Inhuman beings: morality and perspectivism among Muinane people (Colombian Amazon)

Like many other Amazonians, Muinane people often use perspectival imagery in discussions of relations between human beings and animals. It is a distinct possibility, within their ontology, that beings that humans perceive as animals, perceive themselves as human, and there are numerous complementary...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ethnos 2005-03, Vol.70 (1), p.7-30
Main Author: LONDONNO SULKIN, Carlos D
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amazon
Amazonia
Amazonian people
Animal Human Relations
Animals
Cognitive problems, arts and sciences, folk traditions, folklore
Colombia
Cosmology
Ethnography
Ethnology
Everyday Life
Indigenous Populations
Meaning
Morality
Muinane
Ontology
Self
selfhood
Shamanism
Social Behavior
sociality
Symbolic anthropology. Traditional thought, symbolism
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Summary:Like many other Amazonians, Muinane people often use perspectival imagery in discussions of relations between human beings and animals. It is a distinct possibility, within their ontology, that beings that humans perceive as animals, perceive themselves as human, and there are numerous complementary entailments to this. What is most striking about Muinane people's perspectival imagery, however, is that they use it saliently in their moral evaluations of subjectivity and action. I show that this makes perspectivism central to the everyday meaningful practices through which Muinane people achieve social life, and to their understandings of themselves. On that basis, I claim that accounts of Amerindian perspectival cosmologies should attend ethnographically to their morally evaluative potential and to their use by individuals in their discourses and other practices.
ISSN:0014-1844
1469-588X
DOI:10.1080/00141840500048474