Among the Raramuri or Tarahumara of northern Mexico, human existence is explained as the dialectic oscillating between a) the conjunctions and disjunctions of people and beings in general and b) the interaction and transformation of these individuals and beings.

This paper will present this dialectic swing from established relationships with the dead and sacrificial victims. Analyze how the bereaved and sacrificers conjoined and disjunction substances and relations of those killed and those victims to enable their existence on this plane and relationality with the other planes of their world.

This will briefly describe the major interactions cosmopolitical rarámuri. And I will explain why I believe that "human life" derives mainly from the Raramuri relations with non-human beings with agency and the transformations returners in them as a result of these relationships. That is why tarahumara human existence depends of sociality with the nonhuman. This is a variant of the Indian-American premise of openness to the other and to self-rejection for the existence of self.

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Entre los rarámuri o tarahumaras del norte de México, la existencia humana se explica como la dialéctica oscilante entre a) las conjunciones y las disyunciones de las personas y los seres en general y b) la interacción y la transformación de esas personas y esos seres.

En esta ponencia presentaré esta dialéctica oscilante a partir de las relaciones establecidas con los muertos y las víctimas sacrificiales. Analizaré cómo los dolientes y los sacrificantes conjuntan y disyuntan las sustancias y las relaciones de esos muertos y esas víctimas para posibilitar su existencia en este plano y la relacionalidad con los otros planos de su mundo.

Lo anterior permitirá describir brevemente las interacciones cosmopolíticas más importantes de los rarámuri. Y explicaré por qué considero que la "vida humana" deriva, principalmente, de las relaciones de los rarámuri con seres no-humanos con agencia y de las transformaciones que se reincorporan en ellos a consecuencia de dichas relaciones. Es decir, por qué la existencia humana tarahumara depende de la socialidad con lo no-humano. Lo que no es sino una variante más de la premisa indioamericana de la apertura a lo otro y el rechazo de sí para la existencia del yo.

This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Apiao, a small island of the Chiloé archipelago, southern Chile and is devoted to the peculiar relationship between Apiao people and their dogs. Amongst all the animals that are part of everyday life, dogs cover an important role in household life and daily routine, and epitomise the perfect guardians as well as the indispensable companions on dangerous night trips. They are seen as in-between creatures, and occupy a privileged position within the household bestiary. On some occasions, however, dogs allow their beastly nature to overcome the quasi-human aspect of their kind, becoming anti-social beings, verging on the monstrous. The paper addresses issues of death and guilt in relation to people and their animals, and shows how the social nature of dogs ceases when anti-social behaviour produces the impossibility of negotiation. While relationships between fellow islanders are articulated through constant negotiation, guilty dogs represent the possibility of a society where negotiation is impossible, allowing hierarchy to momentarily take the place of egalitarianism.

The Kuna of Panama have became renown in the anthropological literature for their long and complex chant performed by the shaman in case of difficult childbirth. The shamanic role of elderly women as midwives (and their verbal and non-verbal practices during childbirth), have been nonetheless neglected. This paper is about the experience of two Kuna midwives describing their apprentice and performing the ritual of childbirth. Being born is being separated from a placenta, which destiny will be eventually re-connected again to the person after death. I focus on the processes of separation and multiplication performed by these midwives on the neonatal body, which are at the core of the formation of Kuna living human beings. Stemming from the ethnography, I will put forward two analytical perspectives through which to look at the concept of personhood among the Kuna, one structuralist and one Deleuzian, and will discuss the potential of integrating them for future investigations on Amerindian notions of what it is to be human.

In this paper I focus on the concepts of humanity emerging from the comparative study of two Amerindian rituals. One is the collective healing ritual performed by Kuna people to rid their villages from the disastrous effects of epidemics. The other is the inter-village mortuary ritual carried out by Xinguano people to commemorate their dead chiefs. In both cases alterity, in the form of white people for the Kuna and in the form of dead people for the Xinguano, constitutes the pulsating core of the ritual. I suggest that these two rituals provide a useful perspective to discern a specific Amerindian concept of humanity emerging from a background of encompassing and transforming forms of alterity.

Focusing on the minutiae of daily practice, this paper suggests that Xié (upper Rio Negro) aetiologies and the principles of a vital and healthy life are orientated around the active cultivation of mindful states, themselves evoked and maintained through the careful regulation of attention. Productive activities, including the making of persons, depend on the skilful execution of a vast repertoire of caring-for techniques. Properly accomplished, their outward manifestation can be seen in both the well-formed, physically strong and beautiful bodies of those in good health; as well as in the positive evaluation of artefacts (daily artisanal utensils)themselves demonstrative of one's own mindful capacities. This paper examines how, through the unification of intent and action, embodied engagement with (re)productive activities is primarily involved in proper personal formation (ipso facto persons) and only secondly an aspect of either production or subsistence, that is, the sustenance of a biological life bereft of those mindful. Mindfulness becomes the definition of life and its lived experience endows beings with personable qualities. Moreover, without the embodied manifestations of such a state, a person is considered chronically sick, on the verge of an irrevocable personal transformation (i.e. death) or as potentially malicious. Mindfulness identified here as a prophylactic measure of proper persons, allows us to consider the nature of the Amerindian soul and body, elucidating soul-loss and soul-wondering (or shape-shifting) and the lived experience of mindfulness with all its 'animist' implications.

In the Eastern Guiana Highlands (Brazil, Suriname, and French Guiana), the indigenous Wayana people habitually practice a ritual known as maraké (ëputop in Wayana), which is generally interpreted as an initiation ritual for adolescent boys to become marriageable adults. Tradition and transformation of the maraké ritual, an element of evolving humanity, will be discussed by means of the body of myths and oral histories in conjunction with the recent maraké ritual performed in 2004, in the Upper Maroni Basin. Myths provide a foundation to conceptualize the indigenous Wayana perspective regarding the life qualities humans share with non-humans, transformative processes of life and death, along with general conceptualizations of the vitality of nature. Central in the myth of the Creator twins, who instigated the first maraké ritual, is that death is the necessary transformative process to generate life. Regarding the Wayana region as an emerging world, I will critically assess the nature of this assumed "initiation ritual," whereby emphasizing the role of precious feather headdresses imbued with what I call "ancestral agency." In this sense, feather headdresses and related regalia are not lifeless objects, but instead have their proper object biographies of extended personhood. Rethinking myth and history is grounded in the differences and similarities between the mythical ritual of the Creator twins and the contemporary Wayana maraké ritual which keep the heritage alive.

Para os Kaingang, grupo Jê Meridional, pertencente ao tronco linguístico Macro-Jê, a pessoa se constitui por meio da operacionalização de um conjunto de elementos segundo um regime de saberes relacionados à economia das relações de substâncias formadora de seus corpos: um corpo-parente e o corpo não-parente. O primeiro, denominado hã, produzido pelo sêmen, é vivente do mundo dos vivos, ga. O segundo tipo corporal, nominado ngufõ, fruto do sangue menstrual, é expresso como espécie de corpo futuro, a "roupa dos mortos", e ativo no numbê, concebido como "aldeia dos mortos". Estes dois tipos corporais são produzidos simultaneamente durante o gestar, momento constituinte do que dizem ser inh: concepção de pessoa-humana configurada pela conjugação dos fatos dados - as metades e os nomes -, cuja patrifiliação transmite os atributos simbólicos para a produção de um corpo desejado, os fatos feitos - corpo-alma - e pelas substâncias genderizadas que circulam mobilizadas pela ação dos genitores. Esta dinâmica processual de criação e fabricação de corpos culmina em apreensões de tempos-espaços de parentesco de ocorrência paralela, o ga e numbê, manifestos enquanto estados corpóreos em transformação. O que se pretende neste trabalho é manifestar os sentidos que estes indígenas denotam à morte, compreendida neste contexto ameríndio como evento que produz um tipo de pessoa não humanizada, uma alteridade cuja forma corpórea expressa sua qualidade diferencial. A morte, em suma, mobiliza a existência de um tempo necessariamente paralelo a vida, necessário à sua manutenção.

The Andean life-world is one animated by non-human agents that have the capacity to help, hinder, heal, and harm. If we follow the existing ethnographic literature, the most obvious way to explore this is through the mountain spirits and earth mother that are addressed by agricultural rituals. However, the apus and pachamama are all but absent in the district of Cañaris, part of a rare Quechua-speaking enclave in the northern Peruvian Andes. Cañaris is situated at the cross-currents of Andean, coastal, and Amazonian ritual practice and understanding. A "Cañarense" ritual praxis emphasizes the state of the individual body-subject in relation to their social and environmental surroundings. This can be observed most clearly in the ritual tables of curanderos, shaman-like specialists who perform mesas for healing, luck, production, and sorcery.

"Mallqeys" are a subset of agential plant-based substances used in the curandero's ritual table. They change the body and/or aptitude of the client to take on the characteristics of certain animals: "condor mallqey" increases one's strength, "toro mallqey" makes one impervious to cold and rain, and "misha mallqey" gives one exceptional agility and skill - but may also change one's subjectivity to that of a wild feline. By considering this practice, we may explore human connections to the natural world, human and non-human interactions, and a sort of Cañarense perspectivism that, while not forming the basis of a coherent worldview, provides a uniquely local articulation of the vital role of non-human agents in production and wellbeing in the Andes.

The system of Waorani ecological knowledge (knowledge, practices and representations) reveals socio-cultural and symbolic norms. The forest constitutes a socialized space in which individuals learn about the processes of vegetable development, perceived as analogous to those of humans. The similarity between human and vegetable life cycles is expressed to explain each one of these processes. The dead have functions, both biological and social. Humans and vegetables remains are transformed and participate in forest regeneration, as well as in the transmission of values of the conception of the being, of the person, and of the family clusters. The notions of life and death constitute temporary inversion processes of the functions of ecological dynamics, and differentiated bodily organisms (human/vegetable) are transformed into the same substance at the end of life in this world. Ethnographic information of two Waorani villages settled in the Nushiño River will be presented in relation to forest-managing activities (agriculture, gathering) and of the narratives shared at the time of those activities. The practices of managing natural resources reveal the representations of the vegetable world, the relationship between human-vegetable, and the construction of personhood; this information allows an understanding of the death stage in the life cycles of the Amerindian group.

In recent years, Amazonian anthropology has established that indigenous notions of humanity share distinctive characteristics. Ethnographers have documented how human bodies are 'made' and how humans are continuously 'fabricated'. In this context, one can never take one's humanity for granted: it always requires a sustained effort. I here suggest that the same argument can be extended to indigenous notions of life. Drawing on my ethnography of the Chachi of the rio Cayapas area in Esmeraldas (Ecuador), I show that life is always conditional. That is, to be considered 'alive' always requires a fairly circumscribed effort; and those who fail to deliver it are mercilessly excluded. For example, Chachi people restrict (or at least used to restrict) the status of 'living being' to those who 'live well' (primarily the Chachi themselves) and to those who partake in a common sphere of commensality and conviviality: essentially their companion animals and cultivated plants in their gardens. This restricted conception of life is coupled with an expanded notion of death. Anybody who fails to 'live well' according to Chachi standards - those clumsy highland Quichua, those annoying Blacks living downstream, those dubious Whites dwelling in cities - are strictly speaking not alive but dead. The same goes for all untamed animals of the forest: monkeys, peccaries and felines must be grasped as 'wild-dead' rather than as wildlife. It is no coincidence that those various 'foreigners' and forest animals play a prominent role at Chachi funerary rites - they are palpable representatives of an expanded realm of death.

My research findings explores the array of complex levels of sociability found in the cemeteries of Mexico City. The spaces of the dead such as cemeteries are at times regarded as non-social spaces due to a believed negligible amount of daily social interaction and activity between the living, the dead and the ánima (spirit/soul). My paper argues that the spaces of the dead, like the cemeteries of Álvaro Obregón are clear examples of active social, spiritual and visual spaces in which the dead and their ánimas are daily socialised and memoralised through a combination of contemporary funerary practices and material culture.

My paper analyses the phenomenon, socio-cultural and political conditions of the dead in the private and public spaces dedicated to host them by the use of visual and sensorial methods, analysis and practice of photography in collaboration with other more established ethnographic research methods. Including the investigation of life histories of the people who visit and work in the cemetery in order to explore why communities in México City have embraced and transferred agency to material objects and photography in order to bond with their dead. Digging deeper into why the wide spread embrace of material culture is playing a greater role in the contemporary rituals dedicated to the dead in the cemeteries of a megalopolis.

The literature on indigenous Amazonia highlights that places and landscapes, like bodies, are transformable and filled with agency. This paper expands on the agential and relational aspects of land, focusing on how some indigenous Amazonians posit it has memory and a high sense of morality. This is especially important in today's context of extractive practices and increased indigenous interest in economic activities which require a more intensive use of the environment.

My work amongst Ashaninka people offers a different view into the agency and memory of land. I will show how Ashaninka understanding of the current scarcity of fish and game and the diminished productivity of their gardens is grounded on aipatsite's ('our land/territory/earth') capacity as a moral and memorious agent whose emotions have been affected by the extreme violence of the Peruvian internal war (1980-2000) and of extractivist industries.

I propose that not only do Ashaninka people see aipatsite as a living entity they must interact with in socially productive ways, but that they see a parallel between it and themselves as moral agents whose memory is inscribed in their bodies. Just like the antisocial behavior of many Ashaninka people in the wake of the war is understood to be fuelled by anger felt from them 'not being able to forget violence', scarcity is understood as evidence of aipatsite's anger due to this continuous violence. Thus, people and aipatsite must be reminded of the positive pre-war social relationships in order to eradicate the memory of violence from their bodies.

A dualistic worldview is a prevalent cognitive pattern in contemporary and ancient Andean communities and can be found in their ceremonies, tales, rituals, and narrative stories. Traces of dualism and binary opposition can also be found in the social structure and spatial organization of these communities; especially in the pre-colonial Inka Empire. The cosmological concept of complementary duality, suggested by the unity of two opposed entities known as yanantin, evinces the notions of reciprocity and dualism prevalent in contemporary Andean communities. The paper analyzes the perception of death as reflected in the reciprocal concepts of yanantin and ayni. During the process of coping with grief and loss, the communities perform mourning songs and libations and thus establish the interaction between the ancestral world of the dead and the present life of the communities. Using ethnographic data and historical analysis, this paper explores the binary and cyclical nature of death in the Andean indigenous communities as reflected in their mythology, cosmology, and, particularly, funeral, burial and mourning practices.

This paper will explore the materiality of gasoline as a tool for offering a more nuanced theory of life and essence amongst the Sanema of Venezuelan Amazonia. Gasoline is progressively becoming the lifeblood of many modern Amazonian communities, increasingly essential for mobility, production and enjoyment. Among the Sanema, for instance, siphoning gasoline is fast becoming a skill that young men are mastering above even the use of shotguns. And yet very little has been written on how native Amazonians interact with and contemplate this enigmatic and volatile liquid.

Through an exploration of gasoline not as an object so much as a component of 'matter' among a cosmos of materials in a continual process of transformation, this paper seeks to shed light on how life or vitality is perceived among the Sanema. I shall focus on the properties of gasoline - its fiery nature, its fluidity, its capacity to give life to other things, as well as its potential to de-materialize - through descriptions of such properties in Sanema daily life, stories, mythology and shamanic chants. In this way I explore concepts of life not through the lens of animism or perspectivism, which presume living beings to be distinct bounded entities inhabiting an inert world. Instead I shall argue, through an exploration of gasoline and its use, that being 'alive' is more than simply possessing an individual spirit.

Brightly coloured oxygenated blood circulating through a living organism is a sign of life, but the spilling of dark blood can signal wounding or death. In highland Andean communities people make libations of llama, alpaca or sheep blood and other liquids with the purpose of revitalizing life qualities in persons, herd animals and other entities. Andean countries have suffered national crises in which the state has, in recent times, failed to protect its people. This paper, written from my perspective of having conducted fieldwork with herders from Isluga, northern Chile, reviews ethnographic studies of rural Andean agrarian and pastoralist communities, mainly in Peru and Chile, in the context of local people's practical actions in making libations. It addresses how these ritual activities are connected with life processes and trajectories of political power in cycles of life, death and revitalization. The symbolic meanings to be explored include the importance of breath and the infusion of life-giving oxygen.

El objetivo de esta ponencia es, a partir de etnografía o sería mejor decir de teoría etnográfica, dar cuenta de uno de los conceptos de vida de algunos rarámuri (conocidos como tarahumaras que habitan la Sierra Tarahumara de México). Se tomará como punto de partida el término iwigá o alewá que ha sido traducido en la literatura etnográfica como "alma". Se cuestionarán los modelos de vida y persona que ha generado esta primera traducción (alewá = alma, soplo divino, aliento), para posteriormente y bajo una segunda traducción dirigirnos hacia la teoría nativa. De tal manera que si el término alewá o iwigá no tiene un término sinónimo en nuestro propio mundo (como el alma que puede devenir en un animismo), entonces éste puede ser comprendido desde su propio contexto. Esto es, desde una teoría del parentesco (análoga a alguna de nuestras teorías sobre lo humano) y de los caminos rarámuri (por los cuales las alewá caminan para mantener la vida misma, sea dentro o fuera del cuerpo), y sobre el principio bajo el cual la vida es per se colectiva.