Scattered Things: Virtue Ethics and Objectness in Indigenous Amazonia

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to extend the enduring focus on the body and bodily substance in Amazonia, which have historically eclipsed other forms of relatedness and ethical practices. Among the Venezuelan Sanema, morality is enacted predominantly through manufactured items rather than solely corporeal expressions of relatedness. While artefacts of all forms are receiving increased recognition in the region, they are often explored within a non-dualist frame that foregrounds inalienability, ownership and subjectification. Yet, the Sanema ethnography reveals that dissolving dualisms in this way suppresses the existence of important categories such as objects. Focusing on how ethical practices are enacted through partible beads and diesel-powered generators, this paper reveals how alienable goods among the Sanema are valued precisely for their ‘objectness’ rather than their personified qualities.

KEYWORDS:

• Morality
• materiality
• Amazonia
• kinship
• material semiotics

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to Miranda Shield Johansson for pushing me think more about dualisms. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their comments. Thanks to Michael Scott, Harry Walker, Evan Killick and Katie Swancutt for their comments on the material that was to become this article. An early version of this paper was presented at the ‘Forms of Objectification’ workshop held at the LSE in 2015. I am grateful to Harry Walker for inviting me, and to the participants for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In translation, Sa. refers to Sanema terms and Sp. refers to Spanish terms.

2 My fieldwork was conducted between 2009 and 2011 in both Bolivar and Amazonas states of southern Venezuela at a time of relative political and economic stability, in part because oil prices were high during this period. All place names and personal names have been changed to protect the identities of the people involved.

3 I will not cover handcrafted artefacts in great detail in this article because, besides being sparse, were not discussed with much detail or enthusiasm among the Sanema.

4 Different scholars describe estimation of animist vitality is various ways, from possession of spirit masters, to the symbolic and practical roles that certain animist entities play (Viveiros de Castro 2004: 470), to systems of signs that characterise living selves (Kohn 2013).

5 These modern glass beads and their form of use were adopted from the neighbouring Ye’kwana indigenous peoples.

6 It is for this reason that there was a preference for Czech seed beads that measure 1.4–1.6 mm in diameter.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.