Ontological transformations: the Kawaiwete's shifting relations with spirits as seen through changing ideas of conception

Abstract

AbstractDrawing on the insights of the ontological turn, this article explores how human and nonhuman social relations have changed over a thirty‐year period for a community of Tupian Kawaiwete people in Brazil's Xingu Indigenous Territory. Changes in human‐spirit relations are discussed through a focus on people's changing understandings of human conception and the relative importance and roles of maternal and paternal substances, shamanic practitioners, and spirit beings. While changes in relations with nonhuman others are usually understood in lowland literature in terms of the impact of outside forces, such as conversion to Christianity, in this article, we look at the agency of one particular shaman in restructuring humans’ relations with spirits, bringing these entities much closer than they used to be three decades ago. We argue that this shaman is responding to his historical context, and look at how his agency is entangled with the agency of nonhumans. Ultimately, we suggest that cosmology and ideas of conception are more variable and transformable than they are often portrayed.