Aparecida Vilaça

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro | UFRJ · Departamento de Antropologia

While our own notions about well-being tend to foreground peaceful and amicable relations with fellow humans, for many Amazonian peoples the achievement of well-being, manifested in healthy, well-nourished and fertile bodies, requires engaging in harrowing, agonistic relations with others through warfare, shamanism, dreams and ritual practice. Draw...

In the Amazonian literature, the scarcity of numerical terms and lack of interest in counting, which characterize diverse indigenous peoples in the region, are usually associated with linguistic issues or cultural limitations. My purpose in this paper is to take a different approach and relate the enumeration processes of one of these peoples, the...

This afterword offers a commentary on the concept of relations discussed in the introduction and the individual contributions to this special issue by critically reflecting on the key concepts that have emerged in it. It contributes to the discussion with a reflection on the use of the term parente in Amazonia, showing how its exclusive use in inte...

Pesquisa etnográfica para a confecção de relatório técnico visando a ampliação dos limites da TI Rio Negro Ocaia, dos Wari', em Rondônia

Imaginando esse texto, oscilei entre contar algo sobre as leituras que me abriram o mundo dos livros ou falar daquelas que têm me fascinado nos dias de hoje. Optei pelos dois e me surpreendi com a continuidade de meus interesses ao longo de cinquenta anos como leitora

Based on long-term ethnographic research among the Wari’ Indians from Amazonia, this essay aims to analyze the ontological and moral changes related both to conversion to Christianity and to schooling. I aim to show that although in Christian culture knowledge is still intrinsically moral, the dissociation made by the missionaries between the heart...

Biografia de um indígena amazônico, Paletó, e a história de sua relação com a antropóloga Aparecida Vilaça

Biografia de um indígena amazônico, Paletó, e a história de sua relação com a antropóloga Aparecida Vilaça

Biografia de um indígena amazônico, Paletó, e a história de sua relação com a antropóloga Aparecida Vilaça

English excerpt from the book Paletó e eu. Memórias de meu pai indígena. Publicado em 2018 pela editora Todavia

The notion of “aberrant derivations,” coined by Lévi-Strauss in The origin of table manners in his discussion of the strange sums made by Native American peoples, take us to an usual starting point-mathematics, to explore the theme of the transformations arising from the encounter between Amerindian peoples and whites in Amazonia, among them the co...

Agribusiness has unprecedented leverage over highly unpopular Brazilian president Michel Temer, who is faced with several corruption charges and is struggling for political survival. In a little over one year, the agribusiness lobby and its allies have managed to erode thirty years of human rights and conservation laws. Indigenous peoples and their...

Over her many trips to Wari’ lands, Vilaça has studied many aspects of their cosmology, their way of life and its recent transformations. Praying and Preying, along with her past work, stands, in this reviewer’s mind, as some of the finest ethnographic expositions of what anthropologist Viveiros De Castro calls “Amerindian perspectivism.” As he and...

This paper analyzes the two distinct concepts of translation at work in the encounter between the Amazonian Wari’ and the New Tribes Mission evangelical missionaries, and the equivocations stemming from this difference. While the missionaries conceive translation as a process of converting meanings between languages, conceived as linguistic codes t...

Review of the book Praying and Preying. Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia (University of California Press, 2016), by philosopher Geoffrey. E. R. Lloyd

This paper analyzes the two distinct concepts of translation at work in the encounter between the Amazonian Wari' and the New Tribes Mission evangelical missionaries, and the equivocations stemming from this difference. While the missionaries conceive translation as a process of converting meanings between languages, conceived as linguistic codes t...

Praying and Preying offers one of the rare anthropological monographs on the Christian experience of contemporary Amazonian indigenous peoples, based on an ethnographic study of the relationship between the Wari', inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia, and the Evangelical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission. Vilaça turns to a vast range of historica...

Chapter 5 continues the analysis of a properly Wari’ notion of conversion, turning here to the notion of an opening to the other and the interest in adopting the other’s perspective. The foray into myth reveals the opening of Wari’ thought to this perspectivist notion of conversion, characterized by the possibility of reversal, given that the origi...

Chapter 1 forms an introduction to the history and ideology of the New Tribes Mission, setting out from the literature produced by the missionaries, anthropological works about them, and the lesson books in Wari’ language prepared for catechism. The objective is to analyze the concepts of culture, religion, and catechism guiding their work among na...

Chapter 2 analyzes the two distinct concepts of translation at work in the encounter between the Wari’ and the missionaries, as well as the equivocations stemming from this difference. While the missionaries conceive translation as a process of converting meanings between languages, conceived as linguistic codes that exist independently of culture,...

Chapter 8 explores the moral transformations associated with Christian life, especially with the new rituals, examined here through Foucault’s notion of “technologies of the self” and its reworking by Robbins. Two other rituals, confession and the conferences, are discussed, respectively, as modes of constituting an inner self—an idea alien to the...

Chapter 7 provides an ethnography of the ritual life of the Wari’ Christians, focusing on the church services, holy supper, and baptisms. It examines the guidelines for choosing pastors and deacons, the way in which the services are structured and unfold, and the interpretations of the biblical texts made by pastors and “preachers” through their re...

Chapter 6 discusses the equivocations involved during a second phase of Christian translation, this time focused on the search by the missionaries and their Wari’ assistants for native terms to designate the central concepts and figures of the Christian universe: body, soul, God, Jesus, and devil. It shows that while, unaware to the missionaries, t...

Chapter 4 is devoted to the analysis of the first translations produced by the Wari’, based on imitating the missionaries and trying to make them and the God presented by them into kin. It looks to comprehend Wari’ conversion through body language. The chapter also examines the mythic references used initially by the Wari’ to translate the Christia...

Setting out from a general presentation of the encounter between native peoples and Christian missionaries, the introduction details the specificities of the Wari’ case, based on the long-term field research conducted by the author. An overview of the central questions raised by the anthropology of Christianity allows these to be compared and contr...

Chapter 3 provides a quick overview of Wari’ life before the first peaceful contacts with whites. Since these encounters formed the central topic of Vilaça’s earlier book, they are described here in a summarized form, emphasizing the action of the New Tribes missionaries, including the specific missionaries involved in the encounters, their backgro...

Praying and Preying offers one of the rare anthropological monographs on the Christian experience of contemporary Amazonian indigenous peoples, based on an ethnographic study of the relationship between the Wari’, inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia, and the evangelical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission, which first began in the 1950s. Vilaça tu...

This article is an ethnographic essay on the notion of an 'ontological turn', taken here in its literal sense of ontological change. It explores a specific sociocosmological transformation – one resulting from the conversion of an Amazonian people, the Wari', to Christianity – via the concept of ontology. The central question here concerns the rela...

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 southw...

What if a Religion Is Not Made to Last? Aparecida VilaçaThe Sense of an Ending Simon ColemanConstructing Continuity Máire Ní MhaonaighBut Whose Categories Are These? Don SeemanAuthor's Reply: On Morality, Time and Religious Disappearance Joel Robbins

Cet article est une analyse du cannibalisme funéraire wari’ (Txapakura, Rondônia, Brésil), fondé sur les narrations détaillées d’informateurs ayant participé eux-mêmes à ces rites, à partir d’une critique de la conception de « condensation rituelle » développée par Houseman et Severi (1998) dans leur analyse du Naven Iatmul. Ma critique est basé su...

The last several decades have seen both a renewed anthropological interest in the possibility of cross-cultural comparison and the rapid rise of the anthropology of Christianity. These two trends should be mutually supportive. One of the promises of the anthropology of Christianity from the outset has been that it will allow people to compare how p...

Scholars have frequently credited Christianity with an important, if varying, role in the ontological configuration of “modernity.” Based on the Christian experience of the Wari' Indians, from the Amazonian southwest, this chapter aims to analyze the correlation between two different movements considered essential in the transition to modern life:...

Eating God’s Words: the Bible as read by the Wari’. This paper deals with one particular aspect of Christianity as experienced by the Wari’ (Amazonia, Brazil): the interest they take in the Bible, which has been translated into their language by the New Tribes missionaries who have been living among them for nearly fifty years now. The comparison o...

This paper deals with one particular aspect of Christianity as experienced by the Wari' (Amazonia, Brazil): the interest they take in the Bible, which has been translated into their language by the New Tribes missionaries who have been living among them for nearly fifty years now. The comparison of God's Words with food equates reading or hearing t...

This article explores the Christian experience of the Wari', an Amazonian native group, in light of a central feature of their personhood: its dual composition, both human and animal. Arguing that the centrality of the relation with God has resulted in a more stable human person, the article provides an ethnographic examination of how this relation...

Native Christians reflects on the modes and effects of Christianity among indigenous peoples of the Americas drawing on comparative analysis of ethnographic and historical cases. Christianity in this region has been part of the process of conquest and domination, through the association usually made between civilizing and converting. While Catholic...

The Wari’, speakers of a Txapakura language living in the west of Rondônia state, Brazil, have been in close contact with fundamentalist Protestant missionaries of the New Tribes Mission for five decades. Using myth as a comparative framework, this article looks to understand conversion to Christianity as a process of adopting the enemy’s perspecti...

Esse artigo parte da oposição entre sociedades individualistas e relacionais desenvolvida por Joel Robbins para a análise do conflito gerado pela adoção do cristianismo entre os Urapmin da Papua Nova Guiné. No caso dos Wari' amazônicos, a percepção aguda da centralidade da noção de indivíduo no cristianismo a eles apresentado, e do conflito potenci...

Based on ethnographic material relating to the Wari’ (Rondônia, Brazil), this article questions some of the presuppositions concerning native conceptions of the body present in contemporary anthropological literature by exploring a central dimension of Amazonian corporality – one that has been little explored in ethnographic works on the region – i...

Between Protestantism and Catholicism: On the Conversions of the Wari'. -- The ethnology of the Wari' (in the southern Amazonian area of Brazil) are used to show how a Native American society understands Christianity and how missionaries` teachings and practices are interpreted in the light of the native culture's presuppositions. Catholic and Prot...

The ethnology of the Wari' (in the southern Amazonian area of Brazil) are used to show how a Native American society understands Christianity and how missionaries, teachings and practices are interpreted in the light of the native culture's presuppositions. Catholic and Protestant missionary activities are comparatively analyzed in order to emphasi...

This article analyses the process of producing kinship among various Amazonian peoples, focusing primarily on the Wari’, a Txapakura-speaking people living in Western Amazonia (Brazil). It argues that the production of kin cannot be related exclusively to the domestic or intra-tribal domain, since kinship emerges through a constant dialogue with no...

A partir da análise da etnografia wari' (Amazônia Meridional), justaposta a outros materiais etnográficos das terras baixas sul-americanas, o artigo pretende mostrar que o idioma da corporalidade, central para o entendimento da capacidade do xamã de mudar de identidade, transformando-se em animal, é essencial para se pensar, no contexto ameríndio,...

The Wari’, a southern Amazonian group of the Txapakura linguistic family, ate their dead and their enemies until at least the beginning of the 1960s. This article argues the continuity between these two forms of cannibalism by demonstrating that the Wari’ conceive the ingestion of the dead as a means of transforming them into prey. Predation – a de...

О que signified tornar-se Outro ? Xamanismo e contato interetnico na Amazonia brasileira Atraves da analise da etnografia wari' (Amazonia Meridional), justaposta a outros materiais etnograficos das terras baixas sul-americanas, pretende-se mostrar que о idioma da corporali- dade, central para о entendimento da capacidade do xamâ de mudar de identid...

A partir de uma etnografia detalhada do ritual funerário endocanibal, este artigo tem por objetivo refletir sobre o significado da morte e do canibalismo para os índios Wari' (Pakaa Nova, Rondônia, Brasil), a partir da noção de corpo como sede da visão de mundo e da diferença entre os seres. Conclui-se que a ingestão dos mortos é antes de tudo um m...

In the 1970s, the Pakaa Nova, also known as the Wari’, an indigenous people of the State of Rondonia, Brazil, converted to the Christianity of the Protestant missionaries of the New Tribes Mission of Brazil. They developed their own distinctive interpretation of Christian teachings, adapting them to their own cultural codes and to their cosmology....