Seeing, Hearing and Speaking: Morality and Sense among the Panará in Central Brazil

Abstract

Based on the ethnographic example of the Panará, a Gê-group in central Brazil, this paper examines the significance of vision and visibility. For Gê-speaking groups it has been suggested that while hearing and speaking are socially privileged faculties, contributing to the mature status of an individual, seeing has been considered to be an anti-social faculty and is largely associated with the exercise of negative mystical power. While not wishing to deny the appropriateness of this association, I argue that seeing and being seen, as well as the particular visual qualities of phenomena play an important role in an Amazonian lived world.

Keywords:

• Panará
• Amazonia
• vision
• sociality
• personhood

Acknowledgment

Fieldwork among the Panará has been funded by the esrc, the British Academy and the Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. I wish to thank members of the Panará community for allowing me into their lives and participants in seminars in the University of St Andrews, London School of Economics and University of Oxford for invaluable observations and questions. I thank Elisabeth Hsu for her comments during the writing of this paper and I am grateful to Shirley Ardner and the co-conveners of the Ethnicity and Identity Seminar in Oxford for providing the impetus to start the paper and to the two anonymous Ethnos reviewers for enabling me to finish it.

Notes

This list is purely illustrative and by no means exhaustive.

The importance of physically intervening in the fabrication of a child's body is described by many ethnographers of the region as summarised in (Vilaça 2002:349).

A notable exception is a paper by Alexandre Surrallés (2003:777) whose analysis of Candoshi welcoming ceremonies points to the significance of sensory experience and visual perception in transforming latent hostility into a social relationship.

Though note also Uzendoski et al.'s (2005) discussion of Napo Runa women's songs as transformative events, related to perspectival concerns with bodily transformation.

Like Ingold (2000:6) I am fully conscious of the objections to the term ‘Western’ and yet find that, at present, there is none more suitable.

In 2007 the central men's house had been rebuilt following Kayabi architectural design, with walls up to about adult chest height. In contrast to my previous visits, it was noticeable that the men's house was barely being used, with adults at best gathering just inside the two entrances during the day, from where they could still see the rest of the village.

The term ‘clan’ is used here for the sake of brevity, though there are good reasons for suggesting that ‘spatial descent group’ may be a better designation (Heelas 1979:79).

Joanna Overing and Alan Passes’ collection The Anthropology of Love and Anger gives ample examples for the creation of sociality through convivial relations and practices of various kinds (Overing & Passes 2000).

In this context the twoway radios which provided the main source of contact and news to the villages in the Xingú also caused a huge amount of tension at least among the Panará who would listen in on the talk flying backwards and forwards between upper and lower Xingú groups and from this derive all sorts of information on who was accusing who of exercising negative mystical power.