Robak zjada jaguara: procesy tworzenia relacji z perspektywy Amazonii zachodniej
A worm eats a jaguar: the processes of creating relations from the perspective of the Western Amazon

Summary/Abstract: On the Tapiche River, in everyday lives of the local people, as well as in their understandings of relations between beings or cosmology, a prominent role is played by the figure of the smallest, often invisible perpetrator – in local terms, “the worm” (gusano). The article follows the ethnographic position of the “worm” in the local representations, suspending its understanding as a parasite in order to emphasize the space combining locally what we would call “parasitism” (as a kind of predation) with what we would call “consanguinity”. In addition, the “worm” position plays a decisive role in the ubiquitous and ambivalent causal process. As such, the ethnographically analyzed dynamics of the “worm” can be understood simultaneously as an outline of the local thought processes. The ethnographic description is at the same time a locally embedded theoretical argument about processes that create relations. It leads to reflection on the default tools and strategies for building anthropological knowledge. Thus, it is also a methodological proposal. I show that through the images opened by the “worm” figure – as a trace of an ambivalent killing-generation process – the local thought introduces distraction into the conventional and fundamental Euro-American distinctions of “alterity” (accompanied by hostility and predation indexed in the form of a jaguar) and the sphere of intimacy and kinship (with the accompanying security). In other words, ethnography shows the limitations of ideological assumptions about relations and kinship that mark the conceptual tools of social sciences.

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