have delegated the completion of the process of transforming into white
people and Christianization to posthumous life. Experiencing this completion on
earth would imply death in life.
The images of posthumous life show that the Wari’ recognize individualism
to be part of the Christian message, but exploit the ambiguity of the missionary
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

the Wari’ to experience identity paradoxes in a nonproblematic way, assuring an

alternation of perspectives and the coexistence of distinct configurations of per-
sonhood, they have begun to pursue a univocal movement of conventionalization
in which paradoxes and differences are negatively valued.
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Dividualisme et individualisme dans le Christianisme indigène:

Un débat vu d’Amazonie
Résumé : Le but de cet article est d’intervenir dans un des débats contemporains
les plus intéressants en anthropologie du Christianisme, le problème de la relation
entre le dividualisme et l’individualisme, en explorant une configuration spécifi-
quement amazonienne de cette opposition à travers ma recherche ethnographique
parmi les Wari’, un groupe indigène du sud-ouest de l’Amazonie. Mon intérêt sur ce
sujet va au-delà du débat lui-même : je le vois comme un environnement favorable
pour démontrer la productivité des concepts issus de l’ethnologie Amazonienne—
en particulier la notion Levi-strausssienne « d’ouverture à l’Autre » et de « dua-
lisme en déséquilibre perpétuel », tout comme le perspectivisme conceptualisé par

Viveiros de Castro—dans des discussions plus générales du changement culturel,

un sujet sur lequel j’ai travaillé durant les vingt dernières années.
Aparecida Vilaça is Associate Professor for the Graduate Program in Social

Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, UFRJ. She has undertaken extensive field-
work among the Wari’ Indians of Amazonia, focusing on the themes of ritual, eth-
nohistory, cultural change, and Christianity. She is the author of the books Strange
enemies (2010), Quem somos nós (2006), and Comendo como gente (1992), as well
as coeditor of Native Christians: Modes and effects of Christianity among indigenous
peoples of the Americas (2009), and the author of numerous other book chapters
and articles.
Aparecida Vilaça
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social - Museu Nacional
Quinta da Boa Vista s/nº - São Cristóvão - Rio de Janeiro-RJ
CEP 20940-040
Brasil
aparecida.vilaca@terra.com.br

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2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): 197–225