Extreme normalcy: The place of violence in indigenous Amazonians’ well-being

Abstract

While our own notions about well-being tend to foreground peaceful and amicable relations with fellow humans, for many Amazonian peoples the achievement of well-being, manifested in healthy, well-nourished and fertile bodies, requires engaging in harrowing, agonistic relations with others through warfare, shamanism, dreams and ritual practice. Drawing on the ethnography of two Lowland peoples – the Wari’ of Brazil and the Aents Chicham (Jivaro) of Ecuador and Peru, we will examine how a certain kind of person is constituted through ‘extreme’ relational experiences that, while dangerous, are considered necessary for leading a meaningful life. Further, we will discuss how the complex forms of subjectivity fostered by these experiences challenge our ideas on the presumed opacity of minds and on what psychology are about. Finally, we will show how the gradual disqualification of these extreme yet expected ways of interacting with others, following Cristianization and sustained contact with Western lifeways and forms of knowledge, leads to impoverished and monotonous lived worlds, in short to states of (ill)being antithetical to indigenous notions about proper ways of living.