Amerindian political economies revolve around life perceived as being the scarcest resource. All living beings compete among themselves to accumulate as much vitality as possible. Generalized predation is countered, however, by an ethic of self-regulation that ensures a certain balance between species. Through the analysis of personal anecdotes with the Yanesha of Central Peru, I propose that such precarious balance is based on ambiguous intersubjective relations permanently oscillating between predation and friendship as well as between acts of ex-corporation and in-corporation.

Most accounts of cassava cultivation in Amazonia interpret the indigenous assertion that “plants are persons” at a purely symbolic or metaphoric level. On the basis of my fieldwork with the Waiwai of Southern Guyana, this article offers an alternative interpretation, namely that Waiwai womanhood and cassava can be seen as fractal images and divergent embodied forms of a common intersubjective being, one that is holistically represented in the mythic figure of Cassava Mother. In this interpretive stance, it is argued that womanhood and cassava acquire their meaningful specificity within Waiwai sociality through their aligned capacities, affects, and perspectives, as much as through their differences in scale and form. This foregrounding of modes of alignment and fractal similitude provides an analytic space for considering the embodiment of intersubjectivity across the ontological divide we frequently insist on between “human” and “nonhuman” realms. Waiwai mythic narrative and agricultural practice suggest that, while differences in scale and form are significant, they are often eclipsed by an emphasis on aligned capacities and affective stances that are self-similar across scales and forms.

This article presents an outline of a complex and dense “nexus” of meanings inherent to religious power and knowledge in the traditions of the Baniwa, an Arawak-speaking indigenous people of the Northwest Amazon. It demonstrates how Baniwa cosmology can be understood through the notion of intersubjectivity in which the deities and spirits, the religious specialists, and sacred instruments form an integrated whole. “Matter” and “Spirit” combine and separate in a myriad of ways in Baniwa cosmogony, cosmology, ontology, and eschatology. “Spirit” inhabits all forms, while ancestral “power and knowledge” are transmitted across generations through the living “owners” (or, “keepers”) and “masters” of religious traditions. The vehicles of meaning through which the universe came into being and is reproduced for all times, or can be destroyed by enemy outsiders are homologous in their material forms (bones, elongated tubes, flutes). These forms are infused with powerful, nonmaterial lifeforces (fluids, such as blood, saliva; breath) of the deities and hence of the origins of the cosmos. Ancestral knowledge and power together are critical to creating, reproducing, or destroying the universe; they are embodied and “emplaced” throughout the Baniwa sacred geography, as sources of life that are constantly circulating in fluid forms throughout the cosmos, renewed through ceremonial specialists and their sacred instruments. The notion of cosmic intersubjectivity allows us to understand how the whole universe is considered to be a living being, materialized through a variety of sacred instruments.

Glass beads in Amazonia are objects of value and desire. They “materialize” social relations through processes of acquisition, transmission, and destruction. Although beads provide the “raw material” for the making of ceremonial adornments, they are also subjected to constant processes of unmaking and remaking. They are most visible precisely during these moments, when Panará women sit together stringing beads or making ornaments, often to undo them again once they have served their ritual purpose. These moments of visibility of both beads and persons are moments at which persons make themselves intersubjectively available to one another, and contrast with the withdrawal and concealment of people who are in a state of unavailability. Just as intersubjectivity is a process constantly to be generated, so glass beads, as desired objects, must also overcome the fixity of being “made into a thing” and, thereby, be continuously remade. In this article, I reflect on continuity and process and the way in which the fluidity of beadwork allows for the making and remaking of intersubjective relations.

This article is based on fieldwork among a Central Carib people known as the Trio, who have for the past 40 years lived alongside their former enemies in large sedentary villages in southern Suriname. The article analyses the relations that have been established and nurtured between people, particularly those of distant affines, at times of communal celebrations such as beer feasts, with a particular focus on intersubjectivity. As the frequency and magnitude of these beer-drinking feasts seems to be on the rise in the whole region, I examine the relationship that exists between sedentarization, conversion to Christianity, and the long-term process of peaceful engagement with enemies, which together make for contemporary Trio sociality, particularly at the times of communal feasts.

In this article, I draw on my experience as a friend and (honorary) daughter in a Nahua community in Guerrero, Mexico, to show how emotions and empathy between “informants” and the “anthropologist” were central to my work. Through examples involving sadness, I suggest that “learned empathy,” or the embodiment of a new emotional arrangement during long-term fieldwork, allows for a better understanding of some native conceptions. In addition, I introduce the concept of “emotionally contextualized discourse,” where affects are intensely expressed and complement the verbal message in a way that is consistent with indigenous communicative modes. I conclude that attention to these emotional components during fieldwork makes possible a more humanistic, dialogical research process.

This article focuses on the social significance and the cultural politics of the body-sensorial knowledge acquired through learning music. It considers music as a means for producing particular kinds of embodied subjects, as a repetitive practice and a mode of discipline that inculcates and hones gendered and classed sensibilities. These ideas are elaborated in reflection on the author's experience of learning South Indian classical (Karnatic) music through apprenticeship, multiple pedagogical encounters, and learning to appreciate music in the company of others.