Abstract
Abstract This article considers how relations with certain plants produce multiple temporalities for the Wajãpi, an Amerindian people from the Brazilian Amazon. Inspired by a non-anthropocentric anthropology or an “anthropology beyond the human,” the article is an ethnographic exploration about how the Wajãpi perceive the concrete and sensible features of certain vegetable species, and thus how they see them as subjects, in a process that produces different space-times. I also show how certain concepts are central to this same process, specifically, that of life cycle and maturation (including death), which lead to notions of co-temporality and difference between groups and individuals.
Highlights
This article considers how relations with certain plants produce multiple temporalities for the Wajãpi, an Amerindian people from the Brazilian Amazon
I work with families who live on the Wajãpi Indigenous Land (WIL) on the Brazilian side and who move throughout their territory, occupying small villages at the limits of the WIL during the dry season and concentrating in large central villages – regional conglomerates made up of small clearings that surround state institutions such as schools and health posts – during the rainy season
To broaden our reflection beyond the Western distinction between living and non-living beings or animals and plants – given the importance attributed to human-animal relations in Amazonian studies in the last two decades (Viveiros de Castro 2002, Garcia 2010, Lima 1996, Fausto 2008) – it is useful to raise some of the spatio-temporal connections that the Wajãpi establish with animals, as well as with objects
Summary
This article considers how relations with certain plants produce multiple temporalities for the Wajãpi, an Amerindian people from the Brazilian Amazon. Plant beings are central to the construction of space times by Wajãpi families, as I observed while walking through the gardens and forests that compose their world1.
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