Moral Sources and the Reproduction of the Amazonian Package

Abstract

This article claims that lowland South American indigenous peoples have reproduced some form of the “Amazonian package”: mutually imbricated understandings to the effect that human bodies are fabricated socially, that this occurs in the context of a perspectival cosmos, and that relations with dangerous outside others are indispensable to this process. The spread and relatively conservative reproduction of these understandings pose a causal historical question. Extrapolating from a description of the package as it appears among People of the Center (Colombian Amazon), the article makes the case that this reproduction may be tied to the package’s constitutive role in shaping morally evaluative, motivating pictures of what it is to be a good or admirable human being.